life without buildings on fire

life without buildings is on fire right now. last three posts:

the most awesome building in the universe
a crisis of conscience and containers
barack obama: first architect

yes, yes, and more yes.

the hagiography of the affluencer

I almost said something when I read this article "The Affluencer" in the Times Magazine last week, but thought better of it, as it seems sisyphean to go around complaining every time you find something vapid on the internet. But a couple of letter writers seemed to have similar complaints, so I will indulge myself and quote their letters:

I never fully understood the "putting lipstick on a pig" phrase before reading Lauren Zalaznick's attempt to place reality television tripe like "Real Housewives" on the same artistic plane as the incredible work done at Killer Films (Susan Dominus, Nov. 2). I'm not judging Zalaznick for selling out, but don't deny the choices you make. It's still a sale if your artistic merit is bought and paid for by a desirable demographic.

SAM HUTCHINS
New York

"The Affluencer" was gutsy and made me squirm. I especially liked the quote from Zalaznick about the chef contestant with seafood allergies. She thought it would be "funny" to make him cook with shellfish. That summed up her values in one line -- anything for entertainment! Maybe she was hoping the chef would have an anaphylactic reaction on film and die right there! That would boost ratings. Amazing woman.

NISA LEVY
Denver

More:
::Previously noteworthy letters to the editor here (that one is really quite humorous) and here.

guided by voices::my valuable hunting knife

matt shlian::12 morning glory lane

Seen on _urb_:

matt shlian::12 morning glory lane [link]

More drawings and paper engineering can be seen and/or purchased at Matt Shlian's website; while its more or less all quality work, the drawings like 12 morning glory lane, which filter clean lines through computer and pen plotter to achieve distortions that resemble perfected topographies, are particularly evocative, suggesting a midpoint between Maya Lin and Tron (bonus: Tron Sweded).

ordos

ordos desert, near site of the ordos 100

While I have a great deal of respect for at least some of the architects (LTL, for instance) involved in the Ordos project (and perhaps they will make something more of it than is apparent on the surface; that, after all, is what good architects should be able to do), today's Archidose image does little to allay the concerns raised in May by Lebbeus Woods:

A hint of trouble appears when we notice that Ai Weiwei's design company is called Fake Design. Sure enough, when we look at his overall plan for the development, we find that it copies American suburban tract developments from the 50s, say, in California's San Fernando valley. Cf. the movie, "The Two Jakes." Sand-blown, treeless, lifeless for all human purposes, but soon to contain "your Dream House"-- just sign here! The picture published in the New York Times of the invited architects surveying their desolate sites is absurdly comic and at the same time sad. What must be going through their minds? Is this the Weissenhof Siedlung for the new age? Can I make great architecture here? Will I be mentioned in next Times article? Or, did I come halfway around the world for this? Am I here as an architect, or as a pawn in Ai's latest art game?

The idea of building large private houses on three-quarter acre plots jammed together without regard for the spaces between or the relationship of one house to the next must be unsettling to many of the invitees, especially considering the history of American suburbs. Some have questioned the lack of even basic design or ecological guidelines in the planning, and may be wondering, too, if Ordos, of all the rapidly developing places on the planet, really needs a retro typology--however updated and upgraded--as the most visible symbol of its future. It would be a more hopeful harbinger of the future not only for this city, but the field of architecture in general, if a number of the Ordos 100 architects banded together and came up with a coordinated overall plan and insisted that it be adopted. And, if it were not, they would simply decline the opportunity.

Viewing the settlement as a whole as in the model, the houses seem not significant (as one might hope a collection of architects such as this could provide), but baubles scattered on the surface of the planning equivalent of a dead carcass; as Diego Penalver put it in the comments on Lebbeus's post: "this project seems like an architectural collection of a sort, where all architects have been called to solve nothing, or a very conventional program at best, an architectural figure show". While the search for beautiful forms is by no means a bad thing (in and of itself and considered out of context, I would argue that it is in fact one of the grandest things humans can do), it is hard not to find, in the concentration of the energies of so many talented architects on a project that does nothing to confront the enormous challenges facing China[1], a confirmation of the charge that architecture is an inessential discipline, of use only to those with the wealth or power to buy its decorative services. (And it is because I think that charge should and could be inaccurate that I find Ordos somewhat distressing).

[1] see NYTimes: "A noxious cocktail of soot, smog and toxic chemicals is blotting out the sun, fouling the lungs of millions of people and altering weather patterns in large parts of Asia..."; the spatial organization of Ordos implicitly endorses the continuance of the sort of urban pattern and living arrangements that is responsible for this 'noxious cocktail'.

[welcome things magazine readers]

A few recent things that may be of interest if you were reading things:

a. the erie canal as a superhighway [an underdeveloped post on the comparative impact of canals and freeways]
b. a series of thoughts on big boxes: big box flip-a-strip and darwinian retail, big box urbanism [a guest post by stephen becker], and big box coda
c. just like honey [two approaches to compressed space in contemporary tokyo]
d. one grows rich in a year but dies in six months [on alan berger, the pontine marshes, and remediation]
e. billboards vs. trees
f. the minor landscape of glouster, ohio [on political geographies]
g. corridors of the unbuilt imagination [on drawing, representation, and landscape architecture sparked by a post by lebbeus woods; also contains incomplete thoughts]

I apologize for the brokenness (i.e. ugly formatting) of the archive pages; haven't had a chance (ok, the desire) to fix them since I restructured the blog a couple months ago. This also means that the older archives have a tendency to do shady things (like not give you a link to get back to the home page).

I might also suggest my rss feed, in xml or rdf.

election shock: rhetoric and action [potentially] not identical [if rumors are correct and entrails read properly]

Some of us in the anti-corn-subsidy-voting-bloc (yeah, we're a small constituency) have hoped that Obama's references to having read and assimilated some of Michael Pollan's writing on food would lead to a shift in the department of agriculture from prioritizing the needs of (very large corporate) producers of food to prioritizing the needs of eaters of food (that would be "everyone not employed by Con Agra et al").

Obviously, we do not know what policies the Obama administration will actually implement (because, at this moment, there is no Obama administration), but the initial signs, as Ezra Klein explains, are not exactly promising:

Yesterday, I wrote about the troubling possibility that Tom Vilsack could be appointed Secretary of Agriculture. Vilsack, of course, is the former governor of Iowa, which means the sum total of his agricultural experience has been building loving relationships with large corn producers in a state where they have a hammerlock on the political structure. And building those relationships has meant being a ceaseless and effective advocate for corn subsidies...

...At the end of the day, Secretary Vilsack will implement President Obama's agenda, whatever that might be. Which is why I see commentary on the Vilsack pick as commentary about Obama's priorities, not Vilsack's skills. And there's only one real signal from this sort of a pick: Your subsidies are safe.

If the Vilsack pick is actually the pick (as far as I know, it is actually a rumor of a pick) and it means what it seems to mean, then that is a real disappointment. Because I was looking forward to a president who would say things like this:

I was just reading an article in the New York Times by Michael Pollan about food and the fact that our entire agricultural system is built on cheap oil. As a consequence, our agriculture sector actually is contributing more greenhouse gases than our transportation sector. And in the mean time, it's creating monocultures that are vulnerable to national security threats, are now vulnerable to sky-high food prices or crashes in food prices, huge swings in commodity prices, and are partly responsible for the explosion in our healthcare costs because they're contributing to type 2 diabetes, stroke and heart disease, obesity, all the things that are driving our huge explosion in healthcare costs. That's just one sector of the economy. You think about the same thing is true on transportation. The same thing is true on how we construct our buildings. The same is true across the board.

And then do something about it. [1] Regardless of the accuracy of this rumor and one's interpretation of its significance, this provides an excellent place to point out that Pollan's recent Times Magazine article on food and the presidency is well worth reading, though it covers perhaps more ground than it could encompass completely coherently and is probably not Pollan's tightest piece of writing (but since Pollan is actually a really, really good writer, that means its just "above average" not "fantastic"):

Before setting out an agenda for reforming the food system, it's important to understand how that system came to be -- and also to appreciate what, for all its many problems, it has accomplished. What our food system does well is precisely what it was designed to do, which is to produce cheap calories in great abundance. It is no small thing for an American to be able to go into a fast-food restaurant and to buy a double cheeseburger, fries and a large Coke for a price equal to less than an hour of labor at the minimum wage -- indeed, in the long sweep of history, this represents a remarkable achievement.

It must be recognized that the current food system -- characterized by monocultures of corn and soy in the field and cheap calories of fat, sugar and feedlot meat on the table -- is not simply the product of the free market. Rather, it is the product of a specific set of government policies that sponsored a shift from solar (and human) energy on the farm to fossil-fuel energy.

...

Subsidized monocultures of grain also led directly to monocultures of animals: since factory farms could buy grain for less than it cost farmers to grow it, they could now fatten animals more cheaply than farmers could. So America's meat and dairy animals migrated from farm to feedlot, driving down the price of animal protein to the point where an American can enjoy eating, on average, 190 pounds of meat a year -- a half pound every day.

But if taking the animals off farms made a certain kind of economic sense, it made no ecological sense whatever: their waste, formerly regarded as a precious source of fertility on the farm, became a pollutant -- factory farms are now one of America's biggest sources of pollution. As Wendell Berry has tartly observed, to take animals off farms and put them on feedlots is to take an elegant solution -- animals replenishing the fertility that crops deplete -- and neatly divide it into two problems: a fertility problem on the farm and a pollution problem on the feedlot. The former problem is remedied with fossil-fuel fertilizer; the latter is remedied not at all.

[1] I added a bunch of qualifiers up in the previous paragraph because I think getting too upset over how we think policy might play out based on rumors about who might be appointed before the administration in question begins is rather silly.

More:
::Slightly older Ezra Klein on food policy, one of those random areas (like zoning policy) where left-leaning folk are more likely to hew to the naturally right-wing position (in this case, doing away with subsidies that distort the food market) than right-wingers are.
::Also it would be fantastic if Obama required his various Secretaries and Chiefs and advisors to come to all the White House meetings wearing animal costumes. Yes, that is an actual picture of Tom Vilsack.

silver jews::slow education

Silver Jews, Slow Education

there's a screen door, banging in the wind...

get your rulers out, kids, we're measuring meaning

I mentioned a couple posts ago a brief essay on happiness at Culture11 which I largely agreed with; now I will quote from one (in the same series on happiness, but this one is by Will Wilkinson) which I find self-evidentially absurd (and it saddens me to know that, clearly, not everyone agrees):

"More interesting, and much more compelling, were those who chose to admit the evidence, but argued that happiness isn't everything. Sure, family can be a pain, but it's meaningful. Indeed, the Newsweek article that imparted the unhappy news to a broad American audience noted that "parents still report feeling a greater sense of purpose and meaning in their lives than those who've never had kids." If meaning is an excellent reason to have children (and I'm not saying it isn't), perhaps it is also at least as good as happiness as an argument for generous child tax credits. And with meaning firmly in hand, perhaps happiness mavens disappointed by the numbers can jump from one paradox of prosperity to another.

Appeals to meaning are nice, but they just push the lump in the rug. What's so great about meaning, anyway? For that matter, what is it? How does one validate that x is in fact meaningful, or more meaningful than y? If meaning is going to carry a justificatory load in weighty personal and political deliberation, we can't just wave our hands about it. Intellectual virtue requires care. We need to get started on measuring meaning. There are many questions. How much is meaning worth to us in terms of happiness? How much is happiness worth in terms of meaning? There are no doubt many and varied sources of meaning. With science on our side, we are sure to discover that some of them are corrosive to other of our cherished values while some enhance them. Then we'll be well-situated to say goodbye to toxic meaningfulness. Goodbye national identity? Goodbye God? Who knows what we might find? Science is a source of excitement as well as wonder.

...

There is certainly more than one way of winning an argument, but there's just one way of knowing: the empirical way. If there's a way of knowing something about meaning -- including whether measuring meaning threatens meaning -- that's the way [emphasis mine]. There is nothing wrong with the pursuit of happiness. There is nothing wrong with the pursuit of meaning. But there is more than a little something wrong in blind pursuits when the means to enlightenment are at hand."

It must be very easy, being sure and right all the time (in particular, being sure and right that you have answered, definitively, the question "how do we know", a question to which a full third of the discipline of philosophy is devoted, is a neat trick). I suppose the reason I cannot be a libertarian of the Wilkinsonian variety is that I am neither sure nor right all the time.

More:
::I recommend to you this related post by Helen Rittenmeyer at Pomoco; your reading of it, however, will be incomplete unless you wade through the comments, particularly the exchange between Helen, Jonathan, and Ryan.

synecdoche new york

Outlines the difficulty of the human condition well, though the film is much less convincing when it gives Cotard a day of respite; like a massive clocktower with invisible walls. Immersing yourself in Kaufmann's dream logic is bliss, but dream logic is, because even as we give ourselves to it we know it to be unreal, incapable of satisfactorily answering existential questions.

More:
::An obligatory link to life without buildings' interview with Charlie Kaufmann.
::Trailer.
::Previous short movie review, Southland Tales.

r&sie(n)::i'm lost in paris

Seen on core.form-ula:

images via new-territories.com

Project by R&Sie(n), twelve hundred hydroponic ferns and three hundred blown glass beakers add up to one unique wall.

the erie canal as a superhighway

The NY Times had an interesting article a couple days ago on the Erie Canal. Perhaps most intriguing was not the contents of the article, but the title of the article: "Hints of Comeback for Nation's First Superhighway" -- suggesting that canals and freeways belong to the same category of structure. And to some degree, of course they do -- both are infrastructures, both serve to transmit goods and people. But more importantly, yet perhaps less obviously, both have an effect on the territory in which they reside, influencing land values and potential building sites, determining what parcels are seen as viable for commerce and what parcels will be left to farmers and deer. So when you build a superhighway -- whether it is navigated by cars and trucks or barges and towboats -- you are also building a city.

But I'm getting ahead of myself; let's go back to the beginning of the story:

"Completed in 1825, rerouted in parts and rebuilt twice since then, the Erie Canal flows 338 miles across New York State, between Waterford in the east and Tonawanda in the west. It carved out a trail for immigrants who settled the Midwest, and it cemented the position of New York City, which connects with the canal via the Hudson River, as the nation's richest port. In 1855, at the canal's height as a thoroughfare for goods and people, 33,241 shipments passed through the lock at Frankfort, 54 miles east of Syracuse, according to Craig Williams, history curator at the New York State Museum in Albany.

Though diminished in the late 1800s by competition from railroads, commercial shipping along the canal grew until the early 1950s, when interstate highways and the new St. Lawrence Seaway lured away most of the cargo and relegated the canal to a scenic backwater piloted by pleasure boats."

detail from 1853 map of the erie canal, showing canal profile

While the canal remains a rarely utilized means of transportation, usage is rising:

"The canal still remains the most fuel-efficient way to ship goods between the East Coast and the upper Midwest. One gallon of diesel pulls one ton of cargo 59 miles by truck, 202 miles by train and 514 miles by canal barge, Ms. Mantello said. A single barge can carry 3,000 tons, enough to replace 100 trucks.

As the price of diesel climbed over $4 a gallon this summer -- the national average is now about $3.31 a gallon -- more shippers rediscovered the Erie Canal. On one trip in mid-October, the Margot motored down the canal at about seven knots, pushing a barge loaded with a giant green crane. The machine was being transported from Huger, S.C., to the Pinney Dock, operated by the Kinder Morgan Company in Ashtabula, Ohio.

"It really just came down to economics," said Lee Demers, the dock's manager. The other option was to move the crane through the St. Lawrence Seaway, adding more than 1,000 miles and greater fuel costs to the trip."

buffalo, ny along the erie canal, 1903 postcard

The return of the canal, as minimal as it may be (at least for now), suggests a comparison of the differing effects of these two categories of superhighway -- automotive and liquid -- might be in order. To some degree, time has dampened trace of the canal in the larger cities it passes through -- Rochester, Tonawanda, Schneteday. The warehouses and factories which once lined the canal (as seen above) may have disappeared. However, the urban pattern that they instigated remains:

erie canal aqueduct, in rochester ny, late 1890s

the same site, today with bridge built over aqueduct highlighted

I have heard it said that there are two kinds of markings on the land that never disappear: roads and property lines; I don't think it would be wrong to add 'canals' as a third kind of permanent marking (by this it is not meant that roads and property lines (and canals) never disappear, but rather that the trace of these things can always be discerned, if you know where and how to look).

Compare to the arrangement of commercial and industrial structures a few miles to the west, generated by freeways:

via google maps

The canal and the freeway can also be compared in terms of their effect on rural territories; the effect the canal has had on urban patterns in more rural portions of New York is unmistakable (though, it should be noted, a railway parallels the canal, so this effect is also a result of the presence of the rail line):

newark, ny, along the erie canal, via google maps; click to jump there

We can compare this to contemporary growth in a rural area, along a I-81, north of albany, new york:

This is too brief a look at the effects of canals and freeways to really examine why they are associated with such disparate patterns of urbanism. But I think it does suggest that such study -- and the corresponding techniques of insertion that could develop from it -- is essential to the development of a post-Corbusian urbanism, an urbanism that sees cities not as collections of buildings but as a lace of processes, both natural and artificial, in tension and fluctuating.

ballots cast

[image via California High Speed Rail Authority]

Proposition 1a passes in California; great news for the future of transit in America. If we can't make high speed rail work between Los Angeles and San Francisco, I doubt we will make it work anywhere. There was a good bit of debate on the internets (and in print) leading up to the election; I guess we'll find out if Reason's case against rail was really as reasoned as they'd like you think. Personally, I doubt it was -- high speed rail is demonstratably viable in the other countries its been tried in -- Japan, China, France, Spain, etc. -- and I see little evidence that Americans are so exceptionally averse to rail travel that we can't make high speed rail work.

More:
::Enjoy the animations the state put together to sell the project; give it a starting point, a destination, and watch.

modernity, happiness, sedation, autonomy

Culture11 is running a series examining the notion of happiness; one of the pieces, by Peter Lawler, is more or less consonant with my suspicions. I'll let Ivan Kenneally (at Postmodern Conservative) summarize, since no one paragraph in Lawler's piece captures the entire thrust of the argument:

"...Peter Lawler insightfully examines the evidence that, despite breathless exertions in the service of creating a secular paradise, the modern attempt to "master and possess" nature has failed to make us fundamentally happier. The crux of the problem has to do with our interpretation of the individual as an agent of autonomous freedom untethered from any natural bounds--happiness is now to be sought against the obstacles of nature rather than consonant with the purposes and limitations it might illuminate. As a consequence, happiness is delinked from virtue, once understood to be its requisite condition, and the experience of happiness is severed from the edifying lessons of melancholy and misery. If we want to be truly happy we have to learn to be truly good, and goodness requires the fortifying experience of struggling with, rather than evading, the characteristic human encounter with alienation and loneliness."

If I were to highlight one point that I believe is particularly accurate, it is tying the flowering of a great deal of the problems of the modern [1] condition to the insistence on autonomy (the modern understanding of which is at once new and not new).

[1] I don't want to take the time or space to defend this, but I would generally argue that most people -- including traditional postmodernists such as Foucault and Rorty -- are (hyper)modern, not truly postmodern, in that traditional postmodernism is merely a working out of the consequences of being radically serious about the foundational assumptions of modernism (see Nietzsche, the only essential postmodernist), not a break with those assumptions)

big box coda

This is an old item, but its a timely old item, as it relates directly to the postings from last week on big boxes and urbanism (see big box flip-a-strip and darwinian retail and big box urbanism). From an interview on Archinect, images by Martha Schwartz's office, analyzing the landscape condition of big boxes:

[image via Archinect]

Schwartz and the interviewer, Quilian Riano, discuss the possibility of working in the strip:

QR: What do you say that we switch gears now and talk a little about some of your work. I was particularly interested in the visual analysis you did of the big box landscape. Is your firm beginning to pursue work in the strip malls?

MS: I have to say that right now our firm is getting larger and more urban civic and commercial projects than those in strip malls. We are now getting the signature spaces within cities that afford a lot of flexibility. The problem getting the strip-mall like projects is that developers are not willing to pay for real landscapes and are content with the minimum token landscapes that codes require. In the case of highways and other civic projects in the suburban landscape, there is a lack of political understanding and will to spend the money to humanize those spaces. The main problem is that there is an abundance of design need in the bland landscape but the client just does not exist. So for now I feel all we can do is bring up the issues and maybe through academia begin to engage leaders in government and business to take the improvement of the landscape as a real challenge.

QR: Your other analysis of the lack of power that architecture has in the strip seems to me similar to what Venturi has been saying, but then he returns to the architectural object to address some of those problems. You are telling us that it is the landscape that will really make a difference in these areas.

MS: That is right, in the suburban landscape architects are stuck on the object, which, although nice, lacks real power. Architects seem to have retreated to signature buildings in the middle of cities that are irrelevant to the majority of people. It is the responsibility of architects and landscape architects to care about the spaces that people actually inhabit. Without our collective advocacy cities and developers will do nothing.

To illustrate the notion of the powerlessness of the object to overcome its context, Schwartz provides us with these telling photoshops:

[image via Archinect]

finding reasons to farm central london

Pruned has a series of posts running recently on a 07-08 studio at the AA in London, which was centered on the question "Can extremes of programmatic effectiveness blend with the fragility of human habitat?"

Farmacy::Samantha Lee

Fish Farming in Central London::Benedetta Gargiulo

King's Vineyard London::Soonil Kim

I won't pretend I have anything to add to Pruned's summary, other than a shared sense of appreciation for the sense of wonder these students have clearly approached their projects with.

More:
::The work of the other students in the studio can be seen here.
::Pruned should have a fourth project up, at some point. Keep an eye out.

woven hand::ain't no sunshine

Woven Hand::Ain't No Sunshine (cover)

alec soth::sleeping by the mississippi

Via we make money not art, this collection of photographs, Alec Soth's Sleeping by the Mississippi, caught my eye:

[images from soth's website]

More:
::Watch an interview with Alec Soth by Minnesota Public Radio
::No post related to the Mississippi is complete without a link to (a) Pruned's series "Geological Investigation of the Alluvial Valley of the Lower Mississippi River" and (b) the 1944 Fisk report by the same name to which the Pruned series refers.

big box urbanism

[this is a guestpost by stephen becker, to some degree in response to my post from a few days ago "big box flip-a-strip and darwinian retail". thanks, stephen. if you enjoy it, encourage him to get his own blog in the comments.]

It's hard for the architectural community to resist creeping schadenfreude regarding the collapse of so many big box stores, and I think that tone spills into discussions of how these behemoths may be appropriated by, and reconfigured towards, a post-suburban environment. Thus, most competitions and research projects (at least the ones with which I am familiar) deal with developing new programs for old boxes. Currently, these corridors are governed by very strict, banal, homogenous patterns of components and use. Without acting as an apologist for the often abysmal architecture and planning present in typical exurban retail developments, I think it's worth taking some time to discuss why the economic retail model found in most big box stores (as opposed to its usual architectural manifestation) doesn't have to be in contention with a positive urbanism.

This sort of investigation, which focuses on yet-to-be-built retail centers, is at least as important as investigation of out-of-work boxes. Big box retail corridors are still popular, successful, and increasing in number - especially outside of the United States. Beyond the reality of their still-primary position in much of exurban America, there is a persuasive argument for their increased inclusion in dense, urban environments as well, as was noted yesterday by Matt Yglesias:

"As far as this issue goes, I think urbanists ought to wholeheartedly embrace "big box" chain stores. When there's a problem with an urban-situated big box store, which there often is, it's because (like the Home Depot near the Rhode Island Avenue Metro station) the site has been laid out in a way that's inappropriate for an urban environment. But such inappropriate structures are hardly unique to big box retailers (the CVS at 7th and Florida has a strongly suburbanist design quality) or to national chains. What's more, these problems are often caused by misguided regulations (which of course should be fixed, but are not the fault of the big box chains) or else relate to a general lack of experience financing and constructing stores in an urban environment.

But you can make a physical structure, like DC USA in Columbia Heights, that works in an urban environment. And it would work even better if it didn't have so much shopping.

But the bottom line is that successful chains are successful because they're good at bringing to market products that people want to buy at the offered price. If you want people to live and shop in cities, you need to open the cities to the firms that are good at bringing to market products that people want to buy at the offered price."

Echoing Yglesias' argument, there is a serious need for architects to (pardon the pun) think outside of the box - though I would go further, and contend that the box is ill-suited for not only urban situations, but suburban conditions as well. Its failing is less a function of some inefficiency at exchanging goods, than it is a colossal missed opportunity to create a vibrant public space.

Koolhaas and the Harvard Project on the City published a study in Mutations arguing shopping is the last mode of public interaction:

"Shopping is arguably the last remaining form of public activity. Through a battery of increasingly predatory forms, shopping has been able to colonize - even replace - almost every aspect of urban life. Historical town centers. Suburbs, streets, and now train stations, museums, hospitals, schools, the internet, and even the military, are increasingly shaped by the mechanisms and spaces of shopping. Churches are mimicking shopping malls to attract followers. Airports have become wildly popular by converting travelers into customers. Museums are turning to shopping to survive. The traditional European city once tried to resist shopping, but is now a vehicle for American-style consumerism. "High" architects disdain the world of retailing yet use shopping configurations to design museums and universities. Ailing cities are revitalized by being planned more like malls."

The challenge, then, is to take advantage of the popularity of the big box in such a way as to minimize the manifold problems caused by big box developments, issues like water runoff, asphalt heat sinks, energy use, etc; while fostering engaging, flexible public arenas. The Flip-A-Strip competition cited by Rob in his earlier post is a good example of movement in this direction.

Another study that examines the potential for the re-imagination of the big box is 'Flatspace' (published here and here), by Lateral Architecture:

Lateral Architecture, from their website.

Lateral Architecture analyzed 'retail corridors', the urban conditions cropping up outside urban and suburban communities which are defined by "highways and paved planes...dominated by big boxes and retail power centers, conflating an ever-evolving consumer culture with public space." From their description, "The potential for design in flatspace is less about inserting a foreign program or form and more about positing that the system can recalibrate existing elements and agitate encounters of the public without altering its capitalist dependency on efficiency and geo-economics." The existing elements (which they termed filters) they recalibrated were program, parking and landscape; three proposals for each filter were developed.

Lateral Architecture, from Young Architects 7 (link above)

What is compelling about this project is that it investigated the logic of the systems as-is, looking at the relationship between the three filters according to how people interact with them. A litany of alternatives was then developed, each a proposition with the potential to reestablish the nature of the retail corridor and its role as commercial center and public space through a novel reconsideration of the nature of the existing elements.

Lateral Architecture, from their website.

A second point of interest regarding this investigation is that it demonstrates an application of what might be termed as 'infrastructural thinking' - that is, considering the ways in which systems not usually thought of as infrastructure - such as x - function in an essentially infrastructural way in the urban system. Two of the three filters, parking and landscape are infrastructure, and all three were considered infrastructurally, although this is not how Lateral Architecture framed their research. All three filters are private initiatives by corporations, typically considered only insofar as they may generate profits. These infrastructural filters combine to create a larger infrastructure which produces profits for these companies, and distributes goods to consumers. Even in the current big-box condition, they have effectively created public space. The Flatspace investigation demonstrates how a re-calibration of smaller infrastructures (the filters) might serve to increase public interaction and involvement. It takes advantage of an existing trend , and develops it according to an infrastructural analysis.

Obviously, similar studies situated in an urban condition would differ in several important ways; requiring the inclusion of housing, more restricted land use, having a built-in pedestrian population, etc. But, much like Lukez's work, it also hints at how the suburban and urban evolve toward each other - helping us to imagine a situation in which these retail corridors are no longer considered in isolation, but instead are absorbed into the logic of the [sub]urban condition. Instead of the evolution from city to mall Koolhaas observes, retail and city birth a third condition. The evolution of the big box store is no longer an isolated story, but merely a piece of the continuing emergence of the 21st century city. Some student work has begun to explode these novel urbanities, such as the following project by former Princeton M.arch student Christopher Leong:

"This thesis proposes a way to combine the typologies of the mat building and the tower-in-the-park in order to generate a new urban condition that embraces the logics of the dispersed city... By sampling different conditions (housing, shopping, office, agriculture, recreation, wetlands, etc.) within the region, remapping those conditions over a half mile square site, and then layering those patterns into a new inhabitable ground it is possible to create a more cohesive system of inhabitation."

image: Christopher Leong, Princeton University S.O.A. Masters Thesis spring 2006

If anything, more questions are raised by these kinds of projects than are answered: How do they come to be? Can zoning ever effect a development such as this, or must it be engendered by mega-developers? Does it need to be built all at once, creating island community systems linked together by larger, city-wide infrastructure, or does it spread like mold, internalizing existing infrastructures, to become a city itself? Does the home loan crisis present Wal-mart with a golden opportunity to buy up vast quantities of housing and suburban acreage, extending its monopoly beyond the things we bring into our homes, toward our homes and streets and cities as well?

the sea and cake::crossing line

The Sea and Cake::Crossing Line

New Sea and Cake album is out/nearly out (depending on your source); download the title track, "Car Alarm", here.

big box flip-a-strip and darwinian retail

[the former site of RPM Indoor Racing in Round Rock, Texas via Google Maps]

A couple nights ago All Things Considered had a feature on the recent work of Julia Christensen, who has been studying the re-use of big box stores for several years now, a project that has recently culminated the publishing of the book Big Box Reuse. The variety of uses she encounters is astounding:

"In Austin, Minn., Christensen went to a big box that had been renovated into a museum devoted to Spam, the canned meat. In Fayetteville, N.C., she went to a flea market that had once been a Kmart. And in Round Rock, Texas, a group of young entrepreneurs turned an abandoned Wal-Mart into an indoor racecar track. Christensen cites the racecar track for its imaginative use of such a large space -- but they couldn't keep up with the overhead costs and had to close down.

Christensen says cities have a huge incentive to find other uses for these buildings.

"Roads are widened. Stoplights put in. Entire bypasses might be created," she says. "So all of this invested infrastructure remains after the retailer leaves the building behind."

Which can make these sites good for repurposing. Take Lebanon, Mo. When a Kmart there went bankrupt, its building was left vacant for three years, and the area became depressed. So the community raised money to turn it into a new and bigger county library.

Cathy Dame, the library's director, says it took awhile for some people to adjust.

"Sometimes, honestly, it was easier to say, 'Remember where the shoe section was? That's our children's room," Dame says.

Since the structure was too big for just the library, they broke it up and now share it with a Route 66 museum and a cafe, among other things. And Dame says they are getting a lot of traffic, partly because it's easy to park."

Designers, naturally, have other ideas about what form reuse should take. One such vision is the work of Paul Lukez, in the Suburban Transformations projects:

[E-Mall Transformation, Paul Lukez Architecture]

Lukez collects several such projects in the book version of Suburban Transformations, which I recommend. In it, he lays out not merely an aesthetic vision, but a working methodology for implementing an incremental urbanism in suburbia, which happens to be one of my pet projects (hence the recommendation). Much of what Lukez suggests -- overlaying various site conditions to reveal synchronicities and disjuncts, for instance -- will seem like old news to landscape architects schooled in McHargian methodologies, but putting such methodologies to the service of an incremental urbanism seems new and useful to me (and even if it weren't new, it would still be useful).

Lukez more or less acknowledges this, suggesting that the value of his project is not that it is completely new and revolutionary, but that it presents a distillation of the most useful components of Smart Growth, environmental planning, and New Urbanism, while accepting (rather than ignoring or attempting to bypass) the elements of time and change. In the interests of not using up too much space on the screen here, I've only shown two snapshots in from the complex timeline of potential transformation Lukez sketches; an animation can be seen here which gives a much fuller impression of the importance of incrementality to Lukez's vision.

Another set of visions was recently collected in the "Flip-a-strip" competition (via Landscape+Urbanism). Susan Krane, former director of the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (which sponsered the competition), describes the competition's origins and aims:

"And so, when we at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art began to discuss the idea of initiating an architectural competition that might be national in scope and application yet have core local significance, it seemed most fitting to address a building type that impacts our public sense of place. Strip malls, ever in our peripheral vision, immediately came to mind. The choice purposefully ran contrary to Arizona's predominant recent reputation for high-style residential architecture. What could be farther toward the other end of the spectrum from luxurious mega-houses on desert hillsides than the strip mall in the flats? The everyday, work-a-day strip mall seemed so wanting of smart architectural attention, ripe and useful for reconsideration--in this community and in so many others across the country. This competition thus intended dually to take SMoCA's architectural exhibitions to the next stage and to highlight the keen social awareness and the broad capacity of a new generation of architects working here and in other regional centers of design excellence.

...

Working with an amazing community advisory committee of architects, planners, developers and urban entrepreneurs, we decided that Flip a Strip should address small, one-to-three-acre, mid-block strip plazas--the most abundant and most vulnerable parcels that lack the anchor tenants of larger sites and missed out on the attention-grabbing positioning of intersections. Most of these strip malls date from the 1960s and 1970s and still yield reliable cash flow for the landowners, regardless of vacancies or disrepair. They provide affordable spaces for small businesses and often service vibrant new-immigrant communities. One can easily find malls around town with exclusively Korean or Spanish signage. In addition, several strips of this scale here have been given facelifts on shoestring budgets by adventurous small-time entrepreneurs: they quickly have been adopted as hip gathering spots for those drawn to impressive, locally owned concerns such as an alternative record store, a homey coffee-shop hangout or an artisanal patisserie. Such grassroots, lifestyle-oriented enterprises demonstrate the potential across the Phoenix area, which has precious few "third spaces" and little street life. What more, Flip a Strip asks, could be possible with good architecture in the mix? How might discrete efforts at such "suburban villages" be knit together to alter not just one parcel of land but the look and feel of cities' prime corridors?"

The winning entry, Urban Battery, was designed by MOS:

[MOS::Urban Battery; competition images via bustler]

MOS describe their entry, which transforms by layering program upon program:

"In terms of zoning, Urban Battery is a physical structure similar to a power station, vertical greenhouse, and a billboard, all rolled into one. It doesn't fit into the zoning chart. We believe that Scottsdale zoning is open enough to accommodate the programmatic innovation, even though this proposal is beyond the original intention of the competition. Urban Battery acts as an energy producer, filtering air, housing oxygen regenerating plants, providing bike paths, public gardens within the structure, and stores bioproducts. It also includes an additional building for community events that is attached at the base of the structure. This additional program could be for either teens or seniors dedicated to expanding activities from the neighborhood and accessible through a new bike and walking path, converting the alley into part of an urban infrastructure."

Other projects explore more commonly offered (but also potentially transformative) possibilites such as rooftop agriculture and the provision of community market space.

There is a wide distance, though, between the exuberant renderings of projects proposed by these architects and the actual reuse projects that Christensen explores in Big Box Reuse, such as this elementary school in Laramie, WY:

[source: Big Box Reuse]

or this future church in Pinellas Park, FL:

[source: Big Box Reuse]

Even the cheery constructions, such as the Spam museum, a Wal-Mart which has received a facade-lift, are quite banal:

[source: Big Box Reuse]

Perhaps these banal re-purposings will inevitably outnumber more creative and vibrant transformations; or perhaps it will simply take time and distance for better reuses to win out -- like this "70's slum block building" recently repurposed by Jonathan Segal Architect, in San Diego (via Archidose):

[source: Jonathan Segal Architect, via Archidose]

These discussions take on a new urgency now, as retailers are experiencing the pain of the current credit crash -- Linens 'n' Things, I hear, has already gone bankrupt, unable to find buyers for the vast majority of its properties, while Circuit City is shuttering a fifth of its stores. The future we and our exit towns face seems grim, with doors shuttered, parking lots cracked by stray grasses and Ailanthus altissima, windows blackened. All of this has assumed that this is bad (and obviously, in many ways, it is). But what if it is also necessary? What if this is how the exurban experiment dies? Or perhaps both scenarios are valid; perhaps the best structures will find reuse, whether beautiful like Lukez's proposals or merely utilitarian, like the elementary school in Wyoming, while those structures which never should have been built will wither, cast-off tributaries of a river of credit that no longer exists.

More:
::I discussed an Atlantic Monthly article about the abandonment of suburbia in the post "mommy, there's a crack house in our cul-de-sac".
::Another interesting item on All Things Considered which I discussed a couple months ago, involving a legal battle between billboards and trees.
::Visit bigboxreuse for a tour of various reused stores as well as a wiki for submitting and georeferencing new reuse projects.
::Julia Christensen also appears on NPR's On Point, discussing big box reuse. Various callers and other experts weigh in as well.
::MOS have posted a video of a prototype of the system for Urban Battery. I haven't watched it yet, but I'm sure its interesting.