Applications are now open for the Summer Workshop of the new MFA Products of Design program. Held at the beautiful Domaine de Boisbuchet in Southwestern France, this year's workshop will run for 10 days, inviting participants to immerse themselves in the evolving field of product design.
The Products of Design Summer Program in France offers hands-on, collaborative experience and instruction in rapid sketching, materials investigation, prototyping, iteration, narrative creation and environmental stewardship. In addition to work completed during the days, participants will enjoy opportunities to sight see, socialize with designers from around the world, and attend lectures in the evenings.
The program invites applicants from various backgrounds: design professionals, students (in at least senior standing at an art & design college), or graduate students in any field. Faculty will be MFA Products of Design chair Allan Chochinov and faculty Emilie Baltz.
Products of Design Summer Program in France
June 17-27, 2012
Domaine de Boisbuchet, Southwestern France
Tuition: $2,500 (includes room & board)
Applications due: February 10, 2012
While the last entry saw me complaining about an example of shoddy Chinese manufacturing, now we'll look at an example of Chinese manufacturing might. In this six-minute video currently making the blog rounds, we see an astonishing feat of design, engineering and execution: The 30-story T30 Hotel constructed in Hunan Province, taking just 15 days to erect.
When I first stumbled upon these poorly scanned data sheets of so-called gravity base stations, I thought they were actual “stations,” that is, actual gravity sensing devices that are constantly taking measurements of local geodetic conditions. Compact machines like those humidity monitors you see in museums and galleries that are sometimes mistaken for art installations.
To protect them from the environment and public tampering, I imagined each device encased in a metal canister, permanently embedded in concrete or stone and topped with a benchmark disk, itself stamped with an identification number and a warning of a fine or imprisonment to anyone who disturbs them.
I also imagined them forming a pointillist sensor network, just another sedimentary layer of a much more totalizing enviro-veillance network superimposed on the surface of the earth. Deployed in the most unassuming corners of the built environment, they pique little interest outside the insular worlds of geologists and geocachers.
But I was giddy with the possibility that they might be like buoy stations set adrift by NOAA not in the open ocean but on “solid” ground. Instead of ocean waves, they surf on invisible gravitational swells and troughs. And instead of the hyperactivities of the weather, they monitor something beyond our lived experience and even beyond their operational lives: gravitational fluxes caused by the million- or billion-year-long gyrations of tectonic storms.
The Maurizio Cattelan exhibition ALL ended its run at the Guggenheim last weekend and I wanted to share some quick thoughts about the show, especially in light of what seems to have been a mostly negativereception from some of our more prominent art critics. But more than that, I’m also hoping that by posting what is little more than a few ill-informed observations jotted down in a notebook about an artist whose work I had never seen before stepping into Frank Lloyd Wright’s atrium late last year, I’ll instigate a bit of a sea change for Life Without Buildings. Basically, I want it to be more fun. After years of hard work and school, writing architectural history has actually become an honest-to-god, bill-paying job and now more than ever I need a place to experiment with different forms of criticism and documentation, to work out new projects, to make mistakes, and to write about things that are little less serious. This will be that place. So that’s happening.
But back to the Cattelan show. I loved it.
I kept thinking to myself, ‘this is the ultimate Postmodern exhibition.’ Naive? Probably. An exaggeration? Definitely. But I’ve had Postmodernism on the mind a lot lately, due in no small part to both the recent Reconsidering Postmodernism exhibition and the excellent Radical Postmodernism issue of AD edited by FAT and Charles Jencks. All embodies those peculiar qualities that we have come to know and love and associate with Postmodernism. It was an autobiographic, end-of-career retrospective that was not only incredibly contextual (more on that in a second) but also de-familiarized the artists’s oeuvre –for those familiar with it, I suppose– by re-presenting and juxtaposing formerly independent, site-specific works. On paper, it looks like a terrible idea, and if the critics were to be believed, maybe it was. But it was also a hell of a lot of fun and something that anyone who walked in could enjoy.
For me, All read like an exploded novel whose pages kept rearranging themselves, revealing and concealing and re-revealing plot threads until some semblance of a narrative –or narratives– seemed to emerge as I slowly spiraled down the ramp of the Guggenheim. Cattelan’s world proved to be one where where scale is mutable and hearts are on felt sleeves and the uninitiated viewer is left to make sense of the artist’s entire life. As Robert Rauschenberg famously erased a drawing by de Kooning, Cattelan seems to tackle similar issues by hanging (twice!) what appeared to be effigies and invocations of Joseph Beuys. Perhaps that’s not entirely fair because everything was hanging – suspended from the ceiling of the Guggenheim, cluttering the museum’s atrium while the walls remained bare. By no means was this the first show to build in the atrium space, but it was surely one of the best I’ve seen (excluding those that involved climactic cinematic shootouts). It was also the first exhibition I’ve seen with an accompanying iPad app, though I’m sure that will soon become de rigueur if it’s not already.
It was a stunning use of the space. The museum turned inward and I caught myself looking at the other visitors as much as at the work and falling in love no fewer than six times and eavesdropping on conversations that went something like this: “that’s so weird! you’re looking at the same thing but it looks different!” EXACTLY. That simple comment prompted me to tweet the following:
Dear Concept Of Phenomenology In Architecture As Developed By The Norwegian Theorist Christian Norberg-Schulz,
I'm as open-minded as the next person, but my neighbors regularly wander around their apartment in the nude and don't close the curtains. I guess they are "liberated," but I'm bothered by their, in my opinion, disrespectful disregard for basic boundaries (our backyard faces directly into their family-room picture window) and so is my wife. How do I get them to show some simple modesty without coming off like an old-fashioned stick in the mud? —Peeved in Pensacola
Dear Peeved,
In examining the trinity of "places, paths, and domains," remember that whereas a place denotes the distinguishing of "inside and outside," a pathway between places can symbolize the full extent of man's existence as he moves from the known to the unknown through a succession of spaces. The rhetoric of residing is therefore distinguished from the rhetoric of movement through the phenomenological world. The distinction unfortunately continues to elude many modern theorists, who have unfortunately followed the dissolution of the once-vibrant early potentialities of so-called postmodern thinking into superficial playfulness.
Read more Ask The Concept Of Phenomenology In Architecture As Developed By The Norwegian Theorist Christian Norberg-Schulzat The Onion.
Once the cities established their beachheads, the dredge boaters and their mud-suckers entered the soft, defenseless womb-belly of the Great Dismal Swamp.
There was an Empire to be made.
Some began on the margins, gnawing away at the neither solid nor liquid surface, leaving an alien grid of ditches and canals, by which the wetlands were sucked dry. Others were dropped in the middle of the marshy wilderness, carrying planks of timber, bushels of coal, and the iron marvels of nascent modernity, all assembled together at the gooey center before cutting their escape routes.
At the vanguard of each cadre was the giant, steel hardened, biting snout of the sludge-extractor, which swiveled left and right to regurgitate its cargo of excavated slime. It was both the mouth and the anus of the monstrous beast. At the back were rooms where the dredge boaters ate, slept and passed the time away. Indeed, these dredge boats were their homes for the weeks and months and sometimes years that it took to exsanguinate the wetlands. They were terrestrial-sailors plying the waves of an inland prairie-sea.
Once in a while, the dredge boaters passed through a pioneer township, a sort of Land Grant port of call. Like their seaborne counterparts, these landlocked mariners relieved themselves on booze, cabaret, gambling and prostitutes. One or two even left with a partner. Some of the newcomers became lived-in whores for the crews, while others actually married into the dredging life, in which case the dredge boat was turned into a floating cathedral for the wedding.
The new couple was then given their own dredge boat, and there they raised a family, a new crew of dredge boaters. They birthed swamp babies on dead-straight lines of stagnant waters, sent them to floating schools staffed with traveling minstrel-teachers from the East, entertained them with stories of the Bog Monster, apprenticed them on the art of marsh-bloodletting, and indoctrinated them on empire-building.
And there, on that same dredge boat, that's where they also died, had their quivering as steam whistled lamentations in the front, before being scooped up by the bucket-ladder and buried on some stretch of dredged tumulus-levee, at peace with the knowledge that they did their heroic part in preparing the landscape for the heroic farmers, the heroic ranchers, the heroic rail builders, and the heroic megalopolis.
Breaking Out and Breaking In: A Distributed Film Fest of Prison Breaks and Bank Heists kicks off Friday, January 27, sponsored by BLDGBLOG, Filmmaker Magazine, and Studio-X NYC. [Image: Breaking Out and Breaking In poster by Atley Kasky and Keith Scharwath; view larger!].
Breaking Out and Breaking In is an exploration of the use and misuse of space in prison escapes and bank heists, where architecture is the obstacle between you and what you're looking for.
Watch the films at home—or anywhere you may be—and then come back to discuss the films here on BLDGBLOG. It's a "distributed" film fest; there is no central venue, just a curated list of films and a list of days on which to watch them. There's no set time, no geographic exclusion, and no limit to the food breaks or repeated scenes you might require. And it all leads up to a public discussion at Studio-X NYC on Tuesday, April 24.
The overall idea is to discuss breaking out and breaking in as spatial scenarios that work as mirror images of one another, each process with its own tools, techniques, and unique forms of unexpected architectural expertise.
How do prisoners and burglars reinterpret the built environments around them? Where does this more aggressive understanding of space differ from the constructive insights of an architect—and how can a building be strategically unbuilt so as to get at what lies on the other side? What particular kinds of spatial and temporal knowledge—where to tunnel, when to go—do these other users of buildings need to develop?
If burglary and prison breaks each require a kind of counter-manual of the city, then what might such a guide include—from precise time schedules and blindspots to the limits of surveillance—what points of weakness and unexpected parallels should it map, and what typologies of incisions or perforations would it posit to allow new routes through closed spaces?
The escape and the break-in here are both about illicit reinterpretations of space, sometimes violent, sometimes simply used against the grain, operating a building, we might say, in every way the architect—and the guards who police his or her creation—regrettably overlooked.
Conversely, how is space regulated and maintained from the standpoint of the police and the prison guard, or from the point of view of the homeowner who seeks to hide his or her private riches? What obstacles, blockades, misdirections, decoys, safe rooms, and security systems must be implemented to ensure that a given space is properly accessed? [Image: Breaking Out and Breaking In poster by Atley Kasky and Keith Scharwath].
These are all recurring themes here on BLDGBLOG, where, over the years, we've discussed how to plan the perfect heist and how to perforate a skyscraper, as well as how to worm your way through the interlinked foundations of London; and perhaps we might say that 19th-century architect George Leonidas Leslie, who used his spatial skills to become "the head of the most successful gang of bankrobbers known," is, in a sense, our festival's mascot or patron saint.
Over the next four months, we will be discussing these questions and many more—from how certain sequences in these films were shot to the stage sets constructed to produce them—culminating in a public event at Studio-X NYC in April.
Of course, not all of these films are escapes from prisons as such or heists specifically aimed at banks; instead, we'll explore what it means to break out from an overly managed suburban life in The Truman Show and how an elaborate home invasion goes wrong in Panic Room; we'll watch the perfectly timed dream-physics kicks and corporate secrets of Inception as well as a team of German terrorists robbing the vaults of the Nakatomi Building of its negotiated bearer bonds. And our list is by no means exhaustive, with some films chosen less for their cinematic quality or the depth of their characterization than for their discussability or the originality of their spatial propositions.
So, in order of viewing, this distributed film fest of prison breaks and bank heists includes:
—Breaking Out—
Friday, January 27, 2012 Grand Illusion (dir. Jean Renoir, 1937)
Monday, January 30, 2012 A Man Escaped (dir. Robert Bresson, 1956)
Friday, February 3, 2012 The Great Escape (dir. John Sturges, 1963)
Monday, February 6, 2012 Cool Hand Luke (dir. Stuart Rosenberg, 1967)
Monday, February 13, 2012 Papillon (dir. Franklin J. Schaffner, 1973)
Friday, February 17, 2012 Escape from Alcatraz (dir. Don Siegel, 1979)
Monday, February 20, 2012 Escape from New York (dir. John Carpenter, 1981)
Friday, February 24, 2012 Cube (dir. Vincenzo Natali, 1997)
Monday, February 27, 2012 The Truman Show (dir. Peter Weir, 1998)
Friday, March 2, 2012 The Escapist (dir. Rupert Wyatt, 2008)
—Breaking In—
Monday, March 19, 2012 Rififi (dir. Jules Dassin, 1955)
Friday, March 23, 2012 The Day They Robbed the Bank of England (dir. John Guillermin, 1960)
Monday, March 26, 2012 The Italian Job (dir. Peter Collinson, 1969) vs. The Italian Job (dir. F. Gary Gray, 2003)
Friday, March 30, 2012 Dog Day Afternoon (dir. Sidney Lumet, 1975) vs. The Third Memory (dir. Pierre Huyghe, 1999)
Monday, April 2, 2012 Die Hard (dir. John McTiernan, 1988)
Friday, April 6, 2012 Following (dir. Christopher Nolan, 1998)
Monday, April 9, 2012 Panic Room (dir. David Fincher, 2002)
Friday, April 13, 2012 Inside Man (dir. Spike Lee, 2006)
Monday, April 16, 2012 The Bank Job (dir. Roger Donaldson, 2008)
Friday, April 20, 2012 Inception (dir. Christopher Nolan, 2010)
Again, you can watch the films wherever you might be, from the Lower East Side to Rotterdam, from Toronto and Mumbai to Beijing, and then join the relevant comment threads here on BLDGBLOG (posted, I hope, within a day or two of the screening date). Further, look out for some original analyses on Filmmaker Magazine as the festival unfolds.
Finally, stop by Studio-X NYC on the evening of Tuesday, April 24, for a free public discussion featuring a stellar group of panelists soon to be announced.
I hope many of you will participate in this experiment in film curation!
(New Yorkers, note that Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped happens to be screening this week at Film Forum, so it might be a good idea to catch it before it leaves the theater).
With a lot less exposure than the Central Library competition but with much potential the city of Espoo has launched a competition for a masterplan of Finnoo-Kaitaa for 20,000 people. There has just previously been a masterplan report made (download pdf here ) by WSP Finland who won the Helsinki 2050 competition a few years back. This site has previous as it was featured in Europan 09 with a winning entry that caught my eye at the time. It would be centred between the harbour and as yet unconfirmed station on the west leg of the metro. The City of Espoo seems to be saying all the right things like trying to make this development carbon neutral by 2030. Could we see a properly urban plan enacted somewhere in Espoo soon? Go here for competition details.
SOPA & PIPA are the sort of Bullshit censorship models we can do without on the internet. That’s why I went dark on the 18th January and thankfully they were defeated this time. Have a read of some background to the wellthoughtout arguments as why we need to oppose these types of measures now and most likely in the future too is easy to find.
I only recently found out about Google's reverse image search functionality. Since then I've been busy feeding its search engine some of the more mysterious images that have been littering my archives for years, hoping finally to figure out what they are actually pictures of, and why I even found them interesting enough to keep in the first place.
One of those images is the one you see above. According to a translation of this article published by the Russian magazine Science and Life in 2000, it shows one of the “monuments of science and technology” that “brought [the Soviet Union] to the forefront of the analog computer” — Vladimir Lukyanov's marvelous water computer.
Built in 1936, this machine was “the world's first computer for solving [partial] differential equations,” which “for half a century has been the only means of calculations of a wide range of problems in mathematical physics.” Absolutely its most amazing aspect is that solving such complex mathematical equations meant playing around with a series of interconnected, water-filled glass tubes. You “calculated” with plumbing.
To better explain how it works, here is a description by Steven Strogatz of what I'm assuming is a comparative device. Built in 1949, nearly a decade and a half after Lukyonov's, it's called the Phillips machine, after its inventor, Bill Phillips.
In the front right corner, in a structure that resembles a large cupboard with a transparent front, stands a Rube Goldberg collection of tubes, tanks, valves, pumps and sluices. You could think of it as a hydraulic computer. Water flows through a series of clear pipes, mimicking the way that money flows through the economy. It lets you see (literally) what would happen if you lower tax rates or increase the money supply or whatever; just open a valve here or pull a lever there and the machine sloshes away, showing in real time how the water levels rise and fall in various tanks representing the growth in personal savings, tax revenue, and so on.
“It’s a network of dynamic feedback loops,” Strogatz further writes. “In this sense the Phillips machine foreshadowed one of the most central challenges in science today: the quest to decipher and control the complex, interconnected systems that pervade our lives.”
To go back to Lukyanov, his water computer was built specifically to solve the problem of cracking in concrete, a “scourge” that slowed the construction of railroads by his employer. Doing so meant developing manufacturing regimes for concrete blocks that take into account the complex relationships between material properties, the curing process and environmental conditions. Existing “calculation methods were not able to give fast and accurate solutions.” Lukyanov's invention could.
Appropriating and altering Strogatz's text, we get:
Filling up not just a corner but the entire room, inside not one but several structures that resemble large cupboards with a transparent front, is a Rube Goldberg collection of tubes, tanks, valves, pumps and sluices. You could think of it as a hydraulic computer. Water flows through a series of clear pipes, mimicking the production line of concrete blocks. It lets you see (literally) what would happen if you change the type of cement used or increase the load capacity of the concrete or whatever; just open a valve here or pull a lever there and the machine sloshes away, showing in real time how the water levels rise and fall in various tanks representing material properties, curing time, temperature, and so on.
Changes to the water level in the “measuring tube” would be marked on a graph paper — “a kind of curve,” and “these marks build schedule, which was the solution of the problem.”
Because of the simplicity of their design and programming, subsequent models were “successfully used” in other fields such as geology, thermal physics, metallurgy and rocket engineering. The first and second generations of digital electronic computers could not match their computing abilities. In the mid-1970s, they were still being used in “115 manufacturing, research and educational institutions located in 40 cities” across the Soviet Union. “Only in the early 80s” were digital computers cheap, configurable and powerful enough to match the “possibility of [the] hydraulic integrator.”
Having briefly traced the history of water computers forward from Lukyanov to the rest of the 20th century, I can't help but thread the timeline backward to include some of the most elaborate hydraulic engineering schemes used in sprawling aristocratic gardens of early modern Europe, such as the always indispensable Versailles, the hydro-acoustically drenched Tivoli, the masterworks of Salomon and Isaac de Caus, and one of my top favorite gardens, Pratolino.
Garden historians usually characterize the technical control of water in stately gardens as part of a system of social control. As an alternative, or at least to offer another layer of meaning, this augmented timeline presents a crypto-historical narrative of gardens as gigantic water computers.
All those water-screws, force pumps, water-lifting wheels, vents, wells and settling tanks, all those reservoirs, canals, aqueducts and pipes buried under mountains and rivers, and all those jets spurting out of vases and statuaries, creating water rainbows and sonic merriment, and all those fountains, water parterres, giochi d'acqua, automatas and damp grottos: those are the gurgling circuits, the programmable interfaces, the data storage devices and the visualization screens of landscape proto-supercomputers.
Embedded in the earth is a Rube Goldberg collection of tubes, tanks, valves, pumps and sluices. You could think of it as a hydraulic computer. Water flows through a series of clear pipes, mimicking the way that money flows through the empire. It lets you see (literally) what would happen if you lower the price of bread or increase the construction of palaces or whatever; just open a valve here or pull a lever there and the machine in the garden sloshes away, showing in real time how the water levels rise and fall in various tanks representing colonial trade supplies, food riots, and so on.
Attached to the measuring tube is a series of fountains that gurgles the solution to the equation.
Gardeners and their patrons would then walk around marking the fluctuating levels of these fountains on graphic paper. From fountain to fountain, they follow a set of programmed perambulations, gathering data at relevant nodal points, along the way not just picking up the solutions to the problem being computed but also gaining a greater understanding of the complexities of the natural and social worlds.
With these gardens as crypto-water-computers, they were taking measurements of the universe.
Last weekend I attended Reconsidering Postmodernism, a two-day conference in New York City organized by the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art. The event was convened in an “attempt to illuminate postmodernism’s overall cultural impact.” Whether or not it achieved that goal is debatable – but unfortunately, it wasn’t often debated, as you’ll see below. I’ll be writing a couple articles on the event later, so what follows is really just an informal summary via tweets, retweets, and a little additional commentary. This is also a bit of an experiment, as I’m using storify for the first time to put everything together.
The ArchHive
"Critical archive of architecture." (Added to sidebar under Architectural Links » Online Journals.)
Architect in Person
"Experiencing the field of architecture from the inside looking out." (Added to sidebar under Blogs » Architecture.)
53 Questions
"Between February and August of this year, Luca Farinelli met with some 20 architects, critics, and historians and presented them with an identical sequence of questions, recording each meeting on video." (via Arch Daily)
Spontaneous Interventions
"Spontaneous Interventions: design actions for the common good is the theme of the U.S. Pavilion at the 13th International Venice Architecture Biennale (Fall 2012)." Deadline to submit a project for consideration is February 6th.
[Image: The expansion of Manhattan island, via Urban Omnibus].
For those of you in New York, consider stopping by Studio-X NYC for a short visual history of geotubes, silt fences, sensate geotextiles, engineered earthforms, and other monuments of the dredge cycle as Rob Holmes and Stephen Becker of Mammoth join Tim Maly of Quiet Babylon to present the work of the Dredge Research Collective (with Brett Milligan of Free Association Design, who, sadly, is unable to attend).
In the words of the event organizers:
The Dredge Cycle is landscape architecture at a monumental scale, carving the coastlines and waterways of continents according to a mixture of industrial need and unintended consequences. Thus far, dredge has remained the domain of logistics, industry, and engineering, a soft successor to the elevated freeway interchanges and massive dams that captured the infrastructural imagination of the previous century.
For the past year, the Dredge Research Collective have been exploring the choreography of these interconnected sedimentary landscapes, visiting dredged material confinement areas, from Poplar Island in the Chesapeake Bay to Hayden Island in the Columbia River, talking with dredge experts, such as the transnational materials conglomerate TenCate, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the Bureau of Land Management, and publishing and lecturing widely on dredge.
The evening’s conversation, which is free and open to the public and will be followed by a lively Q&A, will also serve as a prelude to a limited-ticket Festival of Dredge tour in the summer of 2012, for which interview attendees will be given reservation priority.
Things kick off at 6:30pm on Tuesday, January 24, at 180 Varick Street, Suite 1610; here's a map. Hope to see you there!
Here are a couple photos of Unipark Nonntal (University of Salzburg) in Salzburg, Austria by Storch Ehlers Partner, 2011. Photos are by M. Correia Campos.
To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just:
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Updated on January 27, 2012 10:00 PM UTC. Entries are normalised to UTC time.
issue of AD edited by 
[Image: Breaking Out and Breaking In poster by 
[Image: Breaking Out and Breaking In poster by 
[Image: The expansion of Manhattan island, via 
