FREE ASSOCIATION MAGAZINE SPRING 2018, ISSUE #5 // F L I G H T
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[inside cover] Dan Harvey
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FREE ASS. MAG.
Free Association (Maga)Zine SPRING 2018, ISSUE #5 : FLIGHT Free Association Magazine (Free Ass. Mag.) is a Seattle-based, independently-published, biannual anti-architecture/architecture magazine whose content is driven by the desire to create deeper dialogue and engagement between those who design our cities and those who live in our cities. Free Ass. Mag. is a reaction to the insular nature of the architecture community and driven by a frustration with a too often top-down design approach. The goal for the publication is to collect work from around the world that is inspired by sufficiently-broad yet thoughtfully-controversial themes in architecture in an attempt to unpack wide ranging perceptions from people with littleto-no architectural training. The vision is to foster a meaningful conversation amongst thinkers in order to create better buildings, better cities, and ultimately better communities, targeting a dysfunctional industry in a dysfunctional world.
Collected and hand-bound extending across the globe.
in
Seattle,
but
Printed in the Georgetown neighborhood of Seattle by Paper Press Punch. Cover: Excerpt from Nonhuman Autonomous Space Agency by Fred Scharmen, pg. 87-93 View past and present issues online: freeassmag.com
Follow or like on social media: @freeassmag Send digital mail or submissions to: freeassmagazine@gmail.com 4
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EDITOR-IN-CHIEF & PUBLISHER Amanda Wills (seattle, usa) EDITOR & ART DIRECTION June Lee (seoul, south korea) CONTRIBUTORS Ashley Armitage Bridgit Gallagher Dan Harvey Enrique Ramirez Evan Chakroff Fred Scharmen Gideon Schwartzman Haden Miller Ian Petersen inercies Irena Gajic Jack Wates Karen Davis Karl Ochmanek Katie Naclerio Keefer Dunn Kelsey Sucena Lyra Jakabhazy Maela Ohana Melanija Grozdanoska Nate Otto Noritaka Minami Rachel Derum Seigar Shabtai Pinchevsky Ted Black Vicky Zhang Victor Devlin Wanda Fraga Sánchez de la Campa Will Powers Yağmur Özdemir ESSAY #1, pg. 20-21 Karl Ochmanek speaks of experiences at 30,000 feet. ESSAY #2, pg. 28-37 Enrique Ramirez discusses the role of flight in architecture. ESSAY #3. pg. 44-51 Gideon Schartzman proposes a city diguised from drone strikes. 5
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Fred Scharmen 6
baltimore, usa
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_ F L I G H T. Hey thanks for picking up this humble zine, reader! We are excited to share the contents of this fifth(!!!) issue of our antiarchitecture/architecture publication! With each passing issue, we’ve tried to inject more playfulness and femme undercurrents back into the conversation around architecture. Hopefully, we’re inching our way closer to an architecture publication that is less exclusive and rigid by inviting anyone and everyone to add a voice to the conversation. As always, we are incredibly humbled by the inspiring and thoughtful work for this issue, themed “Flight”. The mission of Free Association Magazine (Free Ass. Mag.) is, and always will be, to catalyze a dialogue around themes in architecture with works freely associating with one another, drawing connections often overlooked. Fasten your seatbelts, and be prepared to soar above the clouds, dive into the depths of the human body, and imagine a world where manatees live in outer space. Brace yourselves for a peek into unnatural landscapes, brought to you by the explorations of the talented individuals filling the following pages. We hoped to capture the fascination and energy that the experience of flight makes available, at least to a few of us. For those who can fly, there are many more who face insurmountable barriers to the ability of flight, both literal and metaphorical. We invite you, reader, to ponder this as you explore the pages beyond. For our fifth issue, Free Ass. Mag. asks you to elevate your thinking and imagine a new plane of discourse in architecture. We want to challenge the current state of affairs by looking at what the concept of “flight” has influenced in our current built fabric. Now a commodity, few think twice when rocketing up into thin air - a vehicle from point A to point B. Amanda Wills Editor-in-Chief • Founder 7
Ashley Armitage
chicago, usa
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Shabtai Pinchevsky
jerusal em, israel
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Ashley Armitage
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Bridgit Gallagher chicago, usa 19
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Essay # 1
I wrote this at
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30,000 feet
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Weeks ago
I was going to write an essay about the majesty of flight running dry in the face of ever rising terror and bureaucracy. Some sort of parable about regulation and fear warping what, by all accounts, ought to be exceptional. But then I flew again and it has made me rethink. The romantic vision of watching birds never particularly worked for me. Maybe I never empathized fully enough to envision myself as the bird, to be envious of their flight. However I can remember most of the times I’ve ever flown, the specific poses of flight (standing, sitting, mild reclining), the inner ear pressure, and yes the wonder. Looking around at take off I can see people praying, people sleeping, and people filled with wonder as we pull away from terrestrial life. Suddenly it feels like we’ve been cast into a community and the premise of Lost makes sense again. If we did crash, who would I like, who would bring what skills, what does this randomized portion of travelers bring to the table? And, indeed, flight feels like a fantasy to me. A mile, two miles, three miles from the face of the Earth the curtain on my urban life has been drawn back. Cast in miniature is Chicago and as far as the eye can see is the delicate support system for our modern life, the land we don’t think about any more, the portion of the country we don’t listen to any more. Flight is about disconnect, is about leaving and going. On this flight my technology is pleasantly useless, there is no one to talk to but the people so immediately present. It feels like one of the few spaces in America that you’re alone with your thoughts, not that there isn’t in flight wifi, not that there aren’t movies and distractions made available. In this sense flight also feels like it is about selfishness, about burning through resources, about making the world accessible for a price both known and unknown. There is a brutal efficiency about flight, the plastic cups, the queues, the taking of important cargo (bodies and minds) to one place only to spirit them away again later.
Karl Ochmanek chicago, usa 21
Keefer Dunn chicago, usa
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Jack Wates london, uk
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photography by
Jack Wates
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illustration by
Lyra Jakabhazy chicago, usa
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Essay # 2
A FACE WITHOUT One
of the most well-known romances between architecture and aviation had everything to do with seeing ... and not seeing. We can look to the very opening moments of Le Corbusier’s Aircraft (1935) to have this revealed before us, the portrait of the young architect as a young polemicist. The year is 1909, and the young Le Corbusier, then an apprentice in Auguste Perret’s office, sequestered in a “student’s garret on Quai St. Michel,”1 hears a noise. It is the sound of the Comte de Lambert flying his Wright flyer around the Eiffel Tower. It may have not been the loudest noise in the world, and yet the aircraft’s single 35-hp engine would have created enough of a distinguishable drone in the air to catch an unsuspecting ear. The flight was the latest event in what would be a watershed decade for the history French aviation—and a momentous occasion for Le Corbusier as well. This was, after all, the very moment when “men had captured the chimera and driven it above the city.”2 And yet the Comte’s flight was literally obstructed by architecture. The noise was enough to cause our young architect to crane his head out the window, away from the building, so to speak, “to catch sight of this unknown messenger.”3
Such talk of messengers is wholly apposite, for as Le Corbusier tells us, it was some time later when Perret burst into his atelier brandishing a copy of L’intransigeant announcing Louis Blériot’s successful flight across the English Channel on July 25, 1909. These two events—the Comte de Lambert’s fight around the Eiffel Tower and Blériot’s channel crossing—have a special significance for narratives of architectural modernism in that they anticipate Le Corbusier’s own infatuation flight and flying machines. There are of course other, and in some cases, earlier and more fruitful instances where the cultures of architecture and aviation have merged. Yet what is important here is that this early entanglement with aviation would inform some of Le Corbusier’s most important polemical statements about architecture.
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EYES
Enrique Ramirez
brooklyn, usa
Within the pages of L’Esprit nouveau, the publication edited and published by Le Corbusier4 and Amédée Ozenfant from 1920-1925, there appears a series of installments with the cryptic title “Des Yeux Qui Ne Voient Pas” (“Eyes That Do Not See”). The phrase, attributed to a poem by Stéphane Mallarmé called “Le phénomène futur,”5 is an indictment of Le Corbusier’s contemporaries, architects who are incapable of seeing without any sense of clarity, of not seeing what “is right before our eyes.”6 It is as much an appeal to contemporaneity as it is a demand for architects to really look at the various industrial objects around them to truly understand how to pose a design problem.7
The first “Eyes That Do Not See” that appeared in L’Esprit nouveau No. 8 (1921) is about ships, and the second, from No. 9 (1921), concerned airplanes. Here, Le Corbusier looks to flying machines to argue how architects should be looking at design problems. The logic goes something like this: if an airplane is a machine for flying, and a bomber a machine for bombing, then the reason why houses are not looked at as machines for living is that architects have not trained their eyes to really pose the question in this manner.8 Thus the photographs of aircraft in the pages of L’Esprit nouveau No. 9, many of which would be reprinted in Le Corbusier’s influential book, Vers une architecture (1923), serve a didactic purpose. They are evidence not only of design problems that are well-thought out, but also exhibited (if that’s the appropriate term) to stand in stark contradiction to the work of contemporary architects. Hence the last spread in “Des Yeux Qui Ne Voient Pas ... Les Avions” (1921) pairs an ensemble of public and private buildings, all gaudy and overscaled, against the sleek lines of a Farman Goliath.
photography by
Evan Chakroff seattl e, usa
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Le Corbusier-Saugnier, “Des yeux qui ne voient pas ... Les Avions” L’Esprit nouveau No. 9 (1921)
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Whereas
Le Corbusier labels buildings by Marcel, LaJoie, Vorin, Lavirotte, Garriguenc, Gosselin, and Castel as “Le problème mal posé ... des yeux qui n’ont pas vu” ( “The badly posed problem .... by eyes that have not seen”), the Goliath, on the other hand, appears pristine against a cloudless sky. It is visible, obvious. This is not to say, however, that the aircraft appearing in “Des Yeux Qui Ne Voient Pas ... Les Avions” or Vers une architecture were at the pinnacle of French aviation technology. Much as the text rarely corroborates or references the images of aircraft, the vehicles themselves seem to have no relation to each other other than the fact that they are aircraft, and that many of their images are culled from publicity brochures and advertisements. Most are Maurice Farman designs. For example, the image on the title page of “Des Yeux Qui Ne Voient Pas” (reproduced in Vers une architecture) is a Farman F.40 from L’escadrille 44 flying a reconnaissance mission over Verdun sometime in 1916. By the time L’Esprit nouveau went to print, it was an airplane that had already been superseded by sleeker, faster, and bigger 30
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models, including the Goliath. How interesting, then, that one of the aircraft that Le Corbusier chooses to present is a SPAD XIII, one of the most celebrated aircraft of the First World War. In 1912, textile heir Armand Deperdussin founded the Société de Production des Aéroplanes Deperdussin. And with the help of aircraft designer and engineer Louis Béchereau, Deperdussin’s company became famous for designing fast, single-engine monoplanes that became popular with foreign buyers. In 1913, Deperdussin became embroiled in a fraud scandal and was subsequently arrested and sentenced to trial. An external consortium of aviation experts appointed Béchereau as the head of Deperdussin’s former company. The head of this consortium was none other than Louis Blériot, the very same pilot and aircraft designer who made the first crossing of the English Channel by plane in 1909. They renamed the company Société Pour L’Aviation et ses Dérivés, or SPAD. Under Béchereau’s supervision, and just in time for the outbreak of the First World War, SPAD produced a series of agile, heavily armed biplanes, including the SPAD A-Series and the more successful S.VII. But it was the S.XIII, with its powerful 220-hp Hispano-Suiza engine, that became the one of the Allies’ favored frontline fighters during the First World War. It was the very airplane that made French airmen Rene Fonck and Georges Guynemer, Italian pilot Franceso Baracca, and American aces Eddie Rickenbacker and Frank Luke famous. Advertisement for Bleriot PHI-type dynamo, L’Aérophile, 15 October 1910
The caption underneath the picture of the S.XIII in L’Esprit nouveau identifies it as a “SPAD XIII Blériot.” This is because in 1918, Blériot had purchased all the assets in Béchereau’s company and taken over the production line. The new company, now named Blériot-SPAD, continued producing aircraft using the SPAD brand until 1921. This means that the aircraft depicted in L’Esprit nouveau was not technically produced by BlériotSPAD (production of the S.XIII halted in 1919). In other words, it is an archival image probably used to depict the history of BlériotSPAD’s production line. This perhaps explains the appearance of Bécherau’s name (he had left the company after the war to establish, along with Adolphe Bernard, a new company, the Société des Avions Bernard). The image is therefore a testament to the designer’s legacy, perhaps a suggestion that it was Bécherau, and nor Blériot, that had posed the so-called design problem well. The above materials, the ways in which they implicate Le Corbusier’s interest in aircraft are well-known. So are the methods used to articulate this interest. Scholaes scour archival images and photographs, period newspaper and magazine clippings from the early 1920’s. The idea here is that the proper contextualization of Le Corbusier’s work requires finding direct correlations between the process of writing and laying out L’Esprit nouveau and Vers une architecture. It is a way of acknowledging the perniciousness of intentional fallacy. In other words, although the work of an author is of primary importance, there still added value in acknowledging 31
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the importance of other work that Le Corbusier may have consulted. But before we cast Blériot as the one who “had not seen,” it is not only important to recall that this pioneering aviator was also an industrial designer, but also to recognize one of the central themes of this essay. I am, of course, talking about seeing and not seeing—a distinction that invites another discussion as to the significance of the eye. The idea of the disembodied eye is one that is indelibly woven into the fabric of modernity. Thus philosophy scholar Karsten Harries uses the term “Angelic Eye” to describe a “move to objectivity” to “defeat doubt.” This is, however, much more than a description of the commonly held view that objectivity and rationality are coextensive with modernity. Historian Martin Jay points out, for example, that Harries is presenting a more complicated view, so to speak, one that considers how the disembodied eye “expressed the very human ability to see something from the point of view of the other.”This is a point of view that resonates well with one made earlier by Swiss literary critic Jean Starobinski in L’oeil vivant (The Living Eye) (1961). The subject of this book is the writer’s eye, an eye with not only the capacity to see the world, its objects, and through its objects, but also an eye with the ability to recognize its limits, to know when one cannot truly see. Starobinski describes this tension between the desire to see everything and nothing in poetic terms: “One must refuse neither the vertigo of distance nor that of proximity; one must desire that double excess where the look is always near to losing all its powers.” 32
If Starobinski’s task is to warn of the dangers of “le regard surplombant” (“the look from above”), then it follows that a slightly different vantage point is needed, one that modulates between distance and proximity. My charge here is to describe this process of seeing as somewhere between a close reading and a general history. This entails recasting Starobisnki’s idea of “le regard surplombant” as a mediumaltitude scan. From this height, then, facts, events, texts, images become part of a larger fabric. And yet one of the benefits of observing from this height is that the fabric below appears as a much more fragmented surface. Subject to this medium-altitude scan—this bird’seye view of the bird’s-eye view, so to speak—the landscape below becomes a vexed object. No longer a smooth or continuous isotropic space, our subject is irregular, wrinkled, serrated. Actors, objects, histories shuttle in and out to complicate this vantage point.
Farman F.40 from L’escadrille 44, France, 1916.
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Louis Blériot prepares for his cross-channel flight on 25 July 1909
Consider how this complicates the connection between Le Corbusier and Louis Blériot that introduced this essay. Until now, this brief survey of Le Corbusier’s works involved a close reading of his sources. These are moments of diligence: images are traced to specific publications, which are alluded to in letters between Le Corbusier and others, which, in turn create a tight, interconnected skein of sources and texts that give way to a historical picture. But now, moving a little higher to our medium-altitude vantage point, we note an additional series of texts and authors that, although not directly related to L’Esprit nouveau, are nevertheless instrumental to our understanding of it. And at this height, we can capitalize on the value of coincidence. Although he is more closely associated with developments in aviation, Blériot was also an important figure for automobile culture. And like many aircraft designers, he plied his trade in the design and manufacture of car parts before achieving fame as an aviator. An issue of The Automobile from 1909—the very year that Blériot crossed the English Channel—announces his publishing of an airplane catalog “in which aeroplanes are listed in a commercial basis.” The announcement also mentions that Blériot’s factory, on 16 Rue Duret in Paris, also specializes in the manufacture of custom woodwork for aircraft framework. And as early as 1902, a small listing in an issue of L’Aérophile (a publication started in the 1890’s by the AéroClub de France) tells its readers that Blériot, “known throughout the automotive world for his powerful acetylene headlights” has just built a flying machine in that very same factory.
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Bl ériot also became famous for designing the dynamos needed to power automobile headlights. Attached to an engine flywheel, the dynamo was a device that would generate the electricity needed to power a headlight thought constant, rapid revolutions. And in 1914, Mortimer Arthur Codd, a leading authority on the design of power components for automobiles, published a whole book devoted to the operation of headlights called Dynamo Lighting for Motor Cars. Codd surveys the entire European landscape of dynamo designers, and even devotes an entire section to Blériot’s current dynamo, “modelled on the lines of a central station machine, its parts being of quite ordinary design and of considerable strength and robustness.” It is quite likely that the very dynamo presented in this pages a Blériot “PHI”type design.
In 1910, Blériot published an ad in the pages of L’aérophile promoting this
line of dynamos. The image is remarkable, even illuminating. It reads: “Une automobile sans dynamo ‘PHI’ c’est une visage sans yeux” (“A car without PHI dynamos is a face without eyes”). Underneath is a Modigliani-esque image, a stark, lean face carved out of the interplay between the blackness of the hair and brows and the whiteness of the skin. Earrings shaped like the Greek lowercase “phi” appear in lieu of ears. And the eyes, as the title declares, are missing. The implication here, of course, is that your car’s headlights will not work without a set of Blériot dynamos. But it is the use of the face that really calls attention to the suggestive nature of this image. This is not just supposed to remind us of the front view of a car; it calls attention to the fact that the eyes are missing. Around the time that Ozenfant and Le Corbusier began to publish L’Esprit
nouveau, they would have been familiar with an automobile’s standard front-end light-and-radiator arrangements. When viewed as a front-end elevation, the front of the car would indeed have appeared as a face. Part of the reason for this particular style is that for dynamos to work properly and efficiently, they would have to be placed somewhere near the engine. This would require mounting headlight fairings as close as possible to the engine block: this proximity is what gives the front of the car its literal and figurative visage. This idea was not unfamiliar to automobile culture, however. Automotive
industry trade publications in the early twentieth century published schematics showing the latest designs by car and parts manufacturers. And when showcasing the various kinds of radiators, such publications would often have to depict the front end of a car without its headlights. They were, in essence, publishing faces without eyes. A 1912 issue of the British automobile trade publication The Autocar devoted a whole section to radiators. Displayed in alphabetical order, the images are familiar in the sense that they are perspective drawings of the front ends of cars. But the lack of headlights makes them, if not unfamiliar, disconcerting, as if something was wrong with these cars. In the “D” section, there even appears the front end assembly for a Delage automobile. 34
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To get a sense of what a Delage would have looked like with its headlights mounted, one would only have to look through the pages of L’Esprit nouveau No. 10. And there, at the very end of an article named “Des Yeux Qui Ne Voient Pas ... Les Autos” is a photograph of the front end of a Delage Grand-Sport automobile. Like the images of aircraft in No. 9, this image also appears in Vers une architecture. And there, too, the image of the Delage Grand-Sport is juxtaposed against a photograph of the Parthenon. Jean-Louis Cohen has observed how these two images demonstrate how “the eyes of an era were invited to accept a literally iconoclastic rapprochement between Greek temples and automobiles.” The reference to eyes and vision are, of course, wholly intentional. And here, the issue of proper vision is couched in terms of standardization. In other words, Le Corbusier uses cars as examples of properly-posed questions in the sense that they represent the pinnacle of a design process (i.e., a standard). To go one step further, however, this sense of vision correction would also apply to the various components that make up a car. And though many of the photographs have a distinct emphasis on form, Le Corbusier alludes to the importance of standardized components when he writes in Toward an Architecture that “All automobiles are essentially organized the same way.” 35
photo by Keefer Dunn
1. Le Corbusier, Aircraft (London: The Studio, Ltd., 1935), 6. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. For his various articles in L’Esprit nouveau, Le Corbusier signed his name as “Le Corbusier-Saugnier.” 5. Jean-Louis Cohen, introduction to Toward an Architecture, by Le Corbusier, John Goodman, trans. (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute Publications, 2007), 13. For more on Le Corbusier’s attitudes to poetry, see Francesco Passanti, “The Vernacular, Modernism, and Le Corbusier” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 56, No. 4 (Dec., 1997), 447. 6. Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture, p. 156. 7. For more about Le Corbusier’s inventory of industrial objects within the pages of L’Esprit nouveau, see Beatriz Colomina, “Le Corbusier and Duchamp: The Uneasy Status of the Object” in Taisto H. Mäkelä and Wallis Miller, eds. Wars of Classification: Architecture and Modernity (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1991), 37-62. A version of this essay, with more illustrations, appears in Colomina, “L’Esprit Nouveau: Architecture and Publicité,”in Colomina, et al. ed. Architectureproduction, Revisions 2 (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1988), 56-99. An analysis of Le Corbusier’s interest in automobiles in relation to futurism can be found in Tim Benton, “Dreams of Machines: Futurism and l’Esprit Nouveau,” Journal of Design History, Vol. 3, No. 1(1990), 19-34. 8. I am, of course, summarizing here. To better understand the intellectual milieu surrounding the idea of “Des Yeux Qui Ne Voient Pas,” see Cohen’s introduction to Vers une architecture, especially pp. 13-17. 9. Le Corbusier-Saugnier, “Des Yeux Qui Ne Voient Pas ... Les Avions” L’esprit nouveau No. 9 (1921), 986. 10. I began this discussion with my post on atemporality in the work of Reyner Banham, Albrecht Dürer, L.B. Alberti, and Herbert Bayer in “Story of an Eye (and Another Eye, and Yet Another Eye)” , 2010, http://www.aggregat456.com/2010/03/story-of-eye-andanother-eye-and-yet.html, accessed 5 January 2018. 11. Karsten Harries, “Descartes, Perspective, and the Angelic Eye,” Yale French Studies, No. 49, Science, Language, and the Perspective Mind: Studies in Literature and Thought from Campanella to Bayles (1973), 32. 12. For one of the most articulate and most recent rejections of this view, see Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, Catherine Porter, trans. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1993); Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). For an expert dissection of Galison’s idea of the “mesoscopic view,” check out “Traditions of Practice: Mesoscopy, Materiality, and Intercalation”, from the excellent history and historiography of science blog, Ether Wave Propaganda. 13. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 81, n. 187. 14. Here I am paraphrasing Wallace Fowlie’s review of the English translation of Starobinski’s The Living Eye. See Fowlie, “Sight and Insight,” The Sewanee Review, Vol. 97, No. 4 (Fall, 1989), cxx-cxxii. 15. Jean Starobinski, L’oeil vivant: Essais (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), quoted in Ibid., p. 20. 16. For more on this trend, see Herrick Chapman, State Capitalism and Working-Class Radicalism in the French Aircraft Industry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). 17. Anon. “Recent Trade Publications” The Automobile, Vol. 21, No. 22 (25 November 1909), 941. 18. Anon. L’Aérophile: revue pratique le la locomotion aérienne, No. 11 (Nov., 1902), 292: “Nous apprenons que M. Louis Blériot, l’ingénieur bien connu du monde de 1’automobile par ses puissants phares à l’acétylène, construit dans ses ateliers de la rue Duret une machine volante qu’il compte expérimenter sous peu.” 19. Mortimer Arthur Codd, Dynamo Lighting for Motor Cars (London: E. & F.N. Spon, 1914), 61. 20. Cohen, introduction to Toward an Architecture, 17. 21. I am also being reductive here. For more information on standards and standardization, see Cohen’s discussion of how Le Corbusier used the German word standart to describe this process in Ibid. 22. Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture, 182. 23. Henry Adams, “The Dynamo and the Virgin” in The Education of Henry Adams (Boston: Houghton and Mifflin, 1918), 382.
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Nate Otto
chicago, usa
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In Peter Sloterdijk’s Terror from the Air, Sloterdijk claims that the
20th century does not truly begin until April 22nd 1915.1 On this day the Germans initiated the first ever chemical warfare attack on enemy troops. The string of chemical attacks which followed not only targeted environments, but more importantly removed the aggressor from the immediate location in which the deadly act of war occurs.
...Aggression from a far. Aggression from the air! This newly defined warfare created an increasingly abstracted and morally diluted relationship between those attacked and those attacking. The “unknowing strike” struck fear into those in the trenches, and a new breed of terrorism was (air)born(e).
Essay # 3
Gideon Schwartzman cambridg e, usa 45
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Accord ing to gas bo Sloterdijk, down a mbings wou ld sp target iraling path ing, an o d a su f bseq
Due to a growing escalation of 20th century aerial warfare, fear from what’s above has now become ubiquitous amongst war torn geographies.
With the t and f pullin
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these ini ultima tial acts of Ge te f terro ly send the rman cen ri quent sm, environm tury need f or res ental ponsiv e design 1 .
ev T mil olve he ca itia d an lcu of d b late rem een d g ote ter as c ly rify lou op era ingly d att ted rep ack dro lac s ha ne ed b ve arm y a ies .3
h contin uou target h s advancements as in techn o further become increas disassoc ingly dis logy, t iated wi ng a trig th the a anced ger. ct of 47
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What
possible means of defense do our constructed environments have in an increasingly violent world? This proposal offers a city in disguise. Borrowing the strategy of razzle dazzle, this constructed city aims to confuse and frustrate the current state of machine vision.3 While the ships of the First World War used the super graphic (dazzle) to distort shape, this urban proposal utilizes the graphic elements of stripes, dual tone color, and perspectival shifts to camouflage.2 The dazzle pattern conflates foreground and background. In elevation the city is lost, in axonometric the city is distorted, and in drone view the target is hidden in plain sight. 1. Terror from the Air, Peter Sloterdijk, translated by Patton Amy, and Corcoran Steve, London: distributed by MIT Press for Semiotext(e), 2009, 111 pages 2. Barton, Chris. Dazzle Ships: World War I and the Art of Confusion. Lerner Publishing Group, 2017. 3. Vidler, Anthony. “Terres Inconnues: Cartographies of a Landscape to Be Invented.” October, vol. 115, 2006, pp. 13–30
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Irena Gajic
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London is Bremen
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long island, usa
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I met Doug the other day releasing
his Pigeons in front of Home Depot. He tells me his family has been training them for generations, tells me that his fathers father flew them out into World War I. I feel like I’m following these things across country now, like every time I see one cooing on the streets or nesting up on billboards they’ve got some kind of message waiting for me.
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I have been told that they are like rats, as if rats are useless things.
I remember that rats have had their functions, that everything serves its purpose. I wonder what function these Pigeons have anymore. I guess that in 2018 there are better ways to send messages into battle, but I guess that in 2018 there are probably better ways of doing most things. I wonder what function these photographs might serve. I wonder what function these words might serve.
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ac R
he
um er lD
m elb
ourn e
, a u s t r a li a
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Wanda Fr
aga Sรกn
chez de
la Cam
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Ashley Armitage
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The human body
is so
bea
utif
ul a
nd
inte
rest
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feet
t bu
Katie Naclerio 70
purchase, usa
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are just weird to me. 71
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Haden M il l e r chi
ca g o,
us a
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lia elbourne, austra m m
Rachel Deru
Karen Davis drap er, usa
Will Powers london, england
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Vicky Zhang
tokyo ,
jap a n
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guess
Seigar 80
tenerife, spain
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what?
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Evan Chakroff
seattl e, usa
ELEVATIONS +0’ Did the Wrights take their contraption to the Carolina coast for air denser than Dayton? Lift does increase with density. +1000’ Flights were grounded when Phoenix hit 118 ° F, beyond the planes’ safe operating temperature. Density decreases as temperatures rise. +5280’ Sci-fi tales often propose the mile-high city as a refuge. Far from the inundated coastlines of the Anthropocene, one might imagine Denver’s climate fatalists iterating pressurized homes. +29,000’ Some climb Everest without oxygen. Many more die. +30,000’ Was it a dream, or are airlines now advertising Earth-equivalent cabin pressures? +1,425,000’ The ISS flies at 5 miles per second. Within, conditions approximate sea level. Atmosphere clings like a veil.
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photo
+
words
by
Noritaka Minami
chicago, usa
Tract No. 3107 #1
(California City, California)
California City is a master planned community
in the Mojave Desert conceived by the real estate developer Nathan K. Mendelsohn in 1958. California City was envisioned as the next major metropolis in California in response to the population and economic growths after World War II. Today, California City exists as a place that has yet to meet the original ambition of its developer and the idyllic image that was promoted to the public. Despite having the foundation for a future city in place, there are no indications that this city will ever be realized in the future.
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Fre / Th d Sch e
a
bal Wor rm tim ki en ore ng , us Gr a o
up
on
Ad a
pt
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Sy
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SPRING // ISSUE #5
The Nonhuman Autonomous Space Agency is an open world speculative research
project that proposes a network of robotic and biological systems for exploring the solar system, tied together by exchanges in the material and online attention economies, with no humans allowed. Space exploration has been the heroic imperative of humankind, but this was not always the case.
The first Earthlings in space were dogs,
monkeys, and rabbits. Using robotics and fabrication to create new spatial systems with new affordances for their inhabitants, the Nonhuman Autonomous Space Agency imagines that the future of space exploration and inhabitation might be an adventure for everyone.
NETWORK DIAGRAM (below)
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AND TYPOLOGY
SP
E AC
N LO O C
ION ICAT R B Y FA
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Maela Ohana
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Yağmur Özdemir
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ankara, turkey
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Vicky Zhang
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we’re bottom feeders birds are swimming through the sky fish are all flying
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s ea Ia n
e Pet
rse
ttl
e,
us a
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Rachel Derum
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el Ma
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[inside cover] Dan Harvey
FREE ASSOCIATION MAGAZINE SPRING 2018, ISSUE #5 // F L I G H T F R E EAS SM AG.COM // @F R E EAS SM AG