The Indicator: The Latest Architecture and News

As Mr. Betsky asserts, “Robots, connected computers, miniaturization, and etherization are taking the work out of both the social and the physical sphere.” But isn’t this just a fantasy because this has not yet happened on a large enough scale to produce a true paradigm shift? Or, if the shift has happened, then where is everybody rushing off to on the Monday morning commute? And what are all those buildings jammed in-between the roads for? Most of them seem to be for work as opposed to play.  

We may all float in and out of working networks as we move around, untethered to carpeted cubicles, telecommuting, flex-timing, logging in at all hours, but we are still and will primarily be working in places designed by architects—often without access to sunlight, fresh air, or nature of any sort.

I remember February 27, 2013 because that was the day Aaron Betsky asked a good question on his Beyond Buildings blog at Architect Magazine. Not that he doesn’t ask good questions on other days…because he does…but this particular day presented architecture with the provocative title, “Architecture Beyond Work: Will Architecture and Work Disappear?”

First, we have to get something straight. This is not the VERY Large Array. This is the RATHER Large Array, the Very Large Array’s much smaller, distant—and inexpensive—cousin and the flagship piece for Art Center College of Design’s 2011 exhibition, MADE UP: Design’s Fictions (curated by Tim Durfee with Haelim Paek).

The other thing is that while the Very Large Array still exists out in its Dune-like remote setting, spread across a giant “Y” configuration in the New Mexico desert, the Rather Large Array (RLA) has all but vaporized back into the production streams from whence its PVC tubing and hardware store components came from.

A few weeks ago there was a flurry of debate about one of Zaha Hadid’s designs being copied, or at least copied in terms of its outer form. Very soon after this I discovered an interesting article in the most recent issue of MIT’s Leonardo: Journal of the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology.The article, "Hybrid Reassemblage: An Exploration of Craft, Digital Fabrication and Artifact Uniqueness” by Amit Zoran and Leah Buechley, raises some interesting points about the nature of originality, the subjective experience of making original things, and the potential for digital technology to impute this subjectivity to new and repeatable objects. In essence, the authors are discussing the position of craft, the hand-made, the personal, subjective act of making something that is singular and based on a personal process, the negotiation of decisions and risks with tools, materials, and design intentions.

In 1992, the artist, Christo, with his now late-wife and collaborator, Jeanne-Claude, had a vision to suspend miles of silvery translucent fabric over the Arkansas River in Colorado. Would you expect anything less? 

Christo usually works at such massive geographic scales—land interventions that can be discerned by satellites passing overhead. Here his ambition stretches for 42 miles (67.6 km) of scenic river with no less than a total of 5.9 miles (9.5 km) of fabric suspended over the eight different sections of the river. 

From the recent information overload concerning Zaha Hadid’s Wangjing Soho being pirated in China, one might think that copying was a new phenomenon in architecture. Is this really that shocking or even worth mentioning? 

It must be because, for the next few hundred words or so, I’m going to be mentioning it quite a bit. Copying can be a complicated issue. In Western culture, in particular, the status of the copy is fraught with contradictions. It is a problem that has existed since long before Walter Benjamin wrote about it in “The Work of Art in the Age of the Mechanical Reproduction”. 

I remember the smog in Beijing rendering the most beautiful skies. There was an innocence to the air pollution back then, before the engines of economic development really got going. 

It was just a pretty sunset, or a delicate brown haze that romantically softened the edges of things—while wrecking your lungs, of course. But, like the sand storms, pollution gave the city a different, rarified quality. 

Junichiro Tanizaki’s (1886-1965) book In Praise of Shadows has been haunting me lately. There it sits on my shelf, as it has for years, ever since it was part of a reading list for an art history course I once took as an undergrad. 

It’s a thin volume. Ever so slight, it easily gets lost amongst more substantial books. But every time I’ve gone through my library and thought I don’t need it anymore, I hesitate and then put it back on the shelf. 

In his 2008 book, The Architecture of Happiness, Alain de Botton argues that architecture has an extraordinary power when it comes to influencing who we are. In giving shape to our living environments, it plugs into our emotional existence. I would take it a step further and say that as we reside in architecture we so reside within ourselves, emplacing ourselves in both physical and psychological worlds.

But this is by no means a new argument. As de Botton explains in his most recent collection of essays, Religion for Atheists, the Catholics and Protestants have been elaborating on this theme for centuries. The world around us has a profound impact on how we think, feel, and perceive. Without this underlying logic there could be no architecture.

While doing a search for architects doing politically-engaged work, or work that encompasses a political or ethical agenda, I stumbled upon Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility. The group, as it turns out, has been around for thirty years. Despite their long history I got the sense that many people in architecture, as well as in mainstream culture, don’t know anything about them.

Last week I asked how architecture can ramp up its efforts to do all it can to help limit climate change. Sandy is a turning point. It will take action on the part of the profession and its members to make this turning point meaningful. Turning points are easily forgotten after the panels have been convened and the articles written. The vicarious thrill of crisis abates and everyone returns to business as usual, feeling better for having contributed to the discussion. If we listen to the scientists, we must not lose that sense of crisis and we must do more.

“…clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”

Carl Sagan, The Demon Haunted World

Hurricane Sandy painfully clarified the deadly implications of climate change. In fact, the superstorm was so forceful as a reminder of just what climate change means in real terms that it played a decisive role in the presidential election. 

Here in the US, the issue defines political divides. A recent Pew Research Center survey shows 85% of Democrats believe climate change is a scientific fact, while only 48% of Republicans believe so. Another poll shows 68% of Americans believing climate change is a serious problem and 38% believing it is a very serious problem.

The impact of Sandy may have played a role in bumping these numbers up but there is still no slam dunk on the issue when roughly 30% of the population still believes climate change is not real. For those of you outside the US this is your cue to roll your eyes and say, Stupid Americans. 

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One October morning in 2003, Lebbeus Woods shattered the sleepy air in Los Angeles with a swift and decisive re-deployment of his famed Foundation Cartier installation, The Fall. 1,400 steel rods were drilled into the polished concrete floors running SCI-Arc’s quarter mile. In a single night of cloaked activity, Woods and a gang of student volunteers made Maya, Rhino and all computer pyrotechnics, then all the rage, seem irrelevant with a forest of bent steel rods that seemed to react to the forces of the building…and seemingly appeared out of nowhere.

Not all is well with the global economy. Eurozone is in crisis, and East Asian market is stalling, and North America (read: the US) is see-sawing until after the election. Of course, this is not news to people in the architecture profession, where many firms are just beginning to recover from the last four years of belt-tightening lay-offs and restructuring.

Here in the United States the unemployment rate, though varying state-to-state, is still painfully high nationally at 7.8%. In California it was 10.6% back in August. Compressing further down to Los Angeles where I am, it’s 10%. According to a report from Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce the unemployment rate for recent architecture graduates was 13.9%, the highest among other fields.

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