Found this photo today.

I was really really moved by it.  It just struck me as very powerful and wonderful, that the space where he is sitting doesn’t exist anymore.  Just that he decided to sit there, holding a piece of rebar as some kind of offering, and meditate in the center of his pre-solid volume…  Maybe it’s just me but I felt this great sense of spirituality in the fact that he is somehow consecrating the birth of that slab, really sensing the strength and openness of the rebar as it enjoys it’s last moments of air.  

And for him, later on, to know that he has been inside the place where the concrete now fills… a solid which is never again inhabitable. It’s something very human to idealize a void like that, as a way to nirvana. I don’t know, I just got chills thinking about it. 

Image via strange eyes.

My friend Jason from Cal Poly first introduced me to the Situationists. His architectural investigations are deeply cinematic and bring a complex dimensional montage to the constructed environment. Like his building design, his collages and prints are compositions injected with suspended, fragmented events, all superimposed as surreal escapes from convention.

So as I came across a blog post by Lebbeus Woods on the work of Situationist founder Constant Nieuwenhuys, I knew exactly why I remembered the architectural language.

Woods article outlines the roots of the Situationist International, tracing the motives of Constant and his peers. With ideas rooted in Marxism and the 20th century European artistic avant-garde, Constant (along with Guy Debord, Asger Jorn, and others) advocated experiences of life being alternative to those admitted by the capitalist order, pursuing a superior passional quality. For this purpose they suggested and experimented with the construction of situations, namely the setting up of environments favorable for the fulfillment of primitive human desires. Using methods drawn from the arts, they developed a series of experimental fields of study for the construction of such situations.

Constant Nieuwenhuys abandoned painting in 1953 to concentrate on the question of “construction”. It was to be a lifelong project based on a vision of a future society freed by a labyrinth of architectural and social spontaneity. New Babylon, as the project would be called, is “a situationist city intended as a polemical provocation.”

Lebbeus Woods brilliantly elaborates on the story of the Situationists and Constant’s work in his article, but I especially like this passage:

New Babylon was inspired by and contributed to the work of the Situationists, a group of intellectuals, theorists and writers, as well as artists who were anything but Modernists in the classic capitalist mold. …

Constant joined the Situationists early on and became their architect, much the same as Antonio Sant’Elia had done with the Futurists, half a century before. The spaces of New Babylon were intended to be spaces of disorientation and of reorientation, from rational, functionalist society to one that is liberated and self-inventing. It was meant to replace capitalist exploitation of human labor and emotion with anarchist celebration of them. Its architecture was to provide a complex armature on which could be woven endlessly new, unpredictably personal urban experiences, determined by ever-changing individual desires. In the end, however, the architecture of New Babylon seemed to overwhelm such playful, radical spontaneity by its sheer weight and monumental scale.

Heavy and sprawling as the vision may be, the work is beautiful. For me it definitely achieves the aspirations of layered and interconnected spectacle, and the creation of radical, mobile, and changeable architectural intervention in its surreal landscape.

What does New Babylon have to offer to contemporary architecture and landscape theory? A lot, I think…

Among the ideas generated by Constant, Debord, and others in the SI, the ones that resonate most with me are the concepts of psychogeography and the act of dérive (“drift”).

Debord defines psychogeography as “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals”. In other words, a playful and inventive strategy for exploring cities, as a direct consequence of the arrangement of urban stimulus. It takes pedestrians off their predictable paths and jolts them into a new awareness of the urban landscape. (a recent psychogeographic meet in New York City saw the practice of generative psychogeography, where participants followed algorithmic walking directions — “first right, second left, first left, repeat.” the results were neither goal-oriented nor random, structured but always surprising.)

By definition, psychogeography combines subjective and objective knowledge and studies. Debord struggled to articulate this theoretical paradox, and produced “Theory of the Dérive” in 1958, a document which basically acts as an instruction manual for the psychogeographic procedure, executed through the act of dérive.

“Drifting” through the built landscape, as a series of scenographic events, I think young architects today have a lot to learn from Constant and Debord, especially since we are so accustomed to the type of fluid sensory pace offered by the internet. Spontaneous interaction with the city is often the most rewarding experience I have on the street, between the vestiges of older architectural icons and institutions of “style”.

And though the internet has the tendency to degrade real sensory experience, it’s that same instantaneous interaction that can be applied to the city, through strategic — or random — arrangement of architectural events. Instead of the disconnected drift you see with the computer and it’s blogs, the urban condition offers a drift more associated with the lifestyle of the flâneur. It’s a more immersive stroll of sentience and progressive cinematic experience.

Maybe it’s a bit rediculous to imagine the earth blanketed with these deep urban webs, suspended on pillars above freeways and seas… but the ideas generated by Constant are really valuable I think, in terms of reimagining the typologies of an interconnected city. It’s not that far-fetched to consider different scales of architectural engagement… using larger, more malleable architectural frameworks to provide enriched social games at an individual level.

These images of New Bablyon are from Lebbeus Woods.

Order Is by Louis I. Kahn, 1960.

Found this in my papers, thought I would share.

Michael Pollan’s New York diet.

looking forward to checking out his new book, Food Rules.

(via Totes)

Dream Log #1.

I’m going to start recording some of my most vivid dreams here, hope you don’t mind.
After all, what is more “ephemeral” than a dream?

Frank Chimero is a very smart designer, and he came up with 10 Principles That Might Make Your Work Better or May Make It Worse.

very insightful. very useful.

a lot of times i can get caught up in the same old routines, and feel stagnated by my lack of progress. also, i find myself questioning more and more this adoration and curation of well designed stuff - what Chimero calls “curation culture”, and i wonder why i’m not just creating more of it myself. so his words are a good motivator to renew and move forward with a real, flawed, honest, but active process.

this list might keep me on the right track for now… hopefully you find it helpful as well. oh, and consider this your present… merry christmas!

i’ve seen the work of BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group) before, and always thought it was either way ahead of my grasp of architecture or just way too out there - though i was intrigued, and over time some of the projects began to grow on me. maybe it was my initial focus on what he calls in this video “the architectural object” that made me hesitate on some of BIG’s work. i remember thinking something along the lines of “hey, look at that, they made a donut building… heh…” and on to “hmmm…” and finally, “huh?”

but now, looking back with an understanding of the design processes of generative iteration and cross-mutated building typologies, i have a new view on the work and the minds behind it. somewhere along the line i had an epiphany that it isn’t all about the form - that they aren’t creating those shapes because they think they look cool, but instead because of a considered set of constraints and re-appropriated diagrams of life processes.

what makes me happy when i see this video is the optimism that just pours out of Bjarke, and the rejection of the revolution. not that revolution is necessarily a terrible thing, but it is refreshing to see a successful model of design which acknowledges the diagrams of past AND future, not just one or the other.

the idea that you could reprogram a parking garage as a ascending base for a field of penthouses is a pretty new concept for housing, yet doesn’t negatively distance itself from the paradigms of the past, either. as he says, it’s more about the evolution of the old ideas over time, through trial, success, and failure. reusing things that we’ve already made sparks that “alchemy” between existing ideas, because we can look back on something and realize its fundamental value. in tandem with another idea, it creates the hybridized design which may appear very new, but is just an assemblage of existing references and core ideals about the project.

the whole “yes we can” message is a bit cliche at this point, but i think being optimistic like that really matters in this kind of architecture. the open-mindedness lends itself to ideas from any and every source, especially ones that don’t seem possible at first. i guess i just admire the ability of Bjarke et al to reject the norm with the hope that it may result in something unknown and … ! … maybe even better.

now, having not visited BIG projects, or seen any detailed images, i can’t say if the realization of the projects matches the lofty ideas. i would like to believe that his stuff is detailed beautifully, but with so much emphasis on the scheme, a lot of projects at this scale lose the level of craft. so i’m wondering if there is any architect out there who is balancing the line between the big-picture oriented OMAs, BIGs, and REXs of the world with the more materially conscious Tom Kundigs, David Adjayes, Peter Zumthors, and Glenn Murcutts of Detail mag fame? if so, sign me up.

Bjarke Ingels’ book is Yes Is More, and the studio’s work can be found at the optimistically named big.dk.

if you are at all interested in the reason behind your fascination with that old run-down building near your house,

the one that looks overgrown and reclaimed by the land,

where you’ve always wanted to explore and imagined your house or studio inserted cleverly inside,

but never did because it’s been locked for as long as you can remember,

and it hurt your feelings somehow when they put up that picture of a new high rise mixed-use building on the edge of the property,

even though you know the old thing has seen better days,

and you want to just keep looking at it for as long as you can before they tear it down,

because there’s just something about it’s construction and proportion that they don’t make anymore these days…

if that’s you, then you should read this article, The Romance Of Abandoment: Industrial Parks by Hugh Hardy.

christina told me about terragrams, a podcast series disseminating discussions about the landscape:

“as our societal conscience and appreciation of the landscape heightens, terragrams provides a wide portal into landscape architecture and the lives and thoughts of the professionals who shape it. the project aims at capturing, distributing and archiving these voices. it is an easily accessible, open audio digital archive aimed at collecting first-hand, face-to-face conversations between and about people in and around the field.”

i’ve only listened to one of them (number 5 - James Corner) but i can already tell they are all going to be just as good.

really inspiring stuff, so give a listen if you have some down time.