Typologies for Big Words by ACC Art Books

ORO Editions

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

ORO Editions

. .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

PROLOGUE INTRODUCTION

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 4 8 31 67 81 113 141 161 215 232 234

FACTORY OF ECOLOGY INFRASTRUCTURE OF INTIMACY MAUSOLEUM OF HUMANITY WAITING ROOM OF DEMOCRACY MEDIA LAB OF SAFETY OFFICE OF DIVERSITY MUSEUM OF CAPITALISM EPILOGUE

ORO Editions

Guided by financial profitability, efficient building techniques have long been the hallmark of urbanizing processes.

As criticism of this framework, this project simulates efficient construction techniques with the true intention of enabling the emergence of a new urban nature.

Despite its use of industrialized and prefabricated building components, this factory triggers ground disturbances that create conditions appropriate for vegetal growth.

Through the use of assembly errors, induced cracks, absurd mismatches, missing components, and other building defects, this Factory of Ecology seeks the ground to collapse, the soil to erode, the water to flood, the snow to collect, and weeds to grow.

ORO Editions

The frontispiece of the 1755 edition of Marc-Antoine Laugier’s well-known Essai sur l’Architecture was a print by Charles Eisen showing the muse of architecture pointing toward a structural clarity informed by the biological world.

At about the same time, Piranesi was drawing his now-famous etchings of Rome, where he romantically described visitors exploring and enjoying the ruins of classical architecture overgrown by vegetation.

A short time later, the picturesque emerged as a new aesthetic sensibility through texts, illustrations, and paintings that showed a newly developed taste for the abandoned and the dilapidated.

ORO Editions

ORO Editions

ORO Editions

ORO Editions

“Few tools have become as widely accepted in everyday life in recent years as cell phones. Keitai (“portable”), the shortened term for a cell phone, has come to mean much more than a portable communication terminal: the keitai has become an indispensable tool for constructing the infrastructure of everyday life; the term has taken on a greatly expanded significance to mean new lifestyle media. This spatial design competition seeks new proposals concerning the relationship between the urban environment and keitai in the near future. What sorts of conditions, forms, and environments will the “keitai city” exhibit?”35

ORO Editions

35—From the competition brief of Keitai City DoCoMo International Architectural Design Competition, organized by ntt DoCoMo and a+u, Tokyo, Japan (October 2005).

In response to the competition’s question, this project proposes a playful and mobile infrastructure constructed through a portable device called zep.

A zep is nothing else than a seemingly innocent balloon with technological capabilities: an inflatable keitai holding a cell phone blocker, a fan, and an air heater that is capable of jamming a cell phone’s signal, eliminating its reception within various ranges.

ORO Editions

ORO Editions

Democracy is typically framed in aspirational, celebratory, ideal, and collective terms.

However, democracy is a constant wait.

And waiting rooms are anonymous, equalizing, endless, boring, slow, and dreadful.

Waiting rooms are for strangers.

This tone might be a more accurate description of the democratic condition.

This waiting room is a space in limbo that is simultaneously insightful and frustrating, rational and illogical, energizing and tiring, a combination of emotions that is the basis of any democratic dialogue.

ORO Editions

VII

134

This waiting room is a ghost of other spaces (labyrinth, garden, immigration center, psychiatrist’s office).

But it is both a real and an ideal place.

It is a reserved enclosure with trickling access carved out from the city’s structures of power, order, and symbolism.

A boundary for civic discourse? Maybe.

ORO Editions

VIII

135

ORO Editions

136

ORO Editions

137

This new office type can be framed as a rewriting of Rem Koolhaas’ “Typical Plan,” a text on the American invention of the office building.

“The ambition of the Typical Plan is to create new territories for the smooth unfolding of new processes, in this case, ideal accommodation for business” and “its only function is to let its occupants exist. Business can invade any architecture.”44

The ambition and function of the typical office plan discussed by Koolhaas have been escalated because business is no longer just one possible human activity in the achievement society.

Instead, work is now the only compulsion of the achievement-subject.

This reframing of the typical office plan is showcased in the reconfiguration of two iconic buildings: the Flatiron and the Twin Towers.

44—Rem Koolhaas, “Typical Plan” in SMLXL, eds.

ORO Editions

Office for Metropolitan Architecture, Rem Koolhaas, and Bruce Mau (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1995), 337.

190

In his text and accompanying plans that survey the most emblematic typical office plans of the

20th century, Koolhaas describes the modern office building through rapid-fire sets of architectural qualities.

Some of the qualities he describes can be maintained.

For example, similarly to Koolhaas’

Typical Plan, the Office of Diversity is both a system and a set of unique proposals.

Therefore, it is “no longer a place but a condition.”45

But other qualities must be redefined to reimagine the office type.

The new office type proposed here is no longer “an architecture of the rectangle”46 as the modern office building was, but it is now an architecture of the ramp.

While “Typical Plan provides the multiple platforms of 20thcentury democracy,”47 the office space here proposed provides a continuous helicoid for 21st-century auto-exploitation.