Architecture & Society... discuss.

[Birdy]

Toot away Meggo!

Fwiw, i'm sorry that CK council is composed of a panel of utter morons, spare one or two, who can't see beyond farms or unions to designate the chapel. i've shared some pretty infuriating back and forth correspondence with them. big picture seers, they are not!

[Thorgnor]

That Virilio quote is somewhat defeating in it's truth, Thorgnor.

I wonder if we'll ever get to the point where humans exist in harmony with nature. Or if we'll just continue on down the same line - fixing solutions of the preceding generations. It's hard wanting the harmony and settling on the latter. To think that we're doing good only to be proven incorrect with time and science.

Fuck.

I think the point is that the solution likely won't be technological, but that it may actually consist of deciding which technologies to accept and when to best use them. It seems that all the major trends in architectural theory point to something they rarely say openly, that to sit heavily on a foundation is to walk heavily on the Earth. Life passes through time and space, and if we continue to make attempts towards a technocentric Utopia that nostalgically clings to toxic histories and materials, that tries to hold us in place, we will fail at health and harmony.

Step faster, dig less, burn less, move more often, put ourselves in more peril personally.

“a taste for the light, the practical, the ephemeral, the swiftâ€

Instead of worrying about objects, about the autonomy or the self-referential aspects of architecture, we have to think in terms of mobilizing and adjusting limits, and ultimately in retrofitting institutions, allowing them to frame other types of scales and other kinds of social and economic diversity.

Ultimately we should take the idea of sustainability to task not because it is a bad idea; precisely the opposite, in fact. We should care for it because it needs constant reconceptualization. The threshold for its application should be absurdly high, almost impossibly so.

Some of these new techniques are undoubtedly positive developments insofar as they forestall or retard certain accumulative processes. Unfortunately architects have managed to convince themselves that this time will be different, because this time We Have Gone Green. But these devices, like any technology, are already generating associations that we cannot foresee. Later we will call these accidents and malfunctions, but we should know better by now.

{An ecologically sound lifestyle} involves imagining less comfortable and convenient methods of being in the world, and probably more uncertain and dangerous individual lives.

[Birdy]

My head is being filled with images of caves and tree-huts.

The future seems uncomfortably exciting.

[Thorgnor]

I think maybe tents and grass huts, caves and treeforts, depending on the seasons.

no joke.

[Birdy]

Are we already there?

Edited June 17, 2009 by Guest

[Thorgnor]

Tree House design review.

Edited June 17, 2009 by Guest

[Birdy]

Thanks for that link. I've now book-marked that site. Amazing stuff! I now want to live in a tree house.

I used to think underground housing could do wonders as well... aside from all that digging.

Cool blog

http://webecoist.com/ - this is linked from the web urbanist site and is pretty cool as well.

Edited June 17, 2009 by Guest

[Thorgnor]

Inhabitat Website - http://www.inhabitat.com/about/

Really interesting stuff on here.

[Thorgnor]

Not sure we need this though.

[Birdy]

Whoa.

Sorry for making you quote yourself Thorgnor, I should have looked in the first place.

Whoa.

Bloomberg's shutting down Broadway!!

Sometime early Sunday morning this Memorial Day weekend, a work crew from the New York City Department of Transportation will arrive in Times Square. Waiting for a pause in traffic, the team will close off Broadway at 47th Street, directing southbound cars east to Seventh Avenue. In the weeks to come, construction workers will refashion the next five blocks of the boulevard, turning one of the world’s most congested stretches of asphalt into a 58,000-foot pedestrian plaza. The same will happen a few blocks south, where another stretch of Broadway—from 33rd Street to 35th Street, at Herald Square—will be closed to cars and, by fall, dotted with café tables free for public use.

This simple but dramatic act will amount to bypass surgery on the heart of New York. It will become the most visible component yet of Mayor Bloomberg’s citywide attempt to make New York’s streets calmer, greener, and safer. And it will establish the front lines of a growing movement to tilt the balance of asphalt power away from the automobile and toward cyclists and pedestrians.

http://nymag.com/news/features/56794/ linked to from inhabitantdotcom.

Thanks for sharing! Makes me want to get rid of everything I own and see how much I can replace with only recycled products. Fun!

Edited June 17, 2009 by Guest

[bradm]

I saw something similar (i.e., downtown space converted to pedestrian uses) on CBS on Sunday morning: The High Line Park in NYC.

The High Line was built in the 1930s, as part of a massive public-private infrastructure project called the West Side Improvement. It lifted freight traffic 30 feet in the air, removing dangerous trains from the streets of Manhattan's largest industrial district. No trains have run on the High Line since 1980. Friends of the High Line, a community-based non-profit group, formed in 1999 when the historic structure was under threat of demolition. Friends of the High Line works in partnership with the City of New York to preserve and maintain the structure as an elevated public park.

The project gained the City's support in 2002. The High Line south of 30th Street was donated to the City by CSX Transportation Inc. in 2005. The design team of landscape architects James Corner Field Operations, with architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro, created the High Line's public landscape with guidance from a diverse community of High Line supporters. Construction on the park began in 2006. The first section, from Gansevoort Street to 20th Street, is projected to open in June 2009.

It looks pretty cool: an elevated pedestrian greenspace in the heart of downtown. What I like about the project is how it came about: a citizens' group got together and came up with a realizable proposal, so that rather than simply demand that something be done, they came to the table with a proposal for what could be done.

Aloha,

Brad

[Thorgnor]

What I like about the project is how it came about: a citizens' group got together and came up with a realizable proposal, so that rather than simply demand that something be done, they came to the table with a proposal for what could be done.

Aloha,

Brad

That's exactly the role that the architect should be taking in society. Instead of being seen as technicians, artists or "social cultivators" (Linda Groat's theory), they should play the role of mediator. Architects need to actively involve themselves in the communities they wish to build in/for and then insure that the space continues to change with the groups themselves.

If we really want single family dwellings architects should help us find ways to make them healthy arrangements, but they shouldn't stand in the way of doing things differently because of financial/city planning/materials, they should be visionaries that push our communication and colaboration forward.

In a way they need to help frame debates, literally. If you look at all of our architectural analogies and metaphors you actually find that the style of our buildings have so dramatically affected the way we see time and space that this re-think may be impossible if it only happens in the heads of the elites.

Modernist designers, for all their faults, were almost entirely influenced by anarchist, communist and socialist philosophies of social harmony, but their top-down appraoch has always meant that our buildings, as well as our language, has come to either seperate people by false merits of "timelessness" or to homogenize the masses through myths of "equity" and "equal opportunity" which are directly mediated by our urban spaces.

to defend the right to a nonprojected future as one of the truly inalienable rights of every person and nation; and to set the stage for conceptions of change to which the inventiveness of history and a ‘passion for the possible’ are admitted as vital actors

Not all urban problems favor physical solutions, and indeed, perhaps ‘solution’ is the wrong word in the first place. Within the perimeter of this project, there is an attempt to come to terms with different modes of the urban condition.

[SaggyBalls]

I get what you're saying T and I get what you're saying, brad...

T: Where you're saying the Architect could shine if they made their projects fill a hole in development (the role of project and community coordinator?), Brad's inference that people can make things happen rather than just comment about what isn't being done on the internet.

Brad: work on your punchlines and someday you'll have an HBO special.

[Birdy]

I think we could use a little of both.

[SaggyBalls]

You're not alone.

[Thorgnor]

http://www.yorku.ca/ylife/index.asp?Article=1707

[SaggyBalls]

Smash our cities?

[Thorgnor]

Do we think they'll last forever?

Should we even want them to?

[SaggyBalls]

Would it be easier to rebuild piece by piece as we need it or just build entirely new, ultra-modern communities?

[Thorgnor]

I'm not sure we should be building stationary buildings at all.

[SaggyBalls]

Airship cities?

Giant boats?

Underwater cities?

What are you proposing?

[SaggyBalls]

yurts?

[Thorgnor]

yurts?

why not?

they're practical, made of local materials, can be better designed for health, using modern technologies in tandem with much older and far better prooven designs than poison boxes it could be possible to better align ourselves with our surroundings living a more a passive existence.

Tents? These things are temporary, just as all life is, lightwieght and mobile, just as people are in the grand scheme of the planet.

They aren't very modern though

http://www.exclusivetents.com/

[SaggyBalls]

How will that work with the billions of people on the planet, especially in regards to the demand on services and infrastructure.

That's a nice place in the photo but how will that solve the problems that we face, aside from using more resources/materials in the building process??

The issue with 'poison boxes' as you've so put it is that there are healthy solutions for a more conventional home, but few people are aware or wealthy enough to demand their home be built to spec.

How do we have a more passive existence with the societal and physical constructs that we are faced with?

[Thorgnor]

Theo Janssen - Walking wind-powered sculptures/organisms

How do we have a more passive existence with the societal and physical constructs that we are faced with?

My point is that architecture often structures more than the shape of the house or what it is made up of, and that we need to question how we live and possibly design our communities differently. The entire idea of sedentary civilization, although obviously very dear to your heart if you're so offended by my provocations, needs to be put under a microscope and deconstructed, not in order to "honestly disply our materials" but to make those things part of a healthy life.

That's a nice place in the photo but how will that solve the problems that we face, aside from using more resources/materials in the building process??

no imagination? How exactly do smaller and less permanent buildings require more material?