ABSTRACT B O O K
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of Collegiate Schools of Architecture.
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www.acsa-arch.org
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ACSA wishes to thank the conference co-chairs, Mark Goulthorpe, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Amy
Murphy, University of Southern California, as well as the topic chairs, reviewers, and authors for their hard work in
organizing the Annual Meeting.
EDITORS/ANNUAL MEETING CO-CHAIRS
Ila Berman, California College of the Arts
Ed Mitchell, Yale University
TOPIC AND SESSION CHAIRS
101_1 Waste(lands) + Material Economies
___________________________________
Matter: Excess vs. Optimization
Jason Payne, University of California, Los Angeles
Practicing Industry
Hugh Hynes, California College of the Arts
Less is More: Creativity Through Scarcity
Elizabeth Golden, University of Washington
Gundula Proksch, University of Washington
101_2 Energy Circuits + Artificial Ecologies
____________________________________
Energy Circuits
Sean Lally, University of Illinois at Chicago
Synthetic Ecologies
Marcelyn Gow, Southern California Institute of Architecture
101_4 Exchange Terminals + Interactive
Technologies
__________________________________
Sensing the City
Jason Johnson, California College of the Arts
Living Bits + Bricks
Carlo Ratti, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Nashid Nabian, Massachusetts Institute
of Technology
Negotiated Territory
John McMorrough, University of Michigan
101_5 Enclaves / Territories + Expanding
Megalopolises
___________________________________
Securing the Perimeter
Elijah Huge, Wesleyan University
Architecture’s Next Companion Species
Mason White, University of Toronto
Rapid Cities: Prototyping Urban Growth
Mona El Khafif, California College of the Arts
Ecological Infrastructures: From Bubbles to Territories
Lola Sheppard, University of Waterloo
Strategies Beyond the Compact City
Felipe Correa, Harvard University
Eco-logics
Helene Furjan, University of Pennsylvania
Infrastructural and Ecological Urbanisms
Julia Czerniak, Syracuse University
101_3 Genetic Systems + Non-standard Modes of
(Re)Production
________________________________________
101_6 Populations / Networks / Datascapes: From
Cloud Culture to Informal Communities
________________________________________
Figuring Differentiation
Chris Hight, Rice University
Guerilla Ecologies
Ulrike Heine, Clemson University
Dan Harding, Clemson University
Aaron Bowman, Clemson University
Bernhard Sill, Hochschule Trier | University of Applied Sciences
Digital Craft: Material, Technology and Performance
Heather Roberge, University of California,
Los Angeles
Mass Customization + Non-Standard Modes
of (Re)production
Branko Kolarevic, University of Calgary
Discursive Networks
Ana Miljaki, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Amanda Reeser Lawrence, Northeastern University
Urban Geographies of Multiculturalism
Armando Montilla, Clemson University
Urban Code
Laura Kurgan, Columbia University
Nicholas de Monchaux, University
of California, Berkeley
New Constellations / New Ecologies - San Francisco, CA - 3
TABLE OF CONTENTS
101_1 WASTE(LANDS) + MATERIAL ECONOMIES
5
Super Session|101_1/Waste (lands) + Material
Economies
6
PS|101_1/Matter: Excess vs. Optimization
7
PS|101_1/Practicing Industry
8
PS|101_1/Less is More: Creativy Through
Scarcity (1)
9
PS|101_1/Less is More: Creativy Through
Scarcity (2)
11
PS|101_1/Burn it. Bury it. Or send it on a
Caribbean Cruise
12PS|101_1/Drosscape
14
Super Session|101_2/Energy Circuits +
Artificial Ecologies
101_2 ENERGY CIRCUITS + ARTIFICIAL ECOLOGIES
15
PS|101_2/Energy Circuits
17
PS|101_2/Synthetic Ecologies
18
PS|101_2/Architecture’s Next Companion
Species
20
PS|101_2/Ecological Infrastructures:
From Bubbles to Territories
21PS|101_2/Eco-logics
23
Super Session|101_3/Genetic Systems + Non
standard Modes of (Re)Production
101_3
24
25
27
29
GENETIC SYSTEMS + NON-STANDARD
MODES OF (RE)PRODUCTION
PS|101_3/Figuring Differentiation
PS|101_3/Digital Craft: Material, Technology
& Performance
PS|101_3/Mass Customization + NonStandard Modes
Super Session|101_4/Exchange Terminals + Interactive Technologies
4 - ACSA 101 Annual Meeting
101_4 EXCHANGE TERMINALS + INTERACTIVE TECHNOLOGIES
30
PS|101_4/Sensing the City
31
PS|101_4/Living Bits + Bricks
32
PS|101_4/Negotiated Territory
101_5 ENCLAVES / TERRITORIES + EXPANDING
MEGALOPOLISES
34
Super Session|101_5/Enclaves/Territories + Expanding Megalopolises
35
PS|101_5/Securing the Perimeter
36
PS|101_5/Rapid Cities: Prototyping Urban
Growth
38
PS|101_5/Strategies Beyond the Compact
City
40
PS|101_5/Infrastructural and Ecological
Urbanisms
42
Super Session|101_6/Populations/Networks
Datascapes: From Cloud Culture
to Informal Communities
101_6
43
44
46
47
POPULATIONS / NETWORKS / DATASCAPES: FROM CLOUD CULTURE
TO INFORMAL COMMUNITIES
PS|101_6/Guerilla Ecologies
PS|101_6/Discursive Networks
PS|101_6/Urban Geographies of
Multiculturalism
PS|101_6/Urban Code
SCHEDULE
Thursday, March 21, 2013
12:00PM - 1:30PM
Friday, March 22, 2013
11:00AM - 12:30 PM
Saturday, March 23, 2013
9:00AM - 10:30AM
8
6
PS | 101_1 / Matter: Excess vs. Optimization
5
Super Session | 101_1 / Waste (lands) + Material Economies
21
PS | 101_2 / Eco-logics
14
Super Session | 101_2 / Energy Circuits+Artificial Ecologies
27
PS | 101_3 / Mass Customization + Non-Standard Modes
PS | 101_1 / Less is More: Creativy Through Scarcity (1)
32
PS | 101_4 / Negotiated Territory
Thursday, March 21, 2013
2:00PM - 3:30PM
35
PS | 101_5 / Securing the Perimeter
9
PS | 101_1 / Less is More: Creativy Through Scarcity (2)
17
PS | 101_2 / Synthetic Ecologies
30
PS | 101_4 / Sensing the City
Friday, March 22, 2013
2:00PM - 3:30PM
47
PS | 101_6 / Urban Code
7
PS | 101_1 / Practicing Industry
12
PS | 101_1 / Drosscape
20
PS | 101_2 / Ecological Infrastructures: From Bubbles to Territories
Thursday, March 21, 2013
4:00PM - 5:30PM
43
PS | 101_6 / Guerilla Ecologies
18
PS | 101_2 / Architecture’s Next Companion Species
31
PS | 101_4 / Living Bits + Bricks
24
PS | 101_3 / Figuring Differentiation
36
PS | 101_5 / Rapid Cities: Prototyping Urban Growth
40
PS | 101_5 / Infrastructural and Ecological Urbanisms
46
PS | 101_6 / Urban Geographies of Multiculturalism
Saturday, March 23, 2013
11:00AM - 12:30PM
23
Super Session | 101_3 / Genetic Systems + Non-standard Modes of (Re)Production
29
Super Session | 101_4 /
Exchange Terminals + Interactive Technologies
Saturday, March 23, 2013
2:00PM - 3:30PM
34
Super Session | 101_5 /
Enclaves / Territories + Expanding Megalopolises
42
Super Session | 101_6 /
Populations / Networks / Datascapes: From Cloud
Culture to Informal Communities
Friday, March 22, 2013
4:00PM - 5:30PM
11
PS | 101_1 / Burn it. Bury it. Or send it on a Caribbean Cruise
15
PS | 101_2 / Energy Circuits
25
PS | 101_3 / Digital Craft: Material, Technology & Performance
38
PS | 101_5 / Strategies Beyond the Compact City
44
PS | 101_6 / Discursive Networks
New Constellations / New Ecologies - San Francisco, CA - 5
Super Session
101_1 Waste (lands) + Material Economies
Jason Payne, University of California, Los Angeles
Hugh Hynes, California College of the Arts
Elizabeth Golden & Gundula Proksch, University of Washington
El Hadi Jazairy & Rania Ghosn, University of Michigan
Alan Berger, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Date: Saturday, March 23, 2013, 9:00 AM - 10:30 AM
Waste management and ecological issues have been absorbed into recent architectural pedagogy but
are only yet being interrogated for the conceptual demand placed on the discipline. How might one
transfer material research beyond the technology sequence? How do we understand waste, excess and
progress as a biological and cultural imperative that might need reconsideration and reinvention within
the contemporary architectural design paradigm?
ABSTRACTS
101_1 Waste(lands) + Material Economies
Matter: Excess vs. Optimization
Jason Payne, University of California, Los Angeles
Date: Friday, March 22, 2013, 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
Six Facets Of Matter: Material Futures
for the Architectural Object
Rhett Russo, New Jersey Institute of Technology
The speed of technology presents a significant dilemma for any architectural pedagogy that is focused on matter. Working with any
material and learning how it can be altered formed and manicured
takes time resources and space, all of which, to a lesser degree
can be comfortably avoided with a laptop. As soon as the deep
qualities of matter are deduced they are often thrust into a process
of encryption that makes them accessible to computation, if only
for the sake of speed and the protocols of practice that demand
automation. This leaves many forays into material behavior unanswered. Alternatively, any unknown aspect of material behavior
may be circuited into other known materials or processes where
success is more certain, effectively putting an end to speculation.
This class will explore material as a behavioral mechanism, its relationship to geometry, and its tendency to toward variability.
The separation of the material code from the object and its material relations presents a short circuiting to any discourse surrounding
matter. What often results is a self-regulated curtailing of material
expertise. This is adversely affecting the kinds of risks that graduate architecture students are willing to take. With the increased
introduction of parametric software and optimization plug-ins the
educational appetite for physical experimentation is reaching obsolescence. This demands a careful re-tinkering of the current pedagogy and a broadening of material inquiry to combine contemporary tools and techniques with the broader history of materials,
craft and tectonics. Part of knowing when to automate something
relies on understanding that it is difficult, expensive or even painful
to perform and perhaps more importantly that the consequences
of any optimization process may be contrary to the design intent.
During the semester we will examine six facets of the architectural
object
I. Excess: Minimal and Maximum
II. Scarcity: Ultramarine, as a Force
III. Optimization: Sydney’s Shells
IV. Physics: Granular Contingency and Variability
V. Robustness & Adaptability : Sash Bars and Pendentives
VI. Pressure: Competition among parts (segmentation)
Mixing Urban Cocktails
Ferda Kolatan, University of Pennsylvania
This paper is written in form of an urban design studio syllabus.
It investigates how a “chemical paradigm” as defined by the Philosopher Iain Hamilton Grant, may open up new ways of thinking
about design in an urban context and provide us with a radical
alternative to current planning and urban design strategies. Questions regarding a more material, ambient, and visceral definition of
nature and city are investigated and put to test through methods
of analog synthesis and patternization. “Making” is understood not
as a deductive, result-oriented process or an abstraction but as a
material act through which the designer simultaneously generates
and analyzes the matter he/she produces.
The Garden in the Machine
David Ruy, Pratt Institute
In the early 21st century, we are obsessed with nature and technology, but seldom at the same time. The treehugger is probably also
an Iphone hugger, but never on the same day. We are fascinated
by organic systems and mobile networks, the environment and the
internet, the Grand Canyon and Hoover Dam. Inevitably, when our
cool machines have to be placed in our beloved gardens, problems
arise. We may place it away from view or even try to hide it in plain
sight with a carefully designed camouflage. (Wasn’t it poignant to
see the sky blue patterns on the boxes hiding the reactors at Fukushima?) Our obsession with nature and technology is the cognitive
dissonance of our time.
A hard earned lesson of the 20th century is that there is no good
way to put the machine in the garden. Perhaps it’s time to try a
different strategy and put the garden in the machine. Maybe H. R.
Geiger isn’t so crazy after all in his lust for biomechanical compositions. Take a look at General Dynamics’ Big Dog or General Atomics’ Predator—these aren’t exactly steam engines. The largest civil
engineering project in the history of Europe, the Large Hadron Collider is a 27 mile long circle buried 175 meters below the surface of
the earth, and its’ purpose is to recreate, in miniature, the Big Bang
itself. What kind of machine recreates the birthplace of nature?
Do you remember the first time you surfed the internet? Do you
remember that uncanny sensation of entering into an ocean?
Hold these thoughts as we start the project. Let’s see if we can approach the problem a little differently this time. You will be asked to
develop speculative research and designs for a large infrastructural
machine (like a hydroelectric dam or a particle accelerator) along
with small architectural interventions (like a visitors’ center), but you
will be asked to rise above the banalities that always seem to accidentally arise from this situation. Like Palladio’s Villa Rotunda straddling a productive landscape, how might you locate higher architectural ambitions for an architecture that straddles a giant machine?
Toward an Architectural Theory of Negative Matter
Michael Osman, University of California, Los Angeles
It is time to produce an architectural theory of negative matter. As
a disciplinary degree zero, it is time to collect all the most damning
attitudes documented in the history and theory of architecture and
to assemble them into a unified position, a negative one. This course
is suspicious of: technological pleasure, scientific fantasy, the senses,
experience, talent, nature, happiness, comfort, health, cleverness, reality and authenticity. This course seeks to explore: death, sickness,
wickedness, cunning, boredom, doubt, murder and difficulty.
New Constellations / New Ecologies - San Francisco, CA - 7
101_1 Waste(lands) + Material Economies
Practicing Industry
Hugh Hynes, California College of the Arts
Date: Friday, March 22, 2013, 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM
Automate Architecture
Alfredo Andia, Florida International University
A mixture of software, humans, robots, avatars, and algorithms are
altering the nature of work in a significant number of professions
today. In this paper I argue that the creative and construction processes of architecture are also being affected. Today there are two
distinct and diverging discourses of automation emerging in the
design and construction industry. In the design trades the narratives of automation are related to how architects and engineers
use parametric software. In the construction businesses automation is becoming a synonym of pre-fabrication and modularization.
I observe that the contemporary parametric metaphors found in
scripting and BIM software are only scratching the surface of a
more profound transformation. I claim that the discourse of the
automation process architects are following will eventually clash
with the automation efforts led by Engineers/Contractors in the
construction sector. I conclude that the contemporary emergence
of parametric thinking in design endeavors is part of a first wave
of Artificial Intelligence in the domain of Architecture. Parametric
is the most primitive stage of Artificial Intelligence. What we are
beginning to observe today are the first steps of creating of a design intelligence that will be able to be coded by many authors and
transformed over time.
Full Figures: Finding Form in Excess Matter
Kelly Bair, University of Illinois at Chicago
Diverting from more classical methods of composition and perfect proportions, the formal development process in most contemporary architectural projects can be loosely placed into one of
two categories: the additive (aggregative field conditions based
on parts to whole relationships) or subtractive (removal of one
part using another part in order to produce a new figure from the
original). Full Figures suggest a third possibility where the formal
development process is neither additive nor subtractive. Instead,
form is found through the physical displacement of excessive material matter within pliable boundary surfaces. Nothing is added
or taken away from individual figures; material is simply shifted as
one might adjust the weight of their body or posture themselves in
response to another adjacent body.
Practicing and teaching architecture amidst a climate of economic
collapse in the building industry, Full Figures hinges on an “all in”
attitude with regard to excess matter: the heavier, the thicker, the
better. Speculating on excess in the form of volumetric matter as
opposed to large quantities of parts or complex assembly tectonics, tFull Figures adopts an alternate attitude towards volumetric
excess. Full Figures argues for maximizing matter in the form of
spatial and figural volumes, asserting a position that espouses the
production of excessive matter organized into disproportionate
massing as a means of achieving architectural effects that dial up
physical weight (volume), material performance (thickness), and
visually express the latent phenomenon that brought the form into
being in the first place.
8 - ACSA 101 Annual Meeting
New Industrial Design Protocols
for Carbon Neutral Buildings
Thomas Spiegelhalter, Florida International University
21st century carbon neutral architectural design and digital manufacturing processes must eliminate fossil fuel dependency and reduce the growing demand for land use. The need for change is
crucial despite conflicting goals in developing core tasks for governments, society, and business. Another challenge is that the divide between design and construction has resulted in increased
schedule delays and cost, because information technology, optimization and digital production techniques are not well integrated.
This essay explores parallels between computational and performance based developed architectural design and manufacturing
practices – here represented by projects of leading companies in
Carbon-Neutral Design Coding and Digital Manufacturing. The essay interprets how the future of computationally developed carbon
neutral architecture will affect the design and industrial practice
through parametric-topological and/or algorithmic modeling. The
findings suggest that these tools offer new industrial design visions
in the Human-Computer-Interaction with digital manu-facturing
systems for producing, assembling, and benchmarking carbon neutral buildings.
Rapid Types: A Coffee Pod
and Alternative Digital Processes
Kory Bieg, University of Texas at Austin
Two platforms of industrial production currently shape the practice of architecture: software and hardware. With the advance of
digital technologies (and the progress made in both platforms),
it is now possible to integrate the design and construction of
buildings into one seamless process. Software, particularly Building Information Modelers (BIM), allowdesigners, consultants, and
builders to integrate all of the idiosyncratic complexities that
make up the construction process, including building systems,
cost, performance and schedule into one, fully-loaded threedimensional digital model. Design programs are no longer used
simply for speed, representation, and visualization, but as an integral part of the design process to the extent that designers
use software to test and even generate architectural geometries.
Computer Numerically Controlled (CNC) machines have also been
adopted by some of the leading builders and designers today to
increase the efficiency, speed, and quality of their work. The use
of CNC mills has begun to alleviate some of the problems caused
by human error, prompting us to reevaluate our definition of craft
and our dependence on trade oriented skills, a knowledge base
only acquired through experience and repetition of human-centric
activities. Other industries have successfully negotiated the transition from manual labor to machine production, and it’s about time
that architecture follows suit.
101_1 Waste(lands) + Material Economies
Less is More: Creativity Through Scarcity (1)
Elizabeth Golden, University of Washington
Gundula Proksch, University of Washington
Date: Thursday, March 21, 2013, 12:00 PM - 1:30 PM
Scarcity and Standardization: Architects’ Data
and the Exigencies of Total War
Nader Vossoughian
The goal of this paper is to draw scholarly attention to Architects’
Data (Bauentwurfslehre), which represents one of the two most
significant texts on architectural standards produced during the
20th century. It has been the subject of an excellent monograph
that addresses the life and work of its author, Ernst Neufert. However, its ideological project has still not been sufficiently investigated to date and will thus constitute the focus of my attention here.
My thesis is that this book helps historicize the links between scarcity and standardization in 20th-century architecture. It is a case
study in the importance of efficiency and rationing to the history of
modernity, particularly in the 20th century. It also raises profound
questions about the relationship between privation and innovation,
particularly in the discourse of modernism.
Scarcity: Reality and Ideology
Jon Goodbun, University of Westminster
In this paper I will draw together some of the insights that have
been gained out of my participation in a major EU HERA funded
research project that has run for the last two years between a small
network of European architecture schools (and which will be completed in summer 2013) – entitled ‘Scarcity and Creativity in the
Built Environment’. I was a co-author of the original funding bid,
and have been an active member of the team since then. This paper
will condense some of my/our theoretical insights into what scarcity is as a concept and reality, and will also report on the findings
of the design research project teams more broadly.
The Fallacy of Efficiency and Scarcity
Kiel Moe, Harvard University
Architecture needs agendas for energy not based on the thermodynamically and ecologically misguided notions of scarcity and efficiency. The more accurate thermodynamic and ecological basis
of maximum power energy systems are presented as the basis of
architectural agendas for energy that are better suited to the realities of the twenty-first century.
The Scarcity Aesthetic: Art, Design,
and Population When Systems Fail
Charissa N. Terranova
This essay identifies an aesthetic tendency within fiction, architectural design, and contemporary art, 1966 to the present. Called
the “scarcity aesthetic,” it is not so much a perceptual norm but
an inclination in form that registers fear, unknowing, and prostration in the face of technological disaster, architectural dereliction,
and scarcity of means. The scarcity aesthetic arises in response to
large-scale social systems and their real or would-be failure. While
focusing on literature and works of fine art and design from the
last sixty years, including the film Soylent Green (1973), the novel
on which its based Make Room, Make Room! (1966), the designs of
Atelier Van Lieshout (1999-present), the work of Theaster Gates
(2009), RE Gallery and Studio (2011), Team Better Block (2012),
and Jon Robin (2010), the concept of a “scarcity aesthetic” is rooted in the late eighteenth-century writings on population of Thomas
R. Malthus. The essay further builds on more recent theories of
population, the reified human body, and the bio-political as developed in the writings of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben.
New Constellations / New Ecologies - San Francisco, CA - 9
101_1 Waste(lands) + Material Economies
Less is More: Creativity Through Scarcity (2)
Elizabeth Golden, University of Washington
Gundula Proksch, University of Washington
Date: Thursday, March 21, 2013, 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM
Readymade
High and Dry: Performances around Water’s Absence
This paper and speculative design project reconsiders the concept of
waste in architecture; not simply the byproducts of construction—but
of design itself, the purportedly failed architectural ideas and built form
of a previous era. It reconsiders the products of a particular period
of architectural history, the maligned and internationally ubiquitous
suburban residential tower block clusters of late modernism, as a
vital resource to be revitalized as urban infrastructure. Rather than
abandoning these buildings because of their urban ideology, in this
time of economic and environmental crisis, we need to recast our
notions of “progress.”
The projects discussed in this essay are the outcome of an interweaving of seemingly disparate interests and practices related to performativity, performance making, and ecological research-informed design. These projects embrace “performance” in part on technological,
organizational and cultural levels; at times as literal spatio-temporal
events; and, in the latter works discussed, the performing of the work
that results in such things and events coming into being.
Cheryl Atkinson, Ryerson University
This paper looks at a specific situation in Toronto Canada,
where, an unprecedented (in North America) quantity of these
buildings were built between 1950 and 1978 as up-market rental
housing in the inner suburbs of the city. They have since become
unfashionable, energy inefficient, decrepit lower-income housing,
and under consideration in some cases for “urban renewal,” i.e.
demolition and reconstruction.
Recognizing the architectural heritage and the significant role this
housing plays in supporting the burgeoning population of the City
of Toronto, a group of advocates and architectural researchers
produced an extensive and exhaustive research report in 2008. The
Tower Renewal Guidelines were published promoting retention,
refurbishment, over cladding, and urban infill as critical strategies. In the current economic climate however, none of these initiatives
have been undertaken due to cost.
The project proposed here, is a more economically modest, but
immediately effective alternative—a renewal energy project that
uses these buildings as “readymades.”
This project takes the concept of waste—of these buildings
themselves and the large underutilized parking areas surrounding
them; and reprises these as raw matter for producing both
renewable energy and community. It then looks at the industry
that precipitated this suburban housing form—the automobile
industry, as a protagonist in this project.
Salvaged automotive glass from end-of-life vehicles is used to
create large, glazed, veil-like overlays on the blank end-façades
of these existing slab-block buildings. Over-cladding the inherent
mass and height of these high-rise towers creates a solar thermal,
updraft chimney – a new renewable energy resource for the existing
building. At grade this same element creates both amenity (food,
and employment) and social space.
This work is inspired by the work of artists like El Anatsui and
Brian Jungen who work with the “readymade” and the serial, in
re-composing the detritus of mass culture. The accreted castoffs of our materially profligate society, the automotive glass, is
applied to this problem/resource, also in multiple (1000 towers).
This exercise, like the work of the Rural Studio, provocative
with its inventive use of up-cycled materials, is not just an act
of pragmatism and efficiency, but of the beauty born out of
contingency, necessity and the aggregate.
10 - ACSA 101 Annual Meeting
Beth Weinstein, University of Arizona
Working within the realm of performance design has offered innumerable lessons in productively and creatively operating within tight
constraints. Certain conditions of performing/performance art practices are at the root of this: access to rehearsal space and to performers’ time to develop work is extremely limited by affordability
and availability; a work’s “production value”, without government or
private funding, limited to non-existent. The result of these two dominant conditions is the pressure is to make something from nothing
and within a constricted time frame. These lean and mean conditions
of performance making practices tend to prohibit the accumulation
of decorative and conceptual “fat”. The lack of time necessitates
working methods with embedded rapid feedback loops, to quickly
shake off preconceived ideas and get to the essence of things.
These are the constraints that I have been bringing from designing
for performance into the design studio—as method—to interrogate
other absences, lacks, or scarcities as the topic of inquiry. The projects are explored through scarcity as motive, scarcity as opportunity, and scarcity as method in relation to the same content: water.
Something from Nothing: Extreme Re-purposing
and Material/Construction Processes
in First Year Studio
Marcus Shaffer, Pennsylvania State University
For the past 25 + years, beginning architecture students (at a large
state university in the Northeast) have designed and built small
scale constructions and follies as the culmination of their First
Year studio education. This tradition serves as a synthesis event
in pedagogy that introduces new students to drawing and representation at the start of each academic year, and ends with 6-8
weeks of exposure to material practices, project management, and
1:1 scale construction in the school’s Building Yard. During the 201112 school year, First Year students were invited to collaborate on
the design and construction of a small outdoor Education/Visitors
Center for the University’s Recycling & Waste Management Center
- an operation that recycles nearly 60% of all trash generated on
campus, and stockpiles unused supplies and materials that have
been designated for the trash heap. Inspired by the “client’s” fanatical commitment to keeping usable/recyclable material out of
landfills, one section of First Year students was instructed to design and construct a modular concrete perimeter wall to define
and screen the outdoor space, using only post-consumer/postproduct materials available through the client or scavenged from
trash receptacles. For the facilitating faculty member, this project
Waste(lands) + Material Economies/Less is More (2) continued
in extreme repurposing and material/technological invention motivated by scarcity was very much informed by a careful calculation
of excesses (financial and material) experienced in previous Campus Construction projects, and by the amount of concrete-related
waste that two previous projects had generated. At this institution, the First Year faculty as a body also holds a strong belief, that
educational experiences in the first year shape a beginning design
student’s identity and ethos, preparing character foundations for
their further studies in the Department of Architecture – and an
ethical basis for their professional practices in the future. Along
these lines, the faculty member facilitating design/build of the
screening wall had in mind an “action research” project motivated
by restricted resources; work that might foster future “development activist” architects – architects attuned to “post-industrial,
holistic approaches” to the complexities of doing more with less.
For the fourteen student participants given this project (Section
01), the brief essentially called for 65 to 100 linear feet of impermanent concrete block construction with no budget, to be made from
material waste, material surplus, or materials that had already existed as “something” through at least one product cycle. The work
was initially received by the students with severe trepidation and
angst, as an impossible project doomed to fail through its restrictions. Unable to recognize potential building materials in resources
that existed in post-use form (such as broken plastic stadium seating and cracked garbage cans), the student’s initial reaction was,
we got nothing. . This paper will detail the project as an empirical
search for commodity, firmness, and delight in a site and materials
relegated to waste. The success of the project includes inventiveness, ingenuity, and opportunism that describe both the finished
product, and character qualifications imparted upon the students
through an intensification of recycle/reuse, and restrictions imposed on materials and resources.
An Ecology from Absence: In Place of Pruitt-Igoe
Nora K. Wendl, Portland State University
It is common to ask designers to work with less material, less energy, less money, and for the outcome of their efforts to result
in “almost nothing” itself. But what happens when you start with
nothing, literally. Or, worse than nothing, what if you begin with
a site in which time has moved backward, leaving less than nothing to work with—leaving an historical and physical disaster from
which to begin building anew?
This paper will introduce such a site, and examine solutions to this
site that range from the very speculative to the very real. This is
a site on which an architecture of the most extreme economy of
scale, materiality and design sat, and on which it failed publicly,
precisely because of a mismanagement of resources allocated to
the project. This is the site of an architecture that became obsolete
because it was designed as an autonomous architectural solution
to the very problems that it was designed to solve, and because it
existed as autonomous from the very city in which it was embedded: the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex. Replacing a slum in 1954, its
thirty-three crisp, modern towers stood until 1972, when the towers’ years-long demolition began.
What has emerged from this site in the last forty years is both less
than and more than what it was when the towers were still standing—it exists now as an ecology marked by absence. In forty years,
these 54 acres have transformed into a thriving volunteer forest. In
the past five years, what has emerged in place of resource-strapped
static architecture—the architecture that once occupied the site—
are creative and generative systems, of which architecture plays
only a small part, if any. These emerge in two places—both in the
actual regeneration of the nearby neighborhood by artist Theaster
Gates and his Rebuild Foundation initiative, as well as Juan William Chavez and his substantially funded Pruitt Igoe Bee Sanctuary, and in the speculative realm, in entries to a competition for
the site administered by a St. Louis non-profit agency and, second,
in a competition entitled Pruitt Igoe Now, in which of the nearly
four hundred international proposals reviewed by the competition administrators and the jurors, the predominant narrative that
emerged for the site were proposals of self-supporting systems—in
which architecture played only a small role. These systems generated their own energy, food, filtered water, and even employment.
In many cases, the proposals were structured to benefit not only
the immediate site of the former housing project, but in fact the
larger Northside neighborhood surrounding it.
This paper will detail the speculative and actual projects surrounding this site, and address what it means to begin with nothing,
making a case for these American hinterlands as the site for architecture’s inevitable re-definition. In these ecologies of absence,
new modes of practicing architecture emerge—modes often not
shaped by architects autonomously, but that nevertheless have
profound implications for our discipline.
New Constellations / New Ecologies - San Francisco, CA - 11
101_1 Waste(lands) + Material Economies
Burn It. Bury It. Or Send It on a Caribbean Cruise
El Hadi Jazairy, University of Michigan
Rania Ghosn, University of Michigan
Date: Friday, March 22, 2013, 4:00 PM - 5:30 PM
A Geography of Interest: Waste and Public Life
Curt Anderson Gambetta, Woodbury University
This paper proposes that waste be examined first and foremost as
a problem of interest. Learning from the work of John Dewey, I suggest that understanding where and how waste catalyzes interest
and conflict recenters waste as an ineluctably spatial and material
dilemma, rather than a solely technical and managerial dilemma. It
foregrounds waste, in other words, as an explicitly public dilemma,
problematizing its systems of enclosure at both the scale of the
site (ie: a landfill) and the larger enclosures embedded in its siting
on the urban periphery. I will speculate on how mundane technical
processes of waste management are also social and spatial, evaluating and critiquing current architectural responses to these systems and proposing a new ground for architectural agency in the
context of their instability.
Gob Piles and Culm Dumps
Christian Stayner, Stayner Architects
This paper focuses upon the least discussed of these contemporary
wastes: the left over material produced by large-scale hard rock
and strip-mining processes.
The Reserva Ecologica: Three Streams
of Material Excess in Buenos Aires
Erin S. Putalik, Virginia Tech
Brian Davis, Cornell University
Examples of radical overwriting of the form of the city by repressive or authoritarian regimes proliferate in the global urban history of the last two centuries, from the Haussmanization of Paris to
Robert Moses ‘taking a meat axe to the Bronx’. However, there is
a paucity of studies that consider these processes in terms of material displacement. The spatial result of these large scale renewal
projects is typically understood to be twofold: the removal of the
existing and the installation of the new. However, there is a third
effect- once the construction and demolition waste is displaced, it
can exert an influence on the spatial relations and material reconfiguration of the city.
Using the Reserva Ecologica of Buenos Aires as a case study, this
paper will examine waste, in the form of construction and demolition
debris, as both the result of and embedded with the potential for
a radical spatial refiguring of the city. Construction and demolition
waste, in this case from large scale infrastructural projects within
a dense urban core as part of a conservative political ideology, is
therefore both a spatio-political result, and the raw material for spatio-political transformation. In addition, an examination of the specific case of the Reserva enables construction and demolition waste
to be considered alongside other streams of waste in a specific situation including dredging spoils and biological matter. And not just
as raw material for the generation of new space, but as a catalyst
and armature that figures the powerful ecological and geological
processes of the Rio de la Plata in the historical fabric of the city.
12 - ACSA 101 Annual Meeting
Waste, Industry, Ecology: Urban Design Futures
for Sauget, IL
Midori Mizuhara
Anna Muessig, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Kristen Zeiber, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Decaying post-industrial towns on the outskirts of shrinking cities
have become a prototypical American urban form, rightly characterized as magnets for pollution and undesired land-uses. In these
landscapes where traditional commercial demand is low and regional population is shrinking, the challenges of remediation, development, and urban design are great. Sauget, IL, an industrial suburb of St. Louis, is one such site. Founded by the industrial giant
Monsanto, the town has always served St. Louis as a manufacturing
center, recycling station, and dump. Now, as industry leaves behind manufacturing shells, Superfund sites, and other uses rejected
by neighboring municipalities, Sauget must imagine a new future.
Participants of the Spring 2012 Shrinking Cities Studio, a graduate
urban design studio, examined a former oil refinery site in Sauget
and envisioned new potential for the site and the larger region.
Two proposals are presented here. Transfer Station transforms the
abundance of the local scrap metal ecology into raw material, increasing public appreciation of waste ecosystems in the process.
Remediation Landforms layers remediation techniques with new
public uses to create a flexible landforming process that embodies
the shifts and uncertainties of the region’s future.
101_1 Waste(lands) + Material Economies
Drosscape
Alan Berger, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Date: Thursday, March 21, 2013, 4:00 PM - 5:30 PM
Île de Nantes – designerly ways of recognition
Ellen Marie Braae, The University of Copenhagen
The increasing number of abandoned industrial sites over the last
half century can be considered a waste- or by-product of urban development. What we understand as waste in an urban development
perspective, and not least what we do with it, are central themes in
the sustainability discussion. This is a discussion that is increasingly
reduced to a question of technology (Hauxner 2010: 244), which in
industrial areas is primarily pollution issues. Seen from this perspective, the French landscape architect and architect Alexandre Chemetoff is of particular interest due to his Île de Nantes project. Here
he provides a new framework for understanding urban metabolism
from a development perspective, and demonstrates how urban
development can be seen as an open-ended process. This article
presents and discusses Chemetoff’s innovative approach using a
theoretical framework drawing on contemporary philosophical discussions of the convergence between ethics and aesthetics, and
the ethics of recognition. This article focuses on the transformation
of the island, Île de Nantes, located in the Loire River in southwest
France. Between 2000 and 2010, Chemetoff conducted the process of transforming the island, which formerly housed industrial
and port activities, into an integral part of the city of Nantes. Based
on on-site observations, published project material, literature studies and interviews with Chemetoff himself, Chemetoff’s work and
working methods are examined and discussed, on the theory that
the completed transformations may articulate both the transition’s
implicit value, and the working methods employed. This work appears to be grounded on an appreciative approach, with parallels in
the ethics of recognition found in recent social and political philosophy. This leads to a new starting point for design practice and further connects Chemetoff’s principles concerning “cultivating differences” and “economizing sites”, the recognition discussion, and in a
wider perspective the identity discussion, with a reflection on what
we understand by sustainability. A design practice praising the relational, dynamic and fluid rather than the object and the static.
Big Box Operations: Managing Waste and Change in
Walmart Superstores
Ian Caine, University of Texas At San Antonio
In 1950 Sam Walton opened a discount variety store in Bentonville, Arkansas called Walton’s 5-10 and set into motion a chain
of events that would revolutionize the scale and character of
retail development in North America. In the subsequent decades
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. would systematically reinvent every component of the big box equation, from the size of the buildings to the
financing of civil infrastructure.
material life-cycle of the built landscape and the financial lifecycle of the big box structure; second, that in order to align these
time frames, developers and municipalities must re-conceptualize
building systems as dynamic processes that are transitional, not
permanent, in nature; and third, that to achieve this shift, these
two critical actors must fundamentally reinvent their economic
and political relationship.
The site for this design research is the Walmart Home Office
and Superstore in Bentonville, Arkansas—center of the Walmart
universe. This project re-imagines the legal right-of-way on Sam
Walton Boulevard as an expanded physical and legal armature,
one capable of streamlining redundant infrastructures and managing the material excess that results from uncoordinated private
development. The paper ultimately contends that municipalities,
by bringing the design of civil infrastructure back into the public
fold, can leverage capital investment patterns to reduce waste
and manage the change associated with Walmart urbanism.
From Drosscape to Sponge-scape
Brittney Lynn Everett
With the increase of deindustrialization, abandoned Drosscape sites
are becoming increasingly prevalent in the urban landscape. These
areas tend to form liminal borders between communities because
their economic disinvestment and physical decay creates barriers
against the social, economic, and cultural flows that move between
neighborhoods. The liminality of these Drosscape borders poses
numerous challenges to reinvestment as in-betweenness complicates issues of ownership and collective identity. Consequently,
Drosscape requires a new mode of understanding that looks beyond its physical condition to embrace its liminality and openness.
It is through this lens that Drosscape can be valued as both a necessary byproduct of deindustrialization and an invaluable urban asset.
This paper explores the re-conceptualization of Drosscape borders
as flexible, regenerative urban sponges that move in tandem with
the vast flows of the city. These areas offer respite from the structured organization of urban neighborhoods, providing a malleable
environment in which urban residents can play a significant role in
the creation and re-creation of their milieu. This research uses New
Orleans, Louisiana and Lagos, Nigeria as case studies to explore
how a net of diverse, informal activities can truly transform our cities without huge investment and infrastructure.
This paper focuses on a critical and unintended consequence of
the transformation: the multiplication of material waste. The
waste associated with big box developments manifests in numerous forms: abandoned buildings, underutilized sites, redundant
water and parking infrastructures. The project outlines eight
design interventions—the Big Box Operations—to manage waste
and change in Walmart Superstores. The Big Box Operations rest
on three assertions: first, that much of the excess associated with
big box developments results from the difference between the
New Constellations / New Ecologies - San Francisco, CA - 13
Waste(lands) + Material Economies/Drosscape Continued
Anticipating The City That Never Was
Christopher Marcinkoski, University of Pennsylvania
The stated position of this panel suggests that designers should
pursue “innovative solutions…for [the] inevitable waste to come”
from economic production. While I fundamentally agree with this
position, I would like to take the opportunity to advance this notion
a step further in order to suggest that designers should look to not
just anticipate waste, but begin anticipating the inevitable failure
of anthropogenic settlement altogether. In this regard, this essay
is interested in the capacity of design to more actively concern
itself with the inevitable interruptions, inflections and ultimately
“failures” that emerge from changing social, market and political
demands, as well as the need for course correction, that materializes over the extended time-scale required for the delivery of territorial scale urbanization.
This position is predicated on the notion that urbanization – the
constructing of anthropogenic settlement – has become a globally
recognized means of economic production. The point of departure
for this essay is the empirical evidence suggested by the recent
proliferation of “ghost” settlements and infrastructures that have
appeared as a result of economic growth policies that encourage
speculative urban development in both established and emerging
economies. While there is little question that political and economic
policies are primarily responsible for the speculative development
seen globally that is a root cause of what I refer to here as the City
That Never Was phenomenon, I would also argue that the physical
planning and design solutions that companion these policies are
equally complicit in increasing the likelihood of failure and thus, the
social, economic and ecological gravity of the situation.
The presumption of continuous market expansion together with
the perceived successes of peer metropolitan initiatives has created an environment globally where replicable, pre-packaged formats of urbanization (SEZ’s, casinos, expos, airports, super-talls,
waterfronts, etc.) are sold as instruments of expedient access to
limitless economic opportunity. As such, the City That Never Was
has emerged from a set of increasingly generic urbanistic strategies that presume the continuous construction of new edifices
and infrastructures will serve to attract additional investment and
thereby prosperity. When this model is successful, it is the envy of
governors, mayors, developers, planners and designers alike. When
it fails, it is no less spectacular.
For the purposes of this argument, this paper will consider the vast
and numerous landscapes of incomplete and unoccupied contemporary urban development, leisure amenities and white elephant
infrastructure that lie abandoned or dormant outside the metropolitan extents of established Spanish cities like Madrid, Barcelona,
Valencia and Seville.
14 - ACSA 101 Annual Meeting
Super Session
101_2 Energy Circuits + Artificial Ecologies
Sean Lally, University of Illinois at Chicago
Marcelyn Gow, Southern California Institute of Architecture
Mason White, University of Toronto
Lola Sheppard, University of Waterloo
Helene Furjan, University of Pennsylvania
Date: Saturday, March 23, 2013, 9:00 AM - 10:30 AM
The question of ‘environment’ has never been so prevalent within architectural discourse, asking us
to interrogate the many assumptions that have governed our approach to energy and ecology within
contemporary practice. Energy Circuits focuses, not only on the exchanges and economies of energy,
but also on its material flows and atmospheric effects, reconsidered as primary constituents of the
built environment; Synthetic Ecologies examines architecture’s direct engagement with the organic,
investigating the effects of new architectural bio-technologies and the conceptual, technological and
aesthetic issues surrounding the proliferating living landscapes embedded within the surfaces and
spaces of our emerging agropolis; Architecture’s Next Companion Species asks us to reconsider a truly
post-humanist environment in the service of, or in concert with, species and ecologies other than our
own; and Eco-logics reconstitutes architecture as an environment or eco-system to be created and assessed, not in terms of its objecthood, but rather in relation to the multiple valences of its performance.
101_2 Energy Circuits + Artificial Ecologies
Energy Circuits
Sean Lally, University of Illinois at Chicago
Date: Friday, March 22, 2013, 4:00 PM - 5:30 PM
Mountains & Clouds: Landscape, Meteorology
and Building Form
Natural and Artificial Light as Energy:
Experiments in Space
Mountains and Clouds are often thought of as separate phenomena -one of the realm of minerals the other of the atmosphere- but
they are in fact intimately linked through their reciprocal actions
on each other.
This paper explores the spatial possibilities of natural and artificial
light in human’s sensorial experience in the environment while addressing phenomena related to lack of sunlight, such as insufficient
vitamin D, women’s cycle patterns irregularities, depression. It examines light’s integral role in space through architectural and art
experiments like Zitofos, a series of 56 machines to study light’s response to materials, and Photodotes, a series of spatial installations
that involve light, plants, or food. The paper seeks to define light in
philosophical terms, by associating it with energy and the survival
and by reversing the possible transition from light as necessity to
a surplus. Light as an energy carrier, may be eventually become
a go-back-to-the-core response to the request for sustainability.
Stephen Hugh Roe, Feng Chia University
Recently the Mountain has taken on a new currency in architecture
appearing in multiple projects as a new architectural “typology” .
Here we look at mountains themselves and how they operate to
respond to and transform environmental conditions, especially climate. For various architects, in the past, the Mountain has been both
an obsession and a model and as such is revealing of both an attitude
to nature and to the role of form in nature. Viollet-le-Duc in particular attempted to reveal the physiognomy of the earth through drawings of mountains. While recent interest in mountains has focused
mostly on its programmatic potentials or its structural implications.
Clouds are the result of the interaction of global weather patterns
with local differences in topography. In fact Mountains have a
strong influence on the weather and can cause extreme local variations. In meteorology these phenomena are known as Orographic Effects. Building on an extensive study of the weather and its
causes and effects we look at the potential for such a performative
understanding of the relationship between topography and microclimate to inform the design of architectural space.
Through an interpretation of passive design and the new relationships it introduces between air and space, internal microclimate
and programme, we propose that the interiors of buildings become
as subject to the kind of atmospheric dynamics characteristic of
Internal Weather and Meteorological Space which explore the impact of this way of thinking on an Orographic Architecture both for
the way we think about the role of space and form and for the way
we represent them in plan and section.
Finally two projects are used to illustrate the potential application
of these concepts on the design of large buildings.
While this paper explores the formal and spatial consequences of
this way of thinking, further work explores the smaller scale material and tectonic implications together forming a consistent approach to form, meteorology, space and materiality.
16 - ACSA 101 Annual Meeting
Zenovia Toloudi, Wentworth Institute of Technology
101_2 Energy Circuits + Artificial Ecologies/Energy Circuits Continued
Naturalizing Architecture – Beauty Becoming Beast
A Design Study: Condensation House
Skender Luarasi, Rhode Island School of Design
Carl Solander, Harvard University
In “In the Nature of Cities” Neil Smith challenges the nature-society
dualism and its many disguised manifestations that characterize
the mainstream environmental movement. One of the manifestations that play into the ideological separation of nature and society is the apocalyptic response towards the environment (Smith,
2006): Global warming! Resources’ depletion! Waste production!
Population increase! Water scarcity! Species’ extinction! We need
to do something…; we need to respond and treat environment
“gently” and resourcefully…, otherwise the “beast” will strike back…!
This leitmotif also structures most of the current discourse on sustainability. We often hear: How does the architecture respond to an
environment? Yet, we rarely hear: How does the architecture produce an environment? In this last question lies the premise of this
topic proposal: architecture “becomes the beast…;” it becomes an
environment; it is naturalized into an environment. We can imagine
and design new constellations and ecologies in architecture only if
we cannot imagine environment except as minimally mediated by
design and architecture.
How does architecture produce an environment? We could imagine, for example, an architectural environment in which the temperature differentials among the subjects’ bodies, animal’s bodies,
plants, earth and a series of habitation spaces produce a particular “condensation” subject, and a thermal atmosphere that favors
the gathering and conservation of water through condensation. Of
course the elements in themselves, such as water, gravity, earth and
plants could be considered “natural;” yet they become re-naturalized and socialized into and through an architectural organization
that juxtaposes and frames them into an exchange and productive
system. We could shift in scale and imagine a cloud of condensation subjects, a condensation community network that produces a
water cloud or a water economy that integrates different geological, biological, chemical, social, economic and legislative processes
and practices. A truly ecological architecture would be one that
interpolates subjects and environments through the “calling” and
organization of different objects, data, and material processes, from
the scale of human skin and plants’ cells to building mechanical systems and larger material-data-scapes. It is within the context of this
interpolation where the often dichotomous relationship between
architectural form and environment ought to be situated.
architecture becomes environment. The paper traces a brief foray of
examples and precedents that mark important changes in our understanding of infrastructure and superstructure, and explores these
notions in a design project, The Condensation House.
Systole and Diastole: Multimedia Environments
and Manifold Form
Adam Fure, University of Michigan
Ashley Fure, Harvard University
This paper documents, analyzes, and theorizes current research
into responsive environments conducted by a multi-disciplinary
team. This research has manifested most recently in an interactive
installation that involves sound, space, material, and light. Veer,
as it is called, uses sensors to track position and trigger shifts in
spatialized sound and light, activating the sensory pressures of its
inhabitants and amplifying the dynamic contours of a spatially variegated environment.
The theoretical implications of this work are threefold. First, the researcher’s collaborative design process establishes relational logics
between differing media. Supported by Brian Massumi’s definition
of design as the relation of sense data, Veer combines the sensory effects of sound, space, light, color, and matter into a series
of memorable, emphatic moments. Further, the multiple temporalities produced by Veer’s constituent mediums and the interactive
technology that connects them, establishes a dynamic conception
of aesthetic form that follows philosopher Henri Maldiney. This
form is an experiential becoming guided by the rhythmic relationships of material, spatial, and sonic variation. Finally, Veer supports
the development of an architectural topology based on notions of
multi-dimensional spatiality. Its resemblance of a manifold, a multidimensional topological space, provides the conceptual framework
to think of the multiple components of design as interrelated variables in an integrated whole.
Ultimately, these arguments are put forth to broaden the theoretical basis of research into responsive architectures. The opportunities afforded by interactive technologies challenge architecture’s
most established theories while opening new experiential potential. Designing space as a variably charged, responsive field produces novel relations between bodies, environments and the differential energies that flow from and through them, while informing
the theoretical lines that tie them together.
What is the relationship between form and the signifying practice of
architecture on one hand and environment or environmental performance on the other? This question is both historical and immediately
present; it emerges at the very site of encounter between infrastructure and superstructure, between production and representation,
between technological possibility and our specific historical understanding of nature and environment. The paper attempts to go
beyond the linear cause-and-effect paradigm and traditional questions of “which comes first” or “which gives rise to which.” Instead, it
suggests a framework that conflates both terms, in a volatile act of
reversal and displacement, in which form becomes performative and
New Constellations / New Ecologies - San Francisco, CA - 17
101_2 Energy Circuits + Artificial Ecologies
Synthetic Ecologies
Marcelyn Gow, Southern California Institute of Architecture
Date: Thursday, March 21, 2013, 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM
Synthetic Ecological Frameworks
Bradley Cantrell, Louisiana State University
Frank Melendez, Louisiana State University
Responsive technologies play a pivotal role in the evolving relationship between constructed environments and responsive ecological
systems. Current models of machine/human interaction are slowly
evolving to encompass more complex methods of simulated intelligence and nuanced response. The research presented attempts to
formulate approaches to abiotic and biotic responses that directly
interface with ecological and infrastructural systems across a variety
of scales. This research posits a framework for understanding ecological interfaces and examines a series of pragmatic and speculative projects that support this line of inquiry.
Several technologies are converging to drastically change the landscape of responsive technologies including autonomous robotics,
distributed intelligence, biotic/abiotic interfaces, and ubiquitous
sensing networks. As a composite, these technologies fundamentally alter our ability to imagine constructed systems in highly nuanced relationships between environmental and ecological processes. These new relationships require an expanded view of networked
and object oriented relationships between designed devices, ecological entities, and regional influences.
Noise Control: Designing with Entropic Processes
Daniel Norell, KTH Royal Institute of Technology
Noise Control offers a specific approach to design where noise is
understood as a productive rather than destructive force. This
approach is distinct from others in architecture, where the noise
produced by entropic processes is simply accepted as inevitable, or
from those that celebrate the purely picturesque nature of matter
in a state of decay. Noise Control draws from an eclectic collection
of sources ranging from contemporary dis-courses on matter and
digital design, to disciplinary history and neighboring disciplines. It
argues that the distortion produced by noise can be productively
associated with the precision of digital design in order to produce
specific material sensibilities. These sensibilities lean towards the
strange, because of their pe-culiar pairing of immediate, sensory
experiences of matter with a slower set of associations that rely on
manipulation of vaguely familiar objects.
The Thin Green Line
Dora Epstein Jones, Southern California Institute of Architecture
The current fashion and trend of green roofs and vegetal walls denote a preference for thin planes and surfaces. This “thinness” in
turn points to a language of postmodern reversals from artificial to
organic, or as described here, a “trick.” “The Thin Green Line,” a title
taken from a documentary on frog extinction, instead argues that
while greening is an environmental necessity, it should also challenge us to think differently about architectural aesthetics and the
hegemony of certain formal languages. Taking some cues from
18 - ACSA 101 Annual Meeting
philosophies of deep ecology and Heidegger’s postwar revisions to
techne, this paper sees the thin plane as a key player in architectural
consciousness. Using an example from a gallery installation by Griffin Enright, it instead offers a re-imagined poetic of green tectonics.
Tomorrow’s Ecologies | A Synthetic Approach
Nicole Koltick, Drexel University
Our dreams, aspirations and intimations provide whispers of a near
future that is seamless, wild and yet contained. How much are we
willing to relinquish in order to meet the future? A philosophical
approach that seeks to engage in a speculative realist agenda
may help us to contend with new systems that will only increase
in specificity, scope and scale. Old notions of nature and the illusions of a dominant relationship to the biological world will not
serve us well as we begin to imagine new futures. These persistent and oft times imperceptible biases hold us back as we formulate new modes of operating within an increasingly expanding
and intertwined digital, biological, cultural, informational and material space. The synthetic future which we can see on the horizon
looms forward from a present that is still very much grounded in
the static. We can catch glimpses of a future that may be both illuminating and frightening. We can suggest that we would like our
enclosures to be transformative, adaptive, evolving. What about
sentience, agency and control? What of chaos, risk and unintended
consequences? Can we abandon the reassuring tropes of modernism that assert that control and dominance assure us a temperate
and insulated existence? We have become comfortable operating
in linear and reliable ways. We seek to retain one foot on land while
stepping out into new territories. To embody and engage with the
future that we are rapidly beginning to see before us will require
a leap into conceptual and operational approaches that redefine
our relation to objects, materials and environments. This way of
thinking is easily dismissed as fiction. It is simpler to imagine slight
augmentations and gradual upgrades to our existing systems. The
division between inside and outside, nature and artifice, us and
them has served as a reassuring balm that is slowly cracking and
revealing itself.
The increasing awareness of the incredible complexity and subtle
entwinement of various phenomena and systems, forces us to drastically adjust the definition of our relationship to the world. Contemporary philosophers have attempted to grapple with these new developments and apply them to a more nuanced and speculative way
of approaching the objects, relations and substances of the world.
The mechanisms and behaviors of complex systems, chaotic action
and the role of emergence all suggest that past notions of a static
and linear operational agenda will not be productive as we move
forward. In approaching the future there is a delicate revisionism
that must occur that necessitates a broad and resilient philosophical
and theoretical underpinning through which to grapple with these
decisions. Things have become much less solidified, much less cohesive and much fuzzier. This paper offers up a series of strategies that
may be useful in approaching the synthetic ecologies of tomorrow.
101_2 Energy Circuits + Artificial Ecologies
Architecture’s Next Companion Species
Sean Lally, University of Illinois at Chicago
Date: Thursday, March 21, 2013, 4:00 PM - 5:30 PM
Animal Interfaces for a Posthuman Territory
Ariane Lourie Harrison, Yale University
Architecture today recognizes that its once familiar disciplinary terrain now bristles with new hybrids: smart materials, sentient systems,
and responsive envelopes are but a few of the networks assembling
humans and non-humans, animals and machines, technology and
environments in what Bruno Latour proposes as a “parliament of
things” and Donna Haraway envisions as species-companionship.
The working through of such hybridizations, in disciplines ranging
from cultural studies to bio-digital sciences to animal geography,
has spawned many different theoretical positions that largely reflect
a posthuman understanding of the relations between organisms and
the environment. The animal folds into a networked environment
and is already connected to humans by technology, as Haraway
points out, as lab, food and military animals. Yet the logics of network theory offer new collectives in which animals become actors,
have agency and even possess subjectivity.
Building on the positions established by Hayles and Latour, this
essay charts some of the promising territory for human-animal
relations that the posthuman discourse offers for contemporary
architecture, from its integration of actor-network-theory to transspecies urbanism. Such thinking has been materialized in architecture, as I suggest here and in other publications, in the melded performative, programmatic and formal assemblages by The Living,
Studio Gang and SCAPE. We find in their works evidence for an
ecological approach forged from working among many disciplines:
architects are absorbing methods from new schools of human and
animal geography, political ecology, and Science and Technology
Studies, among other new fields of study. If the current geological
period, the Anthropocene, marks humans (anthropos) as the most
powerful environmental force on the planet—chiefly through technology—then we should understand how architecture can extend a
technological network of care across the environment, and in this
sense, how architecture can function as a companion species to the
many hybrid structures jostling for recognition.
Land Management Tribes: A New Species
of Symbiotic Architectures for The Great Plains
Matthew Spremulli, University of Toronto
Fei-Ling Tseng, University of Toronto
Agriculturally converted grasslands represent a major source of
food, fuel, and fibre for our civilizations. However, both the host
ecologies and the techniques to farm these regions are approaching critical limits incurred by productivity demands and ecosystem
failures. Rethinking how grasslands are managed is unavoidable if
we are to continue farming them.
This project envisions a landscape future for the American Great
Plains exploring new design opportunities in coupling the extremes
of farming ecologically challenged grasslands with the regional
trend of hyper-automated agricultural systems. A series of specielike agricultural-architectures are inspired from studying the endemic flora, fauna, and (currently) machinery on the Plains. While these
are agriculturally minded devices, both the units themselves and
their tribal deployment does not focus on production efficiency, but
rather considers the spatial, symbiotic, and experiential potentials
such technology might offer in this context.
New Constellations / New Ecologies - San Francisco, CA - 19
Energy Circuits + Artificial Ecologies/Architecture’s Next Companion Species
continued
Mess-Mate Codesigners
Constructing Wilderness
Edward Dodington
Joyce Hwang, University At Buffalo, SUNY
The place of human-kind is in a precarious state these days. The human link in the web of life is daily being gently eroded by developments in science, animal-studies and by thinkers and philosophers
such as Donna Harraway. This is not necessarily a problem or bad
thing, but simply a change, an opportunity.
Architects, planners, and citizens are starting to recognize the value
of introducing biodiversity into urban environments. Trends seen in
recent urban and regional master plans indicate that we are becoming increasingly aware of human dependence on flora and fauna. But
what happens when wildlife encroaches upon more densely populated areas of cities? What happens when they develop habitats outside of officially zoned territories, and in residential or commercial
neighborhoods? The artifacts that we construct in response to these
‘out of place’ animals give us clear indications about standardly accepted attitudes toward species co-occupation.
Our species-wide transition is being played out, not without some
distress, across our current ecological, biological, theoretical, metaphysical and stylistic worlds often with the same resounding conclusion: “to be one is to become with many.” To paraphrase, we are no
longer singularly humans but something more, something multiple.
For Harraway to be come with many is an awareness of the reality
of our convoluted, messy, “knotted” existence with a whole host of
other sometimes smaller sometimes larger animals. These are the
animals that live in and around us, bacteria for example, that make
our human lives possible and without whom we could not be. In
practice this translates into increased respect for animal life, a greater appreciation for our connectedness to the webs of life around us
and a holistic appreciation for our own bodies.
“To become with many” suggests a radical paradigm shift in design.
In light of Harraway’s quote above, past and current architecture
appears to be part of an outdated human-centric mindset where “to
be one is always to be different from others.” This is no-longer the
case. That period is over.
Through this paper we will be introduced to several architectural
projects that, though wildly different in almost every way, show us
how as designers, architects and humans we can more actively engage our mess-mate codesigners to produce rich and diverse habitats for all. We will see that to become with many in the built world
is no different from the biological – and that infact there is no space
separating the two. We will see however that while architecturally,
the biophilic sentiments remain the same the practice is perhaps a
bit more confounding. And lastly, the projects collected here will
remind us that outside of the world of Mathematics there is no singularity. We are always enmeshed in the lives of others and always
becoming with many. Isn’t it time we built this way?
20 - ACSA 101 Annual Meeting
Given the conflicted attitudes of city dwellers toward urban wildlife,
perhaps off-the-shelf products for animals will ultimately emerge as
marketable, feasible, and effective. As an architect, however, I am
interested in exploring ways of incorporating wildlife habitats into
the spatial and built environment, that not only ‘perform’ as habitats
but also produce a public resonance and visibility. In this paper, I will
discuss a series of recent projects that attempt to resist the kind of
invisibility that is typically seen in the artifacts that are built for urban
wildlife. I will also discuss strategies for integrating a more comprehensive system of ‘wilderness’ into cities, imagining how buildings,
major urban structures, and infrastructure can be designed to enable co-species habitation.
101_2 Energy Circuits + Artificial Ecologies
Ecological Infrastructures: From Bubbles to Territories
Lola Sheppard, University of Waterloo
Date: Friday, March 22, 2013, 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM
The Envirobubble: Clean Air Pods Redux
Lydia Kallipoliti, The Cooper Union
In 1972, the underground architecture group Antfarm created a
pneumatic envelope at the University of California at Berkeley envisioned as a “Clean Air Pod,” where people could breathe safely
sealed off from the air pollution outside. The Clean Air Pod (CAP)
would screen out deadly pollutants and protect the people enveloped in the bubble. Among other activist performances and statements, this venue reflected the fear of asphyxiation in urban environments which became an issue of intense public concern in the
1960s and 1970s. Outdoor air quality was a primary press headline
in environmental campaigns, while our memory of urbanity in the
immediate postwar period is the dark city of smog.
As levels of outdoor air pollution mounted, Reyner Banham ardently
advocated for the conditioning of indoor air quality and moreover,
for the numerical calculations and flows of air as a novel creative
type of design practice. Banham referred to the contamination of
indoor environments as a pathology and suggested the tempered
air-conditioned interior, furnished adequately with mechanical apparatuses, as a remedial treatment. What remains a paradox is the
fact that Banham’s well–tempered environment has surfaced as a
sustainable design practice promoting buildings as regenerative
and closed ecological systems, capable of harnessing waste and
providing their own energy. With blockage from the mechanics
of the seasons and the flows of the natural world, buildings saved
significant amounts of energy and thus, because of their numerical performance, were esteemed as environmentally favorable. In
light of this perhaps absurd conservationist ethic, Antafrm’s Clean
Air Pod, which was originally conceived as a protective uterinelike environment, has been reiteratively translated as a conserved
ecological milieu blocked from the effluence of the exterior world.
Today, public concerns of indoor air quality escalate fast as large
percentages of building occupants in heavily air conditioned buildings repeatedly experience symptoms of breathlessness, exhaustion, headache, nausea and unconsciousness. Air conditioning systems are in several cases the main carriers of diseases, as they can
quickly transfer and distribute pathogenic airborne bacteria like in
the case of legionellosis. Still, windows remain closed. In parallel,
the outdoor atmosphere has cleared if compared to the 1960s. The
condition is reversed.
Infrastructure as Organism
Mitchell Joachim
Melanie Fessel
URBANEERING UTOPIA, A New Profession for the Design of Cities
Who is the primary authority in the making of utopia or any extraordinary future city? An Urbaneer is a burgeoning discipline based
on urban design that can negotiate the complex mix of technology,
theory and practice that embraces the re-invention of the city to
exceed the needs of the planet. Today, this nascent interdisciplinary field is in a state of radical development.
Sparks of utopian reflection throughout human history have been
indispensable in evolved societies. Utopias, for the most part, are
a necessary paradigm. Utopias display maximal solutions to existing real world problems. They tackle upheaval with orderly retribution. In nearly all variations, Utopias are deliberately excessive.
They overshoot the answer to a crisis to accentuate the problem.
Frontier Urbanism: Explorations and Propositions in
the Expanded Field
Christopher Austin Roach, California College of the Arts
The design disciplines are increasingly driven to engage with transformations of the physical environment at scales and levels of complexity that transcend traditional categories such as urban/rural,
center/periphery, city/landscape, or internal/external. As the territorial and disciplinary contexts of our practices continue to expand,
we must develop new modes of perception, new forms of representation, and new models of transformation that can surpass the
limitations of these dualities. While operating at the outer limits
of scale and context may push us to exceed the normative frameworks of architecture, urban design, or landscape practice, we can
begin to develop methodologies for engaging with these immense
spatial dimensions by leveraging the scalability of the tools that
are familiar to us and cross-breeding them with methods derived
from other disciplines. In this paper I will attempt such a hybridization; borrowing heavily from the conceptual frameworks and cartographic lenses of geography to focus in on the large-scale spatial
transformations that are taking place in the South American hinterland, and demonstrate how this perspectival shift can become
operational in developing alternative models of design agency on
the urban frontier.
Revisiting these projects, the paper will conclude with the presentation of an installation, which raises issues on air quality still eminent today. “The envirobubble” questions if the air we breathe indoors is more hazardous than the air we breathe outdoors, seeking
to expand awareness from outdoor to indoor air quality and alert
visitors as to the breathable air in heavily sealed air conditioned
buildings, with high degrees of condensation.
New Constellations / New Ecologies - San Francisco, CA - 21
Energy Circuits + Artificial Ecologies/Ecological Infrastructures continued
3 Dialectical Ecology: Towards a Critical
Metabolic Materialism
Jon Goodbun, University of Westminster
We find ourselves today in a paradoxical situation in a highly unevenly developed world. Since the middle of the twentieth century, if not earlier, it would have been perfectly possible
to reorganize human society so that there was an abundance
of good food and water, and a rewarding advanced industrialecological urban environment for the entire human population.
Tragically, today, the very possibility of a post-scarcity society
seems to be slipping away, and is barely imaginable ... but it is not
gone yet. Technological progress has not led to liberation. Instead,
many of us in affluent societies find ourselves working constantly
only to become poorer and free-time has proven to be the ultimate
scarcity. Yet in other parts of the world, and also just a few streets
away from us, fellow human beings are living under conditions of
abject poverty.
At the same time, the threat of scarcity shadows our immediate future. It is estimated that there will be 10 billion extra humans added
to the global population in the next decade. While we deal with
the economic implications (which we could easily do on the basis
of different global economic models)1 , climate change and the apparent endgame of this phase of capitalism suggest the very real
potential for chronic shortages in both advanced and developing
countries.
22 - ACSA 101 Annual Meeting
101_2 Energy Circuits + Artificial Ecologies
Eco-logics
Helene Furjan, University of Pennsylvania
Date: Friday, March 22, 2013, 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
A Field Guide to Generating Architectural Species
Nicole Koltick, Drexel University
Matthew Lutz, Princeton University
The question posed by this session topic, of how architecture may
begin to draw from the tools, techniques and concepts of ecology,
is of critical importance to the future of our discipline. Examining
the overlaps between these two fields in an effort to extract useful
insights from the rapidly developing science of ecology and put
these to work in the context of architecture in a meaningful way,
going beyond mere metaphor, will require a clear understanding
of the levels of organization with which ecology is concerned. The
science of ecology is a relatively young field and, like the discipline of architecture, has experienced rapid growth in recent years
with the development of sophisticated computational techniques,
specifically in the area of theoretical ecology. While it is tempting to apply the metaphor of an ecosystem as a complex set of
interacting components and feedbacks directly into the realm of
architecture, it may be even more productive to examine the specific mechanisms that ecologists study at various scales and levels of organization and ask what parallels may exist in architecture
and urbanism. Both architecture and ecology are concerned with
the articulation of form, structure and pattern emerging at multiple
scales in response to environmental conditions.
We may begin by asking, why has ecology suddenly become such
a fertile area of inquiry for architects in recent years? Certainly,
the easy answer is to draw the obvious connection between the
now omnipresent concern with sustainability in the built environment, and a simplistic understanding of the field of ecology, as one
that is primarily concerned with conservation of the earth’s natural
systems. However, ecology is in fact a quantitative science concerned with the myriad interactions between organisms and their
environment, which uses a well developed arsenal of theoretical
models in conjunction with experimental studies at multiple scales
to understand these complex interactions. A more useful and productive understanding of the connections between these two diverse fields requires us to abstract things a bit, and understand
both ecology and architecture as disciplines that are primarily concerned with problems of pattern, scale and complexity, and with
comprehending complex interactions of material and energy that
operate across many nested levels of organization. In combination
with advances in computational power and an increasingly sophisticated understanding of complex systems, architects have begun
to mine the field of ecology in all its manifestations for useful metaphors, mechanisms, processes and tools. In the following paper, I
will explore a handful of concepts drawn from the science of ecology that may be useful for further speculating on the increasingly
productive overlap between these two disciplines.
Niche-Tactics: The Giraffe Model
Caroline ODonnell, Cornell University
“Niche-Tactics: The Giraffe Model” draws analogies between nichethinking in evolution theory, and architecture. In the former, the
animal is inseparable from its environment. More specifically, since
many animals co-exist in one environment, the animal is a product
of its own reading or abstraction of that environment.
Through Charles Darwin, D’Arcy Thompson, James Gibson and
Greg Lynn, the relationship of the form of an organism with its site
is developed, particularly focusing on the giraffe as an extreme example of deformation. The giraffe, existing as it does as an expression of a reaction to site becomes a model for architecture which
might consider site more fundamentally, with the consequence of
an architecture whose site and form are in dialogue, with obvious,
but perhaps secondary, performative benefits.
While the vernacular might be considered to align with nichethinking, it is presented as an imperfect model, burdened as it is
with its own image of itself and its necessity to reproduce that
image. Evolution, since it is not coming from or on a trajectory towards any ideal is liberated to mutate into alternative forms, as
long as they “fit.”
The paper concludes with several historical and contemporary examples that, rather than falling into the traps of “contextualism”
(which, in the worst case, has become known as an architecture of
carbon copies, merely continuing the existing characteristics of adjacent buildings) articulate a relationship between the architectural
form and site that is distinct, legible, and in many cases, monstrous.
New Constellations / New Ecologies - San Francisco, CA - 23
Energy Circuits + Artificial Ecologies/Eco-logics continued
Tropical Ecologies - : Biomimicry as a Generator
for Climate Responsive Architectural Design
Urban Filtration | Architecture as Watershed
Corey T. Griffin, Portland State University
Tobias Holler, New York Institute of Technology
This paper presents the research hypothesis and preliminary findings from a workshop on bio-mimetic climate-responsive architectural design, held within the tropical dry forest ecosystem in Northwestern Costa Rica. Participants included the author, a tropical
ecologist and a local architect.
Architecture has been preoccupied with nature primarily as a
source of formal inspiration. In order to arrive at a more performance based understanding of the architecture/nature relationship, we asked ourselves: What can architects learn from natural
organisms that have developed extraordinary adaptations to resource-constrained environments (e.g. extreme climatic conditions) and how can this knowledge be used to design buildings that
are similarly well adapted, and as a result use a minimum amount of
resources? Important is the focus on the local: the potential of the
local ecosystem to inform a locally specific architectural expression
– a bio-mimetic architectural regionalism of sorts.
The specific ecosystem we are studying is the tropical dry forest
(TDF) of Mesoamerica, an ecosystem with extreme seasonal climate variations – it turns from a lush green forest during the rainy
season to a leafless desert in the dry season. The seasonal droughts
have great impact on all living things in the forest and many of the
characteristic plant and animal species show complex adaptations
in their systems of water storage, water conservation, resource
capture, and growth form that allow them to persist in this challenging environment.
We decided to limit our initial investigation to the study of plants
(as opposed to animals or other organisms) since the majority of
plants share two fundamental principals with architecture: the inability to move and the resulting necessity to optimize locally available resources. Furthermore we focused our observations on the
two most critical adaptations to this particular climate: thermal
control and water management.
24 - ACSA 101 Annual Meeting
As the urban population in the United States is estimated to increase by over twenty percent by 2030, aging urban infrastructure, particularly that infrastructure associated with water, will be
overtaxed. Many water and sewer systems in our urban centers are
at least one hundred years old and simply not designed to meet
contemporary demands and environmental standards, such as
combined sewers that mix sewage and storm water. Replacing or
upgrading the existing infrastructure is economically challenging
as municipal revenues decline and funding is prioritized to meet
the needs of new development at the periphery of urban areas.
Consequently, a new model for how the urban built environment
meets its water needs is required.
Instead of connecting new urban buildings to existing water and
sewage lines, these structures can provide an incremental improvement to the existing infrastructure, serving itself and surrounding
buildings by filtering, processing and utilizing waste and storm water. More importantly, the architecture of these urban filters must
provide tangible connections between building users and the resources they use. Strategies that mimic the filtration of water in
nature, such as principals employed by living machines, should be
prioritized over those that rely on conventional, energy intensive
mechanical or chemical treatments. By integrating, plant-based filtration systems throughout its height and area, a single building
can act as watershed for its surroundings through the catchment,
purification, and percolation of water.
This paper uses Portland, Oregon as a case study for how architecture can address issues of water quality within the urban built
environment. A recent undergraduate studio co-taught by a faculty
member, practicing architect and landscape architect served as a
laboratory to for creating architecture that positively contributes to
the larger urban ecology by integrating biological processes. This
paper argues that architects and architecture students must look
beyond the boundaries of their site and to unglamorous aspects of
the built environment, like wastewater treatment infrastructure, in
order to address pressing environmental challenges. A distributed
infrastructure housed within our architecture challenges the megaprojects of civil engineers by providing incremental, cost effective
and adaptive solutions to meeting the resource needs of future urban populations. By showcasing systems typically hidden, we can
remove the disconnect between user and resource, and by doing
so make individuals acutely aware of how their decisions affect the
natural environment around them.
Super Session
101_3 Genetic Systems + Non-standard Modes
of (Re)Production
Chris Hight, Rice University
Heather Roberge, University of California, Los Angeles
Branko Kolaveric, University of Calgary
Date: Saturday, March 23, 2013, 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
Digital technologies have evolved from being simply representational tools invested in the depiction of
existing models of architectural space to becoming significant performative machines that have transformed the ways in which we conceive and configure form, space and material. These technologies
have enabled the emergence of a new parametric practices emulating genetic and iterative dynamic
evolutionary processes that function at multiple scales and in different domains. These tools are radically changing the ways in which we integrate disparate types of material information into the design
process, while altering methodologies directly influencing both design and manufacture. That our current models of space are far more continuous, variant and complex is specifically a result of the tools
we are using to produce them, an inevitable byproduct of the ever-expanding capacities of digital computation and related fabrication technologies. These sessions focus on current negotiations and mediation strategies emerging within the digital realm between differing scales of operation that extend
from building component to urban environment, between internal codes and external forces that reflect
the nature/nurture dichotomy within design, between digital processes and physical behaviors, and
between computational design strategies and the technologies governing fabrication and production.
101_3 Genetic Systems + Non-standard Modes of (Re)Production
Figuring Differentiation
Chris Hight, Rice University
Date: Friday, March 22, 2013, 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM
A Bi-directional Thermal Rectifying Facade
for a Hot-arid Climate
Layered Fabrications
Grant Gibson, University of Illinois at Chicago
Michael Ritzenthaler, University of Arizona
Thermal boundary layer phenomena significantly impacts the
threshold between two given volumes, interior and exterior. By
modulating thermal energy exchange through this boundary, a
human thermal comfort level can be maintained without extraneous burning of fossil fuels and greenhouse gas emissions from mechanical equipment. Augmented by the concept of a ‘twin ecology’
the built environment may have a more direct connection with its
ecosystem through measurable and non-measurable boundaries;
on all scales perceived by the human condition.
In a hot-arid climate, seasonal and daily temperature extremes
challenge the performance of the thermal boundary layer. In cities
like Tucson, Arizona modulating the diurnal average temperature
difference of 27.8°F (15.3°C) is the critical problem in maintaining a
consistent interior temperature for each season. Using the building
envelope as the thermal boundary, the concept of bi-directional
thermal rectification, flexibly allowing heat transfer in one direction
at a time, is implemented to propose a prototype for a southern
exposure façade in the Sonoran Desert, USA. A façade of ceramic
modules with thermally actuated dampers is constructed and tested to control heat transfer through this boundary.
Heterotopic Speciation [Theorizing an Alternative
Parametric Syntax]
Maximiliano Spina, Woodbury University
The following paper explores the formal and aesthetical reasons that
signal the need for a rigorous theorization of a heterotopic ordering
sensibility as a new model of speciation for architecture and urbanism; not an order that coagulates into another ‘whole’ that promotes
an idealized field of likeness, but rather one that is able to articulate
an incongruous taxonomy; one that is able to maintain the homogeneity of its structure while at the same time yield heterogeneity
of individuation of ‘its parts’ at a range of scales. Considering the
current direction of parametric practices -characterized by relentless
continuity of the self-identical across an all-encompassing system, can a heterotopic model of speciation introduce disturbances or
even interruptions of their regular flow or rhythm? Could this placement of rhythmic stresses or accents and other disturbances outside
common parametric norms foster the appearance of autonomous
species with identities of their own, as well as the consequent emergence of the space that results along the interface of their negotiated
relationship? Employing a series of drawings and projects at various
scales produced by the author, the paper will explore the pertinence
of those formal and organizational devices that recur in the work inasmuch as they are able to articulate both the discrete and the continuum at a multiplicity of scales. These will be seen as part of an experiment that both questions the aesthetics limits of parametricism’s
deep relationality as well as advances the potential aesthetics raised
by an alternative syntax relaying on heterotopias of deviation.
26 - ACSA 101 Annual Meeting
“People tell us that Art makes us love Nature more than we
loved her before; that it reveals her secrets to us; and that
after a careful study of Corot and Constable we see things
in her that had escaped our observation. My own experience
is that the more we study Art, the less we care for Nature.”
-Oscar Wilde, The Decay Of Lying: An Observation
Its been over 120 years since Oscar Wilde gave us an alternative
to mimesis, yet the enthusiasts of architectural form have largely
ignored the opportunities offered in the idea of life imitating art. We
continue to reference natural phenomena beyond our full understanding in hopes of finding deeper meaning or more control. While
the individual results are often spectacular - the collective effort has
become stale. Limitations of earnest biomimicry have become so
widely apparent that many have turned to geological references.
Somewhere beyond the landscape or mineral metaphors and biological analogies, there exists an alternate way that is less a rerepresentation of natural occurrences and more a new representation of human invention or fabrication. It is an approach born in
fiction and carried out in pragmatic techniques of layering. This
paper calls out this emerging sensibility and identifies tactics that
when coupled could provide our discipline with a distinctly new
approach to formal ordering.
101_3 Genetic Systems + Non-standard Modes of (Re)Production
Digital Craft: Material, Technology and Performance
Heather Roberge, University of California, Los Angeles
Date: Friday, March 22, 2013, 4:00 PM - 5:30 PM
Art of Workmanship in the Digital Age
Awilda I. Rodriguez, Oklahoma State University
Digital technology is becoming more engaging and exciting than
ever. Over the past 20 years, computers have evolved from simple
automation, as in the case of the metaphysical shift of drafting with
a drawing machine (CAD), to a more personal and social medium
that is fostering new ways of thinking, analyzing, testing, fabricating and networking. Because of this paradigm shift in the use and
perception of digital technology we are intellectually redefining
the traditional meaning of craft. The word “craft” brings to memory
the “hand made” object. It is generally associated with manual dexterity, skilled artistry and the art of making (process), but can also
express cultural identity (such as folk art), traditions and the past.
Within the notion of craft, not only is the final product important
but also the process of making, which is tied to a particular philosophy (artist choice) and/or skill. Throughout history, prosthesis
and technologies have been rooted in our primordial human need
to extend the physical limitations of the hand . Craftsmen have
incessantly modified their tools or have been the early adopters
of new tools and/or technologies; from jigs and fixtures needed
to hold the work and guide the tools, to sawing machines, electric
kilns, hand held power tools, to today’s CNC manufacturing, laser
cutting, and 3D prototyping.
Even though the conventional idea of craft usually does not bring
to mind a high-tech process, technology has always been there
to advance the craftsmanship. However, craft within the digital
realm is still perceived as something of a paradox since the hand
plays a minor role on coaxing the material. Hence the question,
can an electronic medium such as digital design be considered a
rich medium just like traditional painting or sculpture? Today, generative and parametric designs have more parallels that ever with
traditional media, where traditional skills are being rediscovered
in a virtual context. We are seeing a new craft-resurgence in the
figure of the digital craftsman within the subculture of hacking and
tinkering (crafting) the algorithm (code) and/or the conception of
parametric constrains. These computer enthusiasts are passionately pushing the boundaries of their work and are determined to
investigate design boundaries within the virtual world.
Moreover, artisanry could be defined as an innovative, artistic and
resourceful modus operandi that pushes the boundaries of a limited
medium. Therefore, what aspects of craft within a digital practice
could be considered artisanry? This paper explores the possibilities
of the traditional notions of craft within a theoretical framework
centered on design authorship, principles of form-giving, implementation process, and the influence of digital technology.
Craft Works: On How to Get Medieval
Ramiro Diaz-Granados, Southern California Institute
of Architecture
There seem to be two key features that serve a contemporary notion of craft in relation to digital practice. The first has to do with
the production and management of variability and its aesthetic
consequences/effects. The second has to do with self-discipline
(doing a job well for its own sake). During the middle ages, variability was simply a consequence of customization and the lack of
precisely repeatable production methods. Discipline was an ethos
handed down from a master to apprentice (or disciple). Today,
variability is not only desired but increasingly easy to achieve, and
control, by digital means. And since the master/apprentice model
is all but gone, discipline must be cultivated by the individual. As
parametricism continues its relentless pursuit of totalized variability, it still privileges geometry. A craft ethos has the potential to
open up alternative, and perhaps more substantial, trajectories for
the production of architecture. The digital craftsperson gets dirty
with material and geometry.
This paper drafts out three distinct but related dichotomies around
the concept of digital craft: Autography vs. Allography, Matter vs.
Geometry, Manual Operations vs. Automated Simulations. While
a medieval notion of craft privileged the former end of these dichotomies, I am suggesting that digital craft is a toggling between
each, a more topological relationship than a binary one. It is followed up with four case study projects which provide specific examples that cut across the dichotomies laid out.
Formations of Digital Craft Culture
Andrew Kudless, California College of the Arts
The architectural discipline has debated the notion of digital craft
for more than two decades. The discussion first centered on defining digital craft in relation to traditional hand craft in such works
as Malcolm McCullough’s seminal Abstracting Craft. More recently, digital craft’s status has been confirmed as central to the contemporary practice of architecture through books such as Branko
Kolarevic and Kevin Klinger’s Manufacturing Material Effects and
Gail Peter Bordon and Michael Meredith’s Matter. Yet despite the
emerging prominence of digital craft, specific knowledge on the
production of it remains elusive. That is, we know digital craft when
we see it, yet it is not always clear how to engage in a process that
produces it, especially for students who are new to the discipline.
As new digital modeling, simulation, and fabrication techniques
take root within schools and the profession, it has become increasingly apparent that the formation of digital craft culture hinges on
much more than just access to specific tools but on an intensive
and rigorous understanding of the how the tools can be used with
expertise to produce results that synthesize geometric logic, parametric thinking, and iterative prototyping. This paper documents
these essential topics of digital craft culture within the field of architecture through several academic and professional projects.
New Constellations / New Ecologies - San Francisco, CA - 27
101_3 Genetic Systems + Non-standard Modes of (Re)Production/Digital Craft:
Material, Technology and Performance continued
Strand Porosities: Mixing Traditional Textile
Techniques with Digital Craft
Kenneth Joseph Tracy, Washington University in St. Louis
Christine Yogiaman, Washington University in St. Louis
In the race for novelty and spectacle architects often focus solely
on the newest forms of technology for aesthetic innovation and
appropriation. This approach inherently prioritizes newer techniques above older ones. This “New Release” version of technological appropriation often forces design innovation into a corner
in which subtle versions of strikingly similar techniques can be
seen in different mediums, magazines, schools and blogs. This is
not a massive detriment to architecture in its own right but the
bias toward the newest tools can create a culture of saturation and
aesthetic stagnation. Ironically, while these techniques become
popular within the practice, they often alienate architecture from
a larger audience.
This paper presents three projects in which traditional textile
techniques are combined with digital design processes to create novel forms of porosity. The projects appropriate techniques
from the textile arts of Indonesia, specifically the Island of Java.
In these projects, old and new techniques are valued equally. The
projects appropriate the technical intelligences such as patterning, tooling and efficiency inherent in the textile process. In addition to transferring technical knowledge, cultural information is
transferred through the ways of making. The material resistance
encoded in these textile processes transfers to computer protocols
and through to the materiality of built form.
Combining these techniques does not transfer only the content of
what was made but translates and borrows from how it was made.
This technical transfer of cultural content allows for both bottomup and top-down aesthetic processes to transcend entrenched,
singular symbolic meanings. This type of technique sampling allows one to create visual and tactile links to culture through familiar affects without creating static iconographic identity.
28 - ACSA 101 Annual Meeting
101_3 Genetic Systems + Non-standard Modes of (Re)Production
Mass Customization + Non-Standard Modes
Branko Kolarevic, University of Calgary
Date: Friday, March 22, 2013, 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
Beyond Control: Parametrics and Metadesign as a
Model for Mass-Customization
Frank Richard Jacobus, University of Arkansas
Marc Anthony Manack
The power of technology lies in its capacity to amplify human capabilities. Much of the technological space we inhabit in the 21st
century is data driven, responsive, interactive, and social. Spaces
like Amazon, as a marketplace experience, are using data mining,
recommender algorithms, and social networking as tools for generating space that responds to individualized desires. Metadesign,
through interaction and individualized evolution, are the hallmarks
of these technologies. In the design disciplines many obstacles to
diversity and individuation of space have been overcome in recent
years due to mass-customization processes that use digital coding to allow variety in object formation without adding significant
increased expenses in production. Architecture is now evolving to
meet the demands of this new type of space.
This paper defines metadesign and mass-customization and then
describes two projects, one in academia and one in practice that
use metadesign and mass-customization strategies to achieve their
ends. As an approach that maintains a deeper connection to the
type of space that most human beings now inhabit, these projects
represent design and production approaches that enable lay people to take a greater amount of control over their designed spaces.
Designed objects have been relatively fixed historically because of
constraints and economic implications of mass-production. The
complexities of the production process have also helped reinforce
a division between “designer” and “consumer”. This new type of
design thinking welcomes flexibility, in lieu of fixity, in the designed
object. The distinct line separating designer and consumer blurs as a
result of this process. In lieu of designing fixed objects, a designer’s
role evolves to be one who provides a parameterized formal language and its rules, and then sets these criteria adrift into the social
realm so that it can begin its litany of formal morphologies.
Eclipsis: Historical Precedent - Digital Fabrication
Robert J. Dunay, Virginia Tech
Joseph Wheeler, Virginia Tech
Robert P. Schubert, Virginia Tech
Jonathan Grinham, Studio27
Design research does not effectively fit the scientific model and
does not enjoy traditional funding sources. The tendency to associate research with science, drawing the conclusion that objectivity
is validated through quantitative data underpins much of university
culture. However, though scientific inquiry remains an effective instrument for unlocking secrets of the way things work, its capacity
to embrace an holistic perspective, particularly in regard to the implicit values of human activities, remains in question. Navigating a line
between the perceived certainty of calculation and artistic, intuitive
processes, designers explore situations of uncertainty, instability, and
uniqueness with the goal of postulating new ideas for innovation.
Digital design and industrial fabrication have been the province of
the automotive and aerospace industries for decades, and design
fields have peered with envy at the precision of the structure/function relation that yields innovative performance. Alternative opportunities are now entering the consciousness of architects, changing
the conception and operation of normative practice. Consideration
of the possibilities of digital tools in architecture and their relation
to fabrication and construction are overcoming the discrete specializations that typically govern the conventional building process.
of digital design and fabrication as integral tools capable of addressing contemporary issues. Speculative visualization depicting
architecture as illustration, emboldened by the power of innumerable permutations has opened the door to vibrant imagery. But
the gap between possibility and reality looms large. The graphic
appeal of many of digital presentations is often presented without consequence of cost, maintenance, fabrication and assembly
limitations. Protected from the realities of day-to-day entropy, they
occupy a small corner of response to legitimate criteria. The project presented here attacks the difficult reality of the correspondence between material, technology, form and performance. As
applied research, it employs considerable prototype development
to produce a working building component. It has been validated
through empirical testing and has triumphed in the rigorous setting
of international competition.
concept of Responsive Architecture necessitated an adaptive
building skin. The focus of this paper is the Eclipsis System, an innovative fenestration of laser cut, stainless steel shutter screens.
Their primary function is maximizing daylight while controlling solar gain. The screens adjust to climactic changes and user requirements through automated systems that optimize energy consumption while offering an architecture of delight. Shading, refracted
light, privacy and ventilation are woven though a complex definition designed within Grasshopper, a graphic algorithm editor developed in conjunction with Rhinoceros®. Grasshopper, along with
Visual Basics programming language allowed for the development
of subtle complexity with extensive design versioning. Prototypes
were developed through digital processes and tested empirically
for performance. Water jet and laser cutting technologies were
explored in relation to material characteristic and qualities and alternatives were re-routed back through the digital process to find
a more refined geometry while increasing performance. Built and
operated using industrialized processes, the Eclipsis System optimizes energy use, makes buildings more efficient, and improves
the quality of architectural space.
New Constellations / New Ecologies - San Francisco, CA - 29
Genetic Systems + Non-standard Modes of (Re)Production / Mass
Customization + Non-Standard Modes continued
MASS customization
Danelle Briscoe, University of Texas at Austin
By definition, a brick or masonry unit embodies standard repetition
of standard construction. Much like the 1950s IBM Plant in Poughkeepsie, New York, mainstream masonry facades tend to embody
a design intention of low-maintenance brickwork structures where
the brick is a standard size and is placed in a standard configuration with occasional variation in color, texture, position, pattern,
and joint finish. The IBM Company at the time of this construction
(and publication) had just introduced new products that included
the IBM Card-Programmed Electronic Calculator (CPC) and signaled its commitment to electronic computing with the introduction of the IBM 701, the company’s first watershed production in
the computing industry. In this instance, architecture was as technologically advanced as the computing industry it served. To date
however, computation has advanced immensely from that IBM 701
and yet the architectural discipline has only recently engaged the
capabilities of computer-based numerically controlled (CNC) techniques for innovative masonry production and fabrication.
Despite CNC developments, the standard for brick and stone facades are generally still constructed with the same technique and
economic rationalism as the manner of this IBM facility. Many cities
require that building’s exteriors adhere to a certain percentage of
brick or stone, and yet the standard paradigm prevails. Is the reality
of hand labor the issue? Mark Burry pointed out almost a decade
ago the revival of architect as ‘maker’ brought on by the discipline’s
recent relationship to CNC. Is the masonry product itself restricting
the inertia to mass-customize thermal mass for the masses? How
does the non-standard then become the standard? And should it?
Cost effectiveness and the potential for these masonry walls to do
more than the average brick will be the impetus for furthering mass
customization in masonry.
This paper highlights two case studies that underscore the dialectic between the prevailing paradigm (within mainstream architecture) of masonry standardization and the emerging practices of
unique, non-standard masonry veneer. The case studies, termed
assemblage and product, propose practical opportunities and theoretical implications through the use of standard parametric design and digital fabrication technologies - practices that could ultimately become standards in building tradition. The first case study
will refer to the additive robotic standard brick assemblage of the
Gantenbein Winery – collaboration between Bearth & Deplazes
Architekten and Gramazio & Kohler. The second discloses this
author’s current research and production of non-standard, stone
building components that rely on conventional hand labor to form
mass-customized patterns and effects. These case study models
describe innovative strategies of labor and production of a nonstandard, mass customizable brick or masonry façade and give
new meaning to the term “hands-on” masonry craft. This paper
asks from each model how the emerging fabrication technologies
have continued or furthered the idea of the architect as ‘maker’,
as oppose to ‘manager’, in the context of mass-customization of
the particular masonry construction. These projects suggest that
variety need not be compromised for mass production to be viable.
30 - ACSA 101 Annual Meeting
Super Session
101_4 Exchange Terminals + Interactive Technologies
Jason Johnson, California College of the Arts
Carlo Ratti, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Nashid Nabian, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
John McMorrough, University of Michigan
Date: Saturday, March 23, 2013, 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
These sessions will explore the intersection between interactive technologies and architectural space
at a number of scales and interfaces. Sensing the City is geared primarily to one to one scale interactions that extend the sensible environment of the body through architectural interfaces, Media-scapes
looks at the history and evolution of media and civic space and the recent impact of the social network
on civic space, Living-Bits and Bricks investigates the technological interface between digital information and the scale and operation of the city, and Negotiated Territory solicits proposals which where
resistance and negotiation are seen as constitutive rather than restrictive of the design process itself.
101_4 Exchange Terminals + Interactive Technologies
Sensing the City
Jason Johnson, California College of the Arts
Date: Thursday, March 21, 2013, 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM
Expanding Scenarios for Responsive Architecture
AnnaLisa Meyboom, University of British Columbia
Jerzy Wojtowicz, University of British Columbia
Responsive architecture has been represented many times in movies
and television series such as Iron Man and Star Trek in various futuristic forms but current research has been attempting to make the
future current: architecture schools and upcoming practices are applying the technology to facades , responsive installations and biodynamic structures. This paper seeks to expand on applications for
responsive architecture, speculating on areas with which we would
not normally associate the digital. As well, this paper seeks to expand the discussion on where the concept of design with a capital D
intersects with the digital.
Reconsidering Physicality
Paola Zellner-Bassett, Virginia Tech
Inspired by our changing cultural contexts moving in constant acceleration toward disembodiment, architecture is eagerly attempting to transcend its static nature bound by gravity, and counteract
its inherent inertia. At a time where technology encourages hyperconnectivity to the point of challenging established notions of
place and physicality, a stream of flexible architecture has been appearing on the scene presenting ways to make architecture move,
respond, interact, sense, mimic, display, and change. So far, this
search has mostly yielded mechanistic proposals that act as prosthetics attached to an otherwise apparently incapable architecture,
and digital surfaces or landscapes that reduce architecture to a
physical supportive framework or backdrop; both drives seemingly
unaware of architecture’s potential.
Are we overlooking architecture?
Architecture is the medium we inhabit, a mediator between the context and the self, that grounds the self and gives it a sense of place
and belonging. At present, and within these new paradigms, the
phrase “Architecture is the medium we inhabit” gains new meanings.
In the search for alternatives to a landscape populated with interactive and responsive “ducks and decorated sheds,” this paper seeks
to frame essential architectural qualities while identifying potential
approaches to engage these new paradigms in the search for, what
Anni Albers calls, “anonymous and timeless design.”
32 - ACSA 101 Annual Meeting
101_4 Exchange Terminals + Interactive Technologies
Living Bits + Bricks
Carlo Ratti, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Nashid Nabian, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Date: Thursday, March 21, 2013, 4:00 PM - 5:30 PM
Manual of Networked Possibilities: Forward Thinking
Interventions for Intelligent Cities
Therese Tierney, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Design, as is seen in Frank Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim Museum or
Apple’s IPod, has become an important feature of our increasingly
innovation driven economy.[1] Over the past several years, Intelligent Cities in particular has emerged as a significant research area,
drawing together designers to explore opportunities at the intersection of computer science, industrial design, and urban studies.
As with most interdisciplinary research, the challenge is to better
understand the interactions between humans, computers, and their
environment. To address the challenge, this presentation will discuss projects from “Intelligent Cities,” a graduate level seminar at
the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign.
These projects integrate principles of context-aware systems,
which is to say, computer systems that provide relevant information and services to users by exploiting context. For architects,
context means information about a location, its environmental attributes (e.g., noise level, light intensity, temperature, motion, or
other information) and the people, devices, objects and software
agents it contains. Context may also include system capabilities,
services offered and sought, the activities and tasks in which people and computing entities are engaged, their situational practices,
and intentions.
If context is key, then Intelligent Cities advances three important
goals: The first is to critically examine a set of assumptions about
technology in relation to the city, already embedded within the discipline of urban design. This includes tracing the historical emergence of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) at Xerox PARC in the
1970s to today’s responsive architecture, including discussions on
accessibility, interactive technology, social equity, and participatory media practices.
Second, recognizing that there is a prevailing tendency to construe the city as a spatially distinct form, the seminar advocates
a perspective shift, replacing an emphasis on urban form with an
emphasis on urban experience. Drawing on contemporary urban
scholarship along with everyday social practices –– for example,
what it is actually like to move through and live in contemporary
cities – brings a multitude of experiences coexisting within even
the same urban space.[2]
Third, studying types of user experiences favored by this research paradigm entails an ethnographic
methodology. By means of surveys and questionnaires, the collected user-data contributes to project analysis and design.
Mediated and Situated Landscapes
Andrzej Zarzycki, New Jersey Institute of Technology
Virtual environments, originally seen as less-than-perfect replicas
of physical world, acquire their own identity with unique visual and
spatial logic. Identity that now starts permeating back into everyday
life and informing what is expected or acceptable within physical
reality. The distinction between the actual and virtual fades when
seen through the screen of a smartphone, experienced through a
navigational system of the video game console, or manifested by
media rich culture often confusing a product with an image.
The paper considers massive multiplayer online role playing games
(MMORPG) as the analogy to an urban ritual/happening and places AR in the broader context of the mobility-on-demand culture,
location-based and ubiquitous technologies, and the authoring of
the public realm. It also explores how we can take an advantage
of the urban mobility for crowd sourcing, social networking, and
multi-player gaming as well as non-normative use of public spaces.
Urban Performance and Living Networks
Ariane Lourie Harrison, Yale University
Prior to today’s sentient cities and smart materials, postwar architects had already envisioned—and in some cases prototyped—designs that shed static structure and instead enacted a relational
understanding of urban space. Linking the kinetic constructions of
Nicolas Schöffer, Cedric Price and EAT to the urban performances
of Harrison Atelier and The Living, this essay explores the evolution of the cybernetic discourse into a model for performative architecture. The works described here do not adhere to the idea of
architecture as a static figural object; instead they seek to produce
sensory-immersive and ecologically-charged experiences of the
urban environment. In their program and approach, these works
align with a posthuman understanding of the city as an assemblage
of diverse actors (human and non-human). The paper draws on
actor-network-theory as well as the work of Ihab Hassan, N. Katherine Hayles, and Karen Barad to ally the posthuman with an architectural realization of urban performativity.
New Constellations / New Ecologies - San Francisco, CA - 33
101_4 Exchange Terminals + Interactive Technologies
Negotiated Territory
John McMorrough, University of Michigan
Date: Thursday, March 21, 2013, 12:00 PM - 1:30 PM
Re-Cultivating the Forest City
Christopher Marcinkoski, University of Pennsylvania
Andrew Moddrell, University of Illinois at Chicago
One could argue that design has become a primarily responsive,
service-based undertaking – relying on RFP’s, RFQ’s and design
competitions as vehicles for deploying disciplinary capacity. In
the case of discrete projects like a stand-alone building or a small
plaza, such a mode of operation may be appropriate given the
likely singularity of purpose. However, when it comes to considering large-scale approaches to urbanization, a need for a greater
degree of synthesis is demanded. In fact, given the number and
divergent agendas of the actors who participate in these initiatives,
one might suggest that there is a tremendous value in developing,
disseminating and advocating design speculations as a mode of
provocation rather than simply offering a solution.
However, provocation alone is not enough. Design has a long history of eroding its own credibility though speculative projects that
lack a fundamental utility. Provocation in this context needs to
leverage the topical interests of the present and future – economy, public health, environment, energy, amenity, etc. – into a clear
sense of civic momentum. It is once this momentum is generated
– when design advocacy leads to external advocates for design
– that a project can reach the point of negotiation. And what is
critical about the point of negotiation is that it suggests the impendence of outcome – whether it is physical implementation, policy
adjustment or additional study – and outcome should be regarded
a fundamental goal of design.
Provocation—Conversation—Momentum—Negotiation—Outcome
In order to consider the set of relationships outlined above, this
essay will explore an ongoing design initiative entitled Re-Cultivating the Forest City (RCFC). The project seeks to leverage a highly
modified natural system subjugated by various formats of anthropogenic occupancy in order to create an instrument of urban regeneration in the context of an economically and environmentally
challenged American city. Using four paradigmatic urbanistic projects, the capacity of the RCFC proposal as an ongoing, projective
civic initiative is evaluated and assessed.
The High Frontier, the Megastructure,
and The Big Dumb Object
Fred Scharmen, Morgan State University
This paper looks at Gerard O’Neill’s Space Colony proposals as
a design project of the 1970s, deeply involved in three specific
threads from that period. It traces the relationships between the
images produced and the network of artists working at the intersection of science fiction and engineering illustration. It explores
correspondences between the social goals of the counterculture,
Big Science, and large scale architecture and planning initiatives.
Finally it examines the negotiations necessary in the design process itself, between collaborative consensus and autocratic visionary leadership.
34 - ACSA 101 Annual Meeting
The Demilitarized Zone: Redrawing the 151-mile
Border Between North and South Korea
Dongsei Kim, Columbia University
This mapping research is an attempt to understand the demilitarized zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea beyond its apparent political and physical divide. The set of text and maps allows us to understand the military buffer zone as a complex spatial
condition that engenders flows and reciprocities despite the border landscape acting as a barrier, this as a form of urbanism. This
research expands the understanding of the border beyond a single
static line on a map. The map scrutinizes the DMZ at both local and
global scale over time.
This is achieved by reading the DMZ through the “four lenses”
which was developed as a theoretical framework to read the DMZ.
These four lenses are history, barrier, flows, and global scale. By
representing the DMZ through these four new lenses on a map,
one can start to understand borders not only as a landscape with
geopolitical reciprocities and implications, but also start to reveal
latent possibilities within its landscape. Furthermore, through understanding its spatial manifestations based on its spatial negotiations over time, one can understand the border spaces ultimately
as a form of urbanism.
This mapping research was constructed through overlaying and
transforming non-visual materials, mainly text to geographically
referenced synthesized graphic map, making them easier to be
understood at a glance. Furthermore, beyond the physical geographical territories, invisible processes, flows and legal negotiations were also represented together to help better understand the
DMZ. The result is a base research map that introduces and sets
up a dialectical platform that opens up discussions on the DMZ.
Through this process, the hegemonic representation of the DMZ
and other contested borders can be also be rethought.
Finally, this map is not only an attempt to represent various modes
of information into a coherent map, but one that strives to engage
and disseminate critical global and societal issues through critical mapping research, one that expands the agency of designers
within the growing multidisciplinary approaches in border studies
and practices.
Exchange Terminals + Interactive Technologies/Negotiated Territory continued
Cosmopolitan Beasts: Pee-Wee’s Applied Pedagogy
Julia Sedlock, Cosmo Design Factory
Architecture’s contribution to the production of contemporary collective space depends on its ability to facilitate social and cultural
interactions in novel and unexpected ways. Rather than mourn a lost
conception of public realm, contemporary architects and educators
are working with a renewed sense of agency for themselves and
their audiences, manipulating identity politics and mass spectacle as
a means of encouraging new forms of engagement and participation. Architecture schools can facilitate this practice by modeling
their environments on the kinds of collective space they would like
to see in the world.
Imagine Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, where Pee-Wee Herman empowered
his audiences through a combined display of absurdist performance
art and didactic interaction. Pee-Wee’s pedagogical sensibility advances Albert Pope’s argument for an architecture that supports
multiple subject positions, as a way to preserves architecture’s political agency. While Pope finds sufficient evidence for this argument
embedded in pockets of modernism’s history, Pee-Wee’s contribution of unserious, campy irreverence resurrects the Cosmopolitan
as an alternative to modernism’s soberly constructed and rationalized subjects. This paper reroutes the emphasis on global ethics and
planetary humanism in philosophical Cosmopolitanism to favor an
alternative version of literary Cosmopolitanism that is illustrated by
Pee-Wee’s sensibility. The recent movie Beasts of the Southern Wild
provides a contemporary allegory that shares this sensibility while
shedding a broader cultural light onto themes of subjectivity and
collective agency in relation to urban and architectural form.
Two recent undergraduate studios taught at The University of Illinois
at Chicago, School of Architecture combine lessons from Pee-Wee,
Pope and the Beasts to illustrate how such tactics can be engaged
in the studio at various levels and scales, through investigation of
diverse techniques and programs. The studios approach divergent
agendas with a similar mindset – that through the negotiation of
prescriptive, narrowly focused technique, and a strong conceptual
conceit, students are ultimately liberated to explore and follow their
own subjective impulses to unexpected conclusions. The most fundamental skill taught by both these studios is how to be an architect
as Cosmopolitan Beast – an agent of negotiation between subjectivities, and between worlds. The nature of this proposition is a political
one because it demands the negotiation of a position within architecture’s broader cultural milieu. However, this position is a fluid one.
We learn from Pee-Wee that the key to a successful negotiation is a
playfully intuitive and spontaneous attitude where conflict becomes
an opportunity for novel engagement.
New Constellations / New Ecologies - San Francisco, CA - 35
Super Session
101_5 Enclaves/Territories + Expanding Megalopolises
Elijah Huge, Wesleyan University
Mona El Khafif, California College of the Arts
Felipe Correa, Harvard University
Julia Czerniak, Syracuse University
Date: Saturday, March 23, 2013, 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM
Urban environments and their surrounding territories are rapidly evolving in response to threats, pressures and opportunities that extend far beyond the boundaries of the traditional city. Environmental
and social volatility, the migrations of populations, infrastructural demands and shifting economies
operating at the regional and global mega-scale are accelerating the rate at which cities are transforming, rendering obsolete traditional planning techniques while demanding new methods of urban decoding, new design strategies for prototyping growth, and a new toolbox of spatial and infrastructural
concepts with which to re-imagine and re-define the 21st century city.
101_5 Enclaves/Territories + Expanding Megalopolises
Securing the Perimeter
Elijah Huge, Wesleyan University
Date: Friday, March 22, 2013, 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
For + Against: Designing For Failure
Julie Larsen, Syracuse University
On January 2012, Lebbeus Woods posted a blog entry entitled,
“Questioning Catastrophe” where he asked the most measurable
question architecture and urbanism can ask today, “Can architects
somehow design FOR earthquakes and tsunami, or only AGAINST
them?” If we aim for the latter – AGAINST – we must assume that
in order to be against something, we must be in opposition to it or
resistant to its effects. This sets up a clear boundary between what
needs to be ‘protected’ (communities, cities, or regions potentially
affected by natural disaster) and what those entities need to be
protected from. But if we assume the former – FOR – there is a
potential for reconciliation or reciprocity between systems. Instead
of strictly using defensive strategies between systems of thinking,
there is potential to think about how we can design FOR inevitable
failure. After the catastrophic events of the atomic bomb, Japanese Metabolists were on a quest to redefine architecture as ‘artificial ground’ that could adapt and be responsive to urban and
environmental changes. As Max Frisch wrote in Man in the Holocene, “Only human beings can recognize catastrophes, provided
they survive them; nature recognizes no catastrophes.” But rather
than being against nature as it becomes more difficult to manage,
new Manufactured Landscapes and Megaforms can sustain a new
type of adaptability that is more susceptible catastrophic events.
To be ‘for’ rather than ‘against’ nature will become the new norm, it
will enable coastal regions to see beyond nature as a thing to conquer and rather to accept. This paper will focus on our relationship
to nature, through the lens of designing ‘for’ failure. The paper uses
Tokyo Bay in Japan as a catalyst for how to challenge our way to
rethink our cities and outlying regional coastlines to not just sustain
‘against’ catastrophe but design ‘for’ it.
Woods, Lebbeus. “QUESTIONING CATASTROPHE.” LEBBEUS
WOODS. Www.worldpress.com, 23 Jan. 2012. Web. 10 July 2012.
<http://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2012/01/23/questioningcatastrophe/>.
Proliferating the Perimeter:
A Spatial Plan for the Maldives
Joyce Hsiang, Yale University
Bimal Mendis, Yale University
With over 1200 islands spread over 500 miles at 5 feet above sea
level, the Maldives are a geographic anomaly, susceptible to crises
from rising sea levels to extreme oil dependency. Simultaneously
dispersed and dense, the Maldives defy normative models of classification. A multiplicity of extreme scales and conditions offers
a unique concentration of challenges for securing its viability and
future. The spatial plan investigates strategies for repositioning
the islands, directly linking its anomalous geospatial and environmental characteristics with its complex social, economic and cultural systems. A strategy for countering crisis emerges, informed
by the extremes of the Maldives, yet universally applicable to our
uncertain future.
Territory Jam: Tehran
Rudabeh Pakravan, University of California, Berkeley
The Iranian Parliament banned satellite dishes in 1995, as part of
an effort to limit the influence of “Western culture,” but enforcement has proved difficult. Despite door-to-door sweeps by security forces and electronic signal jamming, satellite use in the capital
is at an all-time high. (Although reliable statistics are hard to come
by, a reported 40 to 65 percent of the capital’s population has
access to satellite television. Tehranis flout the ban, pay the fines,
secretly reinstall receivers, engage in all manner of camouflage and
subterfuge — anything to keep the TV on. Until a few years ago,
apartment dwellers would hide satellite receivers behind air conditioning units or laundry drying on the line. These days, the typical
Tehran roof is so crowded that residents simply place dishes in
the open and resign themselves to periodically replacing those destroyed by police. Revolutionary guards who are denied entry to an
apartment have been known to scale a building’s walls with grappling hooks to dismantle receivers. It may seem like something out
of a spy novel, but this cat-and-mouse game tells the deeper story
of a complex exchange between the Islamic Republic and citizens
of Tehran. In the absence of legitimate public space for discourse
or demonstration, the satellite receiver opens a space for political
dissent and cultural protest.
Discussing initially how public space has been delegitimized by security forces in the capital city, this paper speculates on the emergence of illicit relationships and how everyday tactics can create
spaces of opportunity where none exist.
New Constellations / New Ecologies - San Francisco, CA - 37
101_5 Enclaves/Territories + Expanding Megalopolises
Rapid Cities: Prototyping Urban Growth
Mona El Khafif, California College of the Arts
Date: Thursday, March 21, 2013, 4:00 PM - 5:30 PM
Global Garden City: Trans-Territorial Ecologies
in Singapore
Kian Goh
Singapore, a small island-city-state with a complex colonial past,
has overcome its geographic and political constraints to claim
world-class achievements. Its much-vaunted development – a
complete transformation of social and physical environments – has
been framed around discourses of crisis and survival, size and a
lack of hinterland. Indeed, postcolonial nation and city building
were premised on these. Even as its planning accomplishments are
invoked/imported as a development model in various countries of
the Global South, Singapore has “exported” itself – its expertise,
labor and capital, and reputation – to far-flung places, particularly
as a Model Green City. From its own ever-expanding shores this
eco-territorialization continues with the adjacent Riau Islands of
Indonesia and Tianjin Eco-City in China. How do we assess the
Singapore urban eco-model and its possible impacts? I frame this
question through the concept of trans-territorial ecologies – the
multiple and shifting relationships between ecologies and boundaries. I explore the role of the Singaporean state in channeling its
responses to geographic and political constraints into a model of
urban environmental transformation. I find that the Singapore environmental model constitutes a hybrid urban nature, consistent
with postdevelopmentalist urbanization, and that it maintains historical continuity to a globalizing nationalist agenda. I find as well
that Singapore’s self-proclaimed niche enables it to both position
its development experiences directly in response to current global
environmental exigencies, and as well to expand and continue Singapore’s global relevance.
Structuring Dynamic Growth Through Inherited
Urban Form: Case Study from Chiang Mai, Thailand
Brian P McGrath, Parsons The New School for Design
Martina Barcelloni-Corte, Parsons The New School for Design
Somporn Sangawongse, Parsons The New School for Design
The aim of this paper is to expose the mismatch between the dynamic urban growth taking place in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and the
Comprehensive Plan conceived to control this phenomenon. Contemporary planning strategies in Chiang Mai, despite the evidence
of an increasingly diffused and mixed urban condition, persist in
focusing on abstract models that conceptually and politically separate urban from rural without paying attention to the region’s finegrained and hybrid existing structure. Four decades of comprehensive planning have not acknowledged indigenous settlement
patterns of an urbanized countryside consisting of intricate community based and self-reliant organizational systems built around
shared water management, dense rice cultivation and craft production, that still strongly structures the regional territory. Nor
has planning kept pace with the constantly evolving forms and
increasing scale of contemporary real estate development. The paper explores instead the extent to which Chiang Mai’s rapid growth
could be effectively structured through development of design
and planning models that recognize the resilience of its inherited
urban form and its capacity to balance diverse demands at multiple
scales. Possible alternative pathways will be discussed.
38 - ACSA 101 Annual Meeting
Adaptable Urban Models in the Age of Climatic
Changes: ParametricNOLA
Pasquale De Paola, Louisiana Tech University
This paper examines the pedagogical integration of speculative urban design models based on the use of computational design tools,
which seem to favor the implementation of new methodologies
that focus more on the capacity for the urban to morphogenetically
adapt to the existing climatic and ecological parameters. Particularly, my investigation underlines the implementation of a different
pedagogical praxis that, though not entirely original in its ideological and methodological premises, seeks to challenge the NAAB Students Performance Criteria typical of urban design studios.
To support this framework, most of my research will analyze the
work generated in ParametricNOLA, a computationally driven urban design studio taught during the Fall Quarter of 2011. While recognizing that the idea of parametricism, as formulated by Patrik
Schumacher, indeed offers an aesthetically driven methodology
based on formal exuberance, the studio’s main pedagogical premises were based on the idea that the design of urban settlements
needs to look into new generative models characterized by heterogeneous feedback and morphogenetic adaptability to regional and
climatic changes in order to generate new urban growth and more
dynamic and adaptable city models.
Within this process, the students had to propose a series of tactical
design approaches that challenged the traditional and regimental
nature of the existing physical master plan, seeking valid alternatives in order to produce adaptable solutions more responsive to
regional climatic changes. Thus, complex systems of conceptual
and disciplinary deterritorialization were investigated through the
study of biogenetic and ecological analogues; this was partially
done to underline those morphogenetic qualities of particular ecological systems that show higher levels of formal and structural
adaptability.
While computational strategies have created an exuberant and
sensual aesthetic, they have also proposed a new way to look at
complex systems by way of opening up the field of possibilities
inherent the progressive design of new urban settlements. To design more respondent cities, we need to discard old processes that
favor territorial and ecological discrimination by way of homogeneity, while we need to refocus on the use of computational strategies, which propose a more comprehensive and systemic approach
to the design of urban spaces. This paper will particularly show that
pedagogical and disciplinary architectural preconceptions can only
be overcome through clear opportunistic methodological visions.
Enclaves/Territories + Expanding Megalopolises/Rapid Cities: Prototyping
Urban Growth continued
The Urban Sphere: Global Strategies
Joyce Hsiang, Yale University
Bimal Mendis, Yale University
Rather than redefining the role of the urban project, architecture
should eschew boundaries and reframe the scope and scale of the
urban project to re-engage speculative approaches for global urbanization that define the world as a single urban entity. This is neither a new nor unprecedented intention, but the world as a single
urban entity has yet to be seriously undertaken and fully accepted
as a definitive identity for developing organizational strategies.
This paper presents the context and content of “Worldindexer,”
an ongoing multi-media research project that speculates on new
analytical and organizational strategies for addressing global urbanization. WorldIndexer projects the impact of global development. It confronts the exigencies of growth that reconfigure our
global terrain. An antidote to the fragmentation of global development, the project erases divisions and differences, removing all
boundaries of ownership, politics and responsibility. Rather than
distinguishing between arbitrary dichotomies of rural and urban,
land and water, developed and natural, WorldIndexer projects an
understanding of the collective population and development as
one unified entity, without boundaries. The entirety of the earth’s surface is unfolded and reconstructed to
index global development. The world is seen as one continuous and
seamless three-dimensional landscape. Worldindexer materializes
the vast and intricate condition of global urbanization by tracking,
visualizing and modeling the unprecedented growth, complex linkages and competing demands placed on land and resources.
New Constellations / New Ecologies - San Francisco, CA - 39
101_5 Enclaves/Territories + Expanding Megalopolises
Strategies Beyond the Compact City
Felipe Correa, Harvard University
Date: Friday, March 22, 2013, 4:00 PM - 5:30 PM
Free Trade Zone Urbanism
Martin Felsen, Illinois Institute of Technology
In the early 1970’s, cities throughout the American Rust Belt began
to shrink. Many negative forces contributed and still contribute to
this shrinkage, but one force is rarely considered: the failure of
long-range planning and urban design to stabilize Rust Belt cities.
After all, Rust Belt cities earlier in the 20th century developed several comprehensive urban plans designed to stimulate economic
booms and weather busts, foster engaged citizenry with visionary thinking, establish public infrastructures, and avoid social and
natural catastrophes. “City Beautiful” design documents such as
the Plan of Chicago of 1909, Cleveland’s Group Plan of 1903, and
the Official Plan of the City of Cincinnati of 1925 became integral
long range frameworks for rationally shaping Rust Belt cities. So
why then, despite this history of deliberate urban plan-making are
Rust Belt cities in so much trouble?
This paper considers ways that architects in the Rust Belt might
learn from Houston’s natural resource extraction economy, and
from its loose profit-oriented urban framework that resembles a
free trade zone to create a new type of 21st century urbanism. Fresh
water is speculated on as a natural resource capable of becoming
the basis on an extraction economy to catalyze resurgent Rust Belt
cities in the 21st century. “Smallness” as a rampant contemporary
architectural design strategy is investigated and dismissed as an inadequate technique toward rejuvenating Rust Belt cities. Instead,
this paper suggests that the time is right for architects to recuperate
the underlying ideas that spawned the Mega-Plan and megastructure projects in order to consider how city-scaled megaforms can
become an updated architecture-based urbanism: a conjecture of
what a comprehensible city could be to combat (predicted) crises.
40 - ACSA 101 Annual Meeting
Gaining Ground: Structuring Settlement
in the Uncertain Economic and Climactic Landscape
of the Gulf Coast Mega-Region
Jeff Carney, Louisiana State University
The rapid growth of the Gulf Coast mega-region has in significant
ways surpassed existing urban, rural, and agrarian settlement systems as the ordering force in the landscape of the Mississippi Delta
and Gulf Coast. Coupled with the dislocation resulting from global
climate change and coastal land loss, individual communities find
themselves unable to leverage their unstable position in the new
mega-regional order and cope with the tremendous challenges
they face. As dire as the situation appears for coastal communities,
emerging opportunities for local design and planning are developing in reaction to large scale government sponsored ecological
planning efforts and the machinations of the global economy.
The 21st century reshaping of the global natural resources economy, combined with a broad transformation of coastal protection
and restoration methods are forcing the development of largely
individual and independent community-scaled initiatives. As these
trends build, coastal settlements will increasingly find traction in
a transformation (and re-appropriation) of traditional land-use
and management methods that are fundamentally intertwined
with ecological processes. This re-establishment of communities
in concert with their dynamic ecological foundations coupled with
improved networks of access between coastal communities and
the mega-region could work to move the Gulf Coast successfully
through the dramatic development and environmental challenges
that lie ahead.
This paper considers the transformation of the Delta landscape
through the illustration of three trans-disciplinary research and design projects. Each project grapples with the rapidly changing ecological, infrastructural, and settlement landscape of the Gulf Coast
Mega-region from a different scale and perspective. Far from an
abdication of the responsibility of architects and planners, these
studies illustrate opportunities for re-emergent and altogether new
forms of settlement practice along the Gulf Coast. Rural coastal
communities form a large portion of a mega-region of global economic importance situated precariously at the edge of a vast and
productive ecosystem. The reliance of this expanding system on an
increasingly threatened ecology, reflects a growing conflict facing
mega-regions and urbanized delta globally that will have tremendous implications in the coming century. Communities along the
Louisiana coast will survive or vanish based upon their ability to
respond to dramatic shifts both in the local environment as well as
the mega-regional economy.
101_5 Enclaves/Territories + Expanding Megalopolises/Strategies Beyond the Compact
City continued
Grand Manner Alla Turca: Istanbul’s Territorial
Appropriations
Erkin Ozay, Harvard University
Over the last decade, thanks to major policy changes at the national
level, the Istanbul government appropriated sweeping authorities.
Empowered, the city attempted to move towards a polycentric model, in order to dilute the high density levels in its core city. A rapid
expansion ensued with housing-led developments, supported by ambitious transportation projects. However, this process is transforming
the historic peninsula into a major hub, further reinforcing peak density levels in the center. At the same time, new transportation nodes,
links and intersections, and their means of mitigating the topography, are forming splintering gaps within the city. In the paper, I delve
into Istanbul’s pattern of formal and functional re-centering. I argue
that, by treating its larger environment as negative periphery to its
traditional center, Istanbul is failing to compose a cohesive territory.
Through brief episodes from the 19th century on, I discuss the difficulties of placing large-scale infrastructures and urban forms on the
challenging topography. I argue that, as opposed to relying on structures designed to minimize contact with the terrain, Istanbul needs
to employ strategies for decisive engagement with it. Finally, I focus
on a recent competition entry for a transportation hub located in the
historic peninsula, where we addressed these challenges.
Suburban Sensibilities
David Salomon, Cornell University
In looking at historical and contemporary examples of suburban design, this essay asks how working with atmosphere, sensibility and
aesthetics may serve as a “guide [for] conceiving new relationships
among existing urban parts.”
We tend to think of sensibilities and styles as either being superficial or as the result of some other (economic and political) cultural
forces. That is, as something that covers up or comes after the important stuff. This paper looks at designs for suburban spaces and
cities that reverse this sequence. It asks: What is to be gained by
starting with sensibility and aesthetics when analyzing and producing suburban architectural objects and spaces? Might they be effective “organizational strategies that provides alternative formal and
experiential identities for urban scenarios outside of the traditional
compact city?”
In attempting to answer this question it first turns to the ideas of
Gregory Bateson to examine the potential of thinking and acting
aesthetically. It then examines to the work of Ian McHarg, who’s
work on the relationship between the natural and the urban overlap
with Bateson’s. It will be argued that the limits of McHarg’s design
method - with its emphasis on analyzing existing ecological systems
- while extremely valuable, lies in the fact that it is relatively inflexible
in comparison to an aesthetic method favored by Bateson. Better illustrating the latter’s position is the work of Frederick Law Olmsted
and Frank Lloyd Wright, whose schemes for subdivisions will be discussed. This is followed by a brief look at a new suburban town from
the 1970s, The Woodlands, Texas, which serves as a case study for
illustrating McHarg’s the advantages and limits of McHarg’s method.
Finally, it will look at more recent proposals for suburbia with an eye
towards identifying examples that combine the aesthetic emphasis
of Bateson with ecological focus of McHarg.
Its conclusion argues for the efficacy of using architectural aesthetics methods for creating new environmental and social conditions in
suburbia; a process that privileges the “what if …” approach of an
artist, without negating the “if … then …” logic of the engineer.
New Constellations / New Ecologies - San Francisco, CA - 41
101_5 Enclaves/Territories + Expanding Megalopolises
Infrastructural and Ecological Urbanisms
Julia Czerniak, Syracuse University
Date: Friday, March 22, 2013, 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM
Remaking Paris as the ‘City of Flows’
Lara Belkind, Columbia University
This paper investigates emerging spatial and design politics within
a 21st century urban paradigm – the networked metropolis. Its focus is contemporary Paris, where the State is undertaking the construction of a super métro, a vast regional high speed automated
metro system intended to transform Paris from a highly centralized
into a multi-centered urban region. Infrastructure is playing an expanding role as the city shifts from node to network, and this is
evident both in new public space expressions as well as in changes
in how architecture is employed as a tool in metropolitan politics.
No longer a “non-place,” as once characterized by sociologist Marc
Augé, the train network acts increasingly as a public space and
threshold between central Paris and its troubled suburbs. The
frustrations of migrant workers and disenfranchised communities
with limited geographic and social mobility play out in riots at the
Gare du Nord, and also at La Courneuve, where trains connecting
Charles de Gaulle airport and central Paris bypass the residents of
a social housing estate. Meanwhile, the central rail hub at ChâteletLes Halles, whose street culture is negatively characterized as the
banlieue en ville or “suburbs in the city” is undergoing redevelopment. The tension around this culture might be described by anthropologist Mary Douglas as a reaction to urban “matter out of
place.” It also makes apparent conflicts between local, regional,
and global claims on key sites within large infrastructure networks.
Architecture, long deployed by France’s presidents and mayors
as a tool of politics, is also experiencing a shift of focus – from
buildings to infrastructure, to urban systems and strategies. Architect Lars Lerup has remarked that architecture has become a
kind of “software” for rethinking the metropolis. This could apply
to the ambitious design consultation launched by President Sarkozy in 2007, Le Grand Pari de l’agglomération parisienne. Ten
international teams led by architects were invited to envision the
future of greater Paris, and many focused on infrastructure and
open strategies. This open-endedness has continued in the design and planning of a new super métro and respresents a fundamental departure from the centralized, complete urban visions of
the 1960s – such as the Villes Nouvelles and the RER regional rail
system constructed to link them to central Paris. A shift in the
underlying urban framework to a network model has changed how
architecture is instrumentalized as a political tool and has altered
the way megaprojects are conceived and executed.
42 - ACSA 101 Annual Meeting
Roadmap 2050 and the Promised Landscapes
of Low-Carbon
Rania Ghosn, University of Michigan
The drive to address larger contexts and respond to concerns
that were previously confined to other disciplines have brought
designers to address energy concerns beyond the metrics of
conservation technologies at the building scale and within the
larger terrain of productive landscapes. Partially drawing on
OMA’s Roadmap 2050, this paper explores the imaginaries of
energy futures. It argues that the contemporary conceptualization of carbon as the “energy-problem” evades the basic question of what space and which relations such projected landscapes will materialize. Alternatively, it proposes a framework
to render visible transformations in landscapes and livelihoods
that occur as places are incorporated into systems of energy.
101_5 Enclaves/Territories + Expanding Megalopolises/Infrastructural
and Ecological Urbanisms Continued
Coeur De Ville: An Urban, Ecological Catalyst
Ursula Emery McClure, Louisiana State University
Michael McClure, University of Louisiana - Lafayette
Bradley Cantrell, Louisiana State University
From its first employment by humankind, infrastructure provided
a means to negotiate and eventually control the natural environment. Bridges provided safe crossing, roads provided clear navigation, and viaducts provided potable water when there was none. Infrastructure ordered the wild and subsequently empowered those
that used it. Nowhere more than the Roman Republic and Empire
is this infrastructural empowerment evident. To establish itself as
the “eternal city,” the Romans engaged in a massive infrastructure
building agenda. Their roads traversed more than 400,000 kilometers, their aqueducts could be found as far north as Germany, and
their bridges spanned rivers in more than twenty contemporary
countries. This permeating infrastructure not only supported the
territorial colonization of the Republic’s and Empire’s expanding
metropolis but also identified to the Roman citizens and slaves, the
city’s military power and technological prowess. The infrastructure
was visible, cultural, and clearly fundamental to the population’s
condition and the condition of the city. Infrastructure represented
who they were and made them who they were.
Water Drives the Motor City
Maria Arquero de Alarcon, University of Michigan
Jen Maigret, University of Michigan
Located in one of the most polluted watersheds in the Great Lakes
Region, the Detroit metropolitan region is in a unique position to
challenge the course of its inherited system of water infrastructure.
This paper examines current urban storm water runoff management practices in the city and speculates on a paradigm of waterprone urbanism that addresses the functioning of natural systems,
infrastructural intelligence, typological innovation, and culturally
driven parameters.
This project posits that altering design and construction practices
so that storm water runoff is kept on site can reverse combined
infrastructure failure, reintroduce natural processes in the city and
engage the residents and other urban actors in the process. The
specific condition of Detroit, currently undergoing a long-term
planning initiative, presents a perfect ground to test how this approach can contribute to a more sustainable use of the land. It is
also at the metropolitan scale that we can respond creatively to
the needs of an aging infrastructure that serves an unevenly and
scarcely populated geography.
Roman infrastructure dealt primarily with a non-natural tectonic focusing on regulating nature for man’s needs: stable ground, fresh
water, and unlimited access to all lands. In the contemporary context, infrastructure is still needed by mankind but the tectonic is
changing. No longer does moving fresh water from one location to
another suffice, now the fresh water must be constructed and then
moved. The natural life-support systems that were a given previously, fresh air, clean water, drainage basins, etc., suburban sprawl
and urban densities have all but destroyed. Infrastructure no longer simply requires ordering nature for mankind’s convenience but
instead must now replicate, remediate, and redevelop the natural
living systems required for a healthy biosphere. The Coeur de Ville
project presented here investigates an ecological urban catalyst that
re-envisions the traditional role of urban infrastructure, the control
of nature, for the more contemporary demand, the support of nature. It is an infrastructure that supports the larger urban biosphere. 1
1. “biosphere, n. 1: the part of the world in which life can exist.
2: living organisms together with their environment.” Merriam
Webster. Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary copyright © 2012
by Merriam-Webster, Incorporated. n.d. Web. 18 August 2012.
New Constellations / New Ecologies - San Francisco, CA - 43
Super Session
101_6 Populations/Networks/Datascapes
Ulrike Heine, Clemson University
Dan Harding, Clemson University
Aaron Bowman, Clemson University
Bernhard Sill, Hochschule Trier, University of Applied Sciences
Ana Miljaki, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Amanda Reeser Lawrence, Northeastern University
Armando Montilla, Clemson University
Laura Kurgan, Columbia University
Nicholas de Monchaux, University of California, Berkeley
Date: Saturday, March 23, 2013, 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM
Populations and audiences are evolving through digital interfaces, new discursive networks, groundup community-based practices, new constituencies and communities previously under-represented
or invisible to conventional notions of the public, identity groups, and organizations. These panels examine architecture’s emerging discourses and publics as well as the ways in which data proliferation,
geospatial information and the cartographies of new media are shaping our understanding of these
cultural communities.
101_6 Populations/Networks/Datascapes
Guerilla Ecologies
Ulrike Heine, Clemson University
Dan Harding, Clemson University
Aaron Bowman, Clemson University
Bernhard Sill, Hochschule Trier | University of Applied Sciences
Date: Friday, March 22, 2013, 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
What Can We Do With(out) Action?
Christopher Austin Roach, California College of the Arts
Emerging from Dystopia:
Latin America’s Latest Lessons
Luis Diego Quiros, University of Maryland
More than two years after the global financial collapse, architecture is still waking up with a hangover. As we continue to grasp
for effective ways to bring our disciplinary knowledge to bear on
the challenges of global urbanization, social justice, and climate
change, architects remain caught in the limited field of possibilities
delineated by earlier academic and professional discourses. Even
if we have passed through the “semantic nightmare” of postmodernism, played out the self-referential indulgences of autonomous
architecture, and awakened from the decade-long fever dream of
“postcritical” production, we still seem to find ourselves without a
normative framework for what can be done with architecture, and
in particular, what architecture can do for the city.
A whole host of architects and urban theorists have offered a response to this paradoxical state by positing various forms of direct
action as alternatives to these perceived ideological dead ends of
theory and practice. The energy and interest devoted to these
explorations is both admirable and formidable, and rather than
address the entire terrain of thinking and writing that has developed, I have selected a particular work that I argue is somehow
symptomatic of the various texts and positions that have been
fielded within the discourse to date. I will take the liberty of using criticism of this text as an opportunity to elucidate these positions and unpack the possibilities and pitfalls that they represent.
Informal Urbanism: The Slow Evolution of a New Form
Dan Clark, University of Minnesota
This paper addresses the transformation of the informal city as it
absorbs infrastructures and services originating in adjacent formal
regions.
In recent years, architectural and urban interventions in Latin
America and other emerging regions around the world point out
to a new kind of urbanism – one, which mechanisms differ from
the conception of a totalizing, ideal plan but that emerge as diverse, sporadic, punctual and flexible interventions from within the
dystopian realities of informal settlements. This article explores
the evolution and actual implications of some of these projects.
No More Waiting for Superman:
Teaching Guerilla Urbanism and Reflexive Practice
José L.S. Gámez, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Janni Sorensen, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
This case study illustrates how our course, the Community Planning Workshop, introduces a “do-it-yourself” approach to urban
design and planning that is part participatory planning strategy,
part social capital investment, and part guerilla pedagogy. For
us, “bottom-up” and grassroots approaches help design students
(both architectural and urban) understand the interconnectedness of the social and physical worlds. Working with challenged
neighborhoods, our workshop sets the stage for transformational
experiences and efforts that extend beyond the scope of a single
semester. Students reflect upon strengths and challenges of collaborative processes while helping serve as catalysts for social and
spatial change. In this sense, design students are asked to continuously consider the prospects of implementation rather than to theorize. Their small acts aim to establish guerilla ecologies in which
big changes can occur over time.
It includes work and research conducted in coursework studying
Rocinha, a large informal settlement lodged in a wealthy sector of
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
New Constellations / New Ecologies - San Francisco, CA - 45
101_6 Populations/Networks/Datascapes
Discursive Networks
Ana Miljaki, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Amanda Reeser Lawrence, Northeastern University
Date: Friday, March 22, 2013, 4:00 PM - 5:30 PM
Anonymity and Influence: Corporate Authorship
and The Architects Collaborative
Michael Kubo, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The vectors of influence in architecture are conventionally understood to travel in one directional only: from master to disciple,
teacher to student, elder to younger, “genius” to emulator. According to this model, we are told (by Sigfried Giedion, Manfredo Tafuri,
Charles Jencks, and many others) that Walter Gropius, founder of
the Bauhaus, founded The Architects Collaborative (TAC) as an
application of his ideas on teamwork in the context of postwar
practice in the United States, together with seven of “his” students.
The result was what Tafuri described as his “disappearance into
the reality of American professional life,” taken as a stand-in for the
broader dissolution of prewar avant-garde ideals into the corrupting realities of “high” and, eventually, “late” modernism. In histories
of postwar architectural production, the work of TAC has been assessed (or, more commonly, dismissed) only in relation to Gropius
and his perceived abandonment of such ideals, a historiographical
sleight-of-hand in which the largest dedicated architectural firm of
the postwar period is reduced to nothing more than the corporate
name for Gropius’s postwar practice, a mere footnote to the career
of a single author.
This paper explores the collision between such narratives, based
on conventional notions of authorship and influence, and the true
story of TAC’s origins: seven young architects, associated through
a dense network of personal, academic, and professional connections and armed with possible projects and funding, sought a
senior architect—eventually Gropius, though others were considered—to join their efforts to form a communal practice. A reassessment of the firm’s work against the accepted historiography
of TAC reveals the professional and discursive stakes around questions authorship, evaluation, publicity, and influence at the heart
of both corporate production and critical reception in the decades
after World War II.
[The submission is a previous version of the paper that would be
developed for ACSA, written prior to new archival research on the
origins of TAC and the roles of its founding partners. The developed paper would situate the discussion below of the historiography of TAC and other corporate firms against this account of the
firm’s origins.]
46 - ACSA 101 Annual Meeting
Architectural Appropriations in the Age
of Networked Reproduction
Daniel Norell, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg
William T. Willoughby, Louisiana Tech University
Pasquale De Paola, Louisiana Tech University
This paper extends Walter Benjamin’s 20th Century examination of
artwork and mechanical reproduction into a discussion about architecture and network practices today. Secondarily, this essay reassesses the postmodern predicament forecasted by Jean-Francoise
Lyotard, Guy Debord and Henri Lefebvre. Lyotard, in “The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge,” distinguished the “postmodern era” as a time period when the status of knowledge has
been altered through its acquisition, transmission, legitimation, and
consumption in computerized societies. Fredric Jameson points out
that the observations of Debord and Lefebvre demark the birth of
a postindustrial economy fueled by a new social inclination, characterized by spectacles and rapid, yet bureaucratically controlled,
consumption.
Within this complex framework of cultural and social change over
the last 40 years we have witnessed increased access to spectacles
at all scales, streamed through a global proliferation of personalized
mobile devices. The ubiquitous distribution of media and digital devices follows the accelerated pace of technological innovation and
information flows.
Due to the acceleration of innovation in new technologies that afford
the flow of information, social and political structures have become
disaggregate—taking on greater flexibility and articulation. Globally
distributed systems of human exchange (social, political, economic,
geographic, journalistic, and aesthetic) have become rather complicated and fraught with upheaval, leading to reversals of power, legitimacy, social status, popular taste, and knowledge creation. How
can we untangle such a framework characterized by such heavily
layered contradictions?
This essay seeks to understand both network practices and the
redefinition of architectural design resulting from algorithmic processes. Ultimately, it is the combination of the two—the global
network and contemplation on the spatiality of networks, as well
as advancements over the last decade in parametric and algorithmic architecture—that this essay addresses. Throughout the essay,
we address the discipline-wide preference for variability over and
above permanence, evolution over archetype, global over local, futurity over history.
101_6 Populations/Networks/Datascapes/Discursive Networks continued
Edvard Ravnikar’s Liquid Modernism: Architectural
Identity in a Network of Shifting References
Vladmir Kulic, Florida Atlantic University
The paper focuses on the oeuvre of the Slovenian architect Edvard Ravnikar (1907-1993) in order to theorize the notion of “liquid
modernism,” derived from Zygmunt Bauman’s description of our
current period as a “liquid modernity.” It argues that Ravnikar’s
strategy of appropriating and blending an ever-expanding network of diverse—and often oppositional—architectural poetics may
serve as a precedent for the present moment, characteristic for a
radical pluralism of cultural forms and tastes and their pervasive
hybridization.
A student of Jože Plečnik in Ljubljana, as well as an employee at
Le Corbusier’s rue de Sèvre studio in Paris in the late 1930s, Ravnikar was internationally exceptionally well connected, yet operated from a peripheral position whose reference points constantly
shifted. During most of Ravnikar’s life, Slovenia was a constituent
republic of socialist Yugoslavia, a country suspended between the
Eastern and Western blocs, political and economic systems, and
traditional cultures; it was a country in constant flux, whose political alliances violently shifted between Moscow and Washington
before settling as one of the leaders of the decolonized non-aligned
world. Such a position forced Ravnikar to constantly renegotiate
his position in relation to diverse cultural centers, but it also liberated him in producing novel and unexpected combinations of his
architectural sources. His first blends involved the unlikely amalgamation of the lessons of his two teachers, Plečnik and Le Corbusier;
but his subsequent contacts and appropriations ranged from Otto
Wagner,, Alvar Aalto, 1960s brutalism, to Mesopotamian ziggurats.
The procedure involved dissolving the source material into its constitutive principles and motifs before recombining them into a new
whole, thus avoiding direct citation, yet maintaining clear referentiality that reveals itself upon close analysis. Issues of identity were
crucial to Ravnikar’s work, as he built some of the key representational spaces of the Slovenian nationhood, inheriting the role of the
“patriarch” of Slovenian architecture from his teacher Plečnik. Resemanticizing the appropriated principles and motifs thus played
an important role in his strategy of identity building.
Loos, Law and the Culture of the Copy
Ines Weizman, London Metropolitan University
In 2008, 75 years after the death of Adolf Loos, copyrights over
his work, like any work 75 years after the death of its author, has
become public. The same year a proposal was submitted for Ordos
100, the famous/notorious masterplan for a luxurious residential
area in Inner Mongolia (China) that was developed and curated by
Ai Wei Wei’ s FAKE studio in Beijing and the practice of Herzog
& de Meuron in Basel. The proposal was to celebrate the making
public of the copy rights (copyleft) over Loos’ oeuvre by building a
facsimile of HOUSE BAKER – the house Loos designed – but never
built – for the legendary singer Josephine Baker in 1928. This paper
will discuss the proposal with a series of related works that reflect
upon the function and potentials of copyright in architecture.
What is presented in this paper is a detailed analysis of the history
of copyright disputes which has been discovered when copyright
lawyers began to research the possibilities of realising a copy of a
building that has in fact no original.
This paper analyzes some of Ravnikar’s most significant projects,
starting with the Kampor war memorial at the Island of Rab in Croatia and the Municipal Assembly of the Slovenian city of Kranj, both
built in the 1950s as unique blends of Plečnik’s and Le Corbusier’s
poetics. It then focuses on the central space of Slovenian statehood, the Republic Square in Ljubljana, to finish with the Babylon
Oberoi Hotel in Baghdad, a transhistorical and transcultural mélange of various motifs subjected to a process of resemanticization. Ranging from awkward to sublime, I argue, these buildings,
with their inherently multifarious referentiality, amount to possible
precedents for an architecture of what Zygmunt Bauman calls “liquid modernity.”
New Constellations / New Ecologies - San Francisco, CA - 47
101_6 Populations/Networks/Datascapes
Urban Geographies of Multiculturalism
Armando Montilla, Clemson University
Date: Friday, March 22, 2013, 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM
CompliCity: Transformation of Public Spaces
in the Heart of Sharjah
Samia Rab, American University of Sharjah
Though countries forming the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)
are collectively third most important migration destination after
North America and Europe, they are still being studied as unusual
contexts where the local population is disproportionately smaller
than the migrant communities. Ancient trading links between Gulf
port cities and their counterparts along the Indian Ocean developed a distinct form of pre-modern urbanism that I have elsewhere
termed “seascape” urbanism. In this paper, I will focus on the heritage area of Sharjah to analyze the restoration, de-restoration and
revitalization efforts that are transforming the urban public spaces
inhabited thus far by transnational communities.
While efforts to restore Sharjah’s heritage began in 1990s, a new
five-stage redevelopment project began implementation last year
to rejuvenate the Heart of Sharjah. This project is being developed
by the Sharjah Investment and Development Authority (Shurooq),
which is a private real estate development company owned by the
daughter of the current Ruler HH Dr. Sheikh Sultan Alqasimi.
The Heart of Sharjah project will provide a destination for regional
and international tourists and host the 11th Sharjah Art Biennale in
April 2013. While the project’s five phases are scheduled to conclude in 2025, the physical transformations are changing the public spaces from places of transnational inhabitants to “tourism and
trade destination with modern contemporary artistic touches”.
This paper describes the historical development of Sharjah to illustrate the transnational urban public spaces. It raises issues related to global presence of leisure in a localized environment that
transcends the national paradigm and agendas. It studies the urban
spaces in terms of their connectivity and concludes that the proposed transformation will eliminate the presence of a transnational
community that lives and works in the area under revitalization.
To increase the vitality of the Heart of Sharjah requires an economically productive historic core and the existence of a local community of transnational origins. Sharjah’s globalizing agenda can
be best met through private investment in the redevelopment of a
public space for inhabitants that is attractive for a cultured tourist
seeking local places of transnational origins.
Hedonistic Urbanism: The Beirut Post-War Experience
Elizabeth Martin, Southern Polytechnic State University
Throughout history, Beirut was often called the Paris of the Middle
East. If not for the strong military presence, the ubiquities religious
iconography, and the occasional outbreak of civil war, the analogy
would still hold true, especially since the cultural vibe is still very
strong. On the surface, Beirut is the “party capital of the of the
Arab world,” but taking a longer, more thoughtful look, the city has
multicultural depth (literally and figuratively/experientially) surviving ethnic migration and unfortunate cleansing, with a strong desire for peace and assimilation (or acceptance).
There have been several experimental projects since 1993 as part
of the recuperation of (war-damaged) post-civil war Beirut that
48 - ACSA 101 Annual Meeting
recognizes it’s layered multi-ethnic past and caters to a holistic hedonistic lifestyle. Where after fifteen years of civil war the populace
has a built-in need for escapism and indulgence - a need not only
to create beautiful public spaces and cultural buildings to enjoy
during the daylight, but also at night, a lifestyle highlighted by extravagant dining, decadent drinking and all-night partying.
After traveling throughout Lebanon last May, I was struck by the
fast-paced building construction Beirut is now facing and how it’s
affecting the cities urban fabric. To me, hedonism as an ethical
philosophy can and should be used to analyze Beirut’s situation
because aspects of its philosophical questions and human values
are evident in the cities laws, social conventions, urban and public
policies. This research brings together modern and historical buildings and public spaces as case-studies.
Mapping the African – American Urban Enclave:
The Ghetto in Translation
Scott L. Ruff, Tulane University
The purpose of this paper is to present the physical elements, spatial zones and infrastructure, which make up African - American
urban cultural enclaves’ morphologies – to understand the evolution and transformation of these places and their components over
time. The physio-spatial boundaries, the infrastructural collisions
of these places are known but rarely are they mapped, organized
and categorized in a manner that they might be compared, contrasted and spatially identified. It is not the intention of this project
to suggest that the African – American urban enclave is something
‘other’ within the American city, rather, it is to present the African
– American urban enclave, ‘the ghetto’ , as a distinct place within
its context. Because of the African – American urban enclave’s central role in segregation era America, conceptually it became a city
within a city or adjacent to the city with a vital political and economic base, creating a haven for a disenfranchised people. Over
time, in this post segregation age it has become a shadow of its
former self. Due to movements such as white flight and also “Black
flight” – no longer does an AAUE have a healthy cross section of
economic classes or a thriving market place, creating a perpetual
state of human poverty and infrastructural deterioration. The space
is still a locus of African-American collective energy, if for no other
reason than the majority of the African-American population reside
within these urban environments. This study looks at this American
cultural enclave as a serious and vital space within the history and
evolution of the American city. Most importantly, it positions the
African – American urban enclave as something beyond its, powerful – but clichéd – image, as an economically distressed area of
urban infrastructure – it is a spatially rich site of African-American
and thus American collective consciousness
101_6 Populations/Networks/Datascapes/Urban Code
Laura Kurgan, Columbia University
Nicholas de Monchaux, University of California, Berkeley
Date: Thursday, March 21, 2013, 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM
#Map
Brett L Snyder, University of California, Davis
Jonathan Massey
Through GIS, geospatial information has become an integral medium for real estate development and capital investment in the built
environment. Through satellite imaging, email filtering, and other
forms of data mining, state power has used place-based information to govern at levels that range from waging war to staffing
schools to removing abandoned bikes. While the big story of urban
coding lies in these macro scale datascapes, there is a counterpoint of activist tactics for intervening in data-mediated urbanization and social control.
Extending a newly published, peer-reviewed article on the interplay between urban places and online spaces in political action,
we show how Occupy Wall Street has used geospatial information
and coding to transform the urban landscape of New York City and
beyond. Using an example of a single house in Brooklyn, we will
look at the complex and interconnected narratives that bind the
physical and virtual.
Imaging Latent Communities:
Gis as an Urban Design Medium
Mark Linder, Syracuse University
This paper presents a project that explores the imaging and urban
design capacities of Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Rather
than understanding GIS solely as a tool for the visualization and
modeling of spatial data, this project considers those capacities as
the basis for urban design and image production. The aim of this
work is to creatively use the capacity of GIS to transform census
and municipal data, with its discrete categories and boundaries,
into more pliable, even fluid, relational images that can suggest new
spatial densities, intensities, gaps, affiliations, networks, and territories. While these procedures are highly abstract, they are direct
applications of ubiquitous software and their potential to inspire
design proposals is insistently practical and specific. The project
begins with the premise that GIS data exemplifies what Jacques
Rancière calls the partage du sensible: the partitioning and sharing,
or distributing and dividing, of the sensible world. The production of
data images in the project is a means to institute Rancière’s concept
of “dissensus” and to describe “novel forms of political subjectivity” or “new possibilities of subjective enunciation.” Its techniques
aspire to manifest dissensual and differential space in which “the
people” does not consist of individual data points in a census of
the population, and citizens are not units of demographic categorization or subjects in a policed domain of information. Rather, the
people are reformulated as a spatialized ratio or relation, and thus
emerge as a relative, unstable and latent communities in an improper spatial mapping that we’d like to call discensus.
Radical Railbanking
McLain Clutter, University of Michigan
Over the past several decades, the use of geodemographic data has
become ubiquitous in the regulation of urbanized land use and development. Today, the demand for geodemographics has created a
surging industry of commercial providers who retail complex data
assemblages, called market segmentation sets, describing synthetic consumer identity groups and linking these groups to their
locations in urbanized space through GIS. These data sets combine
information about race, ethnicity, sexuality, consumer tastes, real
estate value, and other characteristics gleamed from census data,
credit card statements, internet usage, and other sources through
which consumers unconsciously provide information about themselves daily. The validity of the data used in creating these group
identities is often condemned, with many scholars noting uncritical acceptance of culturally constructed demographic categories
and latent positivism. Market segmentation sets are used to target mass marketing, direct mailing campaigns, and – critically – to
direct commercial real estate development. Thus, the contention
here is that while the validity of these data sets is debated, their instrumentalization has the effect of reifying the synthetic consumer
groups they construct. Today, the instrumentalization of market
segmentation sets has increasing influence on the character of the
built environment in urban and exurban territories. While these urban applications of geodemography have led to profitable development, their ideological alliances should not go unexamined. Market
segmentation data sets re-describe the spatiality of our urbanized
areas as an assemblage of spatio-statistical consumer territories.
Architecture plays a critical role in this scenario – providing loci in
the form of shopping mall, big box stores or fields of coffee houses
for the condensation of the hybrid consumer identity groups. This
paper first provides a theoretical context through which to understand market segmentation data and its effects on the built environment, and then forwards a project meant to articulate a position from which architects may find agency within the hegemony of
geodemography by tactically gaming with its data classifications.
New Constellations / New Ecologies - San Francisco, CA - 49
50 - ACSA 101 Annual Meeting
Abstracts from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture
100th Annual Meeting in Boston, MA
Address 1735 New York Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20006
Tel 202.785.2324
Fax 202.628.0448
Web www.acsa-arch.org
ACSA-ARCH.ORG