sevensixfive

Spatial Intervention: Five Moments from #occupy

2011-11-19T15:04:00.001-05:00

Some aspects of #occupy that stand out for their implications about the rough edges and overlaps in political control, spatial practice, spatial design, and spatial intervention:

1) Occupy Baltimore Mic Checks Karl Rove.
10 minutes into a speech at Johns Hopkins University on November 15th, protestors from Occupy Baltimore, who had mingled with the talk's audience, started up the People's Mic call-and-response protocol (which always begins with the phrase "Mic Check") to deliver a message:“Mic check. 'Mic check.' Karl Rove. 'Karl Rove.' Is the Architect. 'Is the Architect.'"

The use of the word 'Architect' to describe people who mastermind conspiracies and schemes of control is always fascinating. I've written in CRIT (pdf article link) and elsewhere about the need on the part of those trained in architecture and spatial disciplines to reclaim the broader use of the word, and scheme for the greater good instead of the perceived evil.

2) Occupy Wall Street Bat Signal on the Verizon Building.
In a carefully planned and timed maneuver coordinated to correspond with the march across the Brooklyn Bridge, messages from Occupy chants were projected onto the blank facade of the "Verizon Building" (375 Pearl St., so-named because of a large lighted Verizon ad) facing the bridge.

In this interview, it's noted that the messages were projected by the organizers from a private family apartment, the space was donated by the residents for the use of #occupy that evening: "opposite the Verizon building, there is a bunch of city housing. Subsidized, rent-controlled. There's a lack of services, lights are out in the hallways, the housing feels like jails, like prisons."

This description matches the Alfred E. Smith Houses, a set of cruciform, Corbusian Towers-in-the-Park built by the New York City Housing Authority during the Robert Moses era. The towers in Le Corbusier's original Radiant City plan were intended to be office buildings, not housing, but the image of hand of the architect, autocratically clearing away old for new, has become, in a thousand lectures on urbanism, synonymous with the idea of the Evil Architect, and the misguided social intentions of Modernism in general.

The text from the projection reads:

99% / MIC CHECK! / LOOK AROUND / YOU ARE A PART / OF A GLOBAL UPRISING / WE ARE A CRY / FROM THE HEART / OF THE WORLD / WE ARE UNSTOPPABLE / ANOTHER WORLD IS POSSIBLE / HAPPY BIRTHDAY / #OCCUPY MOVEMENT / OCCUPY WALL STREET / list of cities, states and countries / OCCUPY EARTH / WE ARE WINNING / IT IS THE BEGINNING OF THE BEGINNING / DO NOT BE AFRAID / LOVE.

3) Occupy UC Davis Kettles the Police.
The beginning of the video linked above is difficult to watch, police have been tasked with removing tents from the quad at UC Davis, students occupying the tents sit down and link hands peacefully around the tents. In a sickening act of police brutality, an officer pepper sprays the entire line.

By around the 6 minute mark into the clip, the atmosphere has changed completely. The students have advanced on the police in a line, they have kettled the police, surrounding and confining them in a space defined by a ring of people. The police are in a tactical retreat, but at the last moment, the officer in charge pauses and begins shaking his canisters of pepper spray menacingly. Suddenly the chants fade from "Shame on you! Shame on you!" to another Mic Check: "We will give you 'We will give you' a moment of peace 'a moment of peace'" and finally: "You can go" is picked up in a chant: "You can go. You can go. You can go." The tension unfolds. The crowd has called something up, named it, understood its aggression as masked fear, and then banished it with unqualified impunity. The police, visibly confused at what has been done to them and how, turn and leave.

4) Occupy Fort Myers is recognized as Free Speech.
In what may, in retrospect, be understood as a landmark decision, a federal court in Florida has ruled that inhabitation can be a form of speech, and as such is protected, in certain circumstances, under the First Amendment.

4) Occupy Cal's Architecture School Launches Floating Tents.
The administration at UC Berkeley has, apparently without irony, banned camping on campus. In a symbolic circumvention of this ban, the architecture students at Berkeley have made floating tents, and floating banners to go along with them.

At least one commenter (thanks, @tweeds) has noted the intentional resonance with Archigram's Instant City project of the 1960s. It is worth quoting in full the description of that project from Wikipedia:

Instant City is a mobile technological event that drifts into underdeveloped, drab towns via air (balloons) with provisional structures (performance spaces) in tow. The effect is a deliberate overstimulation to produce mass culture, with an embrace of advertising aesthetics. The whole endeavor is intended to eventually move on leaving behind advanced technology hook-ups.

#Occupy, with its smartphones, livestreams, projections, tents, inflatables, and pithy quotability, can be seen as a direct manifestation of the same impulse underlying the Instant City. As Chris Heathcote has noted in another context, Archigram were BASICALLY RIGHT. The link between protest, festival, media, and creative spatial practice can't be underscored enough, and the participatory structure of things like the People's Mic as practiced by #occupy is the antithesis of the image of the autocratic planner, designer, and schemer.

In 2004, an unnamed Bush administration aide, widely understood to be Karl Rove (The Architect) told a writer from the New York Times Magazine:

"We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

Some on the Left in America have since embraced the idea that they are the "Reality Based Community" that this quote dismisses as merely following and interpreting the creative acts of cultural production in politics. They would characterize the attitude of Rove expressed here as embodying a "Faith Based Community" with no connection to facts.

The creative spatial practices of #occupy suggest a different way: that the arrogance of The Architect in presupposing that his particular acts of reality creation are the ones that others have to deal with, study, and occupy, is now recognized as a symptom of fear. Other models of spatial production, and indeed, even of reality creation - based in collaboration, smaller in scale, briefer in time, and unfolding from a ground of love, not fear - have the potential to defuse the political control over the built environment. Inhabitation is speech, and it can create new realities. The method is less faith, and more magic, and watching this method deployed, it's hard to argue against the message that another world is possible.

On Licensure and How the Future is Going to Get Even More Weird

2011-11-16T00:00:00.004-05:00

I have some thoughts on professional licensure in architecture included in this article in Architect magazine. The article was written by Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson, she's done an excellent job of sorting out a sticky set of issues, through which there are no easy resolutions: academics, professional liability, the roles of the many organizations that regulate aspects of the profession, and the "threat" of a Lost Generation. As usual, Archinect has a great discussion about the article as well.

This is a topic that's near to the interests represented here, I've written about it from the point of view of titular protection, alternative examination structures, and here (pdf link), for the AIAS Journal CRIT, popular perception of skill sets.

It's worth bringing up again. Thinking about these issues as a teacher, now that I'm rereading the finished article, makes me begin to wonder, not about a current Lost Generation, but about the next few generations down the line. Re-examining paths to licensure and registration is going to be even more important for a discipline that wants to wrangle the talents of the generation who are currently just starting out. In the past few years I've taught introductory architecture and design to two groups of first year grad students, three groups of sophomores, and two groups of freshmen, at three different schools. I'm here to tell you that these kids are good, and there's a lot of 'em. If the current group of recent grads is seeming ambitious, talented, numerous, and kind of confused, just wait til you meet the ones who will be coming out with professional degrees in the next four years. It's on us to get this licensing and terminology mess sorted out in time for us all to get down to the real work.

Soft Landscapes: Post Natural Ecologies Lecture Mini-Series

2011-10-24T17:27:00.005-04:00

Very excited to have been invited by Rob Holmes of mammoth to give his Landscape Studio a version of the talk on the Middle Branch that I delivered at the ACSA Conference in March in Montreal. This will take place in the Red Room at Virginia Tech, this coming tuesday, the 25th, at 5:15. If you're in town, come by. Rob has also invited Brett Milligan of Free Association Design to speak on friday, so it's officially a thing: SOFT LANDSCAPES: Post-Natural Ecologies Lecture Mini-Series.

For background on the Middle Branch material that I'll be covering, start here.

2011-06-11 21.32.40a

2011-06-11T21:50:00.001-04:00

2011-06-11 21.32.40a, originally uploaded by ske765book.

Marey_01_unaltered_sm

2011-03-29T16:51:00.001-04:00

Marey_01_unaltered_sm, originally uploaded by ske765book.

The Working Group on Adaptive Systems

2011-01-26T00:49:00.004-05:00

Okay, so here's a new project that's a little while coming: The Working Group on Adaptive Systems.

A friend of mine asked for a Mission Statement, so here it is:

This is a strange time to be doing work in the city. All of the architects want to be planners, all of the planners want to be developers, all of the developers want to be artists, and all of the artists want to be scientists. The Working Group on Adaptive Systems is a vehicle for transdisciplinary research and open ended collaboration that embraces the adhoc, the loose fit, and the multi-scalar, in the service of making things that are real and new.

This is neither a hard launch nor a soft launch, we're skipping launch, we're working through launch. Projects posted here will be continuously added to, refined, extended, scrapped, mutated ... as will the format, so keep checking back for new things over the next few weeks, including brutalist public plaza sculpture with lasers, a greenroof fishfarm over a garage, and campcamping!

Here's that link one more time: The Working Group on Adaptive Systems

Elastic Centroids

2010-08-06T21:35:00.009-04:00

Back at the end of June, I visited the geographic center of New York City. It's a pleasant spot, under the elevated portion of the J. The summertime afternoon light filters down, and bounces off the brightly colored signs and storefronts that line the long run of Broadway. Right at the corner, there's a classic Fenced Lot.

If you need an excuse to see it for yourself, here's a good one: it's part of Neil Freeman's Centroids and Asphalt, created for the Elastic City series of walks. Freeman's work, often with GIS and graphics software, is generated from the difficult-to-see geographic, historic, and material data that compose the structures and streets of cities. The large scale patterns and forms that Freeman finds here are somehow comfortingly familiar and displacingly beautiful at the same time.

(All Streets, Centered, Chicago, by Neil Freeman)

Neil's walk integrates these same concerns: material flow, plant and animal life, social history, and organizational geometry - all in real world terms, all within a few blocks of central Brooklyn.

The best thing about this exploration is that it's conducted *with* the walk's participants, rather than *to* them. A session in front of a rowhouse, listing the inputs and outputs of one specific building, had us all speculating about the difference between a private monopoly and a public utility, privileges and rights, discrete deliveries and continuous flows ...

As Elastic City's founder, Todd Shalom, says in this interview with Neil and Urban Omnibus:

"Walking tours bore me– that’s what podcasts are for. In contrast to traditional walking tours, which seem to re-tell somebody’s or some group’s past experience through data and facts, Elastic City walks strive for a more embodied experience in the present moment. These walks offer to widen the perspectives for participants."

Neil's walk will be held a few more times throughout the end of the summer. There's one tomorrow.

Some Notes

2010-08-02T18:16:00.001-04:00

2010-08-02 16.18.20, originally uploaded by ske765book.

More with less: managerial and visionary expertise to examine existing inventories, find efficiencies, and build consensus around reconfiguration.

We like cheap because we like the aesthetics of efficiency.

Moving between disciplines requires a special kind of work in translation and metaphor.

Small and/or weird, and/or free

“Kill the brand, transfer the equity.”

Using default , conservative language to reinforce search engine results, talking to machines, not humans.

“In the bubble”

“Actionable”

“Mission Driven”

Show us what we are and we tell you it’s wrong, we want to be seen as the kind of thing that we aspire to.

Show us who we think we are (Show us what we want to be).

Means over Ends: We draw something that looks cool, without remembering that it looks cool because it’s rare, and it’s rare because it’s expensive. When the time comes to figure out the implementation, we talk ourselves out of it because of the expense and difficulty.

In house labor is cheaper than field labor.

“This is unique, this is a parking garage in Kansas City.” “Do you like it?” “Yeah, it’s different.”

Different variation of a theme: discrete elements hung on an abstract diagram. Switching back and forth between levels, accepting givens and then exploding them to modify them at a global level. No, exploding is different, exploding is “make unique”, embedding something in the world at the next lower level. Editing the rules is fundamentally different, jumping one level up. Model lines and symbolic lines, an overlay of cognition back onto perception. You need a limited reference space (with a scale, conventions, etc.) in order to create and manipulate *stuff*.

We present the big ideas and people either decide they like them or not, then we spend two hours talking about details and politics of parking or carpets or something.

“Slipping” in reference to a deadline implies the future is a pit, an event as something hanging on the edge, slipping down. An indefinite delay or cancellation as a bottomless drop, like falling up into the sky …

These projects generate collateral eddies and flows, that are sometimes tangential to the primary direction, and sometimes swell up and swamp the original vector.

“My favorite reports.”

Ancient Magical Invocation of Doom: “Okay, we’re done, all we have to do now is print.”

“That way we’re improving student life, which was our fourth priority! Oh wait, that’s our third priority, increasing storage space was our fourth.”

Object --> #^# <-- Field

Less new construction, more internal rearrangement – phasing, planning, and adaptive reuse.

Thinking Small.

“They don’t learn to be better designers, they learn to be better operators.”

“Openness to an open-ended process.”

Those moments in meetings where people say: “what do we do next?”

Sphären_a

2010-07-07T19:51:00.002-04:00

Sphären_a, originally uploaded by ske765book.

Just a quick update to point at a new collection of my drawing and photography work assembled on Cargo Collective: link. Those following same here will see a few new things.

Also, there's a tumblr that I finally started using: 7UM6L5

Bigger and better news soon ...

Adaptive Reuse

2010-07-03T14:12:00.003-04:00

I'm thrilled to have an article in the current issue of the ACM's Interactions Magazine: Adaptive Reuse: Things, Containers, and Streets in the Architecture of the Social Web. Many thanks to Contributing Editor Molly Steenson for assistance and advice.

From at least the advent of the homepage, the words used to describe online places have been explicitly architectural and urban. If online organizational structures and real-world architecture have anything in common, this set of similarities has nothing to do with the qualities of form, space, and material that are usually appreciated in buildings. To speak in terms of information architecture, or cyberspace, is inadequate to describe the ways in which all of these structures, built or unbuilt, are produced and sustained by the social and economic systems that surround them.

The piece is, in many ways, a companion to an older article, from 2006, written as the result of a semester long research project in social media, enclosure, and architectures of control: "You must be logged in to do that!":

One does not escape the physical body into a noncorporeal cyberspace as a jailed man escapes from a prison into the wide world. If a body is recomposed as information, it is all the more subject to the specialized techniques of control: distributed surveillance, data aggregation, and the continuous modulation of production and access.

In the newer piece for Interactions, I'm particularly grateful to be able to reference some unpublished work by two friends and colleagues: Kio Stark's recasting of 'users' as 'constituents' returns the production of place into a more humanistic and democratic context; and Eric Leshinsky's usage of the term 'cultural containers' condenses the essential isomorphisms in the way spatial enclosure operates, both online and off.

2010-04-27 12.02.08.jpg

2010-04-28T23:32:00.001-04:00

2010-04-27 12.02.08.jpg, originally uploaded by sevensixfive.

But Today We Collect Gizmos

2010-03-17T22:11:00.015-04:00

"To understand the advertisements which appear in the New Yorker or Gentry, one must have taken a course in Dublin literature, read a Time popularizing article on cybernetics, and have majored in Higher Chinese Philosophy and Cosmetics"
- Alison and Peter Smithson, on advertising

"Its function was to bring instant order or human comfort into a situation which had previously been an undifferentiated mess."

- Reyner Banham, on gizmos

To respond to a problem, it's necessary to bring some kind of model to bear on it, and be ready to discard or change that model if it isn't working. A gizmo is a temporary, easily available, means of organizing an undifferentiated continuum. We collect gizmos because we need to bring many models to bear on the problems we are presented with.

Underneath lies that basic confusion about the ~~American~~ Network landscape - is it a wilderness, or a paradise? For us it would be the objects on the beaches, the piece of paper blowing about the street, the throw-away object and the pop package.

The landscape is informational, the desert is networked. If it is all constructed, or at least made from parts of constructs, the ground can be mined for patterns. Even the navigational gizmos themselves are little else but temporary constellations within social, material, and informational networks. There is the persistent rumor that the skins of the Powerbook G4 and the Guggenheim Bilbao were only feasible to produce during a global dip in titanium prices, after Russia flooded the market in the late 90s. Tablet computers are nothing if not devices to sort through the tangle of text and publishing outlets available, and bring reading back under some kind of manageable control.

Ordinary life is receiving a powerful impulse from a new source. Where thirty years ago architects found in the field of ~~the popular arts~~ mechanical engineering technique and formal stimuli, today we are being edged out of our traditional role by the new phenomena of ~~popular arts advertising~~ interdisciplinary consulting.

Unlike the singular, algorithmic machine, which allows only the variation of parameters, the gizmo is multiple, modifiable, hackable, even (especially) disposable, it is in permanent beta. It is a heuristic, not an algorithm: not the be-all, but the good-enough. The minimum of skill is required in its installation and use, and it is independent of any physical or social infrastructure beyond that which can be ordered from a catalogue and delivered to its prospective user.

The application of a heuristic gizmo is an act of pattern recognition - the intuition that some set of undifferentiated circumstances is isomorphic to some other set that was previously encountered, even if the context was wildly different. A City is Not a Tree, but a maze is, or at least certain types of them are, very much like trees. Simply connected mazes are topologically identical to trees, or in another sense, circles. Mazes of this type can be navigated with a heuristic called the Right Hand Rule: tracing your right hand along the wall of a simply connected maze, you will eventually lead yourself out.

If a maze is connected in 3 dimensions, or is disjoint, other methods must be brought into play, like the Pledge Algorithm, the Random Mouse, or the Recursive Backtracker. Name it, then we'll know what it is. What if you don't know what kind of maze you're in? What if you don't even know that you're in a maze at all? The field of metaheuristics is concerned with ways of determining which heuristic is applicable to a given situation. It turns out that the best way of doing this is often trial and error, with a comprehensive collection of gizmos to draw from. Someone's got to decide whether to hit the Black Box with Maslow's Hammer or Occam's Razor.

It has been said that things hardly "exist" before the fine artist has made use of them, they are simply part of the unclassified background material against which we pass our lives. The application of gizmo metaheuristics requires a certain kind of approach to interdisciplinary work and expertise: try it first, then read the manual. Like a western tourist using chopsticks, there is an attitude of being cheerfully out of one's depth, but willing to learn, and eager to add this new technique to the repertoire and impress the folks back home.

Why certain folk art objects, historical styles, or industrial artifacts and methods become important at a particular moment cannot easily be explained. Techniques, when named, abstracted to their simplest form, and packaged up (Sears catalogue style), seem to want to travel. What can we learn about sustainability from the closed-loop space colony ecosystem diagrams of the the 1970s? How can we talk to civil engineers about the emerging trend of micropractices in stormwater management? A collection of gizmo metaheuristics enables a more fluid code-switching, and a more useful exchange of knowledge within and between disciplines.

Gropius wrote a book on grain silos,

Le Corbusier one on aeroplanes,

And Charlotte Periand brought a new

~~object~~ Gundam to the office every morning,

But today we collect ~~ads~~ gizmos.

#lgnlgn

#endofarchitecturetexts

#remixrevisitremaster

The Plant: Inputs & Outputs

2010-02-23T19:59:00.002-05:00

The Plant: Inputs & Outputs, originally uploaded by ske765book.

The Plant is a sustainable strategic development masterplan proposal for Baltimore. At the the building scale, The Plant is a mixed use prefab construction, containing a small meeting, office, and retail space for a nonprofit cultural institution, with apartments above. At the scale of the block, The Plant generates surplus energy for its neighbors, food from an onsite garden, and improved water quality. Income from The Plant, along with added equity from the block’s other properties, is able to effect change at the municipal level, helping fund a prefab construction supply startup, which is then able to export new techniques and technologies to other postindustrial cities in the larger region.

The Plant was created for the Baltimore Bioneers Conference in the fall of 2008, by the Visionary Green Design and Development Panel: Lisa Ferretto, Eric Leshinsky, Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson, Prescott Gaylord, Thibault Manekin, & Fred Scharmen

Click Here for a fullsized version of this diagram.

Click Here for more information.

(see also)

Crossposted from D:center Baltimore for Manifesto/Manifest.

DSC07916

2010-02-13T13:42:00.001-05:00

DSC07916, originally uploaded by sevensixfive.

Triangular voronoi grid distortion with magnets - this will likely be the last of the Voronoi series for a while. View the rest on the Baker Award site, where there are only two days left to browse and vote.

Procedural Buff

2010-01-24T15:08:00.009-05:00

[[This is a late entry to the 2008 call for mural proposals for Eastern Avenue in Baltimore]]

This project rewrites the creation of a neighborhood mural as an urban game, blurring the lines between graffiti, public art, and community interaction.

When the mural is added to or modified (1), the artist is awarded points. The changes are detected by a webcam (2), and the image is uploaded to the online archive (3). The handheld devices of the other players are notified (4), and given information about the location, color, and configuration of the pixels (5) to update. The first players to get to the mural and make the updates are awarded more points in the game.

[[based on a photo by Napalm Filled Tires on flickr]]

"There has always been one rule in the game that never falters, dont go over your history no matter how old or wack. I cant imagine going over a Vinny throw up just because, it is a known known here in NYC in which we try to adhere to, let the buff or time erase it, not to say toys dont kill shit but established writers know better." - MARE 139, South Bronx

[[Banksy vs. Robbo image credits: (1), (2), (3), (4)]]

The project outsources the production of the mural to the local graffiti and street artists in a combination of social network, internet archive, and street game. The mural is the constantly changing result of the interactions between the artists involved. The ephemerality of this kind of urban artwork is foregrounded, and the tendency toward competition between different artists and different styles is systematized and neutralized by the gamelike aspects. This is a mural that can never be vandalized.

Traditionally, the only neutral way that the wall can be refreshed is with a new coat of paint laid down by the property owner or law enforcement: "the buff". This project takes the elements of graffiti and street art that are usually deployed as deterrants: surveilance and concealment, and redeploys them as newly integrated components of a larger system, blurring the line between rivalry and collaboration.

[[for more on Banksy vs. Robbo, see Gaia's writeup here]]

A jpeg is worth 1000kb

2010-01-16T18:28:00.004-05:00

ZORK, Colossal Cave Adventure, and the landscape of the text-based adventure game.

[[This essay first appeared in Gary Kachadourian's print zine "A Brief Survey of Video Game Landscapes"]]

Between its release in 1981 and 1986, the text adventure game ZORK sold almost 400,000 copies, making it the best selling title for its parent company, Infocom. ZORK is not strictly a *video* game, there are no images in it, only words. At 92 kilobytes, the game file is about 1/10th the size of a single still frame from a contemporary game with full motion video. But inside all of this text is an entire world, navigated by the player with simple commands in plain english: "open the window" "go up the stairs" "pick up the knife". The imagery exists within the player's mind, helped along with occasionally evocative text from the narrator:

>LOOK
Dam Base
You are at the base of Flood Control Dam #3, which looms above you and to
the north. The River Frigid is flowing by here. Across the river are the
White Cliffs, which seem to form a giant wall stretching from north to
south along the east shore of the river as it winds its way downstream.
There is an inflated boat here.

The game replaces the visual landscape with its own description, and this has been cited by many as the key to its longlived success and sales record. As computers became more and more sophisticated during the 1980s, graphics became more and more complex, and older games quickly looked outdated and obsolete. ZORK and other text based adventures never relied on images, and so never seemed stale.

This reliance on the verbal over the visual is exploited by the game's designers, clues to the puzzles are embedded in the things the narrator points out, and ambiguity is turned into confusion in some of the game's more difficult to navigate portions. In the maze, 16 rooms have an identical description: "This is part of a maze of twisty little passages, all alike." This sameness is effective blindness, and even though there are vital objects hidden here, the player is forced to grope through on trial and error.

The phrase "twisty little passages" is a reference to Colossal Cave Adventure, a mainframe based text adventure game that was the freely distributed predecesor and inspiration for ZORK. Created by two computer scientists, Don Woods and Will Crowther, Colossal Cave Adventure included its own 'all alike' maze, described in the same way. There was also a complementary 'all different' maze, using almost all possible systematic permutations of the phrase:

Little maze of twisting passages
Little maze of twisty passages
Little twisty maze of passages
Maze of little twisting passages
Maze of little twisty passages
Maze of twisting little passages
Maze of twisty little passages
Twisting little maze of passages
Twisting maze of little passages
Twisty little maze of passages
Twisty maze of little passages

This genre of game was created by and for computer scientists, Will Crowther, in an interview from 1994, speculates: "And why did people enjoy it? Because it's exactly the kind of thing that computer programmers do. They're struggling with an obstinate system that can do what you want but only if you can figure out the right thing to say to it"

The game is a landscape, but this isn't a landscape that can be appreciated visually, it can only be apprehended and understood structurally and functionally. The similarity of the game's structure to the flowcharts used by computer scientists is obvious, it is a network of nodes with paths between them that control how the landscape can be moved through. This resonance is underscored by the fact that, at the same time as the original version of Colossal Cave Adventure in 1975, Will Crowther was working for a defense contractor, helping to build ARPAnet, the networked computer system that would later become the internet.

Will Crowther was also an avid caver. In the 1970s, he was part of a team mapping undocumented portions of Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. Using surveyors techniques, nodal points are connected by clear paths in a network, this bare bones structure of vector lines is then fleshed out with the specific qualities of various rooms and passages in drawing. Portions of Colossal Cave Adventure are said to be so similar in structure to portions of the actual cave that first time visitors familiar with the game can navigate easily.

ZORK didn't come with a map, early players drew their own. The smallest complete map available on the internet today, is, at 480 kilobytes, about five times the size of the game itself. After 1983, Infocom finally released its own map for ZORK, the key shows the five types of passages that connect the nodes: "Normal Passaway, One-way Passageway, Narrow Passageway (baggage limit), and Passageway returning to room of origin".

Text based adventure games work because landscapes can be understood in ways that have little to do with vision. It isn't the specific form of any one object or space that is memorable here, it is the structure of the underlying system. But this disconnect between form and structure is bridged when it is understood that the structure itself has a form, a branching self-similar network that is as intricate as any graphic representation.

The landscape in ZORK is what it does, and it can only be appreciated and unlocked by interacting with it. The keys to the puzzles are often found when the player takes control over the same kind of network flow that generates the landscape, finding ways to open and close new connections between points. The aesthetic is the product of the constant mix up between the operational and the picturesque, between infrastructure and ruin, between interaction and observation:

"You are standing on the top of the Flood Control Dam #3, which was quite a tourist attraction in times far distant. There are paths to the north, south, and west, and a scramble down. The sluice gates on the dam are closed. Behind the dam, there can be seen a wide reservoir. Water is pouring over the top of the now abandoned dam.
There is a control panel here, on which a large metal bolt is mounted. Directly above the bolt is a small green plastic bubble."

[[Much of the background information on Colossal Cave Adventure was found in Dennis G. Jerz's excellent essay "Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther's Original "Adventure" in Code and in Kentucky"]] [[The original game is available for free download from Infocom here]]

DSC07660

2010-01-12T22:04:00.002-05:00

DSC07660, originally uploaded by sevensixfive.

Series of prints to be shown at The Depot, 1728 N. Charles St., Thursday, Jan. 28, 9 pm.

It's the Monkey Hustle Art Show, check the facebook invite here.

This work is based on drawings that can be seen at the Baker Artist Award site here (only three days left to nominate yourself over there, btw).

... also, check them out on tiny apparatus.

(and here)

Losing My Edge: Architectural Informatics (and others)

2009-12-30T18:06:00.006-05:00

(Disclaimer: This is quick and unconsidered)

It is fascinating to watch other disciplines inch closer and closer to the territory that was once claimed by architects. As the profession of architecture continues to shrink, the ground that is ceded does not remain unclaimed for long, and there is new and interesting territory to be discovered at our borders that we no longer seem to have the resources to explore.

Sustainability Consulting, Strategic Masterplanning, Landscape Architecture - all of these other disciplines are very interested in architecture: its literature, its history, and its scope of services. Now add to that the relatively new fields of Service and Interaction Design. Recent articles here and here (and here(and here!)) have all implied that there is a strange relationship between services, distributed computing and cities, with a parallel strangeness in the design of interactions and the design of buildings.

Despite having several friends who are actively working in these fields, I admit that it is sometimes very difficult to understand what it is that they actually do (besides organize, attend, and speak at conferences). Many of them have backgrounds in architecture, and almost all of them are avidly reading Jane Jacobs, Christopher Alexander, Archigram, Situationists - all of this neglected literature from the 60s and 70s that architects themselves had almost forgotten, in our (perhaps bubble-powered) accelerated criticality (and the inevitable post).

So there are all of these people moving in this direction, and there are a few general observations that are worth making about that:

- They seem to think that they have something to learn from the theory and practice of architecture, so let's help them figure out what that is.

- They are creating their own discourse from scratch, outside of academia. Architectural discourse has been supported by schools for so long that it is difficult to remember any other way. The fields of Service and Interaction Design seem to be supported by something more like the feudal corporate patronage structure that architects relied on in the Renaissance. That's very interesting, no? Not the least because despite any purse or apron strings linking them to the corporate world, they still seem to want to talk about ideas, even some of the more out-there quasi-marxist corners of critical theory that academic architects like to frequent. That's kind of fun, right?

- They have no history. Though some might disagree, this is probably a good thing for now (but not for much longer).

- They bring an entrepreneurial startup culture with them. A lot of the work in this area is coming directly out of computer science by way of the old dot.com and web 2.0 pathways, but the thing is, these aren't the casualties, they are the survivors. Many of the people involved with these offices have lived through several busts, and they are thriving. They know about venture capital, public offerings, and bootstrapping. They have business plans. This is kind of exciting, yeah?

For Archinect's '09 predictions last year, I hoped that there would be this massive flow outward from architecture to other disciplines: underemployed architects as secret agents, implanting methodologies into other fields from the inside out. It hasn't happened. Instead, we've lost even more ground to others who are doing the things we do, and it's like the song says: "... to better-looking people with better ideas and more talent ... and they're actually really, really nice." They want to be friends, they want to talk about cities and buildings.

So in the New Year, let's all spend more time hanging out: architects can trade some of our thoughts on cultural context, historicity, and the public realm for some of you all's ideas about agility, narrative, strategery, and business planning, and we'll all hopefully learn a lot.

RC V-D_s

2009-12-20T15:26:00.001-05:00

RC V-D_s, originally uploaded by ske765book.

Circles x Voronoi/Delaunay. This will be the last of the circles drawings for a little while. The complete series is on the Baker Artist Award site here.

RC-1a

2009-12-14T01:10:00.001-05:00

Untitled-1a, originally uploaded by ske765book.

Ziger/Snead's Classroom of the Future

2009-12-03T12:15:00.006-05:00

I've just posted a medium-sized writeup of my office's entry to Architecture for Humanity's Classroom of the Future challenge. This was a fun quick case study, based on the principle that every element should serve at least two functions (or even better, three or four), and that the whole piece should act as one integral machine, made of off-the-shelf components.

A Brief Sketch Concerning Monsters

2009-11-30T22:45:00.014-05:00

Given that there are things out there, in the spaces between concept and matter and social messiness, we recognize the Monster as distinct from (in an incomplete list) the Diagram, the Machine, and the Ghost, in the following ways:

A Monster is a complex, hybrid, semi-autonomous thing whose actions are unpredictable, but interpretable. Monsters can behave destructively if their motives are misunderstood, but if a Monster is seen as an actor within a larger, unfolding story or narrative, and if the maker is able to recognize and work within that same myth, then the unpredictablilty of the Monster becomes productive. Examples include Frankenstein (yes, that's his name), Godzilla, and the Sea Serpent. It is primarily a set of agencies.

[[[A small piece of a larger thing, more later, but quick references include David Simon ("The institutions are the new Greek Gods"), H.P. Lovecraft ("vast, cool and indifferent"), Perspecta 40 {who got it wrong, but more on that to follow} ("Contemporary architecture is in many ways a monstrous thing."), Bruno Latour, ("If the demon is such a terrible threat, it is because it divides in two, if the demos is such a welcome solution, it is because it divides in two."), ZORK ("It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue."), and of course, k-punk ("To call capital a 'self-engendering monster' is not at all to speak metaphorically.")]]]

Baker Artist Awards 2010

2009-11-19T08:21:00.001-05:00

Voronoi Square Magnets, originally uploaded by sevensixfive.

Putting this out on all channels: there's now a pretty complete collection of my drawing and installation work on the Baker Artist website: link. Regular followers of this site will see a few things I've posted before, but it's great to have it all in one place and arranged in way that (kind of) makes sense. Check it out, and if you like it, vote for it. (The whole site is great actually, tons of amazing work, and a sophisticated interface and backend)

For more on the above drawing, see this explanation.

Constellation Energy

2009-11-16T20:12:00.009-05:00

(photos by Eric Leshinsky)

This is an installation for Axis Alley, an open air exhibit in Baltimore, curated by Sarah Doherty in the fall of 09. The site for the show is a nameless (literally) alley street between Hargrove and Calvert, running north/south for only three blocks in the Lower Charles Village neighborhood. The majority of the houses backing up to the alley are vacant, and most of these are owned by the city of Baltimore. The alley, and the backyards of the houses, are visited by drug users, prostitutes with clients, the homeless, and anyone else looking for a temporary quiet spot off the busy north/south streets that cut through these blocks.

The lights are solar powered pool floats, they comprise a light detecting diode, a light emitting diode, a small solar panel, and a battery. During the day, they soak up sunlight, at night, they give off a soft blue glow, more atmospheric than functional. Another series of solar powered LEDs was reconstructed from a set of christmas lights. These were taken apart, soldered back together with extra wire, and threaded through the mat of wild vegetation in the yard, forming another network on the ground.

The title of the project, Constellation Energy, is a nod to the local power company, and also a kind of personal shorthand to help think about ideas of sustainability and autonomy. In an imaginary green world, where every household can use their own energy, grow their own food, and recycle their own waste - where every unit is potentially a closed loop like each of these lights, what are the motivators that bring the nodes together?

A lot of this was heavily influenced, conceptually and visually, by an older piece from Bryan Boyer that I've never been able to get out of my head: Form Follows Fable. Boyer suggests that it's the power of stories in the cultural imagination that forms and reforms the network:

"To be comfortable telling stories is to desire a shared existence, a "we" amongst the autonomous stars, that is OK with continual re-invention and happy to be part of multiple constellations."

(image by Bryan Boyer)

On the site, other things got linked into the network: the big Ailanthus tree, the powerlines and cable TV wires that criscrossed the airspace overhead and clung opportunistically to the masonry walls, the other vegetation that intertwined itself in turn with all of that, forming fat braids with the cords which were then wrapped with copper mounting wire from the glowing spheres, the vines that sprout leaves to catch the sun and then bud off into brightly colored berries.

I never saw the space finished and glowing, these photos at the head of this post were taken by a friend. This is a project that was complete for less than 24 hours. Sarah, the curator, was watching me wire the lowest light to a chainlink fence when she predicted: "someone's going to come along and smash that with a brick". By the next evening, that's exactly what had happened, and by the time I made it out to the site to replace it, all of the globes wtihin easy (even some in not-so-easy) reach had been stolen. The copper was cleanly snipped with wirecutters. Someone had even taken the small solar panel for the lights on the ground. By the time I had returned again with replacement lights, mounting them all overhead with a ladder, the feral vegetation that sheltered the smaller lights had been weedwhacked, short fragments of wire and broken LEDs were mixed everywhere with shredded Paulownia.

(photo by Sarah Doherty)

Other friends pointed out the unintentional resonances with the human environment that I had overlooked: these vacant houses had likely already been hit by scrappers, looters who strip houses of all the wiring and piping that can be ripped from the walls. In that context, copper wire wasn't the best choice as a mounting system. Maybe worse - the blue lights, again, unintentionally, looked a lot like the iconic blue light police cameras that are all over the city. These are known colloquially as 'blueberries' and are so recognizable that people base halloween costumes on them.

This is all well. It's a space that is probably someone's outdoor temporary home. In one sense, this unasked-for light, however pretty, is the light that invites destruction. It is the thing that effects change in the environment that then asks for reaction and change in kind. If it can't survive that reaction, then it doesn't deserve to be in public. And in still another sense, as these lights start to act like plants - soaking in sunlight, clinging to and intertwining with their environment, it's appropriate that they are then treated like plants - they are trimmed, clipped, and even harvested.

As interesting as it is to think about iconic (or even atmospheric) objects dissolving into the networks of formal resonance and systemic connection that create and sustain them, it's useful to remember that there are always other contexts and networks present, too, overlapping and invisible, but no less relevant than the ones we seek to address directly and dialogue with.

[[For more on Axis Alley, see the flickr photo pool here, or the Baltimore Sun slideshow here and story here, for more outdoor installation art, see Invasive Species]]

Circles

2009-10-30T23:13:00.004-04:00

This is an open question: What is this fractal? It's a method for filling a 2D plane with circles in an orderly way - circles made of circles, all the way down. There are published examples of similar systems, like the Apollonian Gasket, the Kleinian Groups, Indra's Pearls, but I've never seen this particular arrangement before, and I've been looking for over ten years. Is this a trivial variation on something already known? Or a new and undiscovered thing? I have no idea. I found it while doodling in math class.

As a teenager in the 90s, my brain was warped and wrinkled by rave flyers, computer graphics, and pop science. I remember zooming in and out of the Julia Set on an Amiga 500 while still in middle school. In high school, these patterns were reinforced with heavy doses of techno music, Mondo 2000, and chaos theory. Hence the embarassing caption to the drawing above, which was made in college calculus class. At the University of Maryland, they wouldn't let anyone enter the architecture major without a B or higher in calculus. It took me three tries. If someone had sat me down and said "look, calculus is all about the always-imossible reconciliation between the grid and the curve, a constant becoming that has to get infinitismally small before its realization," then, I might've got it the first time round.

When the architecture faculty introduced us to Autocad, one of the first things I did with it was to try drawing this thing accurately. The basic rule is to draw a circle around every intersection, which creates four more intersections, and so four more circles, always smaller than the last round. What I couldn't figure out in sketchbooks was whether or not the space left over would be circular too, and whether the centers of the circles were really precisely at the intersections, or shifted slightly. These questions were related - shifting the centers made for circular voids, but I couldn't decide if that was breaking too many rules, or if the whole thing really hung together like it seemed to.

The trick that made it work was an inversion - in Autocad, it's impossible to draw the filled circles around the intersections first, without knowing where the centers really are, but it's possible to draw the voids first and work backwards from there. One of Autocad's many methods for drawing circles is as a three point snap. For any three points, there is one and only one circle that hits all of them - circumcircles, again. And luckily, one of the Object Snap (OSNAP!) settings is tangent to a curve; this means that you can easily draw a circle that's tangent to three other curves, without doing the math. Not that this drawing was easy, the image at the head of this post is a print from a .dwg with over 10,000 objects, the iterations are 9 levels deep.

This view of a hand drawn version shows the two types of circles, filled and void. The whole pattern could be made from either all filled, or all empty; the other kind is emergent from the constant reiteration of the one. The trick of drafting the thing by hand is again all about finding the right tools, and then reckoning. For the larger circles here, I improvised with a thumbtack and a piece of wire, the intermediate were drawn with a compass, the smaller were done with a circle template (always tricky to find one at the right radius), and the very smallest were filled in freehand.

The hardest part of building the thing by hand is to find a center and a radius that will hit all of the adjacent circles at a tangent. In these drawings, I'm trying again and again to find some kind of geometric or proportional rule that will locate the next center point, and while there were a few promising patterns at the larger scale, they all broke down eventually, leaving trial and error as the only way through, but stll it works. That's why this is partially a plea to anyone else who might have more quantitative information about these geometries: help put this in context. What kind of thing is it?

(for more process drawings, click here)

Closed Loop

2009-10-20T21:49:00.001-04:00

closed loop, originally uploaded by ske765book.

Closed loop ecosystem diagram for a Stanford Torus space colony of 10,000. From T.A. Heppenheimer's Colonies in Space.

Mapping the D.center

2009-10-13T21:22:00.006-04:00

Organizational mappings for the D.center Baltimore, produced in the spring of '09 by Jillian Erhardt and Ryan LeCluyse, from MICA's Center for Design Practice.

Crossposted from the D.center blog, posting it here partly because I really like this set of diagrams, and I think they look great lined up in thumbnail form. It's interesting to note that, as is fitting for a quasiexistent entity, operating through a kind of applied decentralization, these diagrams are almost all reducible to some form of directional graph. And as such, they remind me of the work of Mark Lombardi, about whom I've been reading a lot lately, more to follow on that.

Design Convo #12: BIKES

2009-10-03T16:46:00.000-04:00

Please join us for Design Conversation #12 : BIKES this Thursday evening.

Open discussion on frame building, bicycle design, bicycle infrastructure, bike collectives, bike lanes, and all things cycling. A/V system available for impromptu presentations. Free; cash bar. See attached.

Thursday October 8 2009
The Windup Space - 10 W North Ave @ Charles Street
6:30 pm - 8:30 pm

Questions? ben.stone@gmail.com | thewindupspace@gmail.com | blog.dcenterbaltimore.com

Please note that DC 12 has been shifted from the usual first Wednesday of the month to the first Thursday.

Analog Voronoi Grid Distortion with Magnets

2009-09-26T19:41:00.002-04:00

Using a magnetically distorted grid of washers as input sites for the Voronoi diagram.

(See also: How to: Draw the Voronoi Diagram)

2009-09-20 21.01.44.jpg

2009-09-20T21:07:00.001-04:00

2009-09-20 21.01.44.jpg, originally uploaded by sevensixfive.

How to: Draw the Voronoi Diagram

2009-09-07T20:43:00.010-04:00

As has been written here before, Voronoi diagrams, as a geometric model are fascinating because they can be used to describe almost literally everything: from cell phone networks to radiolaria, at every scale: from quantum foam to cosmic foam. Even the regular lattices and solids, cubes, tetrahedra, and the ways in which they combine, can all be seen as special cases of three dimensional Voronoi. It's hard not to get mystical about it, but it's really just the contemporary equivalent of the endless ideal gridded space of modernism or the renaissance, just more exotic and malleable. Geometry is Culture.

Drawing Voronoi diagrams by hand has renewed my interest in the stuff. There are lots of scripts out there for making instant vector crystal foam in just about any modeling or CAD platform, but it's more interesting for me right now to slow it down, take it step by step, and really try to understand the geometries involved. More a heuristic than an algorithm, executing it demands and reinforces the kind of zoned out close attention that almost becomes the whole point of drawing in the first place. The artifact that you get at the end it is just an unexpected bonus: the physical record left by the process of thinking out loud on paper. Below is a rough pseudocode (thanks, mike!) for building it up from a set of points.

(1) Input Sites (2) Connect Nearest Neighbors (shortest line wins) (3) Find Center Points
(4) Draw Perpendicular Bisectors (5) Trace Cells (6) voila

(1) The input points, step one, are called sites, labeled here A, B, C, etc.

(2) The next step is to connect the sites to all of their nearest neighbors without making a line that crosses another. This is known technically as the Delauney Triangulation, and it's maybe the most difficult part. One way to do it might be by brute force - connect every site to every other site, make a true all-to-all rhizomatic meshwork, and then start deleting lines that are too long. This is how a machine might attack the problem, but it becomes too hard for a human to execute when the number of sites jumps into the double digits. Another algorithmic method is to start with a test triangle of sites and draw their circumcircle, the circle that hits all three sites, rejecting the triangle if the circle contains another site within it.

Image via wikipedia

This also takes too long, and circumcircles are hard to draw, so I found a method that's faster, and still mostly accurate. Since no lines on the Delauney triangulation can cross, just eyeball it until you run into a condition as in the above, where you have to decide if FD or AE is correct, the shorter line always wins. This is obvious in the example, but sometimes this needs some careful measuring in the field.

(3) Step three is to find and mark the centerpoint of every line on the Delauney graph.

(4) The fourth step is to draw the perpendicular bisector for each Delauney line. This is where careful accuracy, in finding the centerpoints, and in drawing a tight 90 degree angle, pays off. If everything has been done correctly, there will always be three lines converging at a point, unless the input sites are on a perfectly regular rectangular grid. Drawing the last line of the three and watching it land exactly where it's supposed to is extremely satisfying. Watching it miss can mean going back all the way to step two and flipping the Delauney graph for the triangle. Some mistakes are instructive, reminding you to take your time and think about the moves, but some are more interesting, for being completely inexplicable. A few places in these drawings, I've run into conditions that should work out, but just don't: evidence of some hidden monster in the process, a flaw in the heuristic, or a breakdown of the pseudocode.

(5) The fifth step is to retrace the outline of each Voronoi cell from the perpendicular bisectors. There will be one cell for every site, and at the end, each cell is just the set of all surface area points that are closer to its site than any of the other sites, as illustrated in the last panel: A' -> A, B' -> B, etc.

(6) Sit back and congratulate yourself while contemplating your hard earned tangle of fat distorted honeycomb.

I've found in practice that it's best to use different colors for the input sites, the Delauney lines, and the bisectors, unless driving yourself completely crosseyed mad is something you have the time and inclination to do. Blue and red mechanical pencil leads are pretty easy to get. I made this drawing to practice, using a pepper grinder above the drafting table to get random input sites:

The wall drawing below was made for the Current Gallery's Abandon Ship show. It measures about 3' x 5'. The input sites here were the roughly patched holes and marks left by all the previous exhibits and shows in the space's three year existence as a gallery. Before that, the building was a chocolate factory. This piece will be demolished along with the rest of the show when (if) plans move ahead to build a hotel on the site. I was very glad to get the chance to do a wall drawing, having just visited again, for the second time, Sol LeWitt's ephemeral 'Drawing Series—Composite, Part I–IV, #1–24, A+B' at Dia Beacon. These pieces foreground the disconnect and shifts between the different types of time at play here: the almost instantaneous time of conception, the time spent to absorb the system, process the clues, unlock and understand the method, and the implied slow time spent to execute the drawing itself: a person, on a scaffold, pulling graphite repeatedly across painted gypsum. I wonder if the assistants were well paid.

The five hours or so it took to carry out the Current Gallery piece were well spent: not an all nighter, but a late nighter. Friends brought food and beer, with other people coming and going, cutting holes in the building's floor, plastering the backside with xeroxed drawings, and making Seussian maggots crawl from the walls and ceiling.

[[Edit: If anyone else has tried this, put some pics of it on the web and post a link in the comments]]

[[[Edit 2: for more, see also: Analog Voronoi Grid Distortion with Magnets]]]

View Night Small

2009-08-25T20:42:00.001-04:00

View Night Small, originally uploaded by ske765book.

Installation proposal for Axis Alley

Anatomy of a Container Ship

2009-08-22T00:02:00.001-04:00

Anatomy of a Container Ship, originally uploaded by ske765book.

3000 years worth of Urban Form: A (too brief and easy) History

2009-08-13T15:25:00.003-04:00

(partly from notes on the Urban Development as Counterinsurgency lecture by John Duda of the Baltimore Free School)

Grids as a simple way to control the landscape – Stars as a spiky outer shell – Cracks as the fabric within the shell is compressed and densified – Networks as this dense fabric is reopened and ventilated – Flows for the density to drain further – Softness of the regulatory and fiscal pressures that continue to drive the flow – Holes open up as the fabric is vacated … and now, the dominant formal strategy seems to be all about the infilling or refilling of those holes, along with the repurposing of the scrap left behind.

Ailanthus

2009-08-02T23:05:00.001-04:00

Ailanthus, originally uploaded by ske765book.

Artisanal Parametrics

2009-07-26T14:13:00.004-04:00

The Baltimore Development Cooperative (not to be confused with the Baltimore Development Corporation) has just won the 2009 Janet & Walter Sondheim Prize. The award represents regional and national recognition, and more tangibly, $25,000 in cash.

That a loose collective of recent graduates, whose major work to date is a community garden on a squatted vacant lot, can walk away with a prestigious regional art prize speaks to the current excitement and confusion in art, architecture, landscape, and planning.

Since the irrational exuberance of the mid-late aughties has peaked and popped, we're now in the middle of the inevitable backlash. Fires in China and labor strife in Dubai have become easy metaphors for the descendancy of an explicately formal and digital aesthetic, and by extension, an economic order whose agenda interlocked with it. And so the rise of work that claims a more direct engagement with social, economic, and evironmental justice. See, for example, NYTimes critic Nicolai Ourossoff: Architecture: It Was Fun Till the Money Ran Out, or activist design advocate Cameron Sinclair's The Architect's Dilemma: The Architecture of Excess vs. an Architecture of Relevance.

These journalistic cliches and reductive dualisms are a sadly predictable oversimplification of some complex territory. This is a disservice to the discipline. We can have excess and relevance (and fun) in architecture, whether there's money around or not.

It's been interesting to watch a similar discussion play out locally around the BDC's Sondheim win, with some questioning the presentation of interdisciplinary community organizing as museum quality art, and others questioning the legitimacy of the group's social engagement in the first place.

The major piece in their BMA show, The Dome, is an artifact that suggests there's more space, and fun, at angles to these simple oppositions than might be apparent at first. Bruce Sterling, in a post about the SmartGeometry conference, highlights the question:

"What happens when parametric architecture gets too cheap and too easy? Karrie Jacobs wonders. I think I already know, but it’s nice to see the issue being raised here. Note that the cover of this month’s METROPOLIS is a “twenty-thousand-dollar house” made out of scrap. Is there a reason that isn’t parametric technokitsch scrap yet? Yes… because it isn’t 2015 yet."

The piece, aside from its stated function as a Cultural Container (it's available for any individual or group to book for almost any purpose), is interesting as example of a kind of Artisanal Parametrics, hand made from scrap, but with the recognizable influence of the algorithmically geometric and digital.

DSC06025a

2009-07-12T11:53:00.001-04:00

DSC06025a, originally uploaded by sevensixfive.

Voronoi/Delauney wall drawing at the Current Gallery's Abandon Ship Show. Michael Benevento as scale figure.

Abandon Ship at Current Gallery

2009-07-10T11:23:00.003-04:00

2009-07-09 20.39.13.jpg, originally uploaded by sevensixfive.

Abandon Ship! July 10 at Current
Abandon Ship Opening reception July 10, 7-10pm
Exhibition Dates: July 10 - Demolition, 2009, F-Su 11am - 3pm

MAYDAY MAYDAY MAYDAY... This is Current, Current, Current...Position 30 South Calvert Street, Baltimore, Maryland. Our vessel is going down! We require immediate assistance....All Hands on Deck!

Current Gallery, in conjunction with Off-Site Artscape, is proud to present Abandon Ship, an exhibition in preparation for the demolition of 30 South Calvert Street, curated by Michael Benevento, Monique Crabb, and Hans Petrich. For the past four years, Current has been a breeding ground for cultural production, opening onto countless collaborators, nourishing an ongoing conversation. Like a supernova before the collapse, we prepare for the building's demolition with an ongoing collaborative exhibition that embodies 30 South Calvert. Welcoming you moments before bulldozers consume the building, and we slither out the anus of the temporary shelter, like a colony of parasites discharged onto the city.

This is the last exhibition at 30 South Calvert, an ongoing collaborative installation, which will be demolished with the building (but not the last exhibition for Current).

Current Gallery is an artist-run gallery, studio, and performance space, located in downtown Baltimore. Operating since November 2004, we are committed to showcasing emerging artists and ideas.

Current Gallery
30 South Calvert Street
Baltimore Md 21202
www.currentspace.com

DC10_...

2009-07-01T12:28:00.001-04:00

DC10_..., originally uploaded by D:center Baltimore.

DSC05870a

2009-06-18T22:56:00.001-04:00

DSC05870a, originally uploaded by sevensixfive.

Port Covington: The Ghost of the Masterplan in Tinkerer's Paradise

2009-06-17T23:43:00.006-04:00

In 1898, the city of Baltimore subsidized the creation of the Western Maryland Railroad, intended as an alternative that would compete with the high prices of the Baltimore and Ohio line, which had also been co-founded by the city over 70 years earlier. The two networks ran side by side without overlapping to terminals on the South Baltimore peninsula, where they both unloaded coal from Appalachia to ships that would take it up down the East Coast.

Port Covington, the lower half of the South Baltimore peninsula, is today cut off from the rest of the city by Interstate 95. Historically, this site has always been a place with goods, people, and raw materials moving through it. Before an expansion of the city's boundaries in 1918, this was its southern limit. Light Street continued south to Brooklyn and Curtis Bay via a bridge that took off here.

Then, as now, the spaces on the ground between these lines of connection and transfer were largely forgotten and undeveloped. In the 19th century, this area was the backyard and back door to the city of Baltimore, and like any backyard, this was a place for recreation and storage, comingled with trash and half-completed projects. The map above, part of a citywide topographic survey from 1895, shows rowing piers and resorts among the marshes, along with a dog pound, a guano pier, and a "night soil dump".

The major landowner was the Winans family, who held a large estate situated up the Gwynns Falls from the port. This stream valley connection between these two pieces of property later became the right of way for the Western Maryland Railroad in the 1890s. And, after it narrowly missed becoming an expressway in the 1980s, it was turned into the Gwynns Falls recreational trail during the late 1990s, connecting the waterfront to the Winans Estate, now Leakin Park.

The Winans were a family of engineers and entrepeneurs. Ross Winans had been sent to England by the B&O to study the state of the art in European rail technology. When he returned, it was as the lead designer for the new American railroad's rolling stock. Ross's other projects included a water wheel that powered the plumbing for the estate, and, during the Civil War, a steam powered machine gun.

This aerial view from 1869 shows Port Convington as a kind of tinkerer's paradise, with swamps, stockyards, chemical factories, and gas tanks. On the pier at Winans Cove, another of Ross Winan's projects is visible, a prototype Cigar Ship, the first all iron (not iron-clad) steamship in the country. Having solved the problem of efficient cross-country travel, the engineer had then tried to work out better ways to get people across the Atlantic.

The Cigar Ships were symmetrical and tapered at both ends, with smokestacks in the center and a large waterwheel wrapping around the ship's waist. The first version was constructed here, with later models built and tested in London, St. Petersburg, and Le Havre. These were not submersible, they traveled on the surface of the water. As a piece of engineering, the design was impractical. But this ship may have had a greater influence in the cultural imagination, possibly inspiring Jules Verne's description of the Nautilus in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea:

"Here, M. Aronnax, are the several dimensions of the boat you are in. It is an elongated cylinder with conical ends. It is very like a cigar in shape, a shape already adopted in London in several constructions of the same sort."

The aesthetics of Baltimore's working harbor have evolved from this kind of 19th Century Steampunk Imaginary to the Romantic Decay of the present, but they've come here by way of the 1950s, the high water mark of the Industrial Sublime. Pictorial photographers, especially Aubrey Bodine, came to Port Covington to shoot artifacts like this roller coaster coal loader at the Western Maryland Railroad terminal, yards away from the last fragments of Ross Winan's pier.

This was the endpoint of a rail network that extended deep into coal country. The importance of that connection is underscored in this map: the name of the port, a neighborhood within the city of Baltimore, is printed larger than the name of Annapolis, the state capitol.

The Western Maryland Railroad was bought out by its old competitor, the B&O, in 1983, and shut down soon after. Almost every trace of it at Port Covington has been erased in a cleanup of the site by the Maryland Department of the Environment. The major pieces that remain include a large trestle bridge over the outflow of the Gwynns Falls, and several derelict piers. One of these is now used as a berth for two MARAD ships, the military's ready reserve, part of a large network of ships waiting to deploy personnel, vehicles, and supplies anywhere in the world.

The site is littered with big pieces: the piers, these ships, a factory that makes ceramic insulators, a power station. But the largest things here are the ghosts of failed masterplans. In the 1980s, the Baltimore Sun wanted to move their entire operation out of downtown. With the city's help, the Sun acquired an enormous piece of land in Port Covington, on the south side of 95. They moved the printing presses into a new building here, with Automated Guided Vehicles to transport the stacks of newsprint around the building, and then changed their minds. Now it sits surrounded by empty, well mown, grass fields. As of this writing, the Sun's paper circulation continues to fall, over 9% in the past six months, with a near 6% drop in the six months previous to that.

The slow motion collapse of the Port Covington Shopping Center has left behind the most recent ghosts. In 2000, the Baltimore Development Corporation accepted a proposal from Connecticut retail development conglomerate Starwood Ceruzzi for the site. The city enabled the deal with tax incentives, rezoning, and an agreement giving the developer inculpablility from health hazards related to contamination. Starwood promised to bring a mix of retailers, and agreed to consider community recommendations to orient the buildings toward the water, and to "substantially enlarge the park area, incorporate walking paths, add sports fields, create picnic areas and include fishing and crabbing piers,". The city laid out roads, curbs, stop signs, streetlights, even fire hydrants, but Starwood Ceruzzi built only the Walmart and the Sam's Club, both with their backs to the water.

In 2007, the Sam's Club closed, the building was painted gunmetal grey, ringed with security cameras, emptied, and put up for sale. The Baltimore Business journal quotes Starwood executive Arthur Hooper: "The final phase of development isn't something we were interested in doing, ... We're not long-term holders of projects. We brought in the big boxes. After that we're not in a position to deal with the local."

Ferry Bar Park, at the very southern tip of Port Covington is the remnant of a railroad right-of-way, it was given to the city in 1979. Some documents suggest that the park may have been encroached on by the shopping center's stormwater retention pond, a pond that, given the large amount of planned but unpaved area, my be unnecessary. The park is the site of the Baltimore Powwow, a largely undocumented yearly art and music festival, held to benefit the Arabber Preservation Society.

The continued existence of the Powwow, along with the presence of homeless camps (oriented toward the water) and ongoing illegal dumping at the site, suggest that if shopping center developers aren't in a position to deal with the local, then the local will, however imperfectly, deal with itself. Like the factories in the 19th century marshes, the adhoc uses are filling in the gaps between the bigger, broken pieces; with small scale occupancy, habitation, and transportation, leaving desire lines (and litter) threaded across the fenced lots.

The failure of the last laid plans is little deterrent to future projects, including at least one proposal that shows the existing Walmart gone, replaced by waterfront housing, and a new big box store relocated further inland.

This is a site that is suspended somewhere between development and use, between stated intention, and actual condition. The gaps between overreach and underinvestment are filled in by the people on the ground. The empty parking lots are left to drifting plastic shopping bags and idling interstate buses. On sunny weekends, the derelict piers are covered with people, multiethnic families having picnics, playing the radio, and catching the fish that swim in the 150 year old piles of the Winan's Wharf.

This is not to suggest some kind of schadenfreude at the failure of Grand Plans, or a naive love of Romantic Decay. This is to suggest that there are alternatives between the top-down of strategies masterplanning and the bottom-up tactics of the everyday. This is not a balance, more a productive, intermingling, dis-integration whose synthesis and realization can, like the Cigar Ship, occur more in the realm of cultural imagination than hard engineering.

(This article is the fourth in a series on openspaces in Baltimore's Middle Branch. It is adapted from a workshop conducted as part of the City From Below conference in March 2009. For more information, see previous entries on Masonville Cove, Reed Bird Island, and Swann Park. This research was conducted with Eric Leshinsky and the Working-Group on Adaptive Systems. Thanks to Guy Hager of Parks & People for clueing us into the Winans Cigar Ship.)

How to Start a Design Conversation*

2009-06-16T17:27:00.004-04:00

1) Ask a question. The best and most interesting conversations are usually about the things we don't know. To start, it's not necessary to have an idea about something, it may even be better to have no idea about something, and want to know more.

(Topics can come from all over the place. Design thinking is inherently inclusive, and the participants at these events so far have had pretty diverse backgrounds. Among other things, these conversations have been a chance to come along as people follow their own curiosities and obsessions in strange directions, ending up with unexpected connections, overlaps and resonances. Start anywhere.)

2) Bring it back to basics. It's useful to think about these things in the simplest possible way. How would you describe your interest to someone else? This could be in a way that's specific enough for them to know what you mean, but open enough for them to use and discuss in ways you might not expect.

(Some of the Design convos have had just one-word topic titles that can be read in several ways, like 'Food', 'Tools', or 'Waste'. Others, like 'Vacant Baltimore' or 'What's your Plan?' are direct enough that little other explanation is needed. More mysterious titles, like 'Cultural Containers' or 'Start Thinking Small' can reflect the curator's own uncertainty about the basic concepts in a way that presents an open question.)

3) Think out loud. Sometimes you don't know what you're going to say until you say it. Talking out things with other people is a good way to refine your own interest in the issue at hand, and a way to get others interested in it, too.

(The best way to see if you're onto something interesting is to find out if other people are into it, too. These events are built around conversation, and conversation is a good way to create and curate a topic for one. Talking about it with friends and strangers will help you clarify your topic, build energy and assemble the participants.)

4) Not an answer, but answers. A good talk is one we don't want to end, a discussion with a conclusion is over. If we give up using conversations to arrive at a destination, we can use them instead to explore a territory.

(Curating material for a conversation around a topic can be about giving up on preconceived end results. If you think you already know what's important about a topic, then inviting others to share their experience and interest is going to be redundant and frustrating. Accept at the start that things will go in multiple directions. This will allow everyone to find what they need in the discussion, and sketch out other threads to follow later.)

5) Frame it. Take a position, define a boundary. The larger the space is, the more important it becomes to know where you are, even if only as a starting point, for reference, variation, and disagreement.

(Accepting multiple answers doesn't mean that it's a good idea to remain totally neutral and relative all the time. This is a process that begins and ends with a kind of curious, energizing uncertainty, but in the middle it's useful to be confident and direct about where you are, and what you think is important.)

*The Baltimore Design Conversations are monthly events held the first Wednesday of every month in the Windup Space (12 W. North Ave.) at 6:30 pm. These events are open to the public and are loosely curated by volunteers around a series of topics related to design, art, architecture, cities, and whatever else is on your mind. Please join us. Cash bar and A/V hookup available.

For more information, visit the D. Center Baltimore flickr page and facebook group.

DC9_PROJECTS

2009-05-28T22:54:00.001-04:00

supermicromegainfra

2009-05-09T14:23:00.001-04:00

supermicromegainfra, originally uploaded by ske765book.

DSC05223a

2009-04-15T22:57:00.001-04:00

DSC05223a, originally uploaded by sevensixfive.

Expanded Architectures

2009-04-12T12:50:00.005-04:00

(another in a changing set of positions regarding terminology in the design professions)

A sketch Registration Exam for (X) Architects
(where X is, for example, information, software, building, product, solutions ...)

Are you self critical?

Do you have a coherent set of ideas that parallels production and allows you to talk about why you make the choices you make?

Are you able to position those ideas relative to the ideas of other peers and define a space for conversation or debate?

Is the task large enough that it requires a division of labor, a split between concept and execution, and the continuous maintenance of evolving consensus between multiple stakeholders?

Do you contribute to the public realm?

Do you add more to the solution of a problem beyond the simple fulfillment of the brief?

Or, in simpler terms:

self awareness & theory & discourse & consensus & community & surplus

Report on The City From Below

2009-04-04T18:47:00.007-04:00

A few quick and incomplete notes from last week's City From Below conference here in Baltimore. To call out the one downside of the weekend: this event had too many great things going on, in a schedule that was too densely packed. With four rooms in two venues: the Village Learning Place and the Red Emma Collective's 2640 Space; the hardest thing to do was to decide what to see. Luckily, almost all of the presentations and workshops now have video and/or audio online, looking forward to digging through the rest of those in the coming weeks.

The Baltimore Development Cooperative is an offshoot of the artist group campbaltimore, cheekily named as a nod to the Baltimore Development Corporation, itself a nonprofit QUANGO that exists as the most active and controversial planning agency in the city. The Cooperative presented their work on Participation Park, a multiyear project involving the occupation and use of several vacant lots in East Baltimore near the prison. The project, and the Cooperative itself, is kind of politics and art in action. It produces food, recreation and openspace, in an area that has lacked institutional investment for decades. It also inhabits these gradient layers of legitimacy and permission. It maintains its precarious quasi-official status by presenting itself as different things to different groups of constituents: a gathering place for the neighborhood, a land use strategy to the city, an agriculture project to some funding sources, and an art project to others. It will be interesting to watch how these mechanisms evolve as the project becomes more and more institutionalized.

This method, of creating a subversive project through multiple, overlapping presentations of identity, media, and action, became more explicit at a panel on Resisting Gentrification in the Creative City. The premise of the panel was that artists, or, to use possibly my new favorite term, 'cultural producers' are positioned as unwitting political agents in the Creative Class development strategy. This role, when recognized, becomes an opportunity to twist and even break the Creative Class narrative: instead of softening up neighborhoods that they themselves will then be priced out of, they can use their unasked-for political agency to create new channels for authentic investment and sustainable development in a specific place. Notes to self on other things to look up later: The Change You Want to See, a gallery project in Williamsburg, and Scapegoat, a new journal from the University of Toronto.

Another panel on Urban Sustainability raised other questions about the connection between art production and everyday life. Once a city and a society are recognized as existing at the confluence of various cycles, networks, and flows, how does the work of art become the relative orchestration of those systems to personal and political ends? And what is the relationship between, on one hand, a kind of personal aesthetic of craft, gardening, Doing It Yourself, and, on the other, the larger (or not?) questions of ethics and mutual responsibility? Does a personal commitment to re-use and making scale up to a society wide economic/labor system that makes sense? Is permaculture gardening viable as a societal model when it assumes a kind of lost stasis in an inherently dynamic system? Is it dangerous to tether long term cycles of resource management to much faster cycles of art and fashion?

I am increasingly fascinated by the space implied in questions like this. And increasingly interested in the practical implications of this shift away from the product and towards the network of production, activity, and agency. It was fitting that co-conspirator Eric Leshinsky and I picked this conference to formalize research under the banner of our newly inaugurated Working-group on Adaptive Systems (shoutout to fitnr: "working groups are the new institutes"). More to come about this, and about our presentation on Port Covington as a Baltimore Case Study.

As a coda, a lot of this stuff seems to be swirling around a kind of nodal point in Baltimore and elsewhere this weekend, some related events:

low2no
Postopolis!LA
Harvard GSD's Ecological Urbanism Conference
Transmodern Festival in Baltimore
and on wednesday, don't miss Design Convo #7: TOOLS

DSC05123a

2009-04-02T01:32:00.001-04:00

DSC05123a, originally uploaded by ske765book.

Hand Drawn Artisanal Voronoi from South Baltimore

(at least) Four kinds of Time in Design

2009-03-22T19:09:00.001-04:00

The measured time for completion: How long does it take to have (and execute) a good idea? Billable hours vs. bustop insights, see also: Northcote Parkinson and the Cult of Done ...

The narrative time of composition: an object as an order of conceptual operations. eg: 'first there was a surface that was pushed up and pulled down to create space, apertures were sliced at three locations to connect an inside and an outside ... '

The built time of manufacture: actual assembly, with all the orchestration, staging and logistics attendant ...

The lived time of use, experience, and understanding.

All of these overlap and interfere (productively and destructively) with each other, but it's worth keeping track of what sort of time is unfolding or informing decisions at any given moment in the process.

DC6: WASTE

2009-03-02T11:51:00.003-05:00

The Baltimore Design Conversations are an open forum for design ideas, questions and answers from Baltimore and beyond.

"Waste" presentations curated by Hugh Pocock include:

Keith Lasoya - Waste Neutral Group

Baltimore Free Store

Fred Scharmen - Masonville Cove

Annika Bloomberg

For more information, visit the Design Center Baltimore facebook page

Technological questions sometimes have social answers

2009-02-28T12:28:00.001-05:00

Remember around '98, when everybody said we'd soon have personalized AI bots that would trawl news on the web and send us interesting stuff?

Now, instead, we've figured out ways to trick each other into doing that for us.

(crossposted from twitter)

Kudzu

2009-02-19T00:11:00.002-05:00

Proposal no.7, submitted 02/15/2009, Fred Scharmen, originally uploaded by Balt.Infill.Survey.

.

2009-02-12T19:46:00.001-05:00

tree , originally uploaded by ske765book.

X Ways to Ride a Bike in the City

2009-01-31T19:13:00.013-05:00

"The ruins of the unsustainable are the 21st century's new frontier."
- Bruce Sterling

Coast: Downhill with no traffic, push pedals as if you're being chased by the headless horseman. When you're too exhilarated to add any more speed, let gravity take over. Awareness is focused but time spreads out, and location is smeared and streaked across the millisecond-scale past and future. Subject only to the laws of ballistics, you're following a moving target: the ghosted future of your own potential position in space, speeding towards a frame of reference that is itself also moving, pulling you forward.

As a Swimmer among Monsters: In motion, a car becomes something more and different than a simple piece of steel with a human pilot. A bicyclist navigating among these beasts can start to learn their tendencies and habits: when they are sluggish and hesitant, and when they are prone to make sudden, selfish moves. From the outside, you can see the boundaries of the personal space they maintain between each other as they jostle, and you can move through these gaps in such a way that they are reassured. You are not a threat, just another more agile being, sharing their space respectfully for a moment and moving on.

Synaesthetically: Don't wear headphones. Listen. You can hear space moving around you: close high walls of rowhouses, open uncertainty of an intersection, and dopplered vectors of cars accelerating and coasting through. Behind you and around blind corners, hear them before you see them. You can smell and taste space: in summer, the harbor and storm drains, and in winter, even warm cups of coffee in the hands of pedestrians. Measure the city in pedal pushes. Feel weather. There's something about exercise in the cold, around 20 degrees, when your skin is protected from wind. To inhale air is refreshing, like breathing ice water.

Risk vs. Reward: It's a constant calculation, a numbers game that takes place almost entirely below the baseline of awareness. As this article points out, cyclists in the city run red lights and stop signs because it takes extra energy to get started again. The reward of sustained momentum meets the risk of an oncoming car. Righteous drivers don't realize that there's a lot of space inside the binary stop/go behavior that the law asks of them. A straight shot through a light without slowing is statistical suicide, but a measured glide based on time of day, knowledge of territory, and exposure to all of the sensory information around can be a reasonable response to certain situations. The exaggerated articulation of this internal math, in pointed deep glances left and right, can be a useful cue to drivers that you're aware of the danger and acting anyway.

Mindfully: Different modes of transportation can rearrange perceptions of the urban environment. A city is so densely layered that the ability to quickly scan and pull relevant information out of noise and react to it can become virtuosic. With a nod to AG, the street is an interface, Here for You to Use. A bike rack, for example, is really just a specific configuration of certain geometric and material properties. One looks for something solid, secure, and within a line of sight that is low and narrow enough to get a U-Lock around. Take nothing for granted, a silhouette of a head in a parked car could foreshadow a door in your face, and a flashing crosswalk signal can prefigure a vehicle making a run at a stoplight. Imagine and plan for the worst, wear a helmet. Take care, secure in the knowledge that, like Rumsfeld's unknown unknowns, some unforeseen but consequential circumstance is inevitable.

20:09 (The Plant)

2008-12-26T19:23:00.005-05:00

Two (three!) things to close out '08:

Archinect has just gone live with 20 predictions for 2009, which is just what it sounds like: they've asked 20 people to call out the new year. Glad to have some speculations on design intelligence included among this diverse group. If there really are too many designers in the world right now, maybe it just means that we'll have to design more.

Thinking about design methods and financial development was heavily influenced by participation in another project: The Plant. Six of us met regularly all through the fall, with a mandate to invent a new kind of green development product for the city of Baltimore. We ended up proposing an infill strategy that was able to combine a kind of block scale micro-infrastructure with a cultural container designed to hold the micro-institutions that Baltimore seems so good at spinning off and sustaining.

Here's to more plants in the New Year. I was glad that name unintentionally resonated with the best movie I saw in 2008, WALL-E. I can't think of a more precise statement of optimism at the intersection of small-scale high-tech and urban agricultural living, even if I am kind of nervous about applying post-apocalyptic cultural models to real urban vacancy (which is of course, never really vacant). But in any case, let one hundred flowers blossom.

Soft Sites: Masonville Cove

2008-12-13T12:27:00.009-05:00

"The space in which we live, which draws us out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives, our time, and our history occurs, the space that claws and gnaws at us, is also, in itself, a heterogeneous space. In other words, we do not live in a kind of void, inside of which we could place individuals and things. We do not live inside a void that could be colored with diverse shades of light, we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another."

-- Michel Foucault, Heterotopia, of Other Spaces

(Masonville Cove in c. 1925, labeled 'Changeable Area'. On the left is Reed Bird Island.)

Masonville Cove is a large, mostly open, waterfront plot in South Baltimore. This area is currently the site of a complex engineering project overseen by the Maryland Port Administration: the Masonville Cove Dredged Material Containment Facility. Geographically, the site breaks down into three main pieces. From west to east, call them the Claw, the Head, and the Shipyard.

(Masonville Cove in 1954 [left], and 2005 [right])

The Claw is conspicuous, jumping out of the gmaps aerial photo like a mutant appendage. Between the double pressures of development and industry, this much feral openspace on the waterfront is an anomaly, even for the spottily derelict Middle Branch. It is heavily vegetated, but walking the site, feeling the mossy bricks, ceramic powerline insulators and huge concrete blocks underfoot, one sees that this is really just a big pile, a ground made of stuff. The plants, in some cases huge trees and dense woods, are only the most recent (now the second most recent) system to infiltrate, overlay, and, however incompletely, organize this space.

(Masonville Cove coastline, 1819-2008)

The record in this area is lossy and unreliable, but old maps seem to show no Claw before the early 20th century. Instead of a peninsula, there's a bay, the original Cove. The shallows in the Cove are the product of churn from the mouth of the Patapsco River adjacent, carrying runoff from development in old mill towns and new subdivisions upstream.

In 1904, there was a catastrophic fire in Baltimore. Firefighters from Philly and DC were unable to connect their hoses to Baltimore's hydrants. The fire predated the advent of standardized infrastructure, even between cities that were relatively close. The oldest blocks in the center of downtown were destroyed, but there was no loss of life. The gutted, emptied core allowed new city systems to be upgraded with extra capacity, as modernized water, sewer, and storm drains were laid beneath newly widened streets.

(The Baltimore Fire of 1904)

The fire took down over 1500 buildings, the debris had to go somewhere. In maps made after 1904 there is a new peninsula at Masonville Cove: the stub of the Claw. Locals pass down the story of wreckage hauled south to Masonville in barges. Note the cast iron columns at the lower left of the photo above, compare them to a pile of cast iron columns onsite below. Foundries in the city, retooled after the Civil War, had produced over 100 buildings in Baltimore with cast iron fronts, and almost as many more of these modular precast facade sytems were exported via rail to other cities. From New Orleans in the south to SoHo in the north, much of the iconic cast iron architecture on the east coast was made in Baltimore. The 1904 fire destroyed about 25 cast iron front buildings.

(Cast iron columns found onsite at the Claw)

Beside the layers of rubble, there are other, newer and more toxic layers of ash and sand, possibly mixed with arsenic and lye. In the middle of the 20th century this site, originally composed of destruction and debris, was used as a yard for the preparation of new construction material: concrete and pressure treated lumber. In the older portions of the peninsula, future cleanup is complicated by the many large trees growing between and among the chunks of masonry. Families of wild deer live and forage here. In the newer fields further out, large plants will not grow in the dessicated, chemical laden soil.

The future of the Claw, the scope of the cleanup, and the level of public access, is all uncertain. This portion of the site is either called out as a public park, or a wildlife sanctuary. In the first case, cleanup would be extensive, possibly including complete clearance and capping; in the second case, cleanup would be minimal, and access would be discouraged or disallowed. In either scenario, large areas of the site would be completely remade: the ash fields regraded and channeled to create a nontidal wetland several feet above sea level. In the water of the Cove the wrecked barges, concrete blocks and other debris (which as this Baltimore Sun article points out, is home to complex communities of marine life) would be removed. The Cove would be restocked with concrete reefballs, cast on site in educational workshops.

(planned extent of habitat creation at Masonville Cove. source)

In this newest process, existing landscapes are reengineered into constructed domains in a kind of habitat gentrification process - the accidentally artificial is scraped away to create a new intentionally artificial overlay. When asked about the reasons behind the desire to make new habitats here, a civil engineer working on the project says that earlier committee meetings had established habitat creation as one of the main priorities for this portion of the site, interlocking with the project's larger goals for impact mitigation and community outreach. This intention is preserved in the agenda, meeting minutes, and other organs of institutional memory, even if the reason for its existence has been forgotten.

There is a new nature center under construction at the mouth of the cove. Along with the wildlife sanctuary, this is the mitigation portion of a much larger project: the Maryland Port Administration needs a new place for the five million cubic yards of dredged material pulled out of the bay each year. This place will be the Head at Masonville Cove. The outline of this part of the site will be offset by a dike, and then filled in over the next 25 years to form a new shipping terminal.

(proposed outline of new Dredged Material containment Facility. source)

Erosion is constantly filling the harbor and the bay. For centuries, dredging has been the invisible accompaniment of transport and logistics. More and more things need to be moved, ships get bigger, channels get deeper, and spoils from dredge are used to build new land and new terminals for larger vessels, which then create even more turbulent churn. Shipping, development, erosion, wakes, and dredging are then caught in a feedback loop, each link in the circle generating more of the next.

(container ship sizes, 1956-2006. source)

If the Head is growing with increased erosion and shipping, this is the local effect of a global cycle that also began here. The first purpose built container ships - the MV Floridian and the MV New Yorker, were built in 1960 at the Shipyard portion of the Masonville Cove site. These first container ships were made from oil tankers, cut, extended, and resutured together in a process called 'jumboization'.

(Masonville Cove Shipyard in 1941, source: Maryland Historical Society)

Somewhere between the 1960s and the 1990s, the Shipyard at Masonville Cove stopped making ships. By 1995, this area was mostly used for shipbreaking - the adhoc, often unregulated and extremely dangerous deconstruction of derelict vessels for recycling profit. Decommissioned ships are filled with asbestos, lead paints, PCBs and oil. Taking them apart for scrap metal is toxic unless it's done carefully, and in an industry that depends on thin profit margins, care and safety are sometimes secondary concerns.

(The USS Coral Sea at Masonville Cove. source)

The US aircraft carrier Coral Sea was dismantled over a period of seven years at Masonville Cove. According to this Pulitzer Prize winning series of articles from the Baltimore Sun, shipbreaking regulators refused to board the vessel for inspection, citing safety issues, only a day before another serious accident.

(The USS Coral Sea at Masonville Cove. source)

The company contracted to take apart the ship, Seawitch Salvage, was named after the Seawitch, another vessel that had been towed here to Baltimore in 1973 for disassembly. The owner of Seawitch Salvage was arrested in 1997 and sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison for illegal dumping. He died before his term was up. The cleanup of the Seawitch was completed by the Coast Guard, the Maryland Department of the Environment, and the Port Administration in late 2008 with federal oil spill money. The Seawitch is still visible in aerial photos of the Shipyard at Masonville Cove.

(The Shipyard at Masonville Cove, c. 2005. source)

The Sun series focused on American shipbreaking sites in Baltimore, North Carolina, and Texas. Another consequence of the Sun series was the accelerated offshoring of shipbreaking to Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. Under increased scrutiny, it was no longer profitable to take ships apart in the United States. Local pressure has pushed the practice elsewhere, and now images of shipbreaking have become part of the larger lexicon of Sublime Globalization Space. Shipbreaking is something that happens in the global East and South: frightening, exotic, and well suited to large format photography.

(Shipbreaking #4 Chittagong, Bangladesh, Edward Burtynsky)

The Shipyard at Masonville will be covered by dredging spoils, any remaining wreckage or toxicity buried along with the rest of the Head. This portion of the site is expected to become a terminal for vehicle, or RoRo shipping. Until a collapse in auto sales accompanying the credit crisis of late 2009, car transportation was the fastest growing sector in the Port of Baltimore's business interests. The Seawitch Salvage yard will become a new berth, deliberately oversized to accomodate ships that will arrive after the project's expected completion date, 25 years from now.

(A RoRo, Roll on, Roll off, vehicle transport ship)

The Port Administration leases facilities to port operators, and if demand for new car terminals is low when the project is finished, they can retool the site for other needs. Development on the Baltimore waterfront, residential, commercial, industrial, or logistic, is a powerful motivator: 'there's magic in the water'. As the only landowner in the city with the ability to make new waterfront land from scratch, the Port Administration can afford to remain flexible.

The Lost City of Masonville

None of this is to suggest that the current state of the site should be left as is, ignored, protected or maintained. If Masonville Cove is anything, it is a place without original conditions, it has never been left alone. In one of the earliest maps of the site, Masonville Cove is labelled simply: "Changeable Area".

(The Lost City of Masonville, now buried beneath the confluence of 295 and the CSX yard)

Masonville is a town that was made by the railroad siding, and then unmade by its expansion. This is a peninsula built from destruction debris that becomes a yard for construction material. The birthplace of 20th century shipping is buried here in the backwash of its descendants, along with remains of an aircraft carrier, to form a berth large enough to accommodate some other notional transport vessel a quarter century from now.

If a brick wants to be an arch, what does a brick want to be after it's broken and burnt? What does a pile of ashes want to be? If, as Kahn, Latour, and others suggest, we can learn by interpreting the intent of things, what sort of entity pulls itself into being in this way?

(A derelict barge off the Claw at the mouth of the Patapsco River)

Monsters: Big, old, inscrutable, often invisible things. These are things with their own agency, entirely outside of human concerns, even if this doesn't prevent us from serving and sacrificing to them. 'Vast, cool, and indifferent' in the HP Lovecraft sense, the nervous system and memory of these beings is in the committees, community groups, planning and development commisions labeled, appropriately, as 'Quasi-Autonomous'. Always haunted and hobbled by the twin ghosts of Unforeseen Circumstances, and Unintended Consequences, plans produce other effects, both external and central to the original motivator that made them. These spin off like eddies in a current, threatening to swamp other structures downstream.

Any sufficiently complex set of infrastructures, political bodies, development interests, and natural flows is indistinguishable from a slow motion invisible Godzilla. This is what David Simon means when he says 'the institutions are the new Greek Gods.' Here their names are Emergency, Remediation, Oversight, Runoff, Mitigation, and Outreach. These processes sort and organize the material of the site, they are subspecies of D&G's Lobster God: always one claw that makes, and one claw (Claw) that remakes. Since it's Baltimore, we'll call it the Giant Crab.

Enrique Ramirez writes of the '... oscillations between the monolithic and microsopic, the decaying and the verdant, the dead and the living. This interplay of extremes is (quoting Houellebecq) "An effect of scale, effect of vertigo. A procedure borrowed, once again, from architecture".

To understand these things - where they come from and what they want - we need, not a science of the influences that make sites, but something more like a literature. In territory like this, it only makes sense to talk in terms of Ghosts, Ancient Gods, and Curses. As Bryan Boyer says: Form follows Fable, and like creation myths and horror stories, the fables these places tell invoke and - to some extent - explain the feeling of sublime melancholy that saturates their appearance.

(This article comes directly out of research conducted with Eric Leshinsky on waterfront park sites in South Baltimore's Middle Branch. Thanks to Eric, Liz, Ryan, Kio, and Bryan for talk that informed some of the ideas here. For more Masonville Cove photos, see flickr)

DSC06326

2008-11-21T01:45:00.001-05:00

DSC06326, originally uploaded by sevensixfive.

DSCN7498

2008-11-09T16:37:00.001-05:00

DSCN7498, originally uploaded by sevensixfive.

INVASION

SS credit 4.2 Alternative Transportation

2008-10-27T20:40:00.003-04:00

Did you know there is one LEED credit available for the inclusion of a bike rack¹ into a new building project? Yeah, me too. Help Station North become more sustainable by entering the Station North Bike Rack Competition.

Entries due Friday, November 7th. Full details here.

¹the LEED credit is actually only available if the bike rack is large enough to accomodate bikes for 5% of office building occupants, along with a changing room and shower for .5% of occupants. If it's a residential building, you're going to need a rack large enough for 15% of occupants, but you can skip the shower. The Station North competition actually has nothing to do with LEED at all, I was just reminded of it earlier today by Boyer, who has a new blog, of this we are sure.

Let's Get Small

2008-10-26T10:51:00.003-04:00

DSC06281a, originally uploaded by sevensixfive.

New piece on archinect: link.

It's adapted from a presentation for Design Conversation #2: Start Thinking Small at the The Windup Space in Baltimore. (first wednesdays of every month, next up: Cultural Containers):

"Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty. Think big."
-Daniel Burnham, 1880

"All of humanity now has the option to 'make it' successfully and sustainably, by virtue of our having minds, discovering principles and being able to employ these principles to do more with less."
-R. Buckminster Fuller, 1980

Thanks again to Nam for instigating the archinect writeup; and also to Mark, Eric, Elizabeth, and Dan.

Untitled-6a

2008-10-13T19:48:00.001-04:00

Untitled-6a, originally uploaded by sevensixfive.

(Katinka Matson ripoff)

Paulownia scan

2008-10-07T11:19:00.001-04:00

Paulownia scan 1, originally uploaded by sevensixfive.

Design Conversation 2

2008-09-28T23:23:00.001-04:00

Design Conversation 2, originally uploaded by ske765book.

Invasive Species

2008-09-11T19:01:00.004-04:00

This is a temporary outdoor public sculpture installation for Parks & People on the Gwynns Falls Trail in an area of Leakin Park called Winans Meadow. This ended up as sort of a research project, working at this scale, outdoors, in a non-shelter kind of way is really different from architecture. There's no split between drawing and building, and it was a good chance to try to come up with a system that could be composed at the site in an ad-hoc way.

There was a desire to identify and connect some processes at work in the city:

(1) The process of abandonment and dereliction that produces unplanned open space. Some of this space is acquired by municipalities on the scale of the block, the neighborhood, the city - and turned from dross to amenity. Lots, alleys and fields become rights-of-way, paths, gardens, parks ... or else they're thrown back into the mill for reuse and more building.

(2) The process by which invasive plant life colonizes and takes apart the remnants of the hardscape, opening it up again to wind and rain. Paulownia and Ailanthus trees are foreign species from asia, where they are revered for their medicinal and symbolic value. Here they are uncultivated and volunteer opportunistically, growing quickly where other plants would find no root, scorned as weeds and pulled when unwanted. (shoutout to Kio and Neil from the Working Group for spreading this obsession)

The site at Winans Meadow offered a chance to link these ideas together. The underused Winans family estate was purchased by the city in 1941, it's been a city park since at least 1948. The site has had a reputation as a dumping ground - this is maybe related to the presence of strange ruins dating from around the civil war, including a large broken water wheel, a stone root cellar and a guardhouse.

This project takes the detritus from the constant construction and destruction of Baltimore's built environment - broken bricks and scrap boards - into the park to form new patterns and structures embedded in the ground like reverse archaeology, fresh hardscape with an invented history, waiting to be discovered by visitors, with a form that grows and spreads across the landscape.

Construction imposes built geometry on open space, and as a lot becomes fallow again, growth imposes it's own order as another overlay. The choice to use nonstandard variable geometry instead of a more repetive system was an attempt to collapse these two systems into one. Voronoi and Mesh are the new (pseudo-organic) grid.

That's the intention, anyway, the vagaries of execution tend to distort and dilute things into other things.

The whole deal depended on the use of found scrap material. There were time constraints - a deadline on another thing slipped, and ended up overlapping the start date for this one. The entire project had to be finished - materials located, gathered, transported, unloaded, staged and installed - in an evening, a lunch break, and a half day off work. Also, time spent to embed each piece in the ground was way underestimated. The boards made it in, just barely, the bricks didn't.

There were size constraints - the outer bounds of a given piece were determined by the carrying capacity in a trunk of a not-very-large-car. A lot of promising scraps were left on the table for being too big. This limited the connection distance between points, and the overall scale of the installation - more smaller pieces had to do the work of fewer larger ones. Setting up the systems as open-ended fields allowed the pieces to be composed on-the-fly, and the whole project could be scaled up or down as time and materials allowed.

The scale worked out - the Voronoi board network fit around and between the grid of newly planted farm trees at the top of the hill. There were other lucky coincidences, including the discovery of a hardware/lumber store about 5 blocks from the site, useful to get sand for paver beds and a hammer for tapping things into place. Craft and constructibility was another issue - digging, lifting, clearing and hammering is hard work, there are blisters to prove it.

There are always other things: weather, seasons, and unplanned connections. There is the idea here, as has been seen before, of a ground made of stuff - a seemingly solid base that's actually built up of found material from elsewhere. The opening was scheduled for Saturday, the same day that Hurricane Hannah drenched the northeast. The tour was canceled but the rain washed away the remnant scraps of dirt and joined the pieces to the ground in a way that no shovel could've.

In the above photo, the distorted grid of bricks is barely visible in the background, It is early fall now that the installation is in, and the leaves blur the color and obscure the geometry in an unexpected, but not-unwelcome way.

We've got kind of a catch phrase in Baltimore, when a project doesn't turn out the way you expect, you say something like: "Oh yeah, this is just the trial run, now that we know how it works, it'll be awesome when we do it for real."

So there's a bunch of sculptures in Leakin Park right now, if you're around Baltimore anytime before mid October, go see 'em, and don't miss Doug Retzler's 40 ft sundial made of light poles and railroad ties, he did it for real.

Hauntology

2008-09-07T13:30:00.002-04:00

The Hungry Ghosts of Japanese Buddhist folklore are invisible, they eat excrement, causing it to wither away in the street, and their presence brings sickness to the living. Not a bad summary, for a medieval society, of the germ theory of disease.

Maybe the sense of haunting in the atmosphere of abandoned places is a similar sketch of the invisible, unreconciled forces that made it and left it. Abstract Machines in the Plane of Immanence are felt as spooky presences in places that are unmade or becoming. What kind of taxonomy describes the different species and symptoms of these invisble forces?

DSC03872

2008-08-25T23:45:00.001-04:00

DSC03872, originally uploaded by sevensixfive.

DSC03823

2008-08-12T00:23:00.001-04:00

DSC03823, originally uploaded by sevensixfive.

Greenline

2008-07-31T09:42:00.003-04:00

Jonas Risen is on a roll over at Greenline. I'm biased, because he's a friend, and the blog is run out of our office, Ziger/Snead, but I think it's a rare thing to find writing about energy, materials, and building systems that's this sharp, diverse, consistent and critical.

For an intro, try this piece on Greenwashing and Photoshop in Architectural product ads. Then check this longform case study on the National Aquatic Center in Beijing, a comprehensive writeup that goes way beyond the technical, into fundamental questions about the nature of optimization and integration in a total system.

Crowd Control with Dan Deacon

2008-07-21T23:40:00.002-04:00

DSC03684, originally uploaded by sevensixfive.

Dan Deacon at Whartscape. This was a great (if too short) show. The stuff he does with crowd dynamics is amazing. As this article points out, there's this tension between the way he plays on the ground, off the stage, and the crowd's desire to be all up in his face. The games and little organized routines that he kind of tricks the crowd into playing have the effect of getting them involved with each other instead of just him.

But he's totally orchestrating the whole thing. When I took this photo, he had set up a system where people formed a long, Soul Train style line, and others would dance down the line of people, stopping at the end to form the next row. The line had consumed two thirds of the crowd, and there was no one around Dan but other photographers.

A second after I took this, Dan walked around to the other side of the table, glanced at the line, held his hand up to the sky and finished singing the chorus ... then he hit a button on his gear, slamming a breakbeat into place that dissolved the entire crowd into a freeform dancing mass again.

I'm also totally fascinated by the home-tweaked equipment he's got here, patched together with color-coded cords.

ORDOS100

2008-07-12T20:28:00.004-04:00

I'm almost two weeks back in the states and finally getting around to posting some links related to the ORDOS100 project.

I was there representing Keller Easterling Architects. This was the third and final meeting in Chinese Inner Mongolia, bringing together offices from all over the world, each asked to design one out of 100 villas on a tabula rasa site near the Gobi Desert. The best introduction to the project, and the best sketch of the general mood at these meetings, is Fred Bernstein's New York Times Article.

There are a lot of photos on flickr. Mine, and some other folk's: UNI's, Multiplicities', Michael Schoner's ... in between presentations and meals and ad hoc hallway conversations, the participants would gather around the large 1:250 site model like proud parents, taking as many photographs as possible. Movingcities.org was there, as embedded journalists, their comprehensive coverage is here.

There is, of course, criticism. Lebbeus is skeptical. Eyal Weizman and Teddy Cruz seem to have declined. There is also, of course, an archinect thread.

The best place to see all of the houses is probably Ai Weiwei's blog. Warning: these links are to a Chinese website, they're fairly image heavy, and they've sometimes crashed firefox:

http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_473f90ad0100a71s.html

http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_473f90ad0100a71n.html

http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_473f90ad0100a715.html

DSC03039

2008-06-24T13:42:00.001-04:00

DSC03039, originally uploaded by sevensixfive.

Yes, the sky really is this color.

Memories of Green

2008-06-11T23:02:00.001-04:00

DSC09325a, originally uploaded by sevensixfive.

DSC02693

2008-06-09T01:02:00.001-04:00

DSC02693, originally uploaded by sevensixfive.

Early Summer Links: IA and Bike Tours

2008-06-02T18:36:00.005-04:00

Busy is still Good ... sort of. The bike tour was a success, because nobody got killed. There were some hairy moments involving exit ramps, open grated drawbridges, dirtbike drivebys, and blind turns into unmarked deer paths. We still haven't found The Lost City of Masonville, and we were disappointed that the rumored weekend warriors from City Planning failed to show. But nobody got killed.

I was reminded of it again by this invitation to Mechanicrawl: "Spend a summer day exploring the mechanical marvels along San Francisco's North Shore! See giant running steam engines, turn of the century automata, mechanical computers, an 8 foot high mechanical planetarium and more..." It's on the waterfront, and they encourage people to take their bikes. In the same vein: RIDE-Arc. "RIDE-Arc is a monthly social bicycle ride in the cool evening air with a referenced Architectural theme, mixed with some Urban Anthropology, and your own personal sense of adventure and discovery. Wonderful rides, good vibes taking you to places that shape the Los Angeles urban landscape." File Under: Things I wish I had done when I lived in LA (along with visiting the Bradbury Building.)

Aggregating some stuff from Elsewhere: To mark the closing of Design and the Elastic Mind (flash warning), archinect published a series of exhibit reviews. No comments on the archinect thread, which is pretty rare for that opinionated bunch, but it did get picked up by Adam Greenfield and Bruce Sterling. For more on Information Architecture, see this archinect thread, and this dope little mini-manifesto from Bryan Boyer. There's a bunch of interesting angles in that, and it's an area where I keep changing my mind about the particulars (what's different), but I'm more sure than ever about the generalities (what's shared, and it's definitely not space).

Middle Branch Bike Tour Map

2008-05-21T14:48:00.001-04:00

Middle Branch Bike Tour Map, originally uploaded by sevensixfive.

link

Middle Branch Case Files: Reed Bird Island Park

2008-04-30T00:21:00.002-04:00

DSC02327, originally uploaded by sevensixfive.

Alright, so, a friend of mine and I are looking at these off-the-grid type places in South Baltimore, these open spaces on the water that are kind of shaped by pollution, erosion, development, industry ... all for this project, which is for a gallery show that is in turn part of the Baltimore Festival of Maps.

And there's one spot we've been trying to get to, but we never make it there: Reed Bird Island. It always ends up raining, or it's getting dark, we visited all the other spots, but not Reed Bird Island. You can see the edge of it in this panorama.

Now Reed Bird Island is technically a city park, but only, as my collaborator Eric and I found out, because of a suggestion made by the Olmsted brothers (sons of Frederick Law) in 1904. They pointed out that erosion from development upstream at the Patapsco River was leading to the accumulation of mud flats here at the river's mouth. These were being occupied and used for dumping.

The Olmsteds, as part of their 1904 report on potential park spaces in Baltimore, suggested that the city get ahold of these islands, (their status was in doubt because they were basically new, free land) and cap them to form parks. They also pointed out that rerouting the new bridge to cross these things would increase their visibility and connection to the city. So after a few years, that's what happened.

On the north side of the river today, is Cherry Hill Park, which has a really active public pool, ball fields, and bike paths. But Reed Bird Island Park, on the south side, has no signs, no fields, and no paths made by anything bigger than a deer. You could drive by it on every side and never even know it's there.

(This is turning into a long story)

Anyway, so the other saturday, I finished something up early and the show's already up, but I'm like 'fuck it, I'm going to Reed Bird Island,' I hopped on my bike and rode down there. The only way in is just to go, I hit my brakes at the end of the bridge on Potee street, and just hauled my bike into the woods.

And inside, there are these spotty clumps of trees, with bits of afternoon sunlight breaking through to this impossibly lush groundcover, that turned out to be composed almost entirely of stinging nettles. And I'm wearing shorts, and my shins are getting shredded, but I'm powering through, because it's Reed Bird Island, and I've gotta see it, you know?

So I come over a hill, and I see this clump of stuff, and I think it might be landfill debris that's made it back to the surface, but then I see there's an american flag on top of it. And I'm not wearing my glasses, and I notice too late that there's a guy sitting there, kicked back in a lawn chair with his feet up. It's too late to do anything else, so I'm like 'Ahoy!', and he's like 'Hey, how you doing!'

We shake hands and introduce ourselves. 'I'm just thinking about getting my camp back together,' he says, and I see that there's a furnace, a washbin, a storage area, a compost heap, and tent made of tarps. 'I used to camp up on the hill last summer, but I moved down here when the weather started to get cold, went home over the winter, but now that it's getting nice out, I'm thinking about setting this up again.' It's been beaten by the wind, but the camp is still in pretty good shape.

We talk for a few minutes about the area, and I ask him about rumours that Cherry Hill Park is partly made of rubble from the demolition of the old Camden Yards. 'Oh yeah,' he says, 'everybody knows that.' 'Well what's interesting to see around here?' I ask him. 'Well,' he says, 'I've got a map.'

He brushes the dirt off the bin he had just had his feet up on, and shows me the map he had drawn on the lid with a sharpie, just a few weeks after he had first set up camp, in July 2007. 'Do you mind if I take a picture of that?' I ask.

So he gives me a tour of Reed Bird Island: the tubes coming out of the ground to vent methane from the dump below, the church he made on the hill from woven branches and a hand tied cross, the traces of older camps, the deer trails he uses to get around. 'I chased some poachers out of here last November, guys had branches and leaves tied to their jackets, "Get the hell out of here!" is what I told 'em'

He shows me the exit, back to Potee street, down one of the deer trails. 'If I were the city, what I would do, is buy this land and protect it from people building shit on it, protect it for nature.' I tell him that it's not likely anybody would build on it, the ground's too unstable, that's why the trees are spotty, and anyway, it's already city property, a park even. 'All the city cares about is making money,' he says, 'This is a park?' 'Yep,' 'Reed Bird Island Park, it's on Google maps'. 'Is that on the Yahoo, too?' he asks 'I'm gonna have to look that up the next time I'm at work.'

(I'm co-leading a bike tour of Reed Bird Island Park and three other little known waterfront openspaces in South Baltimore on May 24th, departing from the corner of Light and Wells St. at 5 pm.)

becoming PARKS: Middle Branch Case Files

2008-04-25T13:15:00.001-04:00

DSC02318A, originally uploaded by sevensixfive.

The Current Gallery with Parks & People presents:

Welcome to: ONE PARK

"The show will feature new work, maps, and ideas documenting Baltimore's interwoven greenspace, open space, and parks and the ways residents are working together to activate and reclaim the City's landscape."

This is an installation by Eric Leshinsky and I:

"... AN EFFORT TO RESURRECT THE EVOLVING HISTORIES OF 4 PARK SITES IN THE MIDDLE BRANCH BASIN: SWANN PARK REEDBIRD/CHERRY HILL PARK FERRY BAR PARK MASONVILLE COVE. LOCATED ODDLY AT THE INTERSECTIONS OF INDUSTRY, INFRASTRUCTURE AND COMMERCE ..."

The show has a soft opening Saturday, April 26th, and a reception on Thursday, May 8th.

Oh yeah, we're also leading a bike tour that departs from Light St. and Wells in South Baltimore on Saturday, May 24th at 5pm. More details available at the gallery.

middle_branch_coastlines_sketch

2008-04-13T16:39:00.001-04:00

middle_branch_coastlines_sketch, originally uploaded by ske765book.

What's the Big Idea?

2008-04-12T11:32:00.002-04:00

(notes from a WIP)

What all these projects are lacking is coordination, oversight, and more than anything else, a larger vision in the form of a crazy idea. That's what new Form and Aesthetics gets you: the productive capacity of the almost-impossible.

Collateral Flows

2008-04-08T21:40:00.001-04:00

Big projects move through the world, sending off eddies and whorls of excess energy and resources. If these aren't tapped to build and move other things, they'll dissipate into entropy, or worse, rise up and swamp existing structures.

(shoutout to Brad Rogers of Baltimore Green Construction)

BackStory: Yes and Yes

2008-03-25T20:18:00.001-04:00

DSC00562a, originally uploaded by sevensixfive.

New feature on Archinect: Baltimore: Yes and Yes. Much thanks to instigator/editor/introducer Bryan Boyer for the top drawer instigating, editing, and introducing. Also a shout to Enrique for some on point critique and context.

Infratecture

2008-03-19T23:09:00.000-04:00

It took a lecture and a face to face meet to make me realize what's so great about BLDG BLOG. It's obvious once it's spelled out, but it seems like one of the primary aspects of Geoff's work is the bringing of all this other stuff: geology, climate, science fiction, infrastructure - all these larger scale systems - bringing all of them back under the purview of art and culture. It's an act of projective interpretation, to read agency and authorship into earthquakes, asteroids, and overpasses. The great thing about BLDG BLOG is that it's so rarely about BLDGs, but the voice and the perspective come from a way of looking at the world that's essentially architectural: simultaneously aesthetic, cultural, and functional.

Geoff points out a few things when asked about this: that anthropologists have been looking at material culture in these terms for a very long time, and that there's a lot of work out there, in the schools and the built world, that invokes architectural design at a higher order systems level. Consider the most recent wave of fascination architects have had with energy, economics, politics, and logistics.

It makes me wonder whether there won't eventually exist a complete discipline related to the creation of this kind of work. Call it Infratecture: the creation of very large scale sytems that operate simultaneously in the realms of culture and engineering, with the explicit acknowledgement that the nature of peoples interactions with these sytems is at least as emotional as it is functional.

The Season of Busy

2008-03-17T20:22:00.002-04:00

Coming up for a second to throw some quick links out there. Busy is Good, or so we keep telling ourselves ... part of the busy was this, selections from the Vernacular Formalisms series were published recently in the excellent and beautifully crafted Locus Magazine (the one with art, not scifi). There are also two prints from the series hanging on the walls of the also excellent Metro Gallery. They'll be there through the 22nd, if anyone's in Baltimore and interested in checking them out (Hi Mom!). Besides that, there is some great and diverse work in the show and the mag, including some quiet and articulate photos from D.B. Stovall, and some mind expanding drawing/collages from A.D. Loveday (lotta letters in folks' names). Vernacular is the theme, and Locus equals Local, there are only 300 of the print mags out there, so snag them up. Super excited to have a first publication and a first group show all at once, now I need a first sale to seal it up. Shoutout to Sarah and Guy and Emily and Arthur for putting it together, Baltimore art world power couples indeed.

Lots of other things in various pipes, but I also wanted to say how cool it is that Baltimore is having a Map Festival, and last but not least, an AIA lecture series that any grad school would be proud of: with Teddy Cruz, Daniel Libeskind, Greg Pasquarelli, and kicked off this coming Wednesday by none other than the Internets' own inimitable BLDG BLOG aka Geoff Manaugh.

DSC01569

2008-02-27T01:07:00.001-05:00

DSC01569, originally uploaded by sevensixfive.

Transportation Modality Resolution

2008-01-21T22:10:00.000-05:00

In Reykjavik, the names of neighborhoods and sometimes even streets are conjugated differently depending on whether one is arriving or departing. Catching a bus there depends on the ability to not only navigate an unfamiliar language, but also to recognize the root word, the core of the place name, from its layers of accreted prefixes and suffixes.

Public transit is the norm while traveling, but I rarely find myself using it in my home city. I've lived in Baltimore on and off for years but have never ridden a Baltimore city bus until today. It was easy, but fumbling with my exact change and wrinkly bill, even after the driver had pulled away from the curb, it's hard not to envy the more savvy bus riders who swipe their cards and stroll on like it isn't no thing. It makes me want to master the secret knowledge of Baltimore public transit. Where do you get those cards? Monthly? Weekly? Do they work on the light rail, too?

Every type of transportation, every speed and every mode, engenders its own set of perceptions. Walking along the Venice Beach promenade is not the same as riding a bike along it. The city falls into a different resolution for peds, cyclists, drivers and bus riders, even for runners and cab passengers. The grain expands or contracts depending on speed and attention. And every mode has its own secret language, its own way of reading and writing the city, its own layers of danger and opportunity. Bikers watch for cars and doors, not lights, runners plan every footfall to avoid a twisted ankle, and in the back of a cab you have the leisure to critique the route and imagine alternate scenarios.

I got off a stop too early, not knowing which would be closest to my house, and as I was walking the extra block, I was scanning for the blue bus icons marking other stops. What had been, as a driver, an obstacle, a no-parking zone, was now, to a bus rider, a chance for shortcuts and linkages. Maybe it's just because I'm only now getting around to reading Everyware, but it foregrounds the way that even a small city like Baltimore has so many layers that it's impossible to stay aware of them at all times. The brick types and street widths, the parking rules, building permits and Urban Markup Language, the signage and the window displays are all always already there, the meaningfulness presents itself effortlessly when looked for, but it's always ready to collapse back into texture when forgotten or reprioritized.

...

2008-01-02T20:57:00.000-05:00

related: Tree Drawings

(found via kottke)

Branching

2007-12-30T20:23:00.001-05:00

I'm nearsighted. I got my first pair of glasses at age 22. It was a late winter afternoon, and I remember walking out to the parking lot afterwards and standing slackjawed, wrapped up in the intricate patterns created by bare tree branches against the gloaming sky. It's a Caspar David Friedrich mood, something I hadn't been able to perceive clearly for years, my eyes steadily degrading under the influence of AutoCAD.

There's got to be a whole thread in art history tracking changes in the representation of trees. Tree drawings have a unique place at the overlap of cultural convention, technique, and perception. Gothic trees are either cartooned icons or diagrammatic trees-of-life. 18th century British landscape trees are brown and puffy, like drifting clouds of coalsmoke. The interlaced branching in Celtic art, with crossings alternating over and under each other, might be the first algorithmic tree drawings.

This fork of the thread resurfaces in the fractal trees of 90s computer art, and the fascination, in complexity and chaos theory, with intricate systems built from simple, iterated rules. A city is not a tree, but a tree is not a fractal. In a rule-based system, there's often the question of how to admit variation, in scripting this can come from a call to the random() class, which is actually pseudorandom: a seed number taken from a query to the system clock, then run through a bunch of messy math. Random input is also available from natural or stochastic processes: cosmic rays, vacum tube static, or in the case of Rod McLaren's excellent series of drawings done on the tube: the bumps and lurches of a 140 year old underground public transit network. Rod has composed fragments of his tube drawings into a version of Friedrich's Ruined Abbey Among the Oak Trees:

In general, the problem of tree drawing is this: how to reproduce an intricately complex object without resorting to convention. The problem speaks directly to the perception of pattern and the perception of noise, and the representation of either or both with media-specific techniques. Nobody wants to sit there and draw every branch, but how do you break it down without being reductive? And how do you avoid the double traps of reliance on technique and/or cliche?

These issues, (along with figure vs. ground, shapes vs. lines, shapes vs. patterns, etc.) come up in a series of drawings I've been working on and off with over the last few years. Process-wise, it started with this photo of winter branches silhouetted against an even grey sky:

Fascinated by the shapes, and wanting to know more about how they were put together, I dialled up the contrast and started playing around in photoshop. Composing by removing: I sliced away pieces of the pattern to leave behind figures that had a kind of scaleless abstraction, with indistinct boundaries:

This is all just trying to track down and isolate the qualities that made me want to snap the photo in the first place, a kind of interrogation of the image to find out why it was attractive and interesting: how much could be removed and manipulated without losing the life of it? (disclaimer: I am aware of, and somewhat disturbed by, the overtones of that last sentence, but we'll let it stand as a fair statement of intent for now)

Drawing the pieces left over, the problem is the detail level: which specific bumps and divots can be glossed over, and which are necessary for the reading of the shape as a whole, and of it's relations to the other shapes? This is like the classic fractal problem proposed by Benoit Mandelbrot: how long is the coastline of England? The answer depends entirely on how long a ruler you've got:

A more detailed version of the same composition, here I realized another problem: I was starting from the shapes instead of starting from the lines. This was forcing decisions about the detail level into a prematurely early phase of the process. If the whole set of steps that make the drawing could be reordered, the means of representation would more closely mirror the means of production in the orignal tree: 'fat lines -> medium lines -> thin lines' is an isomorphism of 'trunk -> branch -> stem':

So there's a shift in perception: the shapes aren't primary, they're just the spaces between the lines, the lines have a texture at their edges that shape the spaces, and they are broken down loosely into hierarchies and sub-hierarchies. This opens up the territory and the process, stop at any point and explore any area, and it should all still make sense:

So that's what I did, drawing the fattest lines with a big marker, the smaller lines with a thin sharpie, and the tiniest lines with a fine gel pen. The drawing becomes diverse in time and in space, and exploring pieces of it with a camera is interesting while it's being worked, maybe more interesting than the final piece, maybe interesting enough to branch off into still other projects:

The biggest piece took about 50 or 60 hours to finish, it's the most time I've ever invested in a single drawing, and I think it was the way in which the landscape of the page kept changing that kept my interest. This started out as an exercise in learned pattern-making, the idea being that to analyze the method of production would be to acquire the use of that method, adding it the repretoire and using it later without a direct model, freestyling a tree, or tree-like thing based on the same rules. But the commitment to direct observation was also, in the end, productive. Some of the most interesting things were the bits that didn't fit the diagram, the coincidences that couldn't be planned, that would be edited out of a more orderly thing, the unexpected and the strange:

Terminology Legit: (unlicensed [information/interior] ARCHITECT{ural} interns)

2007-12-30T20:21:00.000-05:00

>> Crossposted from Archinect.

Who gets to call themselves an architect?

The state boards say that no one may call themselves an architect unless they have a license to practice architecture. In my state, this is the relevant law: link. As has been noted elsewhere, this is state law and the states enforce it, but NCARB, the national council of state boards, has tended to bring all the diverse laws in line with one another, keeping the laws and terms consistent. NCARB suggests, with no little authority, that the proper term for an unlicensed architect is 'intern', see, for example, the note at the bottom of this page.

There are a number of problems with this: there's the difference between party style 'what do you do?' chatter and professional representation, there's the difference between popular perception of a term's meaning and the legal reality, and there are a number of edge cases that are steadily eroding the sense of all of this.

1) Interns are peons. An 'intern' in the minds of many people, is a person who is underskilled and underpaid, maybe even still in school and working part time for free. The legal use of this term for entry level professionals with (in many cases) graduate degrees only contributes to consistent complaints about low pay and exploitation that plague the discipline. If the state says you can call me an intern, then you're going to treat me like one. I've heard some people say 'Junior Architect' instead, but that makes it sound like you're in the Boy Scouts. Should NCARB change this designation to something less pejorative?

2) Unlicensed Starchitects. There are many, look it up, you'd be surprised. A dead giveaway is often the lack of the term 'architects' or 'architecture' in their office name, another hint is the lack of any license listing on their CV. When people are licensed, they usually put it on their resume. Not that there's anything wrong with it, but on the one hand, it contributes to the perception/reality split when these people are often repesented in the media as architects when they're legally not. On the other hand, it's contributing to a split between academia and practice, unlicensed starchitects often teach, and they've often spent their youth working for other unlicensed starchitects, creating a perpetual parallel universe in the practice that often corresponds to the Designer/Architect of Record split. Should NCARB help set the record straight on who is, and who isn't, and architect?

3) Unequal enforcement. There was that case in Colorado where the guy was running for public office, and he called himself an architect in response to reporter's question, his state board went after him when he lost the election and there were hints that the prosecution was political retribution. (once again, can't be bothered to google the details) Wherever there exists a law that is underenforced and widely ignored, there's the possibility for abuse of power through selective enforcement. In many states, it's illegal for anyone under 18 to drive a car that has only other (non family member) kids in it, in practice this just gives the cops the power to stop and maybe search any teenager whose looks they don't like. If the law is widely ignored in casual speech, should it just be thrown out or rewritten?

4) (x) Architects. Where (x) is Product, or Software, or Information, or Interior ... This makes Monster.com and Craigslist almost completely unusable when you're on the job hunt, the results are so polluted by these jokers. This is the crumbling edge of the erosion of meaning in popular perception. Karl Rove is not the architect of the Iraq War and my profession is not a metaphor. If we're really going to enforce the limits of the term's use, aren't these people worth targeting?

NCARB should let the law stand as written, but refine enforcement. Throw out the word 'intern' for anyone with a professional degree and replace it with 'Unlicensed Architect' This would cover the cocktail party talk issue, just say 'I'm an unlicensed architect', and leave it at that. NCARB should write a letter to Dwell or Metropolis everytime they call so-and-so an architect when they're not licensed (especially if they're not even degreed), and make them issue a retraction. If the stars (or the regulars) are caught misrepresenting themselves without the 'unlicensed' qualifier, prosecute 'em.

No mercy should be shown to the Software and Information Architects.

DSC01056

2007-12-29T07:31:00.001-05:00

DSC01056, originally uploaded by sevensixfive.

The Wire: Representation without Taxation

2007-12-07T20:48:00.001-05:00

DSC01057, originally uploaded by sevensixfive.

It's not just the architecture. But the sunlit, overgrown alleys are heartbreaking, the logistics infrastructure is vast, cool, and indifferent, and Steven King called the vacant rowhouses one of the scariest places he's ever seen.

The great thing about The Wire is the interrelationships. it's about the way small groups can hold and control urban structures by taking the key spaces, the stairwells in the towers, the courtyards in the garden apartments, and the corners in the streets. It's about the relationship between power and urbanism, in districts, wards, localities ...

It makes the city legible and comprehensible as a network of subcultures, a network of networks, and it presents these networks in a way that anyone can understand and relate to. It's not like these tropes haven't been run through before, we've all seen drama about cops, drug dealers, or politicians in the postindustrial landscape. But this is the first place that shows all the networks together, laid out on a plane like the speed dial numbers in tapped cellphones, and they're all the more traceable for their interconnections, parallels and isomorphisms. The show represents life, not by stealing from it, but by mirroring and modeling it.

It's not just the realism. The realism is great, but realism is a moving target. Being in Baltimore, or any city, with The Wire echoing in your head, makes the social landscape of developers, police, city councilmen and corner kids understandable without being consumeable. You kind of feel, for better or worse, like you know these people. You've gotten a look at the underlying diagrams, just enough to let you know that there are whole worlds built off them to get lost in.

Realism is assembled and eventually decays: Expression -> Story -> Literature -> Cliche. Signifiers are plucked and sold like blossoms from a tree. But the diagrams remain, and resist simple interpretation.

[Edit - Oh yeah, and the soundtrack comes out in January]

Dettifoss

2007-11-25T17:43:00.000-05:00

[This is an edit of an older tavel journal piece, from two years ago. I was reminded of it by a photograph from flickr user OneEighteen (who takes excellent photos, and it seems he knows a thing or two about piloting ships, as well) thanks, Lou!]

Six days on the Eimskip container ship Dettifoss, July 2005

19 July, Tuesday

I'm nervous that I won't make it to the airport in time to catch my flight, I misjudged the timezone shift and the overnight ferry from Helsinki to Stockholm has gotten in an hour later than I had guessed. This is going to be an exhausting day until I get on that boat. Helsinki -> Stockholm -> Hamburg -> a ship that will, in a week, drop me off in Reykjavik. So I take a bus from the ferry terminal to Centralterminalen, and there I buy a ticket for the 1 hour + trip to Skvasta airport. While waiting for the bus I realize that if I have to go to the bathroom I should go now ... but you have to pay to use the restroom and it only takes 5 Kroner coins. I have no Swedish Kroner, only Euros left over from Finland, so I wait in line to use the ATM, and then wait in line to buy a candy bar at a kiosk because the machine has given me nothing but 100s. The man two people in front of me is attempting to pay for two sodas with a credit card, but he apparently does not know how to use his credit card. He tries four times. He calls his wife over. He tries again. I have to go to the bathroom. I may miss my bus. I am wearing a very large backpack. It's extremely heavy. He finally gives up and his wife pays in cash. I buy my candy bar and get my change and then wait in line to use the toilet. It has no paper towels. Why am I paying to use a bathroom that has no paper towels?

We arrive at an airport that's smaller than some houses I've been in, and everyone on the bus gets in line to check into the same flight I'm on. I ask the German couple behind me how far the Lubeck airport is from central Hamburg (Centrum) and they say: "Oh not far, just about one hour shuttle bus ride, it's easy." Thanks Ryanair, cheap but very inefficient. The security guard at the metal detector stops me for a moment to look in my backpack: "You've got a lot of electronic gear in here, sir." That's right. The flight takes an hour and 10 minutes, so that means with the trip to Hamburg I'll be on buses for twice as long as I'll be in the air.

At Hamburg Central Station the first cab driver I approach is completely confused by my desire to go to the port: "Try him, he speaks english," indicating an African guy driving the next cab down. I try my schpiel on him: "The Freeport? Busshansa terminal? Number 80, 81?" "Yeah, I know the port but I don't understand this address." "We'll figure it out, let's try it." I say, and we're off. 25 Euros later we're rolling through stacks of containers five stories tall. "Down there and to the right." the guard says, when I ask about the Dettifoss. And there it is, the name on the bow, already half full and still being loaded. "This is it." We're getting the bags out and the cab driver is laughing at me: "Are you going to ride in a container?" "I hope not, I'm going to Iceland." He just laughs, sure kid.

I have no idea what to do or where to go, I'm standing there shooting pictures of everything in sight, a total rube with a huge backpack on among all these containers, dangerous machines, and guys with hardhats and neon jackets. What the hell? I get on the ship. "Authorized Personnel Only." That's me. Authorized. I wave like an idiot at the first person I see. "Hi. I'm Fred, I'm a passenger." And by passenger I mean moron. "Yes." he agrees. "I'll show you to the ship's steward." So I meet Jonas, the steward, and we climb seven flights to my cabin. That's fine with me, the higher the better. He unlocks the door to an impossibly palatial room right below the bridge with table, chair, couch, fridge, television, VCR, stereo, closet, huge bed, and bathroom. "This is your cabin." "Wow, that's great!" I'm still in slack-jawed yokel mode. "Thanks!"

So I unpack, explore the ship, and meet the German couple who are my co-passengers. They're having their caravan packed in a container and brought along with them to drive around Iceland. "That sounds like a fantastic trip." I say. They're as full of superlatives as I am: "Yes! We love to take fantastic trips!" Dinner is good and hearty, beef and potatoes and cabbage and peas. Solid. "Hello" I hear, and turn around. "Hi! I'm Fred, I'm one of your passengers." "Yes. I'm Matthias, the Captain." And so he is, his name is sewn into his shirt above the pocket in case I hadn't believed it. Captain Matthias Matthiasson is an Icelandic man about the same age as my Grandfather, with a buzz cut, glasses on a string, and a crushing handshake. "I don't want to disturb your dinner, but if you have moment, please stop by my cabin and give me your passport for the register." After dinner I come up to see him. "So you are an architecture student traveling in Finland, then you must have been visiting the work of Alvar Aalto!" he predicts, correctly, "and you are going to Iceland for ... what?" I tell him I'm interested in cities, and seeing how people live, and landscape, and he seems to buy that. "Yes, yes, yes. You know my favorite architect is of course Frank Gehry! I went to see, in this city called ..." "Bilbao?" "Yes. Bilbao! On the same quay that they used to bring Eimskip ships into, he has built a Guggenheim! My wife and I went to see it, and we spent two days! I also love art, my favorite artist is Richard Serra!" I tell him Eisenman's story about Helmut Kohl and the Jewish Monument in Berlin. "Yes." "Of course I also love american tiazz!" "I'm sorry, what?" "Tiazz! American cultural phenomena, tiazz!" "I'm sorry ..." "You might say 'ji-yazz' " "Oh! Jazz!" "Yes. I collect everything I can!" "Well, I don't know much about jazz, but I like 'Kind of Blue' and 'Sketches of Spain' " "Yes." He gets up and walks over to a cabinet, pulling out a 6 disc box set "This is 'Kind of Blue' " "The sessions?" "Yes." "Wow." "I have to stay interested in something here! Because I am not interested in ships and containers!" he said.

I explore the ship and the area of the quay around it, amazed that no one stops me and asks me what right I have to be there. I watch the loading process wishing I had a video camera. Flatbed trucks with containers on their backs pull underneath the large behemoth cranes. The cranes can slide along the quay on pairs of tracks, spaced about thirty meters apart. A grabber drops down from the underslung gantry cabin and latches onto the container. The operator lifts it up, and both the grabber and the operator's cabin slide out along a long rail until they're over the ship. The grabber is lowered and the container is released. It takes maybe 45 seconds to load one container this way, and by the time it's unloaded there's already another flatbed waiting, the flatbeds are loaded by vehicles that look like giant dune buggys, with big grabbers slung up and over their backs like scorpion stingers. The tricky bit must be figuring out in advance where to put the containers and coordinating the loading sequence so that it's efficient and correct. The long rails of the behemoth cranes are folded up when they're not in use, and this profile of the four-legged crane with the rail pointed at the sky like a deer's neck is the typical one that I had associated with industrial harbors in Baltimore. Back on board I settle into my cabin and doze off, we're due to leave Hamburg at 4am.

20 July, Wednesday

As promised, the ship is rumbling at 4. I get up to watch out the cabin window. After a few minutes of preliminary murmur, we're under way and I'm back in bed.

Yesterday my phone and I had an argument, it told me that if I couldn't remember the otherwise useless PIN code that came with my SIM card then it wouldn't tell me what time it was. At this point all I need the thing for is a clock, the minutes on the card are dead, and I don't plan on calling anyone from the North Sea, anyway. But the geniuses who invented this SIM card system decided that the phone, which is also a calculator, stopwatch and alarm clock, would become a paperweight if the user ever forgot the arbitrary four digit number that came with the last recharge he or she got, in whatever random Scandinavian country he or she was in, when the thing ran out of minutes last. I've been traveling for too long. I had cursed it and pulled the battery out. So that meant that when I got up I had no idea what time it was. I looked outside and saw a sleek catamaran with "PILOT" on the side and assumed we were being led into the harbor at Goteborg and it was mid-day. I was wrong, we were still on our way out of the river from Hamburg and it wasn't yet 9 am. I had almost missed breakfast but Jonas still had some stuff out and I ate it alone.

Afterwards I went for a walk around the ship again and went upstairs to read some more. I dozed off and and when I woke, the ship was rolling and we were out in the North Sea. Outside was a thousand shades of grey: the water churns with waves at 7-10 feet and the sky is shot with dark patches everywhere loosing angled, blurry rain on the horizon. Breaks in the clouds let the sun spotlight through and turn bits of the sea to shiny silver, the only color anywhere is the turquoise being thrown up in our wake. After staring at this from the couch for several minutes, I was questioning the stability of my breakfast. I decided it would be wise to lay down and read after typing only made it worse. Reading was good, the rolling ship was fun as long as I couldn't see out the window, and the churning in my stomach turned out nothing worse than some harmless burps. I was asleep again before long ...

And so the day went. Eating: with breakfast at 8, lunch at 12, coffee and cake at 15:30, and dinner at 18:00, it's not hard to stay well fed. Reading: Divine Comedy, Lonely Planet's Scandinavia book, and the Aalto Guide. Sleeping: lying down is the most comfortable position for reading, and who can resist being rocked to sleep by the North Sea and a full belly. I took a total of about three naps, one after every meal, none more than an hour long.

The only break was when Goodman, the Second Officer, invited me to come visit the bridge: "That sign that says 'No Passengers- Restricted Access', don't pay attention to that." There I found only the Captain, standing steadily despite the horizon which was pitching from the top of the wraparound windows to the bottom, with jazz on the sound system. "Is this satellite radio?" I asked, reaching for a railing to grab onto. "No. It is a Danish Jazz station! Denmark is just over the horizon to the West!" He indicated a slightly darker patch of grey off the starboard side. "So it just takes one person to pilot the ship?" The cabin I was occupying was marked "pilot" over the door. "Yes. It is all done with computers!" He showed me the GPS map, and the radar. Small alerts and alarms go off whenever the ship is drawn off course by current or wind, or when the radar senses an immanent collision. "This weather is terrible!" he said, turning on the wipers for the frontmost windows. "Is there usually only one person up here?" I had been struck by how undesigned the ship was, the interior could be a boring hotel, on a roller coaster. There are very few windows or opportunities to make sense of the ship as a whole, but up here, on the bridge there is literally a commanding, totalizing view of all of the containers, the length of the ship, the sea in every direction. "Yes. We only need one person usually, when coming into port, sometimes two." The Captain was standing easily with his hands crossed thoughtfully behind his back. I tried uselessly to keep up with the endless rocking, hanging on to a counter and trying to look casual. "Do you ever get bored of the view?" The Captain snorted and turned to Goodman, who was looking through some charts in the back, and said something to him in Icelandic like: "Boy, this guy's a complete idiot!" Goodman laughed and agreed. "Yes. After fifty years of this, yes I get bored of the view!" the Captain told me. "How long have you been a captain?" "In 1973, I sailed an Eimskip ship to Cambridge, Maryland, as captain." I asked him about the containers: "How do you know that something you need to unload in Goteborg isn't buried under something you need to bring all the way to Torshavn?" "Ah! The operations officer works all that out, with the help of the computer!" He gestures towards an empty chair. "It is all decided in advance. Almost never do we have to shuffle! And not only that, the weight must be calculated as well, evenly distributed so that the ship does not roll over or break." "So the computer optimizes for two variables: the order in which you load and unload, and the evenness of the container's weight." "Yes."

I was a little worried about the persistent uncertainty in my stomach. It seemed to make anything other than reading into a potential disaster. In my cabin I went back to Dante, I had been hoping to catch up on this journal, and maybe do some drawing and painting as well on the trip, we'll see ... I was also worried about how easily I would be able to sleep that night with all the naps I had taken during the day, but the rolling sea and lower lattitudes took care of that, it's good to be away from the midnight sun again and have a nice long, dark, night.

The crew of the Dettifoss:

Matthias Matthiasson, the Captain, loves art, Richard Serra, and Jazz: "You know, Tiazz!"

Bragi, the First Officer, spends a lot of time in front of a computer on A Deck, he's the one to go see if you need shore leave.

Goodman, the 2nd Officer, wears a flannel shirt tucked into sweatpants.

Jonas, the Steward, cut his hand today trying to catch a knife.

"Chief Engineer", the Chief Engineer

And the passengers:

Wilifred (sp?) and ???? a couple from Hamburg "We love to take fantastic trips!".

and Myself.

21 July, Thursday

A little late for breakfast again but Jonas still had everything out. We had slid into Goteborg harbor at about 6 that morning, and the view outside was still dimmed by clouds and spitting rain. I could see a large field of containers, bigger than at Hamburg. Two cranes had already maneuvered alongside us and were unloading containers, which were being picked up by tall four-legged vehicles painted safety orange. These have the same dimensions in plan as the containers, and after the boxes are set on the ground by the behemoth cranes, these vehicles roll over the containers on eight wheels and pick them up with a grabber that runs in the center of their long dimension. Just like the big cranes, these are designed to move things in the x, y, and z axes, with the added ability to roll around and turn. These vehicles I think of as harvesters because here they take the place of the scorpions and flatbeds at Hamburg. The harvesters can roll into the wide container fields and pick up fresh containers from above, they're probably about 12 or 15 meters tall and can grab containers even when they're stacked three high.

The whole process just begs to be completely automated. There's already a map of the position, destination, source and weight of every container aboard the ship, and I'm sure that's coordinated with a map that the terminal has of every container in their possession. If that were linked to a unique RFID signature for each one then the harvesters could just travel along a buried wire to find the container they were looking for in the x, y, and z dimension, verify its identity and precise location with RFID, grab it with magnets at the corners and put it down under the behemoth. The behemoth triangulates the RFID signal to get a fix on it, picks it up, and puts it just where it needs to go on the ship. To ensure safety you probably have a person riding the crane, but you don't need drivers for the harvesters, just give every human on the ground out there a kill switch to use if it looks like a harvester's about to run them over, or better than that, give them RFID too and the harvesters can just steer around them. The stevedores, or as we call them in the states, longshoremen, are becoming the latest group of tradespeople to be put out of their jobs by robots. The ships already practically steer themselves, that's why I'm staying in the pilot's cabin, "there is no pilot". The course of the ship is plotted in advance as a series of vectors with turns at key points. The ship's computer lets the officer on duty know when it's time to make a turn, and corrects itself with GPS as a reference during the straight runs. The origin of word "cybernetic" is "kybernetes" - 'steersman' in Greek. So the arrangement of cargo and the logistics of operations are already optimized by software, the next step will be to link that software directly to the hardware of cranes and harvesters and turn them into robots. They will have a set of broad goals and priorities (the strategy), and the kind of basic decision making processes (the tactics) that the ship uses to stay on course autonomously: avoidance and correction.

The implications of this tendency towards automation are already apparent on the ground. I was allowed to run around taking photographs among the containers at Hamburg because the major movement of containers is done by guys driving regular trucks. The drivers of the harvesters at Goteborg are four stories in the air, and are more concerned with the location of containers than the location of tourists, and so are more likely to hit anyone who isn't trained to stay out of their way. Going ashore in Goteborg is a process that begins with a visit to the office of Bragi, the First Officer, he gives me my passport from the safe and calls the terminal office for a transport to come and pick me up. A few minutes later, a minivan with an orange light on top arrives and we drive to the gate, where there is a city bus stop. All the cars that circulate in the terminal have these warning lights on them, and they all apparently move clockwise around the quays and to the gate, staying in their own clearly marked lane. As in Amsterdam, the modes of transport are clearly segregated from one another by their relative levels of deadliness. The behemoths stay on their wide tracks and beep conspicuously whenever they're moving, cars and peds stay in their zones marked by stripes on the ground, and the harvesters have the run of the of the place, it's their territory, and it's left to anyone who is less dangerous to stay alert and alive.

I took the bus to the tram to the city, amazed at how far out from "Centrum" we were. In the past four days I've driven over 800 kilometers in 10 hours from Rovaniemi to Helsinki, took a cab to the Silja Line Terminal, ridden the Baltic Ferry for over 15 hours, took a bus to the city center, then another hour long bus ride to the airport, then an hour and 10 minute flight before taking another hour long bus trip to the center of Hamburg, followed by a half hour cab ride to the Busshansa Terminal and the ship. At that point I had come all the way from the Arctic Circle to central Germany in two days. And then after 24 hours in the North Sea here I am back in Sweden. The itinerary for the Eimskip line would take me back to Sweden and Denmark, and this almost made me reconsider signing on for the trip, but now it's obvious that arriving at the container port of a city is not the same as coming by train right to Centralstation with the pedestrian shopping zone and hotels ten steps away. These are areas that are not designed for human habitation, these environments are laid out to the specifications of the large vehicles and machines that inhabit them: the ships, the cranes, the harvesters, the containers, and the trucks. The ships keep getting larger, that can be seen in the central stair of the Dettifoss where there is a gallery of photographs showing the four other Eimskip ships that have borne that name. A few people have written about how this tendency of centralization, along with containerization and automation of the process pushes the industrial harbors further and further away from Centrum, where there is deep water to bring in big ships, and wide open land to let the vehicles run around in. A lot of the people who got on the bus with me at the various terminals didn't bother transferring to the tram that would take them to the center of town, they're going to their homes in the suburbs. This cuts the city center out of the loop for the remaining humans who work in these places as they move between different locations around the edge.

But Centrum's still doing fine. Goteborg, like Stockholm and Malmo, seems not to lack for places to shop and people to shop there. The pedestrian streets are being covered, as in Milan, and turned into shiny indoor malls. Who knows what all these people are doing at the mall at 11 am on a Thursday? Are they all on shore leave from various container ships? I needed to get cookies, some movies to watch on the ship, and a new SIM card for my treacherous cell phone, and had no trouble finding all of those things, including the tourist office and an internet cafe, without getting lost.

I made it back to the ship in plenty of time despite the transfers, thanks to the rationality and ease of use that are the hallmarks of Scandinavia's public transportation system. There and back again with one ticket that cost about $2.50. I spent some time drawing the stack of containers and the orange harvesters. Although it's sunny out by now, black clouds still swoop in and drop spots of rain for a few minutes at a time. At coffee I talk about architecture with the Captain. He tells me that the new Opera House in Copenhagen, a ridiculous looking spaceship with with a baseball cap on top, on axis with the Royal Palace, was endowed (and half designed) by the chairman of the shipping company Maersk. And that Maersk, as it's prerogativeas the largest shipping company in the world, has caused Eimskip's original schedule to be rearranged. "Why do we go to Goteborg before Arhus?" I ask. "Yes. That is a good question! We used to take the canal that leads from the Elbe River in Germany to the Baltic, and stop at Arhus on Thursday and Goteborg on Friday. But Maersk has said that it needs to use the entire harbor in Goteborg every Friday, so that means we come on Thursday instead now and add 12 hours to our schedule by going all the way around Denmark!" He tells me that I will soon see one of Maersk's large ships, the Axel Maersk, over 350 meters long and 40 meters wide, carrying 7,200 containers to Dettifoss's 1,453, pulling in this evening. "I have a video you might be interested in!" he tells me. "About the ports?" I ask "No. About Frank Gehry! and Bilbao! Probably you have already seen it!"

Later I'm drawing some more and when it starts to rain again, I move into my cabin to try to color the drawing of the harvester I had made. The Captain knocks on my door, he has the Frank Gehry movie. "I have brought you this movie! Probably you have already seen it!" I tell him that it's not likely, and thank him. "And also this!" the Phaidon book of 20th century art. "It has some of my favorite artists in it! And these!" two jazz CDs "For you to copy! On your computer if you wish!" I thank him and show him the drawing that I'm working on, he looks at it thoughtfully "It's not finished?" I tell him that I still need to finish painting it. "Yes. Well when it is finished, perhaps I will make you an offer for it!" "You know my wife and I, we have sold our little house!" he says, "And we have moved into Reykjavik, a flat in the city, in the Funkisstile!" "The what?" "The Funkisstile! You do not have this word?" "I know the Jungendstijl, but I've never heard of the Funkisstile, is it an Icelandicthing?" "No. Everywhere they have the Funkisstile! It is the boxy! The boxy style!" he points to the shippingcontainers outside the window and in my drawing. "We love it!" I tell him that the Dutch, too, are also very fond of the Funkisstile. "Yes. Well I do not wish to disturb you!" "Thank you for these, Captain, I will take good care of them." "Yes."

Later I watch two tugs guide the big Maersk ship in. I count ten decks in their conning tower to our seven, but theirs was much wider, I wonder if they need more crew to operate a ship that large? After dinner, once it was docked at the quay, six behemoth cranes were engaged in loading and unloading it at once, we've only had two cranes working with us on one occasion. We're done in Goteborg by about 10pm, and I watch the Maersk ship lit up like Christmas as we roll back out into the Kattegak, the narrow sea between Sweden and Denmark.

22 July, Friday

This morning we are in the Danish port of Arhus. This port is entirely owned and operated by Maersk, and is very up to date. The terminal itself is a large rectangle of new land outboard of the older harbor. The Captain tells me that the eventual intent is to move all of the shipping to this new terminal and convert the area of the old port into "fancy housing". I suggest that it might be in the Funkisstile. "Yes." There are heavily loaded ships going back and forth to an area of shallow water next to the new terminal. They are dumping sand for the terminal's expansion, when this is complete It will be twice its current size. The newest areas of the terminal are even now just being graded and paved, and beyond that a new seawall is being put in place by construction ships as the sand is being offloaded. From the uppermost part of the Dettifoss, outside above the bridge, I have a view of the entire process: creating a new port where there was once open sea.

The Maersk facility is even more efficient than Goteborg. The harvesters used here are an improved design, with the cab placed in front instead of hanging off the side, this allows two harvesters to collect containers from adjacent rows without colliding. And they, like the cranes here, are painted a tasteful shade of powder blue that matches the Maersk Sealand containers that are neatly stacked everywhere. Think of the container facility as a giant desktop, the objective is to sort the items on the desktop into organized stacks, the Maersk port has a clearly visible outbox adjacent to the cranes, and an inbox along the narrow causeway access road where big trucks come through, the only link to the mainland. There is also a tidy parking rack for the harvesters off to the left. Building the port from scratch in open water has allowed Maersk to sort its desktop out just the way it wants, and the rapid loading process is the result.

There are lanes underneath the cranes between the tracks, and the smooth way in which the containers are placed exactly on the lines by the harvesters, and picked up swiftly by the cranes is either a testament to the skill of the operators or evidence that this process is already becoming locally automated. The big cranes will often be simultaneously performing all of their possible operations: sliding a few feet along the tracks, pulling in the grabber as it's being lowered and configured to the size and corners of the container. And it seems like the operators (or the software) are compensating to minimize swing as the containers are brought across and down, gracefully turning forward momentum into forward motion and lowering them before they have a chance to swing back. Very smooth. I wish I had a video camera.

This is how everything becomes a robot, small processes are automated and optimized bit by bit, like antilock brakes, not all at once. You don't make the entire crane automatic and then push a button and walk away, you throw a little algorithm in there that tests the heft of each container and swings it across just so. You don't let all the harvesters run around blind, you bury wires in the tarmac under the yellow lines to help the drivers drop the boxes accurately and swiftly. Kybernetes, just like on the ship, you keep humans riding along doing what humans are good at: dealing with unexpected conditions and unintended consequences: the stuff that falls through the grid of the software world map. Thinking of how graffiti artists paint freight cars, which then travel around the country, I can imagine some kind of future scenario where, once the ports are entirely automated, artists can break in and paint the containers as pixels, so that they'll make different patterns and shapes when they're stacked on ships in optimized patterns and carried around the world.

We're back rumbling through the Kattegak after dinner at 18:30, on our way to Frederikshavn in Norway. I've just watched the Bilbao video that the Captain loaned me. "It's really funny because in the academic end of the architectural profession right now, everything has to be done for a reason." I tell him at dinner, "If you make a move or change something the first question is 'why?' " "Yes. Because there are so many things that can be done it's so important to stay open to different reasons!" "Exactly, that's why it's so great the things Gehry says about painting, he's open to all these other influences." "Yes." "And a lot of people say it's arbitrary, but I think it's fairly complex and rational." "Yes. Of course!" I tell him that a lot of architects right now, especially in the states, are interested in making houses out of shipping containers. "Yes. Because you can buy them once they are no longer used. I have seen them used for the refugees!" "But architects are designing these houses for wealthier clients, it's a trend now even though very few have been built." "Yes. But this will be so ugly!" he says, and gives a short laugh. "It's the Funkisstile!" I say.

23 July, Saturday

What did I do all day? Read Dante. Watched my movies: Casablanca and Miller's Crossing. Too bad they're region 2 DVDs, these are good to have around, I ate all my cookies ...

Lunch was three kinds of fish, I could smell it from the outside of the ship, two decks up. The Captain was standing at the buffet table when I got to the galley: "That horrible smell is this!" he said, lifting up a lid "It is a skate!" It was greyish brown. "It is smoked, and then allowed to rot a little." he laughed. "Okay, I'll try some." I put a bite sized chunk on my plate. "And this is salted cod!" ordinary looking steamed fish, okay. "And here we have sauce for the fish, here is melted butter, and this! This is melted lamb's fat! Very good." I tried the butter. "What's this?" I asked, lifting up the last lid to find strange pieces of white plastic underneath. "Oh, this! I didn't know we had this! I would have had some! I'll have get another plate!" the Captain was getting nostalgic "I have eaten this since I was a boy! It is whitefish, steamed a little, and then dried to preserve it and then heated up again!"

The skate didn't taste as bad as it smelled, but I didn't want anymore after one bite. Later, the smell was everywhere, it had stuck to my clothes, even my skin, I changed my shirt and took a shower before I went to bed.

24 July, Sunday

I've gotten up late and am eating breakfast in the galley, talking with Jonas, when a chunk of land slides past the window, it's the southern tip of the Faroe Islands. I went up to the top of the ship, above the bridge, to watch our approach to the harbor and it's a lot like I had pictured: tilted pieces of green and rocky island, bordered by cliffs and treeless, under a grey cold sky. The air is damp and chilly, and I'm thrilled to have to put on my coat for the first time. There are little clusters of tiny cartoon houses in sheltered spots on the shore, all painted different colors with different colored roofs too, some grass. The land when you see it through the mist is close in bands of rock and grass, all kind of crooked like the whole thing might slide back into the Atlantic someday. It's all dramatically lit by the overcast sky with breaks in the clouds casting shadows and spots on the hills, the wind is hard but the sea is calm for now.

The biggest patch of crayola houses is Torshavn, and for a minute I can't figure out where they're planning on docking the ship. The Captain executes a skillful stop just 50 meters from a sand and rock beach and we back into our parking space on the quay right behind a small Spanish cruise ship. No behemoths here, the Dettifoss uses its own cranes to unload, and there's only one scorpion dune buggy on the pier to pick the containers up and put them away. We'll only be here for three hours.

I walked into town with the German Tourists and since it's Sunday, everything is closed. The town is almost empty too, except for us and the other tourists from the cruise ship, everyone is at home or at church. Everything, even the boats, is brightly colored and small under the grey sky, and it must be so cozy to live inside a tiny house with a thick warm turf roof and a red door. I stop and draw one of the small streets with small cars and small houses and even a small, white, friendly, Faroese cat that wants me to scratch his ears.

It's a good place to keep in your head for mental vacations: wearing a sweater because it's 12 degrees centigrade in July and it's threatening rain, taking walks from town to town on paths that are 500 years old, floating around in a sailboat that needs a new paint job when the sun comes out, living in a grass roofed house, in a tiny village, on a cloudy green island, in the North Atlantic.

Back on the Dettifoss I'm on the roof again when the Captain sticks his head up and asks me into the bridge. The ship has the best view of the harbor and the town, taller than anything else, we get binoculars and he points out buildings that he likes. "There is a rowing contest next week! Look, you can see the girl's team practicing there!" "They're all blond!" I say, "and strong!" "Yes." Below us half the crew is gathered in that corner of the ship, watching them and waving.

After we've left, passing the Russian trawlers in the harbor and the Vestmanna bird cliffs, I spent some more time on the top of the ship watching the seagulls get a free ride to Iceland. The gulls here are all different and exotic, with matte black tops or mottled grey like stone, and there are four or five of them that skim along just a foot above the waves, surfing in a zone of turbulence that somehow moves faster than the ship itself alongside it. They almost never have to flap their wings, going all the way to the front of the ship before rising up into another layer of air that moves back and then churning around in the wake before doing it over again. How do they learn that they can do that? and how do they teach each other? It's tempting to see it as a kind of chaos theory metaphor (Surf the Gnarl!) until you remember that it takes a huge inefficient thing like a cargo ship burning literally tons of fossil fuels moving televisions from China to Iceland to generate enough free energy to carry four seagulls across the ocean. It's not sustainable, it's just hitchhiking. If the designers of the Dettifoss could, they'd have her slip through the air and the water so smoothly that she'd leave no surplus turbulence behind at all. Those vortices are extra energy draining away, the seagulls are just there to pick it up and put it to some use. And it it looks like it must be a lot of fun, they don't have to fly that close to the water probably, but when the sea is calm enough it sure is cool to try to see how near you can get to a wave without hitting it.

25 July, Monday

We have crossed two time zones in the past two days, setting the clocks back one hour on each occasion. This means we've gained two hours, always overnight, and the amount of daylight is growing again as we head north. If the meals weren't delivered at the same time every day my sense of when to sleep and when to wake would become totally unmoored. Clock time is drifting, solar time is drifting, only the meals keep me anchored to a predictable sleep/wake schedule. In order to hold the schedule together I have to maintain discipline in two areas: no naps longer than 1/2 hour, and I have to get myself up in the morning in time for breakfast. Yesterday I broke both rules, with a long nap in the afternoon and a late breakfast, and last night I was asleep by 10pm, and stayed in bed until 7am local time, with the extra hour from the time zone crossing I was in bed for 10 hours. We'll be rounding Iceland all morning today until we get to Reykjavik at 3pm, since this is the time I usually start to feel like napping, that should keep me awake, and since I've gotten up early by the clock, hopefully the bright sky won't keep me awake too long tonight.

I've spent most of the morning so far up in the bridge, talking about jazz and art with the Captain, and watching Iceland slide past through the binoculars. There are whole islands out there that are less than 40 years old. the ship went through a channel between a glacier on one side and a volcano on the other. The volcano is part of the Westman Islands, the newest island came up 1967: Surtsey. Biologists and geologists are asking people to stay clear of it so they can observe how the land develops and plants take hold.

We arrive in Reykjavik at about 4 pm, and within an hour the entire crew except Bragi, the First Officer, is packed up and gone. It's funny to see these guys all of the sudden clean up and change into decent clothes, they all get in cars with their wives, carrying cases of tax-free beer. The shuttle bus that's supposed to take me across the terminal never shows up so the Captain and his wife offer me a ride into town, which is great because I have no local currency and no idea where to get some. They're worried about me: "Don't you know where you're staying?" No, my cell phone has turned on me again, refusing to connect to the Icelandic networks. I tell them that I have a few places in mind, and want to check them out. They drop me in the center of town and I realize how small this city is, about the size of Annapolis. The Captain gives me his mobile number and email address in case I need anything, and I'm off in Reykjavik to look for a place to stay.

You Nexus, Eh? I Design Your Eyes.

2007-11-12T20:54:00.000-05:00

(A quick shortform while the discussion about the longform builds)

I've always been fascinated by the huge and often unacknowledged debt that architecture and science fiction owe each other. Does Neil Denari ever talk about Syd Mead?

Syd Mead, Sketch for a Suspended Kitchen, 1979

Neil Denari, Endeavor Talent Agency Screening Room, 2004

I had suspected there were more explicit connections, and maybe it was the big screen, but I didn't notice this until what was probably my 17th viewing of Blade Runner:

Syd Mead, l.a. Eyeworks, Blade Runner, 1982

Neil Denari, l.a. Eyeworks, 2002

DSC00579a

2007-11-12T19:28:00.001-05:00

DSC00579a, originally uploaded by ske765book.

Work in progress.

Magic in the Water

2007-11-02T21:42:00.000-04:00

from:
to: Fred Scharmen

Hi Fred,

There’s a public hearing at Digital Harbor High School (very close to you) this evening re. the Swann Park issue, which, much as I expected, is not dead yet. See Balto Sun last Friday. It’s at 6.30 p.m. if you want and/or C. want to go. If you do I’ll see you there.

D.

{from the article:

'The waterfront park is owned by the city. But much of the cost of cleaning up the ball fields will be borne by Honeywell International, a New Jersey defense contracting giant that assumed liability for the factory's pollution after Honeywell was acquired by Allied's successor company in 1999.

Allied deliberately withheld test results three decades ago showing high arsenic levels in Swann Park, a city health department task force concluded in July. Allied allowed local health officials in 1976 to falsely believe that levels of arsenic in the park were low. But the company knew that large amounts of the carcinogen billowed through torn filters on smokestacks at the DDT factory, blanketing the ball fields "like snow," according to the city task force.'

By Tom Pelton, Sun reporter
October 27, 2007

-}

[summary of meeting: 6:30 - 9pm, 11/01/07]

- intro and background from representatives of the Maryland Department of the Environment: Park closure on April 19th 2007, subsequent investigation, etc ...

- outline of remediation planning and design from Honeywell representatives

- introduction to Swann Park Improvement Master Plan, dated June 1 2007, and credited to Mahan Rykiel Associates, Inc. {warning - their website almost crashed my computer. -Ed.}

- Q&A Highlight Summaries:

Q: I understand the guys from Honeywell talked about the soil sampling, I wonder if anyone's tested the water in the Middle Branch of the Patapsco River to see if any contamination from runoff or seepage has taken place or is taking place?

A: (Horacio Tablada, MDE) There are plans for that testing to occur, yes.

Q: Everyone's talking about the park, when there are people living here, why are you guys worried about a f*cking park, when there's people's lives at stake? Those ten houses down there McComas St. -

A: There are seven houses.

Q: Okay, those seven houses, have got people in them, why are you guys spending - how much is this going to cost?

A: (Honeywell representative) 3.6 million dollars.

Q: Why are you guys spending 3.6 million dollars to rebuild that park, when you could use that money to relocate those people and get them out of there?

...

A: We've responded to the cleanup directives in the order that we've received them, we got the cleanup order for the park first.

Q: There's a Master Plan (PDF) for this area, the Middle Branch of the Patapsco, we know you're bringing in the Aquarium and all that, and there are developers involved. We all know there's Magic in the Water. Given that the plan for these park improvements seemed to materialize pretty quickly, I want to know, does Honeywell have any stake or interest in any of the development plans for the region, or any connection to the developers?

A: (Horacio Tablada, MDE) Perhaps the gentlemen from Honeywell would like to respond to that?

A: (Honeywell representatives) No, no interest.

- further discussion of health risks and statistics from scientists at the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, and Dr. Joshua Scharfstein, Baltimore City Commissioner of Health.

- further Q&A regarding health risks, in particular the risks in the population living immediately adjacent to the park, City and Agency representatives indicate that there is more data to be collected before an assesment of risks can be complete.

...

{Later, interested in learning more about the area's Master Plan, I Google 'baltimore patapsco middle branch master plan'. The PDF from which this image is taken, is hosted at http://www.baltimoremiddlebranch.com/

... at the bottom of the page is a logo:

Dreamed City at the Edge of the Abyss

2007-10-21T14:04:00.000-04:00

Two seasons ago, thanks to the recommendation of a friend (and the random proliferation of Spanish holidays), I visited the medieval Andalucian city of Ronda.

The city's position on a rocky mesa makes it a natural fortress. It was held by the Celts, the Romans, and the Moors until it was taken by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1485 during the final phase of the Reconquista. Ronda was one of the last cities to fall before Granada, the capital of Muslim Spain.

On returning to the states, I spent a lot of time on the internet looking for a Lebbeus Woods drawing that I had seen several years before, showing Manhattan reimagined in a similar setting.

BLDGBLOG's Geoff Manaugh found the drawing, and posted it as the centerpiece of a long interview with Woods, who's just launched his own website documenting thirty year's worth of work.

The cliffs of Ronda drop almost 300 meters at their tallest, according to legend, Nationalist fascists were thrown from them by the outraged Rondans during the Spanish Civil War, an event fictionalized by Hemingway in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Orson Welles asked to be buried here. Rainer Maria Rilke called it 'the Dreamed City' and stayed so long writing that they named a street after him and preserved his hotel room as a museum.

To be in the canyon, and stand at The Gate of the Wind, built by the Moors in the 10th century, is to have one's back exposed to the cliffs, vulnerable to the city above. The gorge below is more than just a picturesque landscape, it is a collage of infrastructures from different cultures and eras.

From the Nasrid Palace, a series of narrow steps and wide vaults was hand carved through the mountain in the 14th century. Known as 'La Mina', and intended as an escape route and water supply line from the city to river, it is filled with dripping water and illuminated by hidden windows in the cliffs. Some of the rooms are said to have held cauldrons of boiling oil, ready to pour down on the invading Catholics.

A few yards downstream from the bottom of this tunnel, and only accessible from a narrow, unmarked path notched into the cliff, is a small dam and waterworks. Here you can see rats running along the collected flotsam of styrofoam cups and sticks, and you can smell evidence of a leak from the city's sewage system into the blue-green water.

To get to this side of the river, you'll have to take a spur from the tourist trail and walk through the backyard of a Spanish hippie's house. I put a two Euro coin in his tip jar and talked with him for a minute about drawing. The path will lead past the waterfall, which drops another hundred meters, and there are strange ruins everywhere. A tower carrying a powerline pierces the roof of an old cistern, and a roman-looking vaulted chamber looks like it's been readapted as someone's home or campsite. The dam probably dates from the 20th century, there is a control room with machinery inside. Nothing is explained or organized, there are no plaques, and no handrails. The landscape of paths, cliffs, waterfalls, machines, ruins, and lush, writhing vegetation kept reminding me of the old text based videogame Zork: 'You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.'

Caves and strange tunnels lead into the cliffs, I walked into one as long as my nerve held out, taking a few steps at a time to let my eyes adjust to the light: 'It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.'

Lebbeus says: 'I made the drawing as a demonstration of the fact that Manhattan exists, with its towers and skyscrapers, because it sits on a rock – on a granite base.':

I wanted to suggest that maybe lower Manhattan – not lower downtown, but lower in the sense of below the city – could form a new relationship with the planet. So, in the drawing, you see that the East River and the Hudson are both dammed. They’re purposefully drained, as it were. The underground – or lower Manhattan – is revealed, and, in the drawing, there are suggestions of inhabitation in that lower region.

Woods' drawing, and Ronda's existence, illustrate the paradox: that which is the most defensible, is also the most precarious: the stability and height of the rock is only matched by the depth of the abyss, and that abyss is composed of the patchwork grand plans of former empires.

All cities are on the edges of cliffs.

(UPDATE-4:47PM:"You are at the top of the great canyon on its south wall. From here there is a marvelous view of the canyon and parts of the Frigid River upstream. Across the canyon, the walls of the white cliffs still appear to loom far above. Following the canyon upstream (north and northwest), Aragain Falls may be seen, complete with rainbow. Fortunately, my vision is better than average, and I can discern the top of flood control dam #3 far to the distant north. To the west and south can be seen an immense forest, stretching for miles around. It is possible to climb down into the canyon from here.")

Apollo-Soyuz: The Aesthetics of Engineering at the Solar Decathlon

2007-10-14T16:47:00.000-04:00

Which way is south?

There are few things more exciting than the idea of living off the grid. Access to power, water and food is historically a function of interdependence: it takes whole societies to build infrastructure for the creation, maintenance and distribution of these necessities. The motivation behind the closed loop, small scale, sustainable developments in architecture and design is less the idea that, with a smaller impact, we'll be fullfilling some kind of moral, karmic obligation to a diffuse concept like the environment. What's exciting about living off the grid is the implied mobility and autonomy that go along with the decoupling from large scale, outdated, static infrastructures: no foreign oil, and no powerlines. Living green implies independence, a freedom to be and to go that wasn't possible before.

The Solar Decathlon, an annual competition between student teams to build the most efficient prefab sunpowered house, should be the hottest architecture event around. But the obsession with kilowatt/hours on the engineering side, and a constant fallback to default design decisions in the architecture of the things has, with few exceptions, kept it from making the crucial leap into consciousness and imagination that the implications of the technologies would promise.

As my girlfriend overheard a woman say into her cellphone: 'They keep trying to explain every little thing to you, when I all I want to do is just look at this stuff!', and it's not just the student tour guides that get all didactic. The structures themselves are jumping all over the place to overemphasize their theme with all the familiar emblems: the trellis, the plant wall, the water tank, the obligatory shipping container, and of course, the ubiquitous huge shed roof with solar panels slanted due south at the optimal angle. It's a disappointingly bland kit-of-parts architecture, assembled to an instruction manual provided by Dwell Magazine.

Some of the best work here downplays the theme, like the simple, slatted box by the students at the Technische Universitat Darmstadt in Germany, where the photovoltaics are dissolved and distributed throughout the louvres. Other teams benefit by intentionally turning the volume up to eleven, pushing the technical aesthetics into straight sci-fi territory, like the moonbase south facade (complete with rover) by the University of Cincinnati.

What's missing here (apart from the conspicuous and regrettable absence of several well-known architecture schools) is the kind of intention and aspiration that can give engineering an emotional impact. Confirmation is no further than several hundred yards down the National Mall at the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum.

The Cold War and the Space Race have done at least as much for aesthetics as they have for technology. Two nuclear missiles greet visitors in the atrium here: an American Pershing II and a Soviet SS-20. Decommisioned in 1987 at the signing of the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces treaty, these two artefacts could hardly be more different in the expression of their intent. The American missile is a pure cartoon of optimism and righteousness: Chesely Bonestell by way of GI Joe. The Soviet missile is all inscrutable alien menace: a triple-lobed point and a body covered in Cyrillic hieroglyphs. Two aesthetics for two different Cold War strategies: the American push to unify from within, and the Soviet intent to menace from without.

One hall down, at the Space Race exhibit, the centerpiece is a recreation of the first meetup between Soviet and American craft in orbit: the docking of an Apollo and a Soyuz module in 1975. This event, ostensibly a scientific experiment, was largely a mediated political manouver signifying détente, the relaxing of Cold War tensions. Again, the contrast is clear, the American Apollo module is an orbiting SUV, bulky and Euclidean. In orbit, where size and weight are at a premium, this is literally Conspicuous Consumption of Space. It dwarfs the sinister, buglike Soyuz, which nevertheless seems to be feeding off the American spacecraft like a parasite.

With solar power, air and water recycling, and even some of the first attempts at onboard farming, what could be more sustainable than a spaceship? It's a mobile, autonomous, closed loop system that does even more than sustain, it produces: political consensus, military power, science fiction. Spaceships make little kids want to study physics so they can become astronauts.

If sustainability is the assurance that the future will be as good as the past, don't we really want more than that? A goal should be framed, not in terms of sustainability, but in terms of productive excess. We don't want the same, we want more. Efforts such as the Solar Decathlon fail to the extent that they refuse to acknowledge the productive power of the imagination, not only for its capacity to make good design, but for its ability to involve people in global change on an emotional level.

[[Edit 10/15: rereading this, it sounds a little more negative than I had maybe intended. Having worked on a collaborative design/build while in school myself, I know how hard it is to generate and maintain a big idea through that process, not to mention all the hard work these student teams put out there just to make these things. Big shoutouts and respect to all the students involved, I'm jealous and ashamed that my school isn't among them!]]

Purlin is a Lovely Word

2007-10-09T22:02:00.000-04:00

So if there's a rough 3 1/2 foot increment that's supposed to organize everything, and the mullions in the curtainwall double up at every third bay, do you let the grid vary to keep the panel size even, or do you maintain the rigor of the system, let it define the centers, and just use two panel sizes? It's an easy question until you remember that the 3 1/2 foot lines organize the spacing of the purlins at the roof as well, and there's no reason for them to vary on the thirds. A nonexistent system can become many things, a real one is limited by the circumstances that brought it into being. Abstraction wins.

Righthand Rule: South Baltimore No-Go Zones Part 1: Swann Park

2007-09-29T10:45:00.000-04:00

Swann Park shares the end of McComas Street with a lumberyard, a petroleum distribution center, and seven rowhouses. The park is next to a former Allied Chemical pesticide plant, now owned by Honeywell. It was shut in the 70s, reopened, and shut again in April '07 when the soil tested positive for contaminants.

View Larger Map

At the south end of Light Street, go two streets west to Hanover Street and keep going south, after the highway, following the Right Hand Rule, it's the first right. The gate's still open, even though the sign says it's closed. The view here across the water of the abandoned Westport Power Station (as seen in Twelve Monkeys) is framed, on one side, by the spaghetti tangle of the 95/395 junction, suspended over the Middle Branch of the Patapsco River, and on the other side, by a disused CSX railroad bridge, with a rotating center for ships that never pass.

Desire Lines always lead to gaps in fences: a path of flattened grass heads into the woods up the embankment, through the chainlink and opening onto the rail line. The tracks are bordered on the other side by the lumberyard, and they continue across the bridge. I'm standing there for several moments, trying to decide whether to ignore the sign and the rotting wood, and step out onto the bridge, when a boat cruises into view.

After walking through the open gate of a closed park, along a path through a broken fence, to the edge of a crumbling bridge that leads to a shuttered power plant, you realize there's always another layer. The No-Go zones are nested like Russian dolls, but there's no deterrent quite as powerful as the feeling that you're being watched. I'll come back when there're no boats.

Riding out of the park, I see two kids playing in front of the rowhouses. The older, chubby one shouts at me: 'There's arsenic in there!'. Meeting minutes from Allied Chemical seem to indicate that the someone was aware of the presence of toxins in the soil as far back as the 1970s, but the park was allowed to reopen anyway. The current proposal asks Honeywell/Allied to perform their own tests at the park. But There's at least one rogue Environmental Toxicologist interested in doing independent oversight to find out the exact extent, and effects, of the contamination. The Baltimore City Health Department has a blog with regular updates on the site's status. 'I know, be careful' I say, I'm not about to tell him that there's chromium in there too. 'Jimmy goes in there anyway!' the younger kid with the mullet says, as I ride back up the hill.

When the Levees Broke

2007-08-29T19:52:00.000-04:00

Spike Lee's documentary should be required viewing for every civics class in the country.

It's like this (and I'm only halfway through the movie): there's a contract - government provides basic services, and protects property, if they fail to do one, they can't give lip service to the other. The chaos that follows the collapse of infrastructure is not an excuse for the imposition of a police state in order to protect property.

... and at least half of the news clips excerpted here are from BBC.

The Internet is Real!

2007-08-23T11:43:00.001-04:00

The Internet is Real!, originally uploaded by sevensixfive.

... and it's made of people!

Shoutout to blogger/flickr buddy Rob Eversion, who sent out a call for postcards via twitter. I've just got the one he sent me (addressed to Fred 765). It's like a real-life blog post or something (post, ha!): honest-to-god original film photos on the front, and some hand generated personalized text on the back. Blows my mind! Thanks Rob!