No. 10 Projections

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I O W A S TAT E U N I V E R S I T Y

JOURNAL OF ARCHITECTURE

LETTER FROM THE EDITORS

This issue you are reading represents a collection of thoughts, forged from discussions with our membership over the past few months. For the first time, this discourse was split, with two parallel, perpendicular, and tangential conversations happening simultaneously from two continents and contexts. DATUM Rome, an experiment that we have been running during the production of this issue, seeks to engage our members abroad — a situation that provides a new opportunity to widen our scope, and to further our discourse.

This dialogue has been surrounding the act of projecting, one essential to architecture and design. To project, essentially, is to imagine, to question, to think, and to communicate – but designers are not alone in this act. While not necessarily drawn, people project their identities and ideas into the world all the time. Inversely, society projects back, shaping and subjugating, molding the spaces we inhabit, the objects we use, and the behaviors and mindsets we employ and exist within.

Around the world today, society is seemingly entrenched in dichromatic postmodern ideologies – views that for most, are ill defined, yet highly partisan. We are saturated in algorithmically created realities, informed by news feeds catered for our digital-selves, and entrapped within the filter bubbles that gave rise to fake news and alternative facts. This condition implores us to challenge our perceptions and ideologies, and to trace the origin and development of the multitude of cultural norms projected upon us. Conversely, we must similarly question our own projections, remaining critical of our own mindsets, methodologies, and makings.

Our issue has investigated these constructed realities, how we as architects and designers play an active role in projecting a multitude of realities onto the world, how our personal ideologies affect the method and content of our designs, and how these ideologies and designs are represented. Inside you will find case studies that trace notions through history, poignant analyses that investigate our habits and practices, and works that allow for new understandings and readings of everyday life.

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K E L L I E W A LT E R S

NICK RAAP

THEME EDITORS

Kellie Walters Nick Raap EDITORIAL BOARD

Grant Bauermeister Chris Perez Andrew Suiter Megan Zeien DATUM is a journal of architecture founded and edited by design students at Iowa State University.

The publication seeks to manifest and catalogue DATUM’s community of discussion and act as a platform for further inquiry and critique. It is organized around a central theme that DATUM feels has been misrepresented, neglected, or needs further examination in the architectural discourse of the Midwest.

Kane Hassebrock Tomi Seyi Laja Jake Spangler WEB

Ian Spadin ADVISORS

Ross Exo Adams Firat Erdim FONTS

PUBLISHER

Heuss

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Avenir Baskerville

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DATUM would like to thank Iowa State University Department of Architecture for their continuous support and invigorating enthusiasm for the journal and community.

GRAPHICS

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TA B L E O F C O N T E N T S

Life is a Highway

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Massimo Monfiletto

The Elasticity of Monumentality

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Michael McKinney

La Sagrada Familia

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Allyson Hinz

Chaos / Void

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Tomi Seyi Laja

The Limits of Translation

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Grant Bauermeister

Divine

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James Lieven

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RED PAG

A Conversation with Douglas Spencer

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Datum + Douglas Spencer

Datum Members

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Datum Ames + Datum Rome

The Language of Intention

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Megan Zeien

The Construction of the Nocturnal Human

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Zachary Hall

Social Media and the Destruction of Identity

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Ian Spadin

6 – 102 | Growth and Desire

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Joeseph Kastner

The Art of Puppetry

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Tomi Seyi Laja + Ruchi Patel

The Palimpsest of Landscape

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Andrew Suiter

ES

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L I F E I S A H I G H W AY: T H E CONSTRUCTION OF THE WEST VIA ROUTE 66 MASSIMO MONFILLETO

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Along Route 66, a now longdefunct subject of much national fascination in the prosperity of post-WWII America, exists a cultural liminality that is both deeply dependent on a rich history of Western colonial domination and entirely predicated on the revision and manipulation of historical and cultural contexts. The 2,448 mile stretch of road was a transnational project that aimed to create a universal American adventure along the lines of the logic that produced the capture of Western territory in the US during the days of Manifest Destiny. In the sites both preserved and constructed along the “historic� Route 66 exists a historical and cultural archive of nationalist development in the Western United States. In this archive we find evidence of the collusion between the state and capitalism to expand colonial dominance and produce a national culture cobbled from the constituent fragments of localized cultures, assembled for the mass production of not only an American vacation destination, but an American ideal. In Route 66, we can observe the contours and

boundaries of US construction of state along colonial lines.

Consumer Construction The nexus point of the American obsession with personal automobiles is the consumer boom following the end of the Second World War. In response to the decades of frugality and economic depression before armistice, as well as a sudden glut in the manufacturing workforce, automobile companies began to build a profoundly enticing middle class ideal around the image of the American car.

The Cadillac quickly became a symbol of the American middle class, with the ownership of a personal automobile becoming coded in personal economic success. It was under these auspices that Route 66 was formed; the sudden upswing in production of automobiles coincided with a strategic development of the tourist trade in the Southwest. The advertisements for the depicted tourist destinations were clear in their influences and frank in their intentions; they painted an exoticized picture of the west, a rough-and-tumble, heavily

racialized space in which an East Coast man could travel and find both adventure and danger.

The primary driver of Route 66’s geographical development of the Southwest ultimately originates from the expansion of US consumer culture.

Colonial Infrastructures

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The Aztec Hotel, a product of the early twentieth-century Mayan Revival, built by architect Robert Stacy-Judd, reproduced

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Certain sites along Route 66 were left largely intact. The Grand Canyon and Petrified Forest National Park, though spruced up and developed to be more suitable for hikers and campers, were for the most part

left unconstructed, as they filled the category of “wilderness.”

There was no need to demolish and rebuild or create a cultural site on top of them; the Grand Canyon is thrilling and terrifying on its own. However, tourist destinations along Route 66 that were developed and constructed with the laying of the highway carry a rich set of anachronisms and cultural hybrids, all aimed at sensationalizing the West.

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the aesthetic properties of Mayan and Colonial Spanish aesthetics in both foundation and facade.

The exterior of the building, arguably the most recognizable part, features a series of fauxMayan designs mixed with artdeco sensibilities. Stacy-Judd, unconvinced that the general American public was familiar enough with Mayan aesthetics to be titillated by the design, changed the original name of the structure, the Mayan Hotel, to the Aztec Hotel for advertisement purposes. This strange hybridized set of cultural signs is indicative of the colonial

logic of Route 66 — indigenous aesthetics are reproduced outside of their cultural and geographical contexts and blended with contemporary Western aesthetics for mass consumption.

This Americanizing and commodification of major indigenous symbols provides evidence from the colonial archive of Route 66 — we can see the ways in which the W of the West traveled with tourists in structures such as the Aztec Hotel.

Similar structures crafted along Route 66 echo this forced detachment from the cultural context of the surrounding areas:

the Wigwam Hotel in Arizona (with locations in Southern states) and the World’s Largest Totem Pole in Oklahoma colored the exotic stretch of the Mother Road. Both cast in concrete and reminiscent of indigenous practices entirely foreign to their surrounding landscapes, they are themselves a culmination of several indigenous aesthetics, each placed along a site of exploration. Thus, the introduction of the artificial posing as the real and the novelty subsuming the indigenous, ascribes a consumerist gaze onto the surrounding Southwestern landscape. Route 66 as a space literally adjusts the gaze of the traveler to an artificial recreation of a presupposed concept of indigeneity. Thus, a sanitized, family-friendly artifice takes the place of genuine indigenous cultural artifact, incubating a white, middle-class, American understanding of Western travel.

The wild, wooly West becomes an amusement park, something a middle-class family of four can enjoy without concern.

Expansion

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The road exists independently of time and reality as a reincarnation of American Westward expansion narratives, playing heavily on the tradition of colonial dominance that foreground its development.

The driver along the road does not experience the places they stop; they have no history, no roots, no cultural context in the surrounding areas. They are relegated to the position of the tourist, the perpetual visitor who experiences a simulacrum of the West’s cultural content with absolutely no ties to history or reality. As the ultimate mode of domestic tourism, Route 66 exists as an archive not only of the physical construction of the colonial Westward expansion, but as evidence of the constructed gaze of the ideal US citizen; the white middle class family with access to a Cadillac and a desire to explore the ‘dangerous’ West. Thus the US citizen is constructed as a perpetual tourist, a stranger in a foreign land that exists tangential to their own, but on the same land mass.

In the historic Route 66, the criterion of ideal US citizenship can be found and extracted.

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It is under these conditions that we can understand Route 66 as not simply a physical expanse of highway in space, but a heavily manufactured domain of signs curated to maximize the tourist experience. Route 66 itself is a spatial laboratory in which the white middle class gaze is invented, developed, and reinforced (in fact, the

preponderance of “whites only” signs in the windows of diners, motels, and attractions along the road offer proof that the 66 was explicitly constructed with the intent to exclude people of color, specifically black motorists). Thus, Route 66 creates a mythologized portrait of the West based on an anachronistic presupposition of the area’s physical realities.

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References 1. Route 66 Green Book Cover. Square Space, static1.squarespace.com/ static/51576727e4b01a74bb805496/t/58a620c7f7e0ab3e7307f af9/1487282382991/green-book-cars-cover.jpg?format=1000w.

2. “Photo of Aztec Hotel.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation Inc., 29 May 2006, 29 May 2006.

3. “Photo of Vega Motel.” America’s Castles, Wordpress, 2007, kendalnite. files.wordpress.com/2007/10/wigwam-arizona.jpg.

THE ELASTICITY OF M O N U M E N TA L I T Y MICHAEL MCKINNEY

Architecture, like all things, is a product of its time. The details of design — clientele, theoretical underpinnings, driving forces — change, slowly but certainly. Of course, buildings are (typically) constructed for the reality in which they dwell, addressing problems of the here-and-now — whether planning a city or a plaza, the physical scale changes but the temporal one rarely shifts in a historically meaningful way. Ancient cities may linger, but at most they tend to provide templates for future designers and a framework for new works to exist in. Given enough time, the original meaning of a design is diluted if not lost entirely; the present all becomes a story eventually.

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Now, the Colosseum is a destination for international tourism. It is surrounded by restaurants to capitalize upon the constant foot traffic, and guides hawk tours at all hours.

Upon arrival, its grandeur is the first thing to register; the second is the metal detectors.

Its second floor, once a space for spectators to mill through and find their seats, now hosts a much slower kind of circulation.

It has been converted into a museum, housing drawings of the building over the centuries, a selection of Roman coinage, and an unending stream of artifacts.

The ground floor of the arena itself has been largely removed to expose rooms beneath, with a small part preserved and made accessible to the public.

It is one of the reasons people go to Rome, and the city has capitalized upon its value as a destination. There is no reason for it to change, or so it appears.

If one unrolls the timeline beyond the past few centuries,

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Before someone is aware of the city of Rome at all, they may be aware of its monuments, like how they may know Sydney for its Opera House, or Paris for the Eiffel Tower. These monuments may or may not have been conceived as icons in the sense that they are today, but that is not important to the modern eye; what matters is that they matter.

While the entire city of Rome — and Italy in general — features this sort of decontextualized

history and monumentalization, with apartments twenty centuries removed from each other put back-to-back, the clearest example of this may be its Opera House, its Eiffel: The Colosseum.

all sorts of alternative histories of the Colosseum reveal themselves, ones treated with a similar weight as the material used for the ancient Roman tickets. While the building is now an economic driver through tourism, its inception posited it as both a political and economic driver through entertainment: an arena for blood sport. This gave attendees something akin to a contemporary sports arena, in both its financial and political concerns, albeit a particularly grisly one to the modern eye. On the day of its inauguration, over two thousand animals were killed in its ring; the most common execution was one where wild animals were unleashed upon whatever poor soul was to be the entertainment for the hour. It was a home for theatre, but one in which the tragedies involved real death. It allowed the state to deal with any stated enemies while keeping its populace both in-check and tuned-in.

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It has since existed as a political symbol; a manifestation of older ideals — toughness, strength, fortitude — and an image in countless postcards. Its meaning is one in constant evolution, which is nothing particularly profound or unusual. But its size and age make it more clearly susceptible to this sort of metamorphosis. A building less notable in its purpose would have fewer people noting upon it, and thus fewer narratives, while a building more recently constructed simply wouldn’t have the time to accrue so

many stories. These narratives, when held together, seem to be in conflict — a violent hub for entertainment, a peaceful destination where the activities inside are rendered secondary to the host. But that is simply the way that history revises itself.

It’s entirely possible that, when the United States as we know it eventually collapses, the football stadiums that dot the country will find their way onto postcards, too. One or two will turn out to be the most popular ones, but it would be a challenging and pointless exercise to predict which those will be. If one follows the model set by the Colosseum, regardless of the location, the grandeur of the design — the low, long hallways giving way to an expanse of foundation and broken seats — will likely come to the forefront.

Football will almost certainly be mentioned, but its importance may be the same as that of the V.I.P. seating or the space where the screens once hung.

This scenario may now seem ridiculous, but so was the collapse of the Roman empire. That is the nature of time and context.

To the contemporary eye, these are architectural spaces, but they are arenas for football.

Throw in a few dozen lions, and our sport isn’t so different.

The meaning of design is in constant flux, but often so slowly that it is hard to notice in the moment; the closest immediate manifestation of this may be an internationally

respected architect’s building, which immediately becomes a destination among a select group of people. But that is limited in scope and is hardly predictive of perceptions even within a generation. The questions this idea, of the present revising the past while ignoring the future’s possibility to do the same, brings up are as valuable as they are difficult to answer: what might a space mean once its cultural context is no longer present?

How does one design for a future that’s impossible to predict and rarely reflective of a current reality? What will a design represent in 2,000 years?

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L A S A G R A D A FA M I L I A : A PROJECTION OF GAUDI’S OUTLOOK ON RELIGION. A L LY S O N H I N Z

What comes to your mind when you think of a Roman Catholic Church? St. Peters Basilica, Notre Dame or Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Paris? These traditional tributes to Catholicism represent what is perceived to be the Catholic church for hundreds of years.

La Sagrada Familia is a tribute to not only God and the Christian religion, but Antoni Gaudi’s tribute to his own faith.

This “radical” thinking on church architecture was something far from anything of its time. Something more timeless than all other architecture, surpassing all design fads. When completed, this masterpiece will represent Gaudi’s spiritual ideals found in his Roman Catholic upbringing and his religious expression.

During his life as an architect, four of his characteristic passions appeared in each of his projects: his love for “architecture, nature, religion, and devotion to Catalonia.” One might say his works were so original that nothing in existence is comparable. In saying that “originality consists of returning to the origin”, he was referring to an origin far before any religion, which was nature. In his eyes, God was absolute perfection and excellence and nature was an extension of that perfection.

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Just as on the façade, the interior appears to be alive, its own organism.

The columns extending up from the floor to the ceiling, mimicking tree trunks with branches extending out towards the top into the ceiling. As they tower over you, they are washed over with colored light filtered through the stained glass. The entire interior environment seems to glow with these colors, leaving you in awe with not just the massive scale and height, but the multitude of color bouncing off all surfaces. As mentioned before, Gaudi was entranced with the natural world around him. He absorbed all the patterns and shapes he saw in nature — trees, shells, and even bones — and made sure to incorporate every aspect of Gods perfect creation into this structure.

This cathedral is a seamless reflection of his concept that nature is an extension of Gods perfection. Gaudi practically designed this cathedral into its own natural environment, growing it out of the

ground. So how does this masterpiece project Gaudi’s own conception of his faith and religion? With the root of his spiritual ideals. This space sends a message about his religion and its tie to nature, his architecture, and its place in his beloved home of Catalonia.

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2. Fraser, Paul. “La Sagrada Familia: Antoni Gaudi’s Tribute to His Faith.” La Sagrada Familia: Antoni Gaudi’s Tribute to His Faith | Highbrow Magazine, 7 May 2012, www.highbrowmagazine.com/1145-barcelonas-la-sagrada-familiahow-antoni-gaudi-paid-tribute-his-faith.

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References 1. Arora, Amit. “Stunning Barcelona, Spain 4K Wallpapers.” Free 4K Wallpaper, 16 Feb. 2016, free4kwallpaper.com/stunning-barcelona-spain-4kwallpapers/.

CHAOS / VOID

TOMI SEYI LAJA

An architecture in observation on how wo/man and the environment can connect through a hand-built space for individual reflection. The bodacious curves are neither inside nor outside; the eyes and mouth of the architecture is transparent and open to the trees, light, air and community of the earth.

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The creation of a sanctuary repurposed into a gathering space creating a new life and spirit within an old architecture. The avoidance of nature attempts to separate, but is failed with the disintegrating concrete and strong cracks in the building.

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While the ruined home creates a void within the chaos of nature, it is also respecting the environment by creating a new space from what was already present and inevitably did last.

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T H E L I M I T S O F T R A N S L AT I O N : P O S T- D I G I T A L T O B U I L T GRANT BAUERMEISTER

drawing work as a one-for-one replacement to hyper-realistic rendering or photocollage, or is it best used as a diagrammatic representation of intangible elements? How have realworld projects been influenced, enhanced, or reinvented by post-digital rendering styles?

Most of the failures of the translation from post-digital to built fall into three categories: Suspension of Belief, Poetics of Object, and Misrepresentation of Materiality. This essay will examine the successes and failures of this method of drawing through the lens of these categories when employed in the process of physical construction.

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“I must admit that these (drawings) are much more artistic than ‘architectural,’” states Federica Sofia Zambeletti.

Federica is the founder of KoozA/rch, a digital blog responsible for the proliferation of the rendering style known as “post-digital.” “KooZA/rch was born from the idea of creating a platform where beautiful drawings, like those produced at the Architectural Association, could be presented and create an architectural dialogue. Too often the means through which we represent our projects, especially as students, are the only physical elements which bring the project to life — most of the times these are never constructed.”

For most students, the drawings themselves are the ends.

This style of rendering has effectively asserted itself as a primary method of representation in contemporary academic circles. However, its influence has also extended itself past the confines of the theoretical, unbuilt environment and into the built environment.

What does this abstracted world of post-digital drawing do for the real world of human existence? Does this style of

Loos’s Villa Muller and the Suspension of Belief

On a weekend trip to Florence, I wandered the primarily offwhite halls of the Uffizi Gallery before entering a strikingly red exhibition room. The neutrality of the color experienced in the previous spaces elevated this simple wall treatment to sublimity. How could this quality be effectively communicated?

In a post-digital rendering, the obvious answer was to dial the saturation of the rendered wall to 11 while desaturating the other elements in the composition.

However, this approach would be ineffective. Instead of the intense phenomenological reaction I experienced in the Uffizi, such a method would read as a diagram.

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The red wall observed in the Uffizi Gallery is closely mirrored in phenomenological quality by this green room in Adolf Loos’s Villa Muller, but taken to a much more advanced degree in both intensity and visceral detail. In the sampled work, the post-digital rendering has been created after the built environment by mimicking the general appearance of the basic postdigital rendering: flat planes of color, preset Illustrator patterns, white dividing lines, desaturated rendering people, and borrowed texture applications.

There are advantages to the

illustrated representation. For one, the tie between the walls and the carpet is made more evident by portraying both elements with the same color and texture. In a diagrammatic sense, this drawing is superior, which is also its problem. The diagrammatic pull of the image is so strong that it is hard to internalize the bold colors subconsciously in any manner other than as a diagram of the architect’s intention, instead of as a physical, built space. In visualization applications where rendering precedes building, the client must simply trust that these smaller details work effectively in the built environment. The post-digital rendering doesn’t speak to material details in a comprehensive way, it merely heightens a more narrow set of the architect’s intentions.

The real-life sequence is impactful when compared to other elements of the built environment. When the rest of the representation features no mundane or (hyper?) real elements, there is no differentiation between the craziness of a shiny green threshold room and the spaces previous. If every element of a drawing is ‘super’, surreal, or fantastical, what room is left for real-life surrealist elements?

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FALA Atelier’s Anticlimax and the Poetics of Object

Anticlimax is an exhibition dedicated to the theoretical successes and ultimate realworld failures of the Nakagin Capsule Tower. According to the architects, “the exhibition happens in an almost negligent way, reflecting the condition of the building…” The use of weathered scaffolding, mimicking the gridded imposition of the Capsule Tower, captures the spirit of the work in question. However, from the post-digital renderings provided, you wouldn’t be able to tell.

To conform to the dogma of contemporary visualization theory, FALA Atelier discards any notion of “negligent,” instead depicting pristine, synthetic, and flat swatches of desaturated texture in lieu of more descriptive representation of the reclaimed architectural elements. The

scaffolding’s wear, an artifact of the object’s honest use, is disregarded, as is the object’s clasps, ties, and knobs, evidence of how the object works and is operated. What is left is an unspecific grey grid in a colorful room. The poetics and complexity of the weathered, modular scaffolding erected in a finished museum space and its reflection on the decayed state of the Nakagin Capsule Tower is entirely lost.

Traditional collage methods would effectively illustrate this message while maintaining an attractive composition. Instead, academic representation dictated a certain style, one that is less capable of conveying the poetics and context of object by stripping the infinitely complex elements that make them real and, therefore, impactful.

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FALA Atelier’s Factory in Abragão and Misrepresentation of Materiality

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Possibly the most widespread problem with post-digital representation is the carelessness with which materiality is represented. In strictly academic settings, this is less of an issue.

Paper materiality is as real as the pixels that comprise it. However, in the built environment, material sourcing is much more difficult than simply searching for an acoustic ceiling panel texture on Google Images, then changing the saturation and white balance for different elements.

In the typical post-digital rendering, materials are more of an aesthetic or compositional signified than a real proposition.

In the above example, the factory façade appears to be some sort of concrete-like material, with another concrete-like material comprising the roof. As a standin for a material schedule in a construction document, this could be effective. However, to convey the visual impact of the structure, this is blatantly misleading, especially when considering that the most interesting aspect of the building is the strange materiality represented in the rendering.

From the image of the built environment, it is evident that no such material is used. The façade appears to be a stucco, while the

roof seems to be a metal panel or vinyl. In no way does the large grain depicted in the rendering appear in the built environment.

This discrepancy stems from a recent backlash against the built environment itself, and an understanding of drawing as the ‘prime’ site for architecture.

Fosbury Architecture, another firm dealing primarily in post-digital rendering, mines materials first, or rather the pixels that create them. “Every time we begin a design we create a pantheon of images,” proudly claims Fosbury’s Nicola Campri.

With an understanding of the built environment as the ends, early material selections are made considering their inherent qualities. The “pantheon of images” created by Fosbury has been selected as a color scheme for a drawing, for aesthetic value alone. As the project progresses, these purely aesthetic concerns are shoehorned into practical matters, divorcing materials from their inherent qualities in order to match the flat visions created from a collection of pixels. The struggle of real material selection conforms to a purely aesthetic vision of the ideal, rather than any practical, sustainable, or functional value.

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Conclusion

In theory, post-digital rendering is diametrically opposed to the construction of built environments. Branded by and for strictly on-paper projects, the application to the real world in late-stage development often experiences moments of clumsiness or deceptiveness.

Both post-digital drawings and built projects are themselves intended as ends, and using an end as a means to a different end without thoroughly considering the constraints of both mediums can be redundant at best and misleading at worst.

References 1. Baratto, Romullo. “From Digital to Reality: A Comparison of FALA Atelier’s Collages to the Actual Buildings.” ArchDaily, 25 Feb. 2018, www. archdaily.com/889487/from-digital-to-reality-a-comparison-of-fala-alelierscollages-to-the-actual-buildings.

2. FALA Atelier. “Anticlimax: A Report on The Metabolist Dream. Nakagin Capsule Tower, Tokyo 1972-2013 / Fala Atelier.” ArchDaily, 22 Jan. 2017, www.archdaily.com/800481/anticlimax-a-report-on-the-metabolist-dreamnakagin-capsule-tower-tokyo-1972-2013-fala-atelier.

3. Medina, Samuel. “The Website Behind the ‘Post-Digital’ Drawing Revolution.” ArchDaily, 18 Apr. 2017, www.archdaily.com/869084/thewebsite-behind-the-post-digital-drawing-revolution.

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4. Medina, Samuel. “Why Architectural Collage Is Important to These Three Chicago Architecture Biennial Participants.” Metropolis, 26 Mar. 2018, www. metropolismag.com/architecture/architectural-collage/pic/29050/.

5. Plockova, Joann. “The Legendary Adolf Loos Designed This Modern Prague Villa.” The Study, 17 July 2017, www.1stdibs.com/blogs/the-study/ adolf-loos-villa-muller/.

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The shadowy drywall bumps on the ceiling form upside down mountains, towering over the molecular domain, unseen to the human eye where the occasional fly, a six-legged explorer, climbs up to a white peak and looks up at the vast heavens of my cluttered bedroom, upon the moon of my sleeping face and the folding clouds of crumpled papers and clothes wistfully searching for meaning from the divine

JAMES LIEVEN

DIVINE

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NEMESTUDIO MASTERCLASS

Each year, OPN Architects sponsors a masterclass conducted with various architecture students. This year’s masterclass was a workshop with Neyran Turan of NEMESTUDIO. The collaboration compiled the students’ final renderings and writings to contextualize the conceptual work put into the rigorous renders.

P L A S T I C W A S T E B Y C H R I S T O P H E R P E R E Z , W E N TA O Z H O N G , A LY S S A M U L L E N , A N D E A S T O N S O T H M A N

By the year 2050, the ocean will contain more plastic by weight than fish, while 12 billion metric tons of plastic will find its new home in landfills. Today, nearly 90 percent of the trash floating around on the ocean’s surface comes from plastic. Moreover, eight million metric tons of plastic waste enters the ocean annually due to the 46,000 pieces of plastic per square mile and the 300 million tons of plastic produced and consumed globally each year. Only ten percent of plastic produced and consumed on earth is recycled, and the current state of plastic overconsumption seems to be far from slowing its pace.

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Current researchers and scientists rely on the earth’s “natural” ability to decompose plastic every 400 years, but reality has proven that this is not a feasible solution to the plastic problem. Every minute, one million plastic bottles are disposed of, creating a cycle in which the hopeful decomposition

of plastic can never be achieved.

Therefore, we have created a new normal wherein our passive solutions have forced us to confront a reality in which continual plastic build up gives life to new land masses and creates unfamiliar densities.

This project speculates a museum of the future in which we can observe the affect that plastic consumption will have ultimately had on humanity and the creation of post-natural resources. The everyday domestic objects so readily made available for consumption have been cast away to the extent in which microplastics and waste have constituted the new landmass.

The very material that millions of seabirds and marine mammals fell victim to now defines new boundaries on which we can reside. Historically, we produced enough plastic waste to circulate the globe four times, now, the

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very circulation of our ecosystem and life revolves around these new plastic landforms.

In the past, governments created incentives to deliver waste to the landfill in exchange for capital, in the time of this museum the new flow of capital exists through the process of extracting and mining the same material that was once used, and discarded, every day. The plastic lifespan has extended itself so much now to the extent that its lifespan has become their new geological formation.

geological plastic build up that constitutes the spaces in which they reside. Rather than natural resources, society must rely on the post-natural resources of plastic geology and land. Within our post-natural, future museum, the diorama represents the way users have the ability to look back at the over-consumed plastic objects on the left, which made up everyday domestic life, and the way in which those historic artifacts have become materialized within the new geology of their world on the right.

In the following diorama, we see the human condition of the past, which was the hyper consumption of plastic objects that led to the plastic conglomerate that creates the new landforms of their world. A museum in construction, all of the materials for consumption must rely on the quarry, which can be seen through the

This diorama represents the importance of us facing the reality of our daily use of plastic objects. Rather than presenting the idealized, optimistic solution of recycled plastic that is already hard enough to achieve, we must be confronted with the extent in which this over consumption could constitute a new geology and reality.

I SLEEP ON THE OCEAN FLOOR BY ALONSO ORTEGA, STELLA HYUNSEO LEE, SUK LEE, WEILUN CHEN

as exclusive economic zones.

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The process of bringing rare earth materials from the seabed to the surface of the water distributes sediments in the ocean, suffocating aquatic species. The machinery used for this process also releases chemical toxins into the ocean. So this is of much dispute within current ecological

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The concern of our project is the experimental field of seabed mining. This is of great debate because the distribution of ocean territory transcends coastline borders and since this regulation is outside of national jurisdiction, seabed mining is currently being managed by the ‘International Seabed Authority’ and distributed to private entities

and political discussions regarding the marine environment.

What you see here is an object that spans ninety thousand square feet in a Natural History Museum. Although in present time we are only just ‘dipping our toes’ into seabed mining, we imagine a moment when the need for constant expansion and growth inherent to current modes of production will pursue uncharted territories for human life. Predicated on this series of events, the curators of this exhibition seek to celebrate the successful escape from the consequences of excavation we witness on dry land today.

The immersive diorama is a 1:1 model of the very environment

in which the museum itself exists.

The seabed is rich in rare earth minerals imperative for human life whose presence on dry land appears to be fading quickly.

Allowing production and circulation to take place in the direct environment from which our dearly held commodities materialize appears as the most efficient means through which capital can accumulate.

The only limitation to this proposition is eradicated through the use of a grid. A concept held dearly to Euro-centric forms of city planning as seen in Barcelona or more closely the American Midwest, the grid presents itself here as at once containing the sea water to a

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given form and providing an equal distribution of property for an orderly human culture.

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While the size of this object may be intimidating, human access is imperative for its program.

Each dry module, enclosed by four walls of glass, is made available with ladders. While much of the sea bed is needed for production cycles, the rest of the space both at the level of the floor and the level of the surface is used for leisure. Autonomous bodies might veer over the open gaps, watching a monstrous auger bury a hole in the sediment or they might linger across the seemingly infinite glass boulevards, basking in the gentle breeze

of the wind turbines’ palpitations.

Regardless of what the occupant might be doing, the monumental scale of the environment in which existence materializes can never be escaped. Drawing three depicts this infinite scale as the viewer peers into the abyss of glass and sea water.

The nature of recent discourse regarding climate change reveals to us the trap of scale as being precisely what prevents a collective recognition of the significance of nature in our present moment. With the spatial distribution that constitutes this object, we begin to ask: does architecture possess the language to communicate information that might be imperative?

A C O N V E R S AT I O N W I T H L É O P O L D LAMBERT FEBRUARY 24TH, 2018

Datum: Could you expound upon how you discuss the line drawn as a one-dimensional line being built into a three-dimensional form?

Léopold: The two-dimensional is actually one-dimensional. What I find interesting is that the line is meant to be a one-dimensional object and in architecture, we are making it a three-dimensional object. By that, I mean that the line requires a thickness, which mathematically it’s not supposed to have. I interpret it as the translation of a supposedly perfect geometry — perfect not in a moral way, but in a mathematical way — that ends up by embodied by an imperfect geometry. That’s also where this subversion, of how architecture operates on bodies, occurs. For example, the funambulist — the tightrope walker — is able to walk on the thickness of the line and on the thickness of the wall, and somehow subverts the orders that the line was supposed to implement by having bodies on one side of it, which may be included, and bodies on the other side of it that might be excluded, or both may be included, or both may be excluded. All bodies are organized according to both of those sides. So somehow the thickness of the line is this space where subversion may happen, but I think we should be careful not to be too romantic about this subversion, because the thickness of the line is also the space of absolute rightlessness.

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I’m thinking for example of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the images we see of November 9th, 1989 are not so much people climbing on the wall to go on the other side, but people climbing on the wall and standing on the wall. That is sort of the best way to signify that the wall became obsolete: standing on the wall. I can also talk about another historical case, where the thickness of the wall becomes a space of absolute rightlessness. In 2012, there was a group of Eritrean people who were trying to find a less precarious economic and warfree situation in Israel. They managed to cross and exit Egypt without entering Israel. They were stuck for one whole week in the thickness

of the line that separates Egypt and Israel, and that was a space of absolute rightlessness. There were no rights. They were given water by the Israeli authorities as a solely humanitarian consideration, but they were left completely to their own fate in the width of the line.

One woman was pregnant, miscarried the child she was carrying, and eventually got arrested and deported. To me, this space is both one of absolute transgression, but also of potential absolute fascism.

It is a very complex and ambiguous space, this thickness of the line.

Datum: With The Funambulist, you speak to people who are extremely eloquent in their personal focus, and your personal work tends to be in mapping and photography of these spaces and representations. What are your thoughts on architectural practice and forms of traditional practice? How do you think there are forms of agency within that? Is it in representation or in practice?

Léopold: I think there are two things. On the one hand, there’s representation, but I think representation is never more politically active than when it is embraced as pure representation or as a story, as a way to open imaginaries... But then I’m also interested in how design is aimed towards built architecture. Urban formation and object formations are also able to influence politically the spatial conditions in which we operate. But what I always insist on is the propensity that architecture has to embody — let’s call it this way to make it simple — oppressive programs. It is very, very easy. You literally can run an entire presidential campaign on the simple act of transforming a line into a wall. There’s nothing simpler than that. Whereas, to actually challenge all those structures of oppression, through design is much, much, much more complex, I think it can take many forms. I think the most successful forms that I am seeing built are tackling a little bit less of a geopolitical scale, and more so the domestic scale and the relationship with the norm regarding gender, regarding ableism, and I think in those areas, there has been the most successful sort of forms of design subverting the normative order.

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What is the architect’s responsibility when they make a decision that might benefit the majority but might hurt the minority? A major concern of contemporary architecture is how to reduce building carbon emissions, but many of the infrastructures to support this require large investment, with questionable benefit to the earth in the long run.

Léopold: First of all, I think it’s amazing that when we talk about that, there is a sort of an absolute implicit situation in which it would never happen that the architect involved in this given project would actually be from the place where they are designing. Because of course, that would be the easiest, right? Because if someone from a given community is doing work on their own neighborhood, then they obviously have a better chance to address those questions in a more efficient way than someone on the outside, whether the outside is a geographical outside or a social outside or a racial outside. It’s quite interesting how we are only wondering about that just because architecture is fundamentally a profession where the practitioner almost always comes from the outside and intervenes. I think that’s what makes architecture inherently colonial to begin with.

Then, when it comes to sustainability, to me, this question is the same question as “oh, how do we recycle better in our life, or how do we compost things?” All that is, I think, is a moralizing discourse in society where the responsibility for climate change and f***ing up the entire ecosystem of the planet has been left on our shoulders as individuals, when actually we can see how corporations and states are the ones to be responsible for this. It’s a way to not really answer your question, I suppose, but I think there can be a comprehensive, sustainable, political program at the scale of a country that does not necessarily involve us having to make a decision in which we have to pick between sustainability and actually not increasing the risk in value of a given place. I think we need to get away from this idea that we are responsible for climate change as individuals because we are not — well, some of us are a bit more than others, obviously. This moralizing discourse is elaborated to covert the responsibility of corporations and states, and capitalism in general. To me, it’s a little like attributing problems of food in the world to demographics, like saying ‘okay, we’re going to be 10-billion people on earth, how can we all eat?’ Well, let’s re-think a little bit about the concept of equality, and probably we’ll be all right. To me, it’s not 10-billion earthlings being a problem, it’s actually how we have think of food itself, which is fundamentally based on unequal capitalistic logic.

Datum:

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Can you speak to the income areas and their

‘giving’ of relationship

amenities in lowwith gentrification?

Léopold: First, I want to challenge the notion of ‘gift’. A redistribution of wealth is never a gift. Low-income populations are exploited by capitalism

and seeing it as a gift denies this exploitation. Now talking about gentrification: to bring programs and to participate as architects on projects — regardless of whether it is done with good or bad intentions — will increase the real estate value of a neighborhood. Without taking the necessary precautions for the local population not to be displaced from the subsequent increase in real estate value is definitely doomed to be a violent systemic project. So it might be a counterintuitive thing for architects, but I’m convinced that what they would need to do is think against the very logics of their discipline, going against architecture’s propensity to embody oppressive and violent programs as we talked about earlier. Obviously we should be pushing for neighborhoods in great economic precariousness to have better spatial conditions in general, but we should work in such a way that the population that is going to benefit from it is actually the neighborhood population and not the next one, richer, whiter, that’s going to replace it. I think we should look at it not strictly from the point of view of the architectural commission, but also in the way it starts, as well in how we talk about neighborhoods, and how we assign certain imaginaries to neighborhoods, and assigning questions of safety or criminality regarding to certain neighborhoods. Actually sometimes, if you check statistically, you find that it is pure myth, because such imaginary will legitimize the intervention of police force, which as we know, is always on the side of the dominant forms of violence in particular, when it comes to racial violence, and the police will ultimately lead to gentrification as well. We should not forget either, that this imaginary of potential criminality over a neighborhood is also increasing real estate value, so it prepares gentrification to invest in this lower real estate value.

Then you bring the police, you kick everybody out, you raise your real estate value, and then you have your gentrified new neighborhood.

We should really consider the point of view of police violence, racist imaginaries, capitalism, and the architecture commission itself.

Datum: Its appalling that in industrial design we are still using the Measure of Man and Woman in professional practice and not talking about the presumptions behind it. Its especially problematic for industrial design because these will be placed on the body, used for the body, and intersect with the body.

Léopold:

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What I find interesting in the Graphic Standard and Henry Dreyfuss’ book Designing for People, is how clothing and objects are also involved.

It’s not just that the kitchen counter would be at the height of a sort of standardized female body to enforce a gendered assignation

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of domestic labor, but that it is at the normal height of a normative female body wearing heels, which I find absolutely incredible because then obviously the height would suggest not only that this part of the division of labor would be achieved by women but that the woman would need to be in a certain apparel to really be optimal for that space as a sort of machine. I find that fascinating how the kitchen counter would force one to wear heels and wearing heels would inform height of the kitchen counter. What is true for 1950s kitchens is also true for all other designs: the violence of the norm is operative everywhere.

Datum: What do you think designing for non-violent space would look like?

Léopold: My whole argument consists in saying that any attempt towards non-violence is doomed to reinforce the violence of the status quo.

Perhaps we can work at reducing architecture’s intrinsic violence, but more importantly we should re-orient this violence to challenge the order in which it is always the same racialized, gendered, dis/abled bodies that are the primary subjects of this violence.

Datum: If you’re designing for a culture that’s completely different than yours, how do you account for those changes in measurements and changes in experience from culture to culture?

Léopold:

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I think my answer to your question is by re-interrogating that notion, because you mentioned the notion of average, but I think it’s nothing about average. It’s about the norm. If we make the average about everyone in an entire café, I can promise you I am the most comfortable on my chair at the table now, the average would be below my size right now. It’s not about average, it’s about power. So in the scenario in which you design or where design is involved for a radically different population, then the norm still applies. It still applies and that’s why it’s violent. We really should part from the idea that we’re dealing with a sort of consensual scenario. ‘We are not going to be able to make everybody happy, so let’s try to find the perfect average or the perfect middle for everybody.’ No, we’re just reinforcing the dominant set of power. So I think once we understand that, we can start challenging it.

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PROJECTIONS

SHARED INTELLIGENCE

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A C O N V E R S AT I O N W I T H D O U G L A S SPENCER FEBRUARY - MARCH 2018

Datum: We want to focus this conversation around your newest work, in particular analyzing the everyday architectural spaces that we inhabit, but we want to start this by contextualizing it in relation to the Architecture of Neoliberalism. Could you talk a bit about how your new ideas are evolving out of this previous work? There is a definite difference between the major projects you focused on previously and the everyday spaces of your current focus.

Douglas: You’re right to say that my current research interests have ‘evolved’ (though I’d prefer ‘developed’) out of those that informed the Architecture of Neoliberalism. The reason I focused on the big names and their projects there was, in part, precisely because of their visibility. Figures like Rem Koolhaas, Patrik Schumacher or Farshid Moussavi are favourably positioned, professionally and institutionally, to publicise and promote their ideas. These, in turn, are widely distributed, discussed and influential within the discipline, particularly in architectural education. What I aimed to do in The Architecture of Neoliberalism was to contest the arguments through which such figures presented their work as ‘progressive’, and to do this through a thorough critique both of their writings and their architecture. It was important to be bold, to name names, and to look critically at major projects since the names and projects are what gives credibility to the architectural positions I wanted to contest.

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That said, one of the other claims of The Architecture of Neoliberalism, drawing upon both critical theory and the thought of Michel Foucault, is that architecture is implicated in somehow producing us as certain types of subjects, ones requisite to specific economic and political conditions. This is why in I write there about ‘citizen-consumers’ and ‘student-entrepreneurs’ as examples of the kind of hybridised subject positions that neoliberalism seeks to produce as its dissolves boundaries between citizenship and consumerism, or between education and

entrepreneurialism. Now, obviously, if architecture does this kind of work for neoliberalism, as I claim it does, it can’t be confined to the tiny percentage of architectural production represented by its most well known practitioners, otherwise it wouldn’t be such a great concern.

So, what I’m working on now are the more habitually used spaces of the built environment, those not necessarily designed to be looked at as ‘architecture’, or in fact really looked at all, but rather passed through, in what Walter Benjamin described as a ‘state of distraction’.

Another reason for this turn in my research related to the Architecture of Neoliberalism is how frustrating it is when people agree with you for the wrong reasons. Sometimes people think I’m criticising Hadid or Koolhaas because their work is ‘spectacular’ — lacking in substance and for visual consumption only. On the contrary, I think their projects are substantial and significant enough to merit serious analysis of how they work, to what ends, and with what outcomes. The criticism of the work of architects and architecture as ‘spectacular’ is a kind of default position that imagines it is being clever in putting down big names and their projects. In fact, this criticism is typically rather lazy since it is content simply to dismiss what it encounters without be patient enough to understand its real significance, economically, politically, experientially or ideologically. So, that has made more interested in exploring how the spaces that seem ‘innocent’, because they are not spectacular — often quite the opposite, rather indifferent looking — are perhaps even more profoundly implicated in shaping our experiences, habits, movements and perceptions.

Really, I’m pushing against the criticism of architecture as ‘spectacle’, and pushing for a more effective critique of how architecture is implicated in economic and political power, and drawing even more now on the methods of figures such Siegfried Kracauer, testing how these might work when addressed to more contemporary targets.

Datum:

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So these innocent spaces are then the ones which actualize neoliberalism through their micropolitics. Is there a particular typology of these everyday spaces that you’re directing your focus towards? Also, how will your method of critique develop in response to this new focus? While previously there were writings and other material to compare against the realized version of these major projects, I can foresee that material being somewhat scarce in regards to these spaces, which as you said, aren’t designed to be looked at.

Douglas: I’m still in the process of exploring and identifying possibilities for the

spatial types that I might analyze in this respect. At present, though, I’ve been reflecting on urban transport infrastructures. The London Underground, for instance, is interesting for a number of reasons. For a start, this system is over 150 years old and is still being expanded. As you move through the system, transferring from one line to another, you become aware of the historically very different ways in which the interiors of the stations and platforms have been treated. One of the most striking features, to me at least, is the apparent historical trajectory towards the disappearance of ornament, as conventionally understood.

Formerly such spaces — and not just on the London Underground but everywhere, from Paris, to Moscow to New York — employed ornament, materials and visual representations that somehow ‘spoke’ to their publics, that recognised and acknowledged their presence as a public, often glamourising railways stations in ways similar to those of other popular spaces, such as the cinema. Especially since the 90s, however, the general turn has been toward a material palette of unadorned steel, glass and concrete, and some residual form of ‘High Tech’ architecture — often designed by practices such as Fosters and Grimshaw — is employed as the default style of architectural cladding.

Rather than acknowledging the presence of their users, offering any point of recognition, these spaces then don’t so much speak as offer an atmospherics, a background music that implies efficiency, optimised performance, security. At the same time the machinic appearance of the cladding is ultimately derived via ‘High Tech’, from a mid-twentieth century notion of what the future will look like, so there’s something reassuringly nostalgic going on here too, I suspect, especially when one considers that the actual design of the spaces, and the planning of how passengers will move though them, comes from a very 21st century model of computational and algorithmic design, using such things as agent modeling systems. So, I think there’s something remarkable going on here, in a shift from the urban subject addressed as a public citizen, to more contemporary and post-political conceptions of abstract crowd components, that can be read through such spaces.

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In terms of the methods of critique, you’re of course right to note that this will necessarily change with the shift from the highest profile architectural practices and their projects to other, more lowkey ones.

One of the ways of addressing this is through existing critical accounts of ‘algorithmic governmentality’ such as can be found in the work of Bernard Stiegler or Antoinette Rouvroy. Typically such critiques remain at a general level of abstraction, though, but analysing the operation of such models of governmentality in relation to concrete cases, such as architecture, brings them into the realm of critical theory, as I would understand it, which is concerned with understanding both the conditions and conditioning of everyday experience, and with reflecting on the political and ideological implications of these.

D AT U M A M E S X D AT U M R O M E

A C O L L A B O R AT I O N A C R O S S C O N T I N E N T S

Over the course of this publication, our members, student contributors, and editors have been separated between Rome and Ames, splitting the journal to managing weekly meetings from both the United States and Italy, leading to many forms of continual interaction and discussion between the two places.

In Ames we are centrally located in Iowa, the middle of America’s heartland, and specifically exist within an agriculturally based town and university. Our “downtown” is a traditional small mid-west Main Street pictured across Hallmark screens at Christmas. Distance between different locations of the city are separated just enough for entire reliance on either the car or on the bus, diminishing care for foot traffic. This along with buildings and infrastructure maxing out the human

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scale delineate any comfort in walking as the basic means of transportation. The underlying infrastructure works against it.

Rome on the other hand, outside of its knackered cobblestones encourages walking as a valid means of transportation.

Pairing ineffective metro, narrow alleys, and limited efficiency of the car, the human finds foot-traffic most comfortable for transportation. The underlying infrastructure works to support it.

This presentation of structural differences and the subsequent project presented is not meant to state an opinion on this topic, but to discuss the differences that exist: the different perceptions of traveling, in terms of class, culture, infrastructure, and the baseline “grid” or lack thereof in which architecture is implemented. The relationship between the individual perception of space, interaction with others, and social stratification of the urban become informative of the underlying cultural, social, political, economic, and historical value behind these constructions.

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In order to maintain conversation and contestation among these topics between the members of our journal split between Ames and Rome, we curated an experience for us to share across oceans. We have instructed each other to meet and discuss our weekly reading (Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction) , then disseminate and video-record our travels back home. Members are instructed to act normally, converse

normally, listen to music, speak to people, and in the same tone — all in the same fashion they would on a regular basis. Video recordings will be collected afterwards and shared with the editors, compiling them into a final cut, and shared with the group on the whole.

The final outcome is portrayed through stills from the videos students captured, and placed in contrast of their differing presentations of infrastructure, transportation, and politics.

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THE LANGUAGE OF INTENTION

MEGAN ZEIEN

Intention is the mother of rhetoric. Words cannot avoid meaning something, but they can be divested of intentionality. A non-intentional language is an abstract language: it doesn’t refer to any concrete reality.

Ulises Carrión I am mapping the political and social terrain in which I live. Shall we cut it there?

Mark Lombardi Why would Kim Jong-un insult me by calling me “old,” when I would NEVER call him “short and fat?” Oh well, I try so hard to be his friend - and maybe someday that will happen!

Current POTUS, twitter

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It seems that in today’s methods of communication, the power and importance of words has been devalued. It is easy to disregard the power of words when so often, many are formed digitally, over platforms such as Twitter or Facebook. Spoken and written language is still completely integral to culture, but now are the completely abstracted characters which often create entire new landscapes of conversation and discourse, without the same temporality and relationship as in the past.

These characters are abstract in the sense that social media posts are completely removed from physicality and their context when consumed.

Carrión writes, “A non-intentional language is an abstract language: it doesn’t refer to any concrete reality.” The mediums of today’s language have developed into this kind of an abstract. Despite this, the power of the hundred and forty character composition is furthered by largescale media and world leaders. In today’s culture, these instantaneous thoughts have the power to reach larger amounts of people and can cause diplomatic distress, spark social-political movements, and create new forms of discourse. It has already changed the way language is used in today’s culture. It is important to understand the structures of power, intention, and thought in regards to the abstraction of these elements through the many new platforms of speech.

Carrión’s drawings

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It seems impossible to map or trace the participating powers that are obscured by the multitudes of daily discussion or modern technology, such as Twitter. Of course, there are artists and theorists, like Carrión and Mark Lombardi, who are brave enough to attempt to map

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Ulises Carrión’s work focused on the ways in which words form greater systems at scales of poetry, art, books, language, and culture by looking at the composition of words within a book, the way intention relates to the meaning of words, and the physical exchange of gossip and cultural language. While written words become artifacts of intention or thought, spoken word becomes part of the larger system of language and dialect, thus a part of culture. This culture of spoken word is the one that amorphously surrounds us in atmospheres of thought, gossip, and relationships. These artifacts are such because these words are important to specific people, in a specific time, written or spoken in a physical place. They are a reflection of that time and place. This creation of language artifacts makes it important to record and contextualize the development of the way text is used in our history and culture.

conversations and meetings on a terrain of traceable thought.

Carrión, in later works, used the idea of gossip as a medium for creation, and classified differences between the different kinds of conversational information. In other works, Lombardi connected more tangible happenings, people, and conversations in an effort to map power relationships, particularly of corruption or scandal.

Both artists attempt to give words a space and a time, representing an event or a historic balance of powers through text and language.

One of the most important aspects of language is the context from which it is spoken and developed, both the temporal geography of events and through a larger social cultural context. Time, and its documentation and mapping, allows speaking and writing to exist in a reality, and within relationships — the most important component of power. Visualizing the placement of words in a larger hierarchy also reveals a topography of voices and opinions.

Carrión’s interest in the spread of time and verbal information went so far as to use gossip as a research tool, and even as another form of art to study human communication academically. What is important to consider today is how these voices — both written and spoken — are heard due to their placement along this uneven topographical mapping, to consider the power given to those we hear, and the power given in return when their names and their phrases are repeated through broadcasts, in the streets, and in conversation.

To talk or write about a subject gives it an inherent power by recontextualizing it. New technologies, such as Twitter, increase the speed and frequency of these recontextualizations to dizzying levels.

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Twenty years ago, Lombardi traced names and money through news platforms and public domain sources. What would it be like to attempt to do the same today? Lombardi is one of the first in an aesthetic sense to manually map data as an art medium.

Today, data visualizations are configured as completely incomprehensible webs, with everything happening at such different levels of technology and finance. News and the spread of information today is so inherently different, that the words most often heard through such sources could be considered a part of what Carrión defined as an abstract language. It is important for words today written or said to be more than a projection of an intention or agenda, contextualized fully with the original writer and setting. Words themselves should reveal a landscape of intentions, not a superimposition. The abstraction of words due to the many different types of media is something that is made even more extreme in our culture today.

In their truest sense, words need to be more than a projection.

They must become an artifact, a landmark of something larger.

One of Lombardi’s “Narrative Structures”

References 1. Carrion, Ulises. The New Art of Making Books. Aegean Editions, 2001.

2. “Entradas Sobre Ulises Carrión En Almudena Baeza.” Almudena Baeza, 5 May 2016, almudenabaeza.org/tag/ulises-carrion/.

3. Richard, Frances. “Utterance Is Place Enough: Mapping Conversation.”

Cabinet, Apr. 2001, cabinetmagazine.org/issues/2/utterance.php.

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5. “Ulises Carrión Collection.” Ulises Carrión Collection, Archivo Lafuente, 2014, www.archivolafuente.com/en/fondos-y-conjuntos/fondo-ulises-carrion.

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4. Tolksdorf, Robert. “Mark Lombardi’s Narrative Structures and Other Mappings of Power...”SOCKS, 9 Feb. 2018, socks-studio.com/2012/08/22/ mark-lombardi/.

24/7/365: THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE NOCTURNAL HUMAN ZACHARY HALL

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From Ames to Wichita, from Hoboken to Lagos, from Paris to New York: the industrialized world has a circadian problem.

Design students will recognize it with their own pattern of living, a culture who even identify themselves with diagnosable neuroses related to interrelated chronic stress and sleep deprivation. What is the educational benefit of a life without rest? Why do pedagogical practices, particularly within the field of architecture, often mandate labor from students that feels impossible without all-nighters, insomnia, and eventual burnout? The College of Design at Iowa State itself never sleeps and the lights within the atrium are always on, at the expense of the circadian rhythm of the surrounding ecosystem and likely the students inside. This experience is not an exclusive one, however. It is a reality common across the industrialized populations, where time demanded by labor exceeds the available time of the day. Such exhaustion is necessary in maintaining a

global capitalist society, fueled by the constant circulation of populations and commodities.

Design of 24-hour lit spaces is a distinct attribute of the American urban landscape, from gas stations to highways, from cities to airports, from Walmart to 7/11.

The creation and popularization of these coincides with the urban development of the American Southwest and the passing of the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956. 24-hour truck stops became necessary measure for the movement of resources between America’s major cities that span several hundred miles apart from one another. The people who transport these resources, truck drivers, have a work-life balance some design students could easily recognize. Despite the necessity of truckers within American transportation infrastructures, they are often victim to predatory and exploitative labor practices.

Because of the unique nature of their work, truck drivers are regulated by the Department of Transportation rather than the Department of Labor, and are

therefore afforded an elevenhour workday, rather than the standard eight. While labor laws regarding trucking do exist, they are hardly enforced due to the solitary nature of the job. As a result of this, truckers often find themselves driving through the night rather than sleeping, only as of 2013 have regulations been adopted demanding drivers be given them time to sleep: two nights of the week, between 1 and 5am. Even in the situation where a truck driver is sleeping from 1–5 am every day of the week, that is hardly a healthy or natural sleeping schedule.

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Humans were, for a while, the only species that exhibited ritual sleep deprivation. However our culture did not stop there, but rather expanded even further to impact ecosystems themselves.

The construction of 24 hour lighting across cities and smaller micro ecosystems have impacted the lives of animals who were never considered at the time they were designed. Artificial lights are known to bleach the visual pigments that allow migratory bird species to see, and in losing sight of the horizon, many birds will circle their cone of light until they die of exhaustion.

Songbirds can be disrupted by artificial light, which make them more susceptible to predators or cause them to breed too early as breeding periods are associated with longer days.

The effect of artificial light on many insect species is well documented. Insects such as bees and moths navigate by flying at a constant angle relative to a distant light source, naturally oriented toward moonlight. The nocturnalization of the human species has necessitated the development of light sources that shine brighter than the moon.

Architects and designers have an opportunity to conceive spaces and interiors that reject the productive value of space and are more conducive to different modes of rest. Just as commercial spaces responded to

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This is not limited to the experience of truckers. In 2016, Amazon employees in Scotland found themselves sleeping in tents near the warehouse despite subzero temperatures. In 2014, employees at a Dongguan computer hardware factory were encouraged to use their ten minute daily breaks to rest their eyes. This issue is hardly exclusive to the working class. A 31-yearold Japanese journalist named Miwa Sado worked 159 hours of overtime with chronic sleep deprivation as a result of the 24hour news cycle, before physically working herself to death. Sado’s body was discovered in bed with her phone in hand. One could speculate that she was finally trying to sleep. Sleep within industrial society is not a matter of one’s own individual health and well being, but something that can be exchanged for productivity demanded

as necessary from employers, the state and the academy.

the construction of the highway system with continuously open businesses, so too have residential spaces responded to new modes of communication. The home itself is now transitioning into its own 24-hour space at the expense of human and ecosystemic welfare. Architects and designers should consider new ways of living that value and prioritize the health and life of the human/

non-human ecosystem, especially given our personal experiences with sleep deprivation. We can critically design spaces that no longer prioritize commodityconsumer-capital relations over the needs of health and biosynthesis. Such design is largely unprecedented but all the more necessary as we rapidly approach total ecological collapse.

References: 1. Duffy, Jeanne F., and Charles A. Czeisler. “Effect of Light on Human Circadian Physiology.” Sleep medicine clinics 4.2 (2009): 165–177. PMC. Web. 18 Feb. 2018.

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2. Rivkees, Scott A. “The Development of Circadian Rhythms: From Animals to Humans.” Sleep medicine clinics 2.3 (2007): 331–341. PMC. Web. 18 Feb. 2018.

3. Worthman, Carol M. “Anthropology of Sleep” Encyclopedia of Sleep and Dreams: The Evolution, Function, Nature, and Mysteries of Slumber. Ed. Barrett, Deirdre and McNamara, McNamara. Vol. 1. City: Greenwood, 2012.

ABC-CLIO Corporate. June, 2012.

SOCIAL MEDIA AND THE DESTRUCTION OF IDENTITY I A N S PA D I N

The study of social spaces is, at its core about the study of human interaction and how it relates to the built environment. However, as the Internet becomes more integrated into our everyday lives, social interaction is happening less in physical spaces. Social media platforms are not physical spaces, but they still carry the same baggage as physical social spaces: the design of the place influences how people behave.

Internet social spaces are quite different from physical ones in that a designer gets to decide the basic rules of how people are allowed to interact. These rules are what differentiate one social media platform from one another - Twitter limits you to 140 characters, Instagram focuses on imagery, Snapchat tries to curate itself towards sharing personal moments instead of building an archive, and so on. The format of the message and how that message is distributed is the design of the space.

This design ties in directly to how people establish their identity on the platform, as every method of self-expression has to be designed in some capacity (not to disregard emergent behavior). Some spaces celebrate anonymity, some spaces allow users to choose between building an identity or remaining anonymous, and others are often tied to either real life or money (Facebook, LinkedIn) in a way that enforces identity.

For the communities that do not enforce identity, it becomes harder for someone to establish their identity as that community grows in size, simply because there are that many more people for others to pay attention to.

On Twitter, someone’s identity is not only defined by their name and profile picture, but also (and possibly even more so) by who follows them and how many retweets/likes their tweets return.

This latter part is not something you can define for yourself.

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This destruction of identity is potentially dangerous. When the platform is based on who follows who, it can pressure people to — consciously or unconsciously — say things and create content that is more likely to be liked and shared. Earning the approval of others is tied into establishing and expressing yourself. Followers, retweets, and likes become an

armor or credibility. All of this goes towards forming an echo chamber.

In 2013, Twitter user Justine Sacco, with 170 followers, tweeted: “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!”

This was one of many of her little jokes she tweeted to her modest following of 170 people, perhaps a little more provocative than the rest.

It was an insensitive joke intended to poke fun at privilege that found its way into the hands of a journalist with 15,000 Twitter followers, and the story blew up. Justine had boarded a plane after sending the tweet, and before the plane had landed, she had become the #1 trending topic on Twitter. People outraged by the tweet dug into her personal life, contacted her employer, pressured her employer into firing her at the risk of bad PR, and even tracked down what flight she was on so people could find her as soon as she got off the plane. #HasJustineLandedYet became a small, quick-lived movement to ruin a person’s life for their insensitivity.

Justine was let go from her job. Many others have dealt with the same consequences for their small misdeeds, as well documented

by Jon Ronson. Anger spreads fast on the Internet. People want to know that others share their outrage. There is little room for subtlety.

Platforms like Twitter are designed in a way that accelerates this process.

Empathizing with someone’s anger makes people feel better, but so does getting likes and follows. Joining in on the movement allows someone to express empathy and get rewarded for it by seeing some numbers go up. An outrage is an opportunity for someone to define who they are, ironically, by saying what people around them are already saying.

The downfalls of social media are partially to blame on human behavior and mob mentalities, but the design of social media spaces and particularly how they allow people to find their identity is also to blame. This issue is beginning to be understood by game developers like Daniel Cook, who study toxic multiplayer game environments (and how to disable them). The approach is not to moderate the community, but instead to change the space that players interact in through more subtle ways.

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It is well understood that the design of a physical social space can greatly influence how people interact within it. The same is true for online social spaces.

References: Duffy, Jeanne F., and Charles A. Czeisler. “Effect of Light on Human Circadian Physiology.” Sleep medicine clinics 4.2 (2009): 165–177. PMC. Web. 18 Feb. 2018.

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Worthman, Carol M. “Anthropology of Sleep” Encyclopedia of Sleep and Dreams: The Evolution, Function, Nature, and Mysteries of Slumber. Ed. Barrett, Deirdre and McNamara, McNamara. Vol. 1. City: Greenwood, 2012.

ABC-CLIO Corporate. June, 2012.

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Rivkees, Scott A. “The Development of Circadian Rhythms: From Animals to Humans.” Sleep medicine clinics 2.3 (2007): 331–341. PMC. Web. 18 Feb. 2018.

6 – 102 | GROWTH AND DESIRE

JOESEPH KASTNER

It is within perpetual temporality in which we establish permanence.

Our experiences, ambitions, curiosities, and desires become manifested overtime.

The objects we acquire, the objects we carry with us – gradually become this manifesto.

These Heirlooms grow with us, filling our container.

As silent reminders towards the life they represent; they tend to speak atmospherically.

It is at this intersection between space and object – temporality and permanence – in which I seek to explore.

Through exposing elements with no voice - imagery speaks to tell a lifetime of untold growth and desire - from a toddler to a centenarian.

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THE ART OF PUPPETRY

R U C H I PAT E L + T O M I S E Y I L A J A

Entering as a blank slate Drenched in colors: Browns, reds, pinks, I am impressionable and moldable.

I allow the strings to wrap, Around my arms, To lead me Through wild, unknown territory.

How do I choose to think?

How do you choose to change me?

Telling me what I know.

How to dress, What is accepted.

And how to speak.

I am a blank slate, Turbulent with plans to change, And innovate.

(Contradict and critique) Too many ideas, I crash.

I rise.

Competing with myself.

How do I find what I need?

How do I file and organize?

Create my own theories?

When I am told I am wrong.

And it cannot change.

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I feel the strings wrap Around my wrists, My ankles, My mind.

The more I learn The tighter the hold.

I want to walk, Between the walls I create.

But the Modular Man, Defines the ideal that will never greet me.

He takes the strings, He ties me to him.

Showing me The art of puppetry.

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T H E PA L I M P S E S T O F L A N D S C A P E

ANDREW SUITER

Forensic (Environmental) Architecture and the Des Moines River Through minute changes in elevation, visible only through highresolution terrain maps, the history of the river is projected onto the landscape. This image shows the Des Moines River in white, the sweeping loops of pentimenti of the river projected onto the canvas of the Iowan landscape. In this way, the terrain of the landscape can be seen as a palimpsest.

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These maps show the territory of the river, a territory which has been seized for farm fields. Many rivers which used to wind across the valley are now confined to rationalized ditches.

Mapping alluvial deposits shows the projection of time onto the landscape.

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SPECIAL THANKS

DATUM is a medium for critical academic discourse through the exchange of bold design and progressive ideas. As a studentrun publication, we are grateful to the Iowa State University Department of Architecture for their continual support. We would also like to thank previous donors for providing the funds to get us to where we are today. Donors have no influence on, or involvement with, the work selected for publication.

Department of Architecture

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Student Government

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