GOING LIVE. FROM STATES TO SYSTEMS by o p e n s y s t e m s

going live.

from states to systems

opsys

â&#x20AC;˘

pierre bĂŠlanger 1

princeton architectural press

pamphlet architecture 35

new york

INDEX 2

±30,000km ASL 48 ±0.90m / 6:00h 66-75 +2680.00m ASL 62-63 -10,000m BSL 48 -00:21:00:00 UTC 44-51 07 March 2015 52 0–217 km/h 30-43 1 micron 40 1 hectare 24-25 1 : 1 billion 5 1 : 647 56-65 10 March 2015 26 1000 Little Pieces 56 13th–16th Century 25 1865 Forest Law 25 1785 Land Ordinance 32 1940 13, 27, 29 1958 42 1972-80 6 1979 6 1979-81 6 1986-1994 6-7 1987 5, 6, 7, 26, 29, 52, 55 1989 3,6 1992-93 4-13, 26-29, 53, 55 1994 4, 6-7, 54-55 1995 3, 7, 13, 52-55, 77, 80 1998 13, 29, 52-53 2014 10, 54-55, 72 209-251km/h 61 25,000 kg / year 34 276m asl 38 299,792,458 m/s 48 500mm / day 74 7,500 µm 41 8,678,321 14-25 17 August 2023 22 Acqua Alta 72 Afforestation 14, 17-19 Airspace 36 Alnus glutinosa 22-23 Altitude 3, 5, 6, 26, 55, 57, 58 Älvsjö Flatbed 76 Apartheid 4, 7,12 Apollo 4, 5 Arecaceae 60-61 Argo 79, cover Artibonite 57-58, 62 Banham 12 Baran 9 Bateson 3, 54, 55 Bedform 72 Behrens 11

Bending Moment 61 Bering Strait 44-51 Berlin Wall 4, 6, 12, 52 Berman 4, 6 Black Locust 22-23 Buck-Morss 64 C'est La Vie 1-80 Chernobyl 4, 6, 12 Columbus (CMH) 31 Copernican 4,5 Coppicing 23 Corner 4, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 27, 28, 29, 53, 76-77 Cousteau 50, 73 Cruz 60 Dead Matter 23 Deformation 11, 40, 73 Deleuze 3,5 26, 27, 29, 52, 54, 55 Diomede (DIO) 44 Dübenholz (DUBF) 15 Earle 75 Easterling 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 11,13, 27, 52-55 Eliade 10 Emergence 6, 10, 27, 40, 77 Florescence 40-41 Geddes 3, 5, 52, 54, 63 Germination 64 Giedion 12, 29 Gleick 26 Guattari 3, 6, 26, 54, 55 Haiti (CAP) 56-65 Haiti & Hegel 64 Hilberseimer 3, 19, 65 Intertidal 70-73 Jackson 9-10 Jencks 4, 5, 12, 13 Kauffman 4, 7, 9, 11, 12, 40, 77 Koolhaas 77, 80 Kwinter 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 26-29 Labor 64 Lagoon 67, 69, 72, 74, 80 Lagos 80 Landscape 3,11 Lenticel 22 Lifeforms 62 Lincoln 65 Live, Lived, Living 5-13 Livestock 39, 57, 65 Living City 42 Macrocystis 69 Madame Sara 64

Mandela 7 Mariculture 73 Marx 4 Mau 11 McLuhan 5 Mariculture 72-73 Meltdown 6-7 Mertins 11, 27, 29 Mondo 2000 28 Nef 4 Nepf 11 Network 7 Ocean cover, 47, 73, 75, 79 Odum 3, 9 Olmsted 12 One Million Plateaus 58 Organizational Ecologies 76-77 Pollination 40-41 Plateau Central 57 Plateau 3, 5, 6, 26, 55, 57, 58, 62 Power 11 Prelinger 3, 53, 55 Prigogine 6, 29 Reagan 9 Reproduction 39, 41 Rhizome 26, 37 Sauer 5, 10, 13 Slope 4, 62 Softness, A Short Story 26-29 South Africa 4, 7, 12 Self-Organization 3, 4, 7, 9, 10 Silviculture 16-19 Stengers 6, 29 Striation 18 Suckering 22-23 Synchronization 3, 12, 46, 48 Synodic 71 Taraxacum 40-41 Thatcher 9 Thompson 2, 4, 5, 12 Time Zone 46-47 Time Zones 52-55 Turibius Script 3 Valley 16, 20, 62-63 Vattimo 6, 12, 26, 29 Venice (VCE) 67-75 Venus 12 Waldheim 6-7, 11, 13 Williams 4, 7, 8, 9, 11, 13, 49 Work Force 64 Wright 42 Zostera marina 72

Pre fac e "Nature has always been at war with life!" —Félix Guattari, Les Trois Écologies, 19891 If “landscape is more than milieu or environment, and encompasses a deterritorialized world” then it is the “contested territory,” “hidden actor,” and “secret agent of the twentieth century.”2 Emerging from a historic turn in the early 1990s, this small volume brings alive the voices of a group of influential thinkers to exhume a body of ideas buried in the fallout of the explosion of digitalism and deconstructivism. Stemming from the early work of the twentieth century’s most influential landscape urbanists—Frank Lloyd Wright, Ludwig Hilberseimer, Benton MacKaye, Patrick Geddes—this mini manifesto explores underdeveloped patterns and unfinished processes of urbanization at the precise moment when environmentalism began to fail and ecology emerged between the '70s and '90s. Informed by systems thinking from the modern atomic age, this slim silver pamphlet is inspired by Howard T. Odum’s big green book created for the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission in 1970, A Tropical Rain Forest. Its parametric flow diagrams, cascading energy systems, and morphological plant profiles illustrate three core ideas from one of the twentieth century’s most prominent urban ecologists: a longitudinal geographic logic, an associative metabolic mind and a relational organic attitude. Referencing modern biology, contemporary botany and systems science, Odum was shedding light on systems of living systems, disentangling the complexity of chaos and filling us with envy for the indeterminate, the indivisible, and the unpredictable.3 Working with living systems then, the selected body of work presented here shares the same attitude. Drawing from Odum's generation, seven systemic scales are explored here: cell, organ, organism, organization, group, society, and supranational.4 Synthesized from historic, botanic, and biologic representations of old and new worlds, these spatial scales are further coupled with time scales.5 Corresponding with the overexertion of static technological systems and the failure of command-and-control master planning, the representation of vegetal geographies and plant configurations take on a life of their own across different territories and temporalities. Sylvan morphology married with botanic ephemerality register geographic intervention across political frames. From flora and fauna to topography and hydrology, the agency of a multitude of life forms opens new scales of influence and invites new modes of adaptation, and of participation, thanks to the infrastructural banality of “trees, daylight and dirt.”6 Spontaneity and self-organization condition contemporary climates and configure cosmopolitan cultures. Gridless and formless, these open systems may seem barely perceptible at first, but they are not entirely invisible. They require alternative representation and new projections. Mixing a dumb, amateur form of analog representation (stippling) with one of the most sophisticated processes of digital automation (scripting), the random dot drawings laid out in the following pages plot several projects to describe fields of active, multidirectional intervention. Patterns and positions are privileged over axial, often exclusionary orthogonal representation. Like points and pixels, this scripted stippling method is then deployed and

deformed to explore different spatial distributions and diffusions in time.7 Akin to topological techniques, this floristic quasi-pointillist method is then supported by definitions and descriptions of growth processes culled from a body of contemporary and classical sources.8 The seemingly loose, fragmented configurations portrayed here tightly confront convention: strategy over site, process over program, material over model, temporality over tectonics, and pace over space.9 If representation is a form of research, then this pamphlet confronts our understanding of fixed, deterministic states (Julian calendars, forecasting models) and physical, political states (national borders, territorial boundaries) by sponsoring the synchronization of ecologic flows and the recalibration of existing datums. The strategy of ecology (more sylvologic than ecologic) is based here on living, material implications at one end, and live, urban effects at the other—as programmer and progenitor of contemporary economic change. Freeform and freestyle, this strategy produces configurations and reproduces experiences that go live when unplanned and unprogrammed. Unlike steady states or idealized equilibria from utopian, biological representation of the Discovery Era, the systemic and intermediate projects represented here operate as freeze frames of fluid processes; temporary after-images of moving conditions—orbiting, layering, circulating—that go beyond the third dimension of Euclidean space and more towards the fourth dimension of time, aspiring to a fifth dimension of lived experience. Here, time is sliced, sectioned, sequenced and sensed, captured by transitional drawings that find scalar sweet spots between processes of representation, techniques of application and effects of duration.10 If designing living systems produces live effects across spatial intervals, then not only do we design with time, in time, or over time...we in fact design time itself. As contemporary life aspires to greater and greater degrees of freedom from a range of inherited states, then the redesign of active living systems and the undesign of over-engineered predictive models through alternative organizational ecologies provide revolutionary grounds for immediate and future action.11 1. “De tous les temps, la ‘nature’ a toujours été en guerre contre la vie!” in Félix Guattari, Les Trois Écologies (Paris, France: Éditions Galilée, 1989), 68. 2. “…le paysage, n'est pas seulement un milieu mais un monde déterritorialisé“ in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Mille Plateaux (Paris, France: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1980): 211; Rick Prelinger, Our Secret Century - vol. 6: The Uncharted Landscape (Landscape as contested territory and hidden “actor” in 20th century America) (New York: Voyager, 1995), Program Notes. 3. Odum’s scale of research ranged from the cellular and the metabolic, to the regional and transnational. The scope of his interests spanned from tropical ecology and coastal estuaries, to urban energy and military economies. 4. See James Grier Miller, “The Nature of Living Systems” The Quarterly Review of Biology Vol.48 No.1 Part 2 (March 1973): 63. 5. For example, Scottish biologist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson (On Growth and Form, 1942), Danish plant ecologist Christen C. Raunkiær (The Life Forms of Plants and Statistical Plant Geography, 1907/1934), and Theophrastus (Enquiry into Plants, 370 BCE). 6. See Paul Edwards, “Infrastructure and Modernity: Force, Time and Social Organization in the History of Sociotechnical Systems” in Modernity and Technology, edited by Thomas J. Misa, Philip Brey, and Andrew Feenberg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003): 226. 7. The randomized, non-directional drawings in this volume were created with a script designed by Mark Turibius Jongman-Sereno using three-dimensional models created in collaboration with Foad Vahidi. The Turibius script can be downloaded from www.pa35.net 8. This volume includes definitions from Benjamin Daydon Jackson’s A Glossary of Botanic Terms (1900) and Herbert M. Wilson's A Dictionary of Topographic Forms (1900). 9. See Gregory Bateson’s chapter “The Great Stochastic Processes” in Mind and Nature (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1979): 145–185. 10. See Henri Bergson’s notions of duration and non-linear time in Durée and Simultanéité (1921) and L'Évolution Créatrice (1907) referenced here in the work of Keller Easterling. 11. See C.S. Holling, “Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems” Annual Review of Ecological Systems vol.4 no.1 (1973), 1–23.

Li ve, L iv ing, L i v e d A Manifesto for Life

for the past quarter century. Largely overlooked and poorly documented, the multidimensionality of this revolution in the early 1990s—postulated and placed here in the parallel works of Sanford Kwinter, Keller Easterling, Rosalind Williams, Stuart Kauffman, and James Corner—is earthmoving.5

1993 represents a huge hole in history. If Charles Jencks penned the end of Modernism at exactly 3:32 p.m. on July 15, 1972 with the demolition of the segregationist Pruitt-Igoe Towers in St. Louis, then the end of Jencks’ reactionary postmodernism may find itself somewhere between the years 1986 and 1994.1 Catalyzed by Chernobyl’s nuclear reactor meltdown, a counter-modernity emerged in the mid-1980s from the fall of the Berlin wall and the end of South African Apartheid by the mid-1990s. What happened during this concentrated era and area of change—across design, from architecture to planning—is nothing short of revolutionary.

During the political thawing of the cold continental wars of the ’70s and ’80s, all that was previously seen as “solid” and “unbreakable”—solid states (nations, borders), solid objects (technologies, fixtures, infrastructures), solid science (permanent prescriptions, forecasts, predictable outcomes)—became fluid and dissolvable practically overnight. In spite of recent rogue erections, the gradual dissolution of barriers, borders, and boundaries of past regimes and state hegemonies that transcended generations—as if placid or permanent—demonstrated remarkable fragility and ephemerality amidst a complex, chaotic, and probabilistic world.

Captured by Marshall Berman’s Marx-inspired adage “all that is solid melts into air,” the cultural compression of the late 1980s saw the explosion of a cyberpunk, grunge counterculture surfing a not-yet-fully-formed information speedway during what would become—according to freestyle philosopher Sanford Kwinter, “the definite change from seven hundred years of history.” This shift moved us from the “closed,” “linear,” “solid,” and “static systems” of “Newtonian thought,” and toward “open,” “nonlinear,” “fluid,” and “indeterminate” thinking of the twenty-first century.2 The Copernican revolution, as Kwinter dubbed it, systemically and systematically opened new horizons on the world beyond Darwin: a world with live models of knowledge and open systems of thinking whose effects began to shake the foundations of classic evolutionary determinism and scientific reductionism. Today, almost a quarter-century later, the dawn of this post-Darwinian revolution is shining light onto a probabilistic environment where the open-ended organicism of doubt, error, and weakness form the foundations of a new spatial strategy: self-organization.

With the post-Malthusian turn finally made possible—beyond environmental catastrophism and global carrying capacity—the definitive movement of 'form to flow' and of 'function toward fluidity' provided the intellectual energy to pass from static spatial programming towards generative ecological processing. The construction of new and alternative models of interpretation and new lenses of perception is captured by the vanguard work of biologist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson (which linked literature and science for the first time), in the opening 1750 epigraph of On Growth & Form citing essayist Samuel Johnson:

Pierre Bélanger

Distinctively departing from scientific views that marooned minds with homogenizing generalizations and universalities, this new dawn opened a systemic strata of alternative altitudes and spectrum of different atmospheres whose preeminent advocate—the biologist and student of Conrad Waddington, Stuart Kauffman, cast light on a new “order” out of “disorder.”3 Kauffman’s 1993 book Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution claimed beauty and complexity out of chaos—it was seismic in effect. With all the interconnections of subsystems and supersystems of contemporary life, Kauffman exposed how “the spontaneous order” of “simple and complex systems can exhibit powerful self-organization.”4

“The mathematicians are well acquainted with the difference between pure science, which has only to do with ideas, and the application of its laws to the use of life, in which they are constrained to submit to the imperfections of matter and the influence of accident.”6 Live, in Real Time Supplanted by the shock of digitalism and deconstructivism of the 1990s, this fin-de-siècle transition was nothing short of turbulent across the design disciplines. As two of the field’s most reflexive and preemptive thinkers, Keller Easterling and Sanford Kwinter recount in live correspondences transcribed here how the 1990s saw a groundbreaking “landscape of change,” yet remains a thoroughly overlooked era of exhaustive and exhausting “perturbation.”7 The process of time, as spatial ontology and epistemological ecology, emerged within a contested ideological zone and rude technological awakening in the reconstruction of the reconception of the world. From different angles and intersecting experiences, they both uniquely lived in, and lived through this major period of transformation over the past two decades. As the soft heroes of a new spatial avant-garde—the contemporary landscape of super-urbanization at the end of the twentieth century—we have just begun to understand the significance, scope and magnitude of their work.

If “wars have been fought over intellectual mistakes,” as economic historian John U. Nef has argued, then this revolution in synthetic and systemic thinking—a powerful cocktail of weak thought and dumb intuition really—was, and continues to be, Looking through Apollo’s eye, Kwinter, the wicked wizard of sysa sweeping intellectual tsunami that has been working us over tems thinking, has been chronicling and capturing the essence

of timelessness in his countless manifestos on 'softness' from several different latitudes and altitudes building new attitudes. Crystallized in his 1993 essay on Soft Systems, Kwinter outlines major changes precipitating from the first lunar mission where, more than twenty years prior, the lens of astronaut Bill Anders cast light what he called ’Earth’ with his Christian continental vision.8 As Kwinter reviews and requestions through the lens of the lesser-known Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the planetarity of the so-called 'Earth'—an orbital body holding more than 70 percent blue, fluid matter—would have been better described by its fluidity and more accurately named “Water.”9 In Kwinter’s preliminary formulation of planetary dynamics of nonlinear and indeterminate consequence—that is, a transformative and irreversible revolution in systems—he proposed going beyond direct, mechanical functions and more towards complex systems of live (synchronous) and living matter (organic) whose materials were the makeup of genes and genetics held together by the epiphenomena of temporal fluxes, fluctuations, and feedbacks. As one of the world’s most intelligible interlocutors of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s groundbreaking research collected in the 1987 A Thousand Plateaus (Mille Plateaux, 1972–80), Kwinter’s countercultural yet deeply insightful and incisive optic on the Copernican revolution was far ahead of its time. Rooted in the intellectual imperialism of communications geographer Harold Innis and media theory mogul Marshall McLuhan, Kwinter’s Franco-philosophical fluency has placed him in an intellectual pole position ever since the foundation of Zone books—whose interpretive aura continues to shine and whose trajectory continues to guide toward the twenty-second century. Simultaneously, in another time zone, Keller Easterling’s preemptive work on the landscape of interconnectivity—in the work on countercultural urbanists such as Patrick Geddes and Benton MacKaye—emerges from the early-1990s to directly confronts a school of thought that exclusively marginalized and purposely overlooked environments, ecologies and infrastructures—that is, the landscape of contemporary urban life. As the dean of infrastructural thought, Easterling’s observational empiricism has not only accelerated over the past two decades, her influence has grown in significance and in kind. Inadvertently, Easterling’s work has been correcting a course set in motion more than forty years ago by so-called revolutionary architecture whose potential and plight were documented and charted in Charles Jencks’ 1972 and 1999 diagrams of the Evolutionary Tree of Twentieth Century Architecture...a course that “has not been healthy or good for the environment.” Footnoting the sexist arrogance of the “dogmatic” architect, “the revolutionary century has been dominated by men,” adds Jencks, “there are very few women among the four hundred protean creators gathered from other writers.” Moving forward, Jencks proposes, “An urbanism both more feminine and coherent would have been far superior to the over-rationalized and badly related boxes that have formed our cities.”10 Between vanguard traditions of geography (once considered Living Orders of Magnitude (D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, On Growth & Form,1942)

a girl science) and indirectly aligned with cultural geographers such as Denis Cosgrove and John Brinckerhoff Jackson, Easterling incepts landscape as a geographic subject of critical importance by making a transitional, transdisciplinary leap across fields of design. Explaining how urbanization is both the stratification of conjunctive and converging powers through different spaces, “organization space” and “infrastructure space,” Easterling's synoptic eye crystallizes what preeminent human geographer Carl O. Sauer saw as the value of “being unspecialized” to translate the complexity of large-scale, trans-scalar processes “into a vocabulary of wider and clearer intelligibility.”11 In her latest book, Extrastatecraft: the Power of Infrastructure Space, Easterling reveals the very nature of infrastructure as process: "Infrastructure space is a form, but not like a building is a form; it is an updating platform unfolding in time to handle new circumstances, encoding the relationships between buildings, or dictating logistics. There are object forms like buildings and active forms like bits of code in the software that organizes building. Information resides in the, often undeclared, activities of this software—the protocols, routines, schedules, choices it manifests in space. [Marshall] McLuhan’s meme, transposed to infrastructure, might be: the action is the form."12 Combined here and brought together for the first time ever, Kwinter and Easterling’s work parallel one another, and has never been more important than it is today with growing levels of uncertainty vis-à-vis changing political and physical climates, scalar complexities and environmental dynamics.

1986-1994

1979-81

1972-80

1983-84

1985

1987

ALL THAT IS SOLID MELTS INTO AIR

MILLE PLATEAUX (french version)

IL PENSIERO DEBOLE (Dialectics, Difference, and Weak Thought)

LA NOUVELLE ALLIANCE

A THOUSAND PLATEAUS (english version)

Ilya Prigogine & Isabelle Stengers

Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari

6 Marshall Berman

Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari

Gianni Vattimo

1986 NUCLEAR PLANT MELTDOWN Chernobyl, Ukraine

Post-Modern Meltdown & Political Plateaus, around 1993. The dissolution of solid states, fixed regimes, and scientific certainty during world events at the turn of the 20th century and the emergence of fluid, contingent, organizational thinking.

1992 LANDSCAPES OF CHANGE Boccioni's "Stati d'animo" as a General Theory of Models Sanford Kwinter

1989 FALL OF BERLIN WALL East & West Germany

1991-92 A DISCOURSE ON THEORY II: Three Tyrannies of Contemporary Theory and the Alternative of Hermeneutics James Corner

1993 1992-93 SOFT SYSTEMS Sanford Kwinter

THE ORIGINS OF ORDER Self-Organization & Selection in Evolution Stuart Kauffman

1993 CULTURAL ORIGINS & ENVIRONMENTAL IMPLICATIONS OF LARGE TECHNOLOGICAL SYSTEMS

1995

NETWORK ECOLOGY

SELF-ORGANIZATION & MAXIMUM EMPOWER

Keller Easterling

Rosalind Williams

1994 END OF APARTHEID South Africa

7 Howard T. Odum

Network Systems & Systems Ecologies (Paul Baran, 1959 & Odum, 1983)

The Geographic Question Fast-forwarding us into this retroactive future, Rosalind Williams, the engineering historian and student of technological giant Thomas Hughes, puts into question whether or not the twentieth century is in fact “over,” as Charles Jencks claimed back in 1999.13 In the same way that Williams transposes the influence of Lewis Mumford’s genius against his unspoken chauvinism, Williams refigured the intellectual ground of urbanism through her technological, infrastructural vantage as “lived experience,” beyond the pedantic and prescriptive limitations of STS, the formal and closely guarded category of Science and Technology Studies.14 As a heuristic hinge between vectors of technology and science, with the orbiting fields of design and planning, Williams identified changes at the end of the twentieth century between the processes of inception (ideation and design) and implementation (execution and construction) by bridging divides between geometry and geography, shortening distances between understandings of site, species and system, and in effect, the relations of between people and power. Captured by her canonical 1993 essay “Cultural Origins and Environmental Implications of Large Technological Systems” published in a special issue of Science in Context, Rosalind Williams posed a resounding, rhetorical challenge to the engineers of environments:

“Engineering the landscape—like any act of engineering—is a process that both reflects and defines human values and relationships. What human values and relationships are represented in the cultural landscape of the late twentieth century, especially in the dominance of pathways over settlements?”15 Of even greater relevance today than it was when originally published two decades ago during a period of crumbling public works funding, Williams—acting more as urbanist and futurist than as historian—sought not only to disentangle practice from profession, but also techne from technology, to make an important premonition: “Systems of connection—the pathways of modern life—transformed the natural landscape in ways that were immediately visible and often dramatic...The outstanding feature of the modern cultural landscape is the dominance of pathways over settlements...The pathways of modern life are also corridors of power, with power being understood in both its technological and political senses. By channeling the circulation of people, goods, and messages, they have transformed spatial relations by establishing lines of force that are privileged over the places and people left outside those lines...the concept of connective systems and pathways is primarily phenomenological rather than sociological. These constructions are tangible structures existing in geographical space, and their components are related primarily in physical rather than in social terms. When engineering involves the creation of such structures, it looks more like a ‘mirror twin’ of landscape architecture or of urban planning than of science.”16 Breathing the same air that Kwinter and Easterling shared during the transformative tremors of the early 1990s, Williams treads similar ground with less than one degree of separation from the design world. Williams’ words come to us as one most outspoken critics of civil engineering broadly, far ahead of her time, yet remarkably of her own time. She has literally sought, and continues to put science in its cultural place, situating it in several contexts, at once beyond the scientific and the technological (Easterling for example, does the reverse). Relevant to the fields of design, Williams' revisionist histories and projective revisions of her predecessors’ work therefore propose a new convergence of means, media, measure, and method. Through the displacement of established disciplinary expertise and specialized practice, Williams sponsors geographically focused roles and socially active responsibilities, not unlike those of Kwinter and Easterling, vis-à-vis the fluidity of new and emergent powers; concerns that fall out from the breakdown of centralized infrastructural concerns in the late 1980s and early 1990s, spilling over into the post-Reagan, post-Thatcher era.

Pivot Irrigators I (James Corner, Taking Measures across the American Landscape, 1996)

Groundbreaking and visionary—lodged in a male-dominated, institutional sea of engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Williams has continued to navigate the unchartered waters of softer, more fluid systemic thinking across her entire career. How “life” itself, through pathways of movements and flows of transmission (instead of fixed structures and static settlements) are not only the predominant structures—infrastructures, substructures, superstructures—of contemporary civilizations but they are a priori “imagined environments,” “sensed spaces,” and “lived experiences.”17 Life, as Delineation of Time Primed by hermeneutic work in the early 1990s, it was finally the landscape architect James Corner who set the stage for critical collaborations of unspoken magnitude and relevance to design today. Through the open-ended, non-vertical, and unspecialized field of landscape, Corner found friends and brought allies together who were previously marginalized and externalized by what he considered to be the hegemony of the “hard” world. Through a sequence of influential texts in 1991, 1992, and culminating with a cover story in May 1993 for Landscape Architecture Magazine (“Projection and Disclosure in Drawing”), Corner’s early writings were highly cognitive and probative into the softness of organizational systems. In one of his early forays into heuristics and hermeneutics, Corner considered that, “the ‘hardness’ of the world has become so clear, especially in empirical terms, that it has lost much of its enigma and mystery. For many the world has become impenetrable and unyielding—a cold and neutral entity devoid of wonder. This makes it difficult for a culture to ‘figure itself.’ To figure is a term in rhetoric, meaning ‘to form figuratively,’ especially through the use of metaphors. We do this as humans so as to be able to imagine and understand our human condition (to figure out). This is largely accomplished through the quest of making, or giving form to ideas (figuring through figuration).”18 From these lucid observations on the dissolution of hardness as the project of the 1990s, Corner saw the processes of urbanization as a complex, entangled landscape where the business of the emergent landscape urbanist was simultaneously designer, director, and curator of emergent urban ecologies. Although Corner and his logistically designated office Field Operations capped off the millennium with a second-place entry for the Downsview Park Competition (Parc de la Villette 2.0), he christened the opening of the twenty-first century with an experimental omnibus seminar at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design on the subject of organizational models. Regrouping some of the most influential thinkers in the world, Corner drew from all fields including design practitioners (Stan Allen, Jesse Reiser, Dilip daCunha), biologists (Lynn Margulis, Stuart Kauffman), design educators (Mohsen Mostafavi, Jeff Kipnis, Bob Somol), historians (Christine Boyer, Michael Hardt) and theorists (Sanford Kwinter, Keller Easterling, Manuel De

Landa). Aptly titled Organizational Ecologies, Corner’s seminar explored developments across a diverse range of fields (from theoretical biology to business management) in an attempt to locate and conflate theories of self-organization, propagation, and spatial logistics towards design. By coalescing a nascent generation of thinkers, Corner proposed the agency of time and the temporality of life as the ultimate infrastructural scales, extending and expanding upon an emergent and synthetic, yet seemingly ephemeral and evasive medium. Best expressed across terrain and territory, the malleability of the medium of time and temporal scales was best captured by the undeniable influence of futurist geographer J. B. Jackson a few decades earlier: “...a landscape is not a natural feature of the environment but a ‘synthetic’ space, a manmade system of spaces superimposed on the face of the land, functioning and evolving....a composition of man-modified spaces to serve as infrastructure or background for our collective existence; and if ‘background’ seems inappropriately modest we should remember that in our

modern sense of the word it means that which underscores not only our identity and presence but also our history...As Eliade expresses it, a landscape is thus a space deliberately created to speed up or slow down the process of nature...it represents man taking upon himself the role of time.”19

Power Play: Boy on Bicycle, Prince Harry, James Corner, Boris Johnson (JCFO, April 4, 2014)

Emerging from these practical interactions and soon-to-be professional exigencies, James Corner proposed an expanded operating system—the landscape of time—as a fluid field and operational ground for the design of contemporary economies.

has been blossoming since the early 1990s. His creative predilections are now seen in projects such as the Freshkills Landfill in Staten Island, the Highline in New York, and the Underline in Miami.21 Time as Territorial Medium In Corner’s work, time is not only tool or technique, it is a cognitive and cultural device that translates ecology into a spatial and political media, one that is “precisely errant and systemically bewildering.”22 Overcoming the chronic black boxing of predictive institutionalized models, temporal strategy finds roots in degrees of risk and levels of uncertainty. Like new datums, the design of new time scales and new time zones explored in the following volume becomes instrumental to the orchestration of large-scale effects through simple formats and fragmentary forms (points, patches, plots) of intervention. Operating on a multitude of time scales, the soft vegetal dimension of design— encompassing the metabolic, the horticultural, the botanical, the silvicultural, the pharmacological, the agronomic, the faunal, the fluvial, the experiential—thus can be integrated as emergent organic infrastructure. Both soft and structural, the design of time operates across different cycles, seasons, and climates— physical and political—which were previously marginalized. In the most extreme circumstances, the urban field demonstrates time’s agility as an open ground plan.

Across this thickened ground of developing services and performances of urbanization, design of this urban field becomes both telescopic and macroscopic, sliding across different scales, systems, and strategies that are no longer defined by Here, in this futuristic field, the full complexity of biodynamic professional jurisdictions nor by political divisions. Rather, the processes and resources could be recovered through repre- field is defined by transdisciplinary collaborations and cosmosentation, synthesized and synchronized, then redeployed in politan imperatives that pass through and across the invented institutional boundaries of the State. In contraposition to the the refiguration of urban infrastructure: hard, fixed infrastructures, this interpretation provides the room for the design of softer, lighter, looser ecological systems: mi“In designing pathways, corridors, patches, fields, macro-interventions with macro-effects, producing new relations trices, meshworks, boundaries, surfaces, mats, memacross systems of trade, exchange, conveyance, mobility, branes, sections, and joints—each configuration highly and communications. Through this bifocal lens, the design of specific in dimension, material, and organization—we life opens a territory of new time zones, scales, systems, and are constructing a dynamic expanding field, literally synergies, upstream or downstream, and across gradients of a machinic stage for the performance of life, for the urban economies. propagation of more life, and for the emergence of novelty. In other words, arguments for staging uncerInformed by geospatial and geobotanical practices of soft thinktainty, for indeterminacy and open-endedness, make ers such as geographer Carl O. Sauer, and others such as sense only in a world with specific material form and ecologist Howard W. Odum and botanist Liberty H. Bailey, the precise design organizations.”20 collaborative and cross-disciplinary nature of designing time As infrastructural ecologies then, Corner's design organizations emerges from historical and historiographic juxtapositions. The engage the full capacity of post-Euclidean planning and the propositional nature of this temporal ecology of transitional, inglobal context of capital flow. For Corner, they exploit the tech- termediate architectures thus entails a double-entendre and no-spatial limits of twentieth century Fordist engineering to de- dual identity—that is, time as infrastructure and infrastructure as ploy ecology and self-organization as agent of urban renewal time. Explored and exposed here in this soft manifesto, the sinand creative innovation. Combining his late work that explores gle-use infrastructure along corridors of movement and path“urbanism as a way of life,” and life as process of urbanism, this ways of urbanization that Williams and Easterling have traversed intellectual milieu has become the privileged space for ped- during the past two decades, as well as the theoretical organiagogical innovation and professional public engagement that zational waters that Kwinter and Kauffman have navigated since

the mid-1980s, establish ground zero for this small volume. A multitude of strategies are combined and examined here: geographic zoning, boundary realignments, material surfaces, subsurface programming, sectional thickening, and ecological reengineering. Staging uncertainty and harnessing contingency become the new urban imperatives; time becomes a dimension of slow but enduring spatial programming for systemic decentralization, racial recombination, class desegregation and spatial layering. This intellectual form of landscaping combines new sources and resources as intellectual fodder and feedstock to drown out and let go of outdated, ideological old growth, trimming down dogmatic overgrowth, and make space for spontaneous innovation and intellectual rejuvenaton. With this longitudinal lens across parallel fields in mind, ecologies of scale can become economies of time. Landscape as Living Power If the year 1993 figures then as a pivotal moment in the world of design and the design of the world, it also represents the moment I was introduced to the field. Unfit and unqualified for the study of Civil Engineering, Visual Arts or Architecture, I was placed within a undergraduate course of study in the Program of Landscape Architecture at the University of Toronto. In addition to the local influence of Bruce Mau’s office, faculty mentoring (by John Consolati, Robert Wright, Fred Urban), and field work (with Michael Hough and Ed Fife) in Toronto during the early 1990s, the magnitude of landscape as cultural project further revealed itself in real time through the crosscutting teachings of urban historian Detlef Mertins. Pivotal was Mertins' yearlong survey course and the baedeker-like reader he compiled for incoming students, bringing together all disciplines under the aegis of urbanism: landscape architects, urban designers, and architects alike. Starting with Peter Behrens’ AEG Factory

(1909) and ending with OMA’s second-place entry to Le Parc de La Villette Competition (1982), Mertins' survey course bears remarkable influence and figures prominently in the profile of landscape work compiled here. Over the past two decades, the magnitude of the agency of time that Corner, Kwinter, Willliams, Kauffman, and Easterling have written of since the early 1990s is slowly but surely coming into focus. Both polemical and political, their work today represents an emergent avant-garde for the coming age and agency of ecology as both organization and environment. Its first generation is being grown and cultivated thanks to the pedagogical ingenuity and intellectual stamina of leaders such as Charles Waldheim, Elizabeth Meyer, Dirk Sijmons, Adriaan Geuze, Jane Wolff, Richard Weller, Anne Whiston Spirn, Michel Desvigne, Kristina Hill, Nina-Marie Lister, Kelly Shannon, Jusuck Koh, Adri van den Brink, Alissa North, and many others. Young practitioners, like Kate Orff in New York and Bas Smets in Belgium, are radically reshaping the field of public practice today through their practice and pedagogy. The design of ecological time has been, and continues to be not only the text and context for building new architectures, but also moving forward into the foreseeable future, it will be the pretext for a multitude of unknown, hybrid architectures to come. This thirty-fifth edition of Pamphlet Architecture looks longitudinally across, and telescopically through, the important hole of history that 1993 comes to represent for the field. As a curriculum vitae, the non-disciplinary design that is shared here charts unspoken courses and undocumented cycles of life across the living language of landscape as strategy and system. By injecting time into design, through undesign, the programmatic forces that launched landscape out of the late twentieth century are both processive and processual, folding space into lived experiences and delineating time across new and unforeseeable territories. Profiling different levels of organizational complexity, its content is sequenced with different scales of time, where different temporal ranges are watermarked on each page as time-stamps. Through a series of projects—in the form of methods, media, and measures—points of view and parameters of influence are presented, plotted, and profiled across a series of projects and methodical experiments. This three-point strategy thus yields a series of drawings whose perceived diffusion and deformation are proposed as spatial deployments that negotiate competing complexities and synthesize systemic interrelationships. Through the cultivation of living systems and live infrastructures, the nascent expression of time as both lived experience and unfolded effect then emerges out of a range of contingent and conditional possibilities: (1) of reversal, reversibility and reflexivity; (2) of synchronization; (3) of deterritorialization; (4) of materialization and dematerialization of process; and (5) of lived experiences...where the cosmopolitan ecology of flora, biota, and fauna perform as contemporary wealth and cultural capital. From Mechanics to Hydrodynamics Seagrass Flume, Nepf Environmental Fluid Mechanics Lab, MIT (Eduardo Infantes courtesy of Heidi Nepf, 2011)

Going Live Moving beyond the conventional Calvinist conservationism of resources or the redemptive contradiction of preservationist restoration that is chronically found in environmental design, a temporal-political-ecological imperative is conveyed here by instigating the design of relationships, where associations and synergies are infrastructural. Softer, more fluid configurations generate open, flexible relationships: risk becomes opportunity, contingency informs morphology, indeterminacy yields interaction, and flux generates form. Adressing gaps in organization and lapses in knowledge, design can operate across greater extents of time: from the largest scales of geography and regions to the engineering and genetics of the smallest size, the basic building blocks of urbanization—plants, soils, and waters—prove necessary and vital to future development. Through the redesign of infrastructure as complex ecology, the work in the future then lies in the recoupling, reconfiguration, and recalibration of these processes.23 Urgent and pressing, the project of the ecological adaptation of existing states— where transportation departments collaborate with local conservation groups or, where port authorities partner with fisheries and waterside settlements or, where power corporations work with waste recycling companies—is a necessary corollary to the next generation of post-Fordist, post-Taylorist systems. Our education and communication of these spatial and political processes is a pedagogical part of that project.

Finally, if the shape of land is most visibly transformed by the infrastructural controls of State systems—from the scale of institutional regulation to the scale of the individual engineer, then the production of landscape and the design of time is a political-technological project of rehabilitation and of resistance: tools for the people as much as a technology of the state. The primitive and primeval nature of trees, daylight, and dirt as modern infrastructural media may then be equivalent to the wiring of modern economies in the hardware of roads, bridges, pipes, and cables. This software of urbanization—a ground plane formed by the programmatic patterns of plants, the circulation of soils, the flows of water, and streams of population that support the culture of economies—then profiles the contours of new spatial production and social participation across fixed boundaries. Along the paths and permutations of urbanization—from pathway, to subway, to highway, to waterway, to airway—this contemporary public project can contribute to a “sense of enlarged freedom”—one that landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted so adamantly advocated for in his designs and surveys of contemporary urbanization at a period of spatial turbulence at the end of the nineteenth-century America—as it grows in kind, to form a landscape of democracy, for years and decades to come.24 In this body politic and body ecologic then, to speak of time as infrastructure is not only to express landscape as an urban form of life and as a living language, but also as a form of freedom and sovereignty. Ecologies of time simultaneously propose the urban field as process and projection of ecological power.

Thus, across boundaries of unborn territories and newborn ecologies, the evolution of a landscape revolution—ignited in 1993, between the fall of the Berlin wall and the end of Apartheid in South Africa, out of the radioactive ashes of Chernobyl that ushered in the cosmopolitan ecology of the twenty-first century—is just the beginning. 1. “Modern Architecture died in St. Louis, Missouri on July 15, 1972 at 3.32 pm (or thereabouts) when the infamous Pruitt-Igoe scheme, or rather several of its slab blocks, were given the final coup de grâce by dynamite. Previously it had been vandalized, mutilated and defaced by ts black inhabitants, and although millions of dollars were pumped back, trying to keep it alive (fixing the broken elevators, repairing smashed windows, repainting) it was finally put out of its misery. Boom, boom, boom [...] It expired finally and completely in 1972, after having been flogged to death remorseless for ten years by critics such as Jane Jacobs; and the fact that many so-called modern architects still go around practising a trade as if it were alive can be taken as one of the great curiosities of our age.” See Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1977): 9; Professor to Charles Jencks and student of Siegfried Giedion, Reyner Banham located the end of postmodernism a little earlier, in 1984: “While postmodernism was an inside joke it as one of the architecture’s more effective mind clearing and bullshit-removing exercises. The moment it began to take itself so seriously...its flimsy ironical structure could do nothing but collapse under the weight of its new acquired pretensions.” See Reyner Banham, “The Academic Arrival of Postmodernism” AIA Journal Vol.73 (August 1984): 81. 2. Sanford Kwinter, “Soft Systems,” Lecture at SCI-ARC in SCI-Arc Media Archive. Southern California Institute of Architecture. <http://sma.sciarc.edu/video/sanford-kwinter-soft-systems/> (April 22, 2015) 3. Well before the rise of developmental biology, the geneticist and philosopher Conrad Waddington conceived the important notion of the ‘epigenetic landscape’ where genes perform as organizational agents. Cited in the work of Sanford Kwinter, Waddington’s extensive body of work on this subject was collected in The Strategy of the Genes: a Discussion of some Aspects of Theoretical Biology (London, George Allen & Unwin, 1957). 4. Stuart Kauffman, The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993): 3. 5. John U. Nef, War and Human Progress: An Essay on the Rise of Industrial Civilization (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950): 381, as quoted by Marshall McLuhan in “The Medium is the Message” in Understanding Media: Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw Hill, 1964): 22; Gianni Vattimo, “Dialectics, Difference, and Weak Thought,” translated by Thomas Harrison, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal Vol.10 No.1 (Spring 1984): 151–64. 6. Dr. Johnson, Rambler No.14 (1750) cited in D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, On Growth & Form (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 1945): epigraph-prefatory note. 7. These expressions are borrowed from the language used in Sanford Kwinter’s “Landscapes of Change” and “Soft Systems” referenced here. 8. Brian Boigon (ed.), Cultural Lab 1 (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996); In a lecture on his book Apollo’s Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), Denis Cosgrove observed that “it is hardly surprising that for Christian believers, Apollo should mutate easily into Jesus Christ: celestial god becomes terrestrial man […] the image of Apollonian light extending from the heavens to the four continents of earth became a theme in Catholic missionary iconography”. See Denis Cosgrove, “Apollo’s Eye: A Cultural Geography of the Globe” UCLA Hettner Lecture (June 2005): 3. 9. Kwinter (1992), ibid. The Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin (world’s first man in space and to orbit the Earth) reportedly radioes to ground control on April 12, 1961: “The Earth is blue […] How wonderful. It is amazing.” See Bulletin of Atomic Scientists Vol.XVII no.5-6 (May-June 1961): 247. 10. Charles Jencks, "Theory of Evolution: An Overview of Twentieth Century Architecture” Architectural Review No.76 (1999): 7. Jencks’ diagram “The Century is Over: Evolutionary Tree of Twentieth Century Architecture” was originally created in 1969 for his Architecture 2000 and Beyond: Success in the Art of Prediction (1969), re-published in 1971 and 1981. In spite of successive reprints and revisions, the content of the diagram was never revised to include female architects or critics that were prevalent throughout the field. Out of the four hundred men cited, only four women mildly figure in Jencks’s diagram: Ray Eames, Maya Lin, Zaha Hadid, and Kazuyo Sejima. If the diagram was revised today, it would have to show the critical and important influence of women such as Ayn Rand (Fountainhead, 1943), Jane Jacobs (The Life and Death of Great American Cities, 1961), Blanche van

Live: Watching for Venus Crossing the Sun, June 5, 2012 UT (NASA/SDO & the AIA, EVE, and HMI)

Ginkel (first female architect in the world to become Dean of a School of Architecture), Francoise Choay (L'Urbanisme: Utopies et Réalités, 1979), Denise Scott Brown (Learning from Las Vegas, 1972), Elizabeth Meyer (“The Expanded Field of Landscape Architecture,” 1997), designer Eileen Gray, Anuradha Mathur (Mississippi Floods: Designing a Shifting Landscape), Anita Berrizbeitia (Inside Outside: Between Architecture and Landscape, 1999), Susan S. Szenasy (Metropolis Magazine, Editor-in-Chief, 1986– ), Jennifer Sigler (S,M,L,XL, 1995), Keller Easterling (Organization Space, 1999), Dorothy Robyn (Deputy Undersecretary of Facilities & Installations for the U.S. Department of Defense, 2012–14), as well as the next generation including Ashley Schafer (Praxis, 1999), Jane Wolff (The Delta Primer, 2003), Diane Davis (Discipline and Development: Middle Classes and Prosperity in East Asia and Latin America, 2004), Meejin Yoon (Material Process, 2004) Sonja Dümpelmann (Flights of the Imagination, 2010), Miho Mazereeuw (Urban Risk Lab, 2013), and Kate Orff (Petrochemical America, 2014) to name a few who demonstrate the plurality of spatial practices beyond the professional confines of the male-centric, predominantly white, highly colonial, Anglo-Saxon discipline of capital ‘A’ Architecture. In his Architecture Theory since 1968 (Cambridge, US: MIT Press, 1998)—the unofficial companion volume to Architecture Culture 1943-1968 (New York: Columbia Books of Architecture / Rizzoli, 1993) written by Joan Ockman with the collaboration of Edward Eigen, K. Michael Hays proposed this corrective course of this project in the introduction of his anthology spanning the quarter century between 1968 and 1993: “indeed, since 1993, there have been important developments in architecture theory not covered by this anthology.” (xiv) In the last footnote of Hays' introduction, and later confirmed in a recent conversation, Hays further explains: “Feminism and identity politics are only the most obvious of themes that have produced massive number of studies since 1993 not primarily concerned with reification.” (xiv-xv) 11. Carl O. Sauer, “The Education of a Geographer" - Presidential address given by the Honorary President of the Association of American Geographers 52nd Annual Meeting - Montreal, Canada (April 4, 1956) in Land & Life (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1965): 393. 12. Easterling (2014), 14. 13. Jencks (1999), 7. 14. See Rosalind Williams, “Infrastructure as Lived Experience” (Keynote Lecture), Landscape Infrastructure - Symposium (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Graduate School of Design, March 23-24, 2012). See aslo her review of “Lewis Mumford as a Historian of Technology in Technics and Civilization” in Lewis Mumford: Public Intellectual edited by Thomas P. Hughes and Agatha C. Hughes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990) which was then radically revised over ten years later in “Lewis Mumford's Technics and Civilization” Technology and Culture Vol.43 N.1 (January 2002). Her critical indictment of MIT’s legacy of engineering is outlined in her Retooling:

A Historian Confronts Technological Change (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). 15. Rosalind Williams, “Cultural Origins and Environmental Implications of Large Technological Systems?” Science in Context Vol.6 No.2 (Autumn, 1993): 381. 16. Ibid, 393–95. 17. Rosalind Williams, “Infrastructure as Lived Experience” (Keynote Lecture), Landscape Infrastructure - Symposium (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Graduate School of Design, March 23-24, 2012): “We need to make up [the young story of infrastructure] as we go along...to define infrastructure in relationship to a constantly changing world, where it’s not clear what authorities design, construct, pay for and maintain infrastructure, are they national, super-national, or something else, as they feel super-natural, and how do citizens participate in these projects?” 18. See Footnote #5 of James Corner’s “A Discourse on Theory II: Three Tyrannies of Contemporary Theory and the Alternative of Hermeneutics” Landscape Journal no. 10, vol. 2 (1992): 131. 19. John Brinckerhoff Jackson, “The Word Itself” (1976–1984) in Discovering the Vernacular Landscape (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984): 8. The last sentence of this quote also figures prominent in the opening epigraph of James Corner’s first anthology Recovering Landscape: Contemporary Essays in Landscape Architecture (New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 1999): vii. 20. James Corner, “Not Unlike Life Itself: Landscape Strategy Now” Harvard Design Magazine No.21 Fall 2004/Winter 2005): 31-34. See also JC/FO, Alvsjo Flatbed: A Field for Fluid Planning and Operational Design (1998–2001), in Pierre Bélanger, “Everything on the Table: Recovering and Reprojecting James Corner’s Lost Map” Landscape Architecture Magazine (February 2015): 126-132. 21. See Louis Wirth, “Urbanism as a Way of Life”, The American Journal of Sociology Vol.44 No.1 (July 1938): 1. (1940). Following the success of the design of the High Line in New York in recent years, James Corner/Field Operations is undertaking the design of the Underline in Miami as of 2015. 22. See James Corner, “Taking Measure: Irony & Contradiction in an Age of Precision” in Taking Measures across the American Landscape by James Corner and Alex S. Maclean (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996): 37. 23. Previous Pamphlets, #30 Coupling and #33 Islands & Atolls, respectively by Infranet Lab/Lateral Office (Mason White & Lola Sheppard) and LCLA Office (Luis Callejas) offer critical insight into this future. 24. For a greater understanding of the significance of Olmsted's recurrent ideas on landscape, democracy, freedom, and power, see Pierre Bélanger's "Is Landscape Infrastructure?" in the forthcoming anthology by Gareth Doherty and Charles Waldheim (eds.) Is Landscape...? Essays on the Identity of Landscape (London: Routledge, 2015).

Checkerboard Pattern, Mountain Logging, Idaho-Montana (NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team)

Afforestation as Regionalization. Employing a silvologic, the establishment of a forest or stand of trees by sowing, planting, or induced regeneration of an area not previously forested, or in areas where forests were cleared ago and other land-use patterns have dominated lands for many generations.d

8,678,321 DUBF A strategy for the transformation of the Dübendorf Military Airbase into an Infrastructural Forest Zone in Switzerland's Glatthal Valley 47° 23’ 57.70” N 8° 38’ 41.55” E 1,470.00m ASL

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C3 B2 C B3 C1 3 A3 C B3 A3 B3 C B2 3 C3 A A1 1 B3 C3 C3 C1 3 B3 A3 C1 A2 B3 A3 A1 A3 A1 C B3 B3 C A2 B3 1 3 C1 C3 C3 C3 B1 A3 B1 B3 C B1 C B3 B2 3 C2 A2 A3 3 C3 B3 B1 A2 B3 A3 A C1 C3C2 A 3 A2 A3 B3 C A1 1 B3 B 3 B3 A3 C B3 A3 B3 C B2 2 3 C3 A3 3 A1 B1C3 C3 C1 A3 A3 B1 B3 A1 A1 A3 B3 B3 A1 C1 B B3 C3 C C C3 3 C C1 3 A3 B3 B1 3 3 B2 C B3 A2 B3 3 B3 C3 B3 B1 C3 A3 C1 B3 C3 C2 B3 C A3 A3 B3 B2 BA3 3 C A3 A1C3 A3 B B3 B2 3 C 2 2 C C3 C1 A1 C3 2 B2 C3 3 B3 A3 C3 B3 B1 C C3 C1 3 A3 B3 B1 A2 C B3 A1 B3 C1 A3 B3 B2 B1 C C 3 C3A3 B1 B3 3 2 B3 B3 C3 B2 C A2 A3 C2 3 B3 A3 B3 C1 A3 C3 C3 A3 A1 C A1 A3 B3 B3 C3 C 2B1 B2 B3 C 1 C C3 C A3 2 C B2 B3 A3 C3 C3 A3 3 3 B2 C B3 3 BB3 B2 1 A2 B3 2 B3 A1 C3 C1 C3 B2 C3 B3 A3 A3 C A3 B3 C3 C B3 3 C3 C1C3 1 C2 B2 A C A3 B3 B3 B2 C B3 1 C A3 2 A3 3 3 A3 B1 B1 A1A3 B1 B3 C2 C3 B3 B3 A3 B1 C C3 A1 C3 A1 2 C3 A3 A3 C3 C2 CA1B2 B1 C3 B3 C3 A3 2 A3B3 A2 B3 C3 B1 C C A1 B1 3 B3 1 C3 C A3 A3 B1 B3 C3 B2 C3 C3 A C 3 C B 1 B2 C2 3 2 B3 B1 1 C B3 B3 B2 A1 C A2 C3 C2 C 3 B3 3 A3 A3 1 B2 A3 C B3 C3 A2 C3 3 B3 C2B3C1 A3 B2 A1 B1 C B3 B3 B2 B3 2 C3 C A3 C1 B3 3 B3 B3 C C2 CA3 C3 A3 C3 A3B1 1 A1 A3 A2 B2 C3 B3 B1 C2 3 C3 C3 A3 C3 C B A3 B1 C A3 B2 B3 2 A3 B1 2 B3 A2A13 C C3 C3 B1 A1 1 C B3 C2 A1 B3 3 A3 A2 C A2 C B3 B2 B1 C3 3 C3B1 B2 C C2 B2 B3 1 A1 C 1 A1 B3 A3 C A3 C2 C2 C1 2 B3 A3 3 B1 A3 CB2 B3 B2 B3 C3 C3 B3 C1 C A3 B23 C3 A1 B3 B2 C1 A2 1 C B3 C3 B3 3 A3 C3 C C1 A3 A3 C2 B3 3 B1 B3 A A A1 3 A2 C3 C3 B1 1 B2 B3 A3 A2 B3 C3A2 B1 C2 C2C A3 A1C1 A3 A3 B3C3 B1 A1 B1 C A3 B1 B1 3 B2 B3 A1 3 C C3 C3 B2 B3 C2 B1 A2 C C31 A1 B A2 B1 A2 3 C1 B2 C C1 A1 3 A3 C3 C3 B2 3 A1 B2 A3 B A1 C2 B3 A A3 A3 C C13 C1 A3 A1 C B3 2 A3 C3 3 A3 B3 B2 B1 1 A3 B2 B3 C C1 B A1 C3 C3 3 B3 C B3 1 A3 C1 C2 B1 B3 C1 B3 C 1 A2 C1 B3 3 A3 C A3 A2 C2 B3 C3 A3 A1 3 B1 B1 A3 B2 A1 A1 C3 B3A1 A3 A3 A2 C2 C2 A3 B3 B1 C3 C3A2 A A1 A1 A1 C1 B3 A B1 A3 3 C B1 A3 C3 3 C3 B 3 B2 C B1 A2 1 B1 B1 A2 C3 C A3 2 B3 B3 A2 B3 B3 C1 C1 B2 3 C1 C A3 C3 C2 A1 A3 B2 A1 3 A3 A1 A3 C3 A B3 A3 B3 A C1 A1 B1 2 A3 A3 B3 3B3 C3 C A3 A3 A3 B3 B3 3 C1C2 C A1 A1 C3 C B3 A3 B1 3 C2 C3 B1 C1 B3 A3 B3 3 A3 C A2 C1 B1 B3 A3 3 A2 AA3 C3 B3 A3 A B1 3 A3 C1 B2 A1 A1 A1 A3 A3 C3 C2 B3 1 A3 A3 B3 C3 A C3 A1 A1 A1 C C1 A 3 B2 A3 B2 A3 C 3 C3 B3 3 B2 A3 B2 C1 2 B1 B1 C A2 A2 B3 C3 B3 C A3 2 A3 B3 A3 C3 C1 B3 B3 A 3 A1A A C2 A1 B2 2 A1 A3 A3 A C3 B3 B3 2 C1 A3 B3 A3 2 1 AA3 C A3 B1 A3 A3 2 B3 C3 B3 3 C A3 A3 A3 C2 C3 B2 B2 A1 B A12 C3 C2 A3 A3 C B3 C3 C3 1 A3 B3 B A3 A1 C 3 C1 A2 B1 3 A3 A3 A2 C3 B B3 A A3 A3 3 A3 B1 A C3 3 C1 A1 A1 C A1 1 B3 1 B3 AA3 A3 C 3 A C3 C3 B3 3 B A A1 A1 2 3 C2 C B2B 2 A3 A3 3 C3 B3 C B1 A3 2 A3 B2 A3 A3 C1 1 1 A2 C A2 A2 C3 A2 B3C B A3 3 A3 A2 C3 C3A B3 B3 A1A A1 3 C3 3 B2 B3 A3 A3 A2 C3 1 A3 B3 B3 1 C AB1 A3 B1 A3 A3 C1 3 3 CA3 A3 A3 A3 C3 B B3 A3 2 A3C A3 C3 B2 1 B3 A1 A3 A1 B1 C3 C B3 2 C2 B3 A3 A2 A3 3 C3 C3 A2 B3 B3 C A1 A1 A B2 B C1 3 A1 A2 A3 C3 3 B3 C3 A3 A3 1 A3 C B1 A2 A3 A1 A1 B1 C2 A3 A1 3 A3 C C3 B3 B1 A3 A3 A3 A3 C3 2 C C3 B3 B2 A1 A2 B B1 1 C2 A3 A3 B2 A2 C3 A2 B3 C3 C1 B1 A2 C A3 2 A3 C2 B3 A2 A1 3 A1 A2 B3 C3 B3C A2 A3 A3 A2 C3A2 B2 B3 B3 A1 3 A1 A1 B2 C3 C A3 A3 B3 A3 A3 C3 A C2 B3 B3 2 C A3 A1 A3 B 3 B1 C1 A3 1 C A3 1 C3 B3 B B3 A3 A3 3 A2 A3 B2 C3 C2 1 B3 A1 B3 A2 A3 A2 B3 C3 C C2 A2 A3 A3 C3 A1 B3 C1 A A1 A1 B3 B23 C3 A3A2 A3 A2 C3 B3 C3 2 B3 A2C2 A3 A3 A1 B2 A1 A3 C B1 B1 A3 A1 A3 C2 C 2 B3 C3 B A2 A3 A3 C3 1 C2 B2 C A2 A1 B1 B3 3 C3 1 A2 B2 A3 C B1 A3 B3 C3 B A2 AC3 3 A2 A2 B2 C2 3 A2 1 A1 A2 A3 C2 B3 C3 A2 A1 A3 A2 A C1 A3 B2 A3 A1 A3 1 B3 B2 B1 C3 A3 A1 C A3 B1 B2 C2 B3 A1 1 A1 C C3 C1 B3 A2 C A3 3 C3 B3 B1 A2 B3 A2 B3 C1 1 B1 B2 C2 A2 A2 A2 A3 B3 A1 C3 A A2 A2 A3 B1 A3 3 C1 A A1 A A2 B3 C3 C2 1 B2 B3 A1 A3 2 A3 C3 C3 A1 B1 A1 C3 B1 CA3 B A3 A2 B1 C2 B3 2 3 A2 A2 B2 B2 C1 C2 C3 A2C1 A1 B3 C3 A2 A2 C1 B1 A3 A2 B3 A2 B2 C3 A2 A1 A3 B3 C2 A1 A1 C1 C2 B3 A2 A3 A3 B1 C1 C3 A2 A1 C1 B3 B2 B1 A3 A1 C3 B3 A2 A2 B1 C1 A3 A2 B3 C2 A1 C2 A2 A3 B1 C3 A1 A2 B3 B1 A3 B1 A2 A2 C2 B3 A1 A2 C3 B2 A3 A1 B1 C3 C1 A3 A2 B1 C1 A2 B3 B2 C3 A2 B3 A1 C1 A2 C1 A2 A3 A2 B3 C2 A1 B3 A1 C2 B3 A2 C1 A2 C1 B3 B1 A3 A2 B1 A3 A1 C2 C3 A1 B3 B1 A2 A2 B2 A3 C1 A3 C1 B3 B3 A1 A2 C2 A2 A1

201 For 1 est

B2 B1

ield

trix

11 1865 - 2065 Forest

& 2011Field Ma trix Forest & Fie ld Ma trix

For Valley of Energy & est A Exchanges, synergies and Farmlanreas ds ecologies between forests, groundwater and urban populations. Across the extents of this new landscape infrastructure emerges a future zone of research2 and 00 1 Flo to development dedicated Wa ws & ter renewable resource cultico vation, and alpine logisticsurses related to the urbanism of the valley regions of Switzerland.

Forest & Farm Areas lands Forest & Farm Areas lands

200 1 Flow Wate 2s0& rc 01 Floowurse s Wate s & rcou rse

To & R pogr elie aph y f Re

Wangenerwald + 516 m.ü.M.

ttu

Wangen + 472 m.ü.M.

Su Dr bte ain rra ag ne an e

Quelle

Wasserspeicher und -filter

Aathal Kies Aathal Aquifer Aathal Aquifer Seetone

Molassefels

Feuchtigkeitsaustausch

Top o & R graph elie y f Top o & R graph elie y f

Trink wa sse r, Su W b är Dra terra m ina nea e g n Su eCO2-Austausch bte Dra r ina ranea ge n Holznutzung

Gockhausen + 565 m.ü.M.

Dübendorf + 440 m.ü.M.

Fr isc hl uf t

Bannholz + 600 m.ü.M.

Adlisberg + 694 m.ü.M.

St au b Molassefels

Kohlenstoffeinlagerung

Moräne

Burghölzli + 498 m.ü.M.

Zürich-Seefeld + 420 m.ü.M.

Zürichsee + 406 m.ü.M.

“All important in the development of culture and civilization is the use of land. Land, together with climate, is the real source of life. Aside from metals and minerals, almost every product derives directly and indirectly from land. Our whole livelihoods depend on the soil and its use.” —Ludwig Hilberseimer, The New Regional Pattern, 1949

1 : 2,900

Sil Th vicu thr e m ltura for oug akin l Str se est h th g of iatio ele ttlem form e fra orde n me en ac gm r o ro en ut nts ts of requ ss g tatio of d su ire eo n o iso g pp rde ort equ raph f r ipm ie . en s of ta nd

Richterswil Stäfa

Hinwil Wetzikon Pfäffikon

Meilen Uster

Horgen

Küsnacht Zollikon

Dübendorf

Winterthur

Zürich

Wallisellen

Kloten

Opfikon Weidholz

Schlieren

Buechholz Grossholz Forenholz Bann Oholz

Eichliholz

Wangenerwald

Eschenberg Chilenholz

ZRH

Tanneten

Jungholz Näniker Hard

Sihlwald

Sennholz

Tannholz Jungholz

Buchegg Aegert

Dürrholz

Hardwald Aspenrain

Dietikon

Regensdorf

Pfannenstiel

Zürichberg

Üetliberg

Riedenholz Dunkelhölzli Chäferberg Hau Hürstholz Aspenholz Buechholz Brand Michelholz Lättenhau Chlosterwald Gubrist Erbholz Hälserholz

Dübenholz (DUBF) 1,421,895

Zurich (ZRH)

DUBF

A Valley for 3,000,000? The Dübendorf military airport floats above the Aathal Aquifer, a 30,000year old glacial subsurface water lens that feeds springs along the surface of the Glatt river region originating from the Greifensee. Following the ridge lines of subalpine forest of pine, larch and oak trees, the Glatthal forms a distinctive linear region flanked by two other valleys including the Limmattal and the Tösstal. The project strategy is informed by the geographic configuration of the valley's dendritic pattern of of decentralization (cities, towns, villages), the multi-modal transportation network that makes the valley global in scope, and the underlying ecology of forests and aquifers that support Switzerland's sprawling population.

Tös

ttal

Lim

sth

Aathal - Rheintal

Living in a Valley of Forests Dübendorf becomes Dübenholz

Glatta

17 August 2023

lenticel: a loose aggregation of cells which penetrates the surface (a stem) of a woody plant and through which gases are exchanged between the atmosphere and the underlying tissues. Commonly found in alder, ailanthus, poplar, rhus, robinia, sumac and walnut.o

Dead Matter DĂźbenholz operates on three levels: as a water treatment facility through groundwater replenishment, as a power plant through biomass production, and as an air filter for carbon sequestration. Expanding the neighboring agglomeration of DĂźbendorf, the urban forest becomes a perpetual, rotational pattern of forest management using a checkerboard and striated configuration, around which other systems, sites and services tied to renewable resources and technological research can emerge and flourish.

coppicing: in forestry, cropping the plantation by cutting the underwood every few years.j

As a revival of a thousand-year old Swiss land management method, and as a resistance to the generic homogenization of cities in the Swiss lowlands, this urbanized pattern of forests and fields for DĂźbenholz eventually becomes a prototype for the expansion of a dynamic, silvicultural infrastructure for the urban valley of the Zurich metropolitan region.

Holz Urbanism, 1291 to the present. Over the past one thousand years, forests have shaped the political, economic, and technological histories of Switzerland. From the creation of the first forest cities and timberland districts (forest cantons) by the German Waldstätten Policy in 1291 to the 1865 Swiss Forest Law, the timeline of forest urbanization depicts how forests shape the economy, and the ecology of Switzerland’s valley culture. Geopolitically, the people of the valley—“homines vallis”—that characterize these lowlying landscapes have historically depended on a spectrum of sylvicultural services: across the understorey flora all the way to the overstorey fauna of the softwoods and hardwoods lining the valleys, slopes and ridges of the central Alps. Historic byproducts range from timber construction for ships, forest litter for bedding, resin for glue, fauna for food, mushrooms for feedstock. Ecologically, forests served the purposes of groundwater replenishment and erosion control, most noticeably during periods of timber exports and rampant clear cutting in the 19th century. Following Forest Wars during the Roman Empire and the timber shortages during the Middle Ages however, conservationists such as engineer Karl Culmann and naturalist Elias Landolt emerged as public intellectuals fighting to preserve and expand the forests, the bogs, the mires and the wetlands that once formed the backbone of the Swiss economy.

ZRH

DUBF 1291 - 2091 ...........

Prescribed Burning

Seedling Planting

Growth Monitoring

Pioneer Plant Emergence

Fire Management

C. A. SHORT-ROTATION HARDWOODS COPPICING A. SHORT-ROTATION A. SHORT-ROTATION COPPICING COPPICING B. SOFTWOODS

Intercropping & Thinning

B. SOFTWOODS B. SOFTWOODS

Overseeding & Interplanting

C. HARDWOODS

Fertilization

Logging & Thinning

Timber Harvesting

C. HARDWOODS C. HARDWOODS

2091 2091

Studying Sylvics: exploring wood economies starting in the 13th century onwards, from the material to the territorial

Acer pseudoplatanus Maple

Quercus Oak

Acer pseudoplatanus Maple

2091

Populus Poplar

Quercus Oak

Larix decidua Larch

2025 2025

Populus Poplar

Abies alba Fir

Larix decidua Larch

Picea abies Spruce

2025

Picea abies Spruce

Abies alba Fir

Corylus avellana Hazelnut

Picea abies Spruce Robinia Black Locust

Robinia Black Locust

2011 2011

Corylus avellana Hazelnut Acer pseudoplatanus Maple

2091

Alnus glutinosa Alder

2011

Alnus glutinosa Alder

Robinia Black Locust Quercus Oak

Alnus glutinosa Populus Alder Poplar

Larix decidua Larch

Girdling

Camping & Hiking

Trail Blaz

Timber Harve

Trail Blaz

Logging & Thinning

Timber Harve

Camping & Hiking

Logging & Thinning

Fertilizing Timber Harve

Fertilizing

Inter-CropLogging & Thinning ping

Logging & Thinnin

Inter-Cropping

Growth Survey

Fertilizing Logging & Thinnin

Colonization

Inter-Cropping Growth Survey

Pioneer Growth

Colonization

Seed

Pioneer Growth

Seed

Logging & Thinnin

Field Burning

Growth Survey

Runway Removal

Field Burning

Seed

Camping & Hiking Trail Blaz Pioneer Growth Colonization

Field Burning

Timber Harve

Runway Removal

Logging & Thinning

Waldwirtshchaft: chart of the ecologic, economic and cultural services, products and industries provided by forests.

Demolition

As an urban forest infrastructure, the new lands of Dübenholz provide grounds for a multitude of new, urban, and contemporary uses from plots, to crops, to camps. Forests and fields, tracks and trails, sports and skyscrapers - all made possible by forestry - can then coexist with industries of fiber and food, pollen and pellets, resin and gum, veneers and lumbers, cellulose and enzymes.

Hiking & Camping

X-Country Skiing

Responding to the intrinsic loss of economic value in forests due to imported substitutes by road and rail in the past two centuries (forests contribute less than 10% to the GDP and employ less than 5% of the population), the strategy pushes forward an expanded role of the forest on the military airfield which rethinks the bucolic, pastoral characterization of wilderness areas and forest reserves through the central, alpine region altogether.

Sports Field

Live Correspondence with Sanford Kwinter Writer, Editor, Philosopher, and Professor at Pratt Institute 10:28 p.m.–12:26 p.m. 1 hour 58 minutes 10 : 42 : 07 pb

Your work from the early 1990s is growing in relevance today, namely with texts like “Soft Systems” and “Landscapes of Change,” published in 1992 and 1993. Since these subjects remain current projects and are the focus of one of your next books on Soft Systems, can you explain the context or pretext in which these writings emerged? 10 : 43 : 10 sk

The title of that first text, “Soft Systems,” came very quickly, in a conversation over the phone with editor Brian Boigon right before it was published in Culture Lab. But you’ll have to understand that those texts came much later, after the release of Zone 6: Incorporations, almost a decade after I started the Zone project in 1986 with the first issues Zone 1|2: The Contemporary City.

10 : 47 : 23 pb

By the 1990s you were not only well aware of Jacques Derrida, but also, more importantly, of Gilles Deleuze. In fact, from your studies in France, you had access to the French version of A Thousand Plateaux (Milles Plateaux, Rhizome), almost a decade and a half before Brian Massumi’s English translation was released. Do you think your ideas were not immediately understood or assimilated because the idea of softness was associated or perceived with what was “feminine,” “light,” or “weak” (as in nonstructural)—too difficult to assimilate for the male-dominated and patriarchal field of architecture?

into his work by exploring how architecture could crumble and fall apart, metaphorically and literally, as a way to bridge the sharpness and hardness of Derridian deconstructivism with the smoother, more discrete processes of digital computation. The computer quickly became a very important tool in that intellectual, architectural project.

“To some physicists chaos is a science of process rather than state, of becoming rather than being”

But philosophy and cognition were very important as well— just as significant as the tools and technologies—so there were many wars between different schools of thought (Columbia, Yale, Princeton, AA, etc.) and the conflicting ideologies of architectural deans like Tschumi, Ralph Lerner, and Neil Denari. But those wars are vastly undocumented since design histories of the 1990s are, for the most part, buried in oral histories. Although Tschumi was following the Alvin Boyarsky model from the Architectural Association in London—bringing people of all kinds together to bridge different developments and advances across technology and history, design and digital computation, theory and philosophy—some contacts were made too fast and some ideas assimilated too quickly that they were misread and misappropriated. This led to misinterpretations like those of the Derridians at Columbia. People like Kenneth Frampton, Manuel De Landa, Brian Massumi, Keller Easterling, Stan Allen, and James Corner all witnessed this fast transformation, and through collecting oral histories, they would no doubt help get to the core of these undocumented issues.

—James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science, 19873

11 : 07 : 28 sk

Since Columbia was one of the foremost schools that was computerizing very, very quickly, the inherited idea of “Le Lisse,” of “smoothness” (in reference to Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s “The Smooth and the Striated” in A Thousand Plateaux, “Le lisse et le strié”) was absorbed really fast. But, to a certain extent, through a misreading of Deleuze at Columbia, that idea later led to the misguided blob—an idea that completely took over the field (with architects like Greg Lynn, Neil Denari, and Jesse Reiser for example). I would argue that that misreading continues today with the “O-O-O”—object-oriented-ontologies. I, on the other hand, was more interested in processes of change. 11 : 23 : 02 pb

Was the radicalism of your work and your reading of Deleuze thanks to your Franco-philosophical fluency, misread or dismissed by Anglo-Americans as theory instead of as operative cognitive strategy? Do you think it led to the misreading or dismissal of Soft Systems as a weak, nonstructural, feminine idea that was not taken as seriously as it should? 11 : 25 : 04 sk

The context of Soft Systems contained a basic, underlying ethos: that control systems are taking over. They are working us over—not in terms of cause-and-effect, but with multiple inputs and multiple outputs. One has to understand the massive change from single input to diverse and diffuse interactions. It is an extreme transformation from the linear and direct nature of causality inherent to the science of physics (and many other fields) to the nonlinear, uncertain softness of biology. I was young enough to put this forward, but even the Derridians and Eisenmanians of the time saw it differently. Like others, includ10 : 51 : 46 sk ing Massumi and Manuel De Landa, I saw my whole job as In the early 1990s, I was giving lectures almost every semester correcting the course of the Derridian, deconstructivist optic. at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, and my work was always about the rising “Being never really is but sends itself, is on importance of complexity and the work of Deleuze. I was, and am, anti-Derridean, which singled me out; I attacked people the way, it trans-mits [sic] itself.” like Jeff Kipnis, Vincent Scully, and others who predominated —Gianni Vattimo, Dialectics, Difference, and Weak the school of thought at Yale. Bernard Tschumi, then Dean Thought, 19844 at Columbia, understood the work of French philosopher Jacques Derrida, while, for the most part, Anglo-Americans 11 : 36 : 29 sk were misreading him; and you had to be sympathetic to the There was, however, an idea that emerged: weak thought (il culture of deconstructivism and paperless studios prevalent pensiero debole), developed in the 1980s by Italian philosoat Columbia (GSAPP) in the early 1990s.1 Reading James pher Gianni Vattimo. “Weak thought” was a proposal that put Gleick’s Chaos: Making A New Science was an earthquake into question the predominance and pervasiveness of univerfor me. Poised to change everything, it was like La Nouvelle sal certainty and the so-called global universalizing objectivity Alliance: Métamorphose de la Science in 1984 (Order out of Modernity. Peter Eisenman tried to translate this thinking Chaos), and it became an important influence and precursor in

Wolf tracks (background), Jackson Lake, WY (JH Underground, 2007)

My recent book, Far From Equilibrium, is a compilation of writings that I did for ANY Magazine (Architecture New York), written during the late 1980s and early 1990s over a period of almost ten years. FFE has become a default, or de facto, history of that period. It’s a shame that there is not more written about this period of time, but since no one else has really taken care to write or document this turbulent era in any significant detail, I was the person non grata for many years.

the 1980s.2 These texts were hugely important when we—to include others like the radical Japanese thinkers Arata Isozaki and Asada Akira—talked about what Deleuze was talking about. But, as I found out, Columbia was not interested in hiring a Deleuzian like me. Although Tschumi was a Derridian, he tolerated me from a distance, in small doses.

problem.” OMA/Mau’s work was shorthand for what has happening at the time: the reduction of complex problems into simple strategies. 11 : 52 : 03 pb

By organizing and curating the Downsview Park Competition in 2000, do you think that Mertins was trying to correct the course of Derridian history that awarded the 1984 competition for Le Parc de la Villette to the deconstructivist Bernard Tschumi instead of the more Deleuzian work by OMA that took second place? Did Mertins see the materialization of what he called “open constructions” in the work of James Corner and the conflation of the “aesthetic, social, and political” in the work of OMA realized for the public competition process of Downsview Park? 11 : 54 : 41 sk

Only history can tell.

Sanford Kwinter, "Soft Systems, "SCI-Arc Media Archive Southern California Institute of Architecture (08 April 1992): 23m52s.

Softness, a Shor t Story

There’s an interview, “The Deleuze Spray,” conducted by an Australian doctoral student (Simone Brott) that went to press a few years ago (without my consent); it recalls this larger context, and the impact of Deleuze and emergence of the Sémiotext(e) journal by Sylvère Lotringer.5 She profiles the deeper history in a conversation with me. Anyone who has experienced or been lost in this historic hole of the 1990s should dig deeper into this generational gap.

"No 'stimulus', no simple cause, is itself an adequate explanation of anything."

—Conrad H. Waddington, Organisers and Genes, 19406

11 : 48 : 17 pb

Was there an alternative moment or context—a project, text, or event—that changed the course of design at that time or was Deleuze simply misinterpreted? 11 : 49 : 38 sk

“Open constructions in space-time [are] capable of supporting a new participatory modality of spatial expression, characterized by the fluid and indeterminate interweaving of subject and object in the activity of space-creation […] from the aesthetic to the social and political and from ideals of unity, immediacy, morality and free creation to dialectical images of awakening in which transparency remains inescapable from opacity, mediation, and destruction."

At the end of the 1990s, as the century was turning, my friend and colleague at the University of Toronto, Detlef Mertins, was shocked and taken back by the diagrams made by James Corner and Field Operations for the Downsview Park Competition. Against the backdrop of Ernst Haeckel’s modernist-naturalist drawings that he referenced in his lectures and writings, Corner’s diagrams were eye-opening for him. He got them. They showed the significance of the non-linear process of time—cyclic and circular, the rise and confluence of different flows, and the evolving nature of fluid thinking through chemistry, synergy, and ecology (versus the hard, mechanical —Deltef Mertins, Transparencies Yet To Come, 19967 formalism of Mies van der Rohe that Mertins had been writing about for over a decade). Mertins was so obviously influenced by the results of the Downsview Park competition, and he was 11 : 56 : 03 pb equally fascinated by the work of OMA with Bruce Mau, who Your 2002 text, “Landscapes of Change: Boccioni's ‘Stati said, “there is no problem in the world that is not a graphic

12 : 01 : 14 sk

What’s particularly ironic is that many people see that text as being about a landscape discipline and they seem to see that as an advantage. Clearly, there was, and is, a general intellectual and cognitive famine in the field, but I think what’s important is that the Boccioni text laid out the general frame for thinking about soft systems, biological services, and process-based thinking. This is the foundation for two books that I am working on now and trying to finish, Two-Dimensional Design is a N-Dimensional Problem and Soft Systems. These were books that I never published since I was working hard in the mid-1980s and early 1990s on Zone 1|2: The Contemporary City and Zone 6: Incorporations.

MONDO 2000 (Boing Boing #9) "Hacking the Planet", Cover, 1993 (R.U. Sirius)

“What does it mean, then, when something stable and continuous ceases to be so? What does it mean when the unfolding of a dynamical process suddenly shifts into a new mode,when an ensemble of units and forces breaks up to form two or more independent, more highly organized systems?”

—Sanford Kwinter, "Landscapes of Change,” 19928

12 : 05 : 42 pb

Since you were not professionally trained as an architect or urbanist, were you criticized for the Zone projects? 12 : 05 : 58 sk

These projects were all absorbing, and Zone did what it meant to do: talk more about the urban than about architecture, and move us beyond the traditional city center. We didn’t want to leave the subject of the city to architects—urbanism was far too important to leave to architects. I remember walking on a city sidewalk in New York in the late 1980s, and Sylvia Lavin shouted out at me: “You can’t do this [write about the city], you’re not experts!” 12 : 08 : 54 pb

Did you recoil? 12 : 09 : 09 sk

I was raised in a different intellectual environment and historical background than the American silo’d environment of disciplinary discourses. With my background in Canada surrounded by big intellectuals like Marshall McLuhan, Harold Innis, Mordecai Richler, and George Grant, the hulking, compartmentalized, professional specializations of academic departments and knowledge disciplines always seemed foreign to me. The history of contemporary society and space in Canada has also been inseparable from the history of technology and the growth of its infrastructure as great spatial organizers. During that time, in the late 1980s, there was also the extremely influential magazine Mondo 2000, published for only three years from 1988 to 1991, which came out at the beginning of the entire VR (virtual reality era) and the Whole Earth Review, where the idea of systems was more than just environmental, it was a political project.9 But the real agency of Mondo 2000 got knocked off by Wired Magazine, the techno-soft psychedelia was wrung out, and turned into a commercial venture bought out by republican cowboys on the frontier of VR, which became some of the early theorists of the digital era.

“In time everything is related, and it is to this multiplicity of relations and their shifting and mobile nature, and to their peculiar, and incompletely theorized, unfolding within the imperturbable unity of a medium (time, duration) to which the study of complexity—or, as Bergson called it, the science of intuition—responds.”

—Sanford Kwinter, “The Genealogy of Models," 198810

12 : 22 : 41 sk

Even though FFE came out ten years too late, it’s been helpful in mapping out that late-1980s/early-1990s era...I am convinced that the next ten years will be about understanding what happened in the 1990s. Far from Equilibrium II will start filling these gaps and extend the arguments from my 1993 Soft Systems text about the future of nonlinear thinking in the growing age of uncertainty and instability.

Wolfprint & Footprint (background), Sheenjek River AK (Tom Unger)

d'animo’ as a General Theory of Models,” has often been associated with, and appropriated by the field of landscape as opposed to eliciting a deeper understanding of fluidity and investigation of flow in current culture—a way of seeing or a mode of operation. Was that also misread?

That’s what Corner was working on in the late 1990s, and although we only met later through his seminar on Organizational Ecologies at the University of Pennsylvania after he released his book Recovering Landscape, it’s useful to recall here that Corner’s work from the 2000 Downsview Park Competition onward was a total game-changer. His work was laced with fluid morphologies and systematic scenarios that were effects of strategic, systemic decisions. His work was entirely non-formal, strategically weak, and intellectually robust. His design was conflating economies, cultures, and durations. It was entirely the reverse of the formal deconstructivist, Derridian era, with a corrective extension and operationalization of Deleuzian thinking. The work came as a total surprise on the circuit of intellectual thinking in the late 1990s. It was organizationally rich and rife with temporal thinking and nonlinear associations. I would say that if economies are inseparable from the psychology of technology—from a Bergsonian optic—organization is the project of the future.

“As a human-made projection, landscape is both text and site, partly clarifying the world and our place within it. The textual landscape is thus a hermeneutic medium. Landscape architecture might therefore be thought of as the practice of e-scaping and rescaping our relationship to nature and the "other" through the construction of built worlds. In the desire to reflect both on our modern context and on our inheritance, landscape architecture might practice a

hermeneutical plotting of the landscape—a plotting that is as much political and strategic as it is relational and physical.”

—James Corner, “A Discourse on Theory II," 199111

1. Bernard Tschumi was Dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Preservation, and Planning from 1988 to 2003. 2. The French version of the influential essay by Ilya Prigogine et Isabelle Stengers was released in 1978, while the English version, Order out of Chaos (Paris: Gallimard), appeared almost a decade later in 1984. 3. James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (New York: Penguin Books, 1987): 5. 4. Gianni Vattimo, “Dialectics, Difference, and Weak Thought,” translated by Thomas Harrison, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal Vol.10 No.1 (Spring 1984): 157. 5. Simone Brott, “The Deleuze Spray, New York 1977: an Interview with Sanford Kwinter, Professor of Architectural Theory and Criticism at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, on the Architectural Reception of Gilles Deleuze in America,” Subjectivizations: Deleuze and Architecture (Masters Thesis, Yale University, 2003). Source: http://eprints.qut.edu.au/67947/ 6. Conrad H. Waddington, Organisers and Genes (1940): 4. 7. Detlef Mertins, Transparencies Yet To Come: Sigfried Giedion And The Prehistory Of Architectural Modernity Volume I (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 1996): iii-iv. 8. Sanford Kwinter, "Landscapes of Change: Boccioni's “Stati d'animo” as a General Theory of Models," Assemblage 19 (1992): 53. 9. William Gibson, author of the 1984 sci-fi cyber-punk thriller Neuromancer, claimed “Mondo 2000 was arguably the most representative underground magazine of its pre-Web day.” See Simone Lackerbauer & R.U. Sirius, “William Gibson On MONDO 2000 & ’90s Cyberculture” (MONDO 2000 History Project Entry #16) http://www.acceler8or.com/2012/05/william-gibson-on-mondo-2000-90s-cyberculture-mondo-2000-history-project-entry-16/ 10. Sanford Kwinter, “The Genealogy of Models: The Hammer and the Song” ANY Diagram Work No.23 (1998): 62. 11. James Corner, “A Discourse on Theory II: Three Tyrannies of Contemporary Theory and the Alternative of Hermeneutics,” Landscape Journal (1991): 129.

Center Pivot Irrigation Systems, Garden City, KS (NASA/ USGS EROS Data Center Landsat 7)

0–217 km/h CMH Demobilizing Traffic Junctions from the Suburban Metropolis of Columbus, Ohio 40° 4’ 49.85” N 83° 4’ 20.08” W 275.84m ASL

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and junctions based on speed, topography and regional economy.

rous ams an Surface, 1999. verybike, out congestion? st h rea proliferation ican t the burden of conre no dangerous the traf? c jams ause

Though the city was named after the explorer, Inspired by the Garden City movement, Upper Arlingtonfamed becomesItalian one of the ? rst planned suburbs around Columbus. In stark contrast to the gridded streets of theColumbus, city center, landChristopher scape architect William Pitkin Jr. designs a plan - albeit a driver’s nightmare - with curving the most understreets and cul-de-sacs copiously lined with trees. Real estate developers Ben and King recognized aspect Thompson turn over farmland to create a park-like, country-club feel dotted withof small green spaces making it one of the most desirable places to live in Ohio.urbanism Columbus' is actually a junction: 1913 Cul-de-Sac confluence of the Inspired by the Garden City movement,the Upper Arlington becomes one of the ? rst planned suburbs around Columbus. In stark contrast to the gridded streets of the city center, landScioto and Olentangy scape architect William Pitkin Jr. designs a plan - albeit a driver’s nightmare - with curving thatReal spawned the Ben and King streets and cul-de-sacs copiously linedrivers with trees. estate developers Thompson turn over farmland to create a park-like, feel dotted with small city’s grid country-club pattern where green spaces making it one of the most desirable places to live in Ohio. High Street (running north-south) crosses Broad Street (running east-west) in the late 1900s.

1913 Cul-de-Sac

r? What if everyy bus or by bike, dunre than a last reeday, new American hchange the the conport structure of the rban part tegy ce and the reduntionsuburbs today, onal uestions with the lay- transport mass new a suburban sing unhe northern part anse main strategy aerns mono-functionative, poly-functional

sing a novel layof-ways, this new cen- widely unploys ated to transologies able ng land patterns the an alternative, ike lityplace. . slenvate nature, the cenvalu- evacuated erally lane igned to enable l oriportation as the es toass-mobility. fm ess, rsection, a slenksenall the private such to free up valuevae ground plane

Rotational Land Use for Cyclical G Employing rowth & Self-Propaga low-altitude tion. introductio and low-e ne n of seeds into an area rgy methods, the and artifici al regenera to promot e natural tion includ aerial, broa ing severa dcast seed l met ing to grou nd-level dr hods from ill sowing. d

1965 Terminal

With its international status attributed in 1965, Port Columbus becomes the largest airport in the Midwest with over 7 million passengers each year.

The vertical oriland and uses to 1965 Terminal 1 : 7,621 anda seamless, With its international status attributed in 1965, Port ing m maximize is Columbus becomes the largest airport in the Midwest at enwith over 7 million passengers each year. otive circulation such 1794 Con? uence ople tairwells, elevaIn the middle of a dense forest, nter1816 Intersection the fork of the Scioto and OlenPlatted by engineer Joel Wright, the ng a tangy Rivers spawns the develbase plan of the city’s grid pattern, opment of the city of Columbus nproductive of and on a north-south axis, is given birth at the end of the 18th century. the at the crossing of High Street and ban diagram is ansBroad Street in the early 1900s. d of automotive 0 5 mpo1794 Con? uence to place people How do we build miles Columbus Metropolis: A Landscape of Crossings & Intersections In the middle of a dense forest, ated ars - at the inter- in Columbus is de?ned by intersections. Though the city was named after the famed Italian explorer, Christopher Columbus, Urbanism under-recognized aspect of its urbanism is actually a junction: the con? uence of the Scioto and Olentangy rivers that spawned the city’s grid pattern where High Street (running north-south) crossed Broad Street (running east-west) in the late 1900s. Population growth at 1816 Intersection the forkthe of most the Scioto and Olen- without cutlural density n the the turnaof the 20th century soon led to the development of planned communities and the metamorphosis of the city grid with the introduction of cul-de-sacs (intersections with dead-ends) that relied, much like Radburn Jersey,Joel on the separation of vehicular and pedestrian traf?c. With the development of the U.S. Interstate Highway System in the mid 20th century, the construction of the Outerbelt Highway Platted in byNew engineer Wright, the banism. Using tangy Rivers spawns the develus. (I-270) of circumvented the city grid altogether, laying down a new structure of roadways and junctions based on speed, topographyopment and transportation at the regional level. From highway interchanges to river crossings cul-de-sacs, can therefore be considered the infrastructural glue that holds together the metropolitan landscape of townships, suburbs, rivers and roads throughout Columbus. base plan of to the city’s gridintersections pattern, traffic of thecongestion? city ofoperating Columbus to the design This diagram characterizes the urbanism and the infrastructure of the city that has evolved over the past two centuries annd whose future depends on the design of these intersections and these junctions nodesaxis, within greater metropolitan landscape. The site of this proposal, the intersection highlighted at the top, is the end connector of a future light rail system that crosses Linworth Road in onas a spatial north-south is a given birth at the end uniquely of the 18th century.

objectiveWorthington, of the a suburb in northern Columbus, located in between the Ohio State University Airport and Interstate 70. at the crossing of High Street and ow mass trans1910 Road Town (Edgar Chambless) 1868 Riverside (Frederick Law Olmsted & Calvert Vaux) 1932 Broadacre City (Frank Lloyd Wright) 1939 Futurama Bel Geddes) 1929 Radburn, Town for the Motor Age (Stein & Wright) 1952 Philadelphia Traf? c Study (Louis I. Kahn) Broad Street in(Norman the early 1900s. 1909 Architecture as Utopian Device 0 5 el for contempomiles Columbus Metropolis: A Landscape of Crossings & Intersections y can be created Urbanism in Columbus is de?ned by intersections. Though the city was named after the famed Italian explorer, Christopher Columbus, the most under-recognized aspect of its urbanism is actually a junction: the con?uence of the Scioto and Olentangy rivers that spawned the city’s grid pattern where High Street (running north-south) crossed Broad Street (running east-west) in the late 1900s. Population growth at congestion in the the turn of the 20th century soon led to the development of planned communities and the metamorphosis of the city grid with the introduction of cul-de-sacs (intersections with dead-ends) that relied, much like Radburn in New Jersey, on the separation of vehicular and pedestrian traf?c. With the development of the U.S. Interstate Highway System in the mid 20th century, the construction of the Outerbelt Highway of Columbus. (I-270) circumvented the city grid altogether, laying down a new structure of roadways and junctions based on speed, topography and transportation operating at the regional level. From highway interchanges to river crossings to cul-de-sacs, intersections can therefore be considered the infrastructural glue that holds together the metropolitan landscape of townships, suburbs, rivers and roads throughout Columbus.

tead

This diagram characterizes the urbanism and the infrastructure of the city that has evolved over the past two centuries annd whose future uniquely depends on the design of these intersections and these junctions as spatial nodes within a greater metropolitan landscape. The site of this proposal, the intersection highlighted at the top, is the end connector of a future light rail system that crosses Linworth Road in Worthington, a suburb in northern Columbus, located in between the Ohio State University Airport and Interstate 70.

1800 Typical Farmstead

1909 Architecture as Utopian Device

1958 The New City (Ludwig Hilberseimer)

1949 Levittown (William Levitt)

1910 Road Town (Edgar Chambless)

1868 Riverside (Frederick Law Olmsted & Calvert Vaux)

1949 Levittown (William Levitt)

1932 Broadacre City (Frank Lloyd Wright)

1981 Highrise of Homes (Site)

1939 Futurama (Norman Bel Geddes)

1955 Dallas-Fort Worth (Victor Gruen)

1929 Radburn, Town for the Motor Age (Stein & Wright)

1956 Lafayette Park (Ludwig Hilberseimer & Mies van der Rohe)

1952 Philadelphia Traf? c Study (Louis I. Kahn)

2007 Worthington Landing, Columbus

How do you create cultural congestion without building density?

ier)

1958 The New City (Ludwig Hilberseimer)

1949 Levittown (William Levitt)

1981 Highrise of Homes (Site)

1955 Dallas-Fort Worth (Victor Gruen)

1956 Lafayette Park (Ludwig Hilberseimer & Mies van der Rohe)

2007 Worthington Landing, Columbus

Transportation, Architecture and Urbanism

th century to the disurbanist proposal of Lafayette Park in the 20th century, this timeline illustrates a series of canonical precedents in the planning and design of cities throughout urban America over the past two centuries. Either built or unbuilt, each project uniquely demonstrates how the design of transportation systems can structure the nature of urban systems and patterns of land use. These precedents also demonation systems that is often overlooked as a ?eld of intervention in contemporary urban design. Borrowing from these precedents, the concluding project of this historical sequence uses Columbus as a design case study and develops an entirely new pattern that synthesizes the structure of mass transportation systems with the imperatives of contemporary urban economies and regional ecologies.

Timeline of Transportation, Architecture and Urbanism

Columbus: a brief history ofLafayette intersections and Americaa (1785-2023). the insquare-mile land ordinance at the urban end of the 18th century the disurbanist e endCrossing of the 18th century to the disurbanist proposal of Park in the 20thjunctions century, thisacross timeline illustrates series of canonical From precedents the planning and design of cities throughout America over the past two to centuries. Either built or proposal unbuilt, each project uniquely demonstrates how the design of transportation systems can structure the nature of urban systems and patterns of land use. These precedents also demonude of of transportation that is often as the a ?eld of intervention in contemporary design. Borrowing from thesein precedents, the concluding project ofofthis historical sequence uses Columbus as a design case study andtwo develops an entirely new pattern that synthesizes the structure of mass transportation systems with the imperatives of contemporary urban economies and regional ecologies. Lafayettesystems Park in the 20thoverlooked century, timeline illustrates a seriesurban of canonical precedents the planning and design cities throughout urban America during the past centuries.

spontaneous (voluntary): generation, the assumed origin of living organisms from non-living matter.

kiss & ride live & dive L5

L4B

Could you imagine a city with a proliferation of intersections but without the burden of traffic? L4A

1 : 12,375 L3

sow & grow

1 hectare (100mx100m) wheat field: conversion of 10,000 kg of carbon from carbon dioxide into the carbon of sugar in a year, giving a total yield of 25,000 kg of sugar per year.

From the regional to the site specific, the prime determinant of design at all scales is mobility, movement and circulation bringing together pedestrian, bipedal, biologic, vehicular, rail, aerial flows together across different suburban densities.

L2 L5

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L4A

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1:1

36 airspace: the structural service of of a root is both for stability, uptake and air circulation of oxygen and others gases.c

Could space be liberated for alternative, slower yet more motile forms of life, where growth is defined metabolically?

rhizome: the rootstock or dorsiventral stem, of root-like appearance, prostrate on or under ground, sending off rootlets, the apex progressively sending up 37 stems or leaves a continuously growing horizontal underground stem that puts out lateral shoots and adventitious roots at intervals. compare with bulb, and radicule (mid 19th century: from greek rhizoma, take root, based on rhiza root)jc

+ +

27L

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asl

Livestock Using the novel configuration of two abutting drop-off areas, the alignment of Linworth Road is interrupted and two dead endsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;much like cul-de-sacsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;are created, opening a large continuous territory for the flow of rail, bus and bicycle circulation in parallel with the river stream course of Kempton Run. In lieu of the layout of parking lots, roads and single family houses that canvass the American suburb, a new pattern emerges with a seamless matrix of living, movement, circulation, and production, with multifunctional land covers spreading continuously across the horizon of the new metropolitan landscape of Columbus and the Olentangy River.

+ + 1 : 50

+ ++

+ + What if everyone traveled by air, by rail, by bus or by bike, where cars were nothing more than a last resort?

Could you imagine a city with a multitude of overlapping and intersecting land uses where production, reproduction, and even overproduction, is possible?

Kevin Frayer / AP

“Living systems—organisms, communities, coevolving ecosystems—are the paramount examples of organized complexity...Since biological entities have causal powers, such as the capacity to evolve, living organisms represent a new, and emergent form of matter, a new instance of the organization of processes.” aerodynamics

40 54-172 seeds/head 2000 seeds/plant 240,000,000 seeds/acre

100 µm

reproduction: self-organization through self-seeding, where gravity is a structural force in biological propagation. increase (a) asexually from one individual, (b) sexually from two individuals or organs; reproductive, applied to parts which share in reproduction; ~cells, cells which have no power of further vegetative development, but by coalescence give rise to a product which forms the starting point of a new plant; ~organs, the parts especially concerned in the production of seeds, spores, and analogous bodies (the stamens and pistils).j

—Stuart Kauffman, On Emergence, Agency, and Organization, 1993/2006 Sinking behavior and trajectory of dandelion seed (0.0267s/100mm)

1 µm = 0.001 mm 1 µg = 0.001 mg

drag effect

l = 6,000 - 7,500 µm w = 320,000 µg

efflorescence: the process (or periods) of flowering.j

Taraxacum officinale Dandelion spp.

1,000 µm

"We are by nature gifted as a vast agronomy. In the humane proportion of those two-industrialism and agronomyâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;we will produce the culture that belongs to Democracy organic. And in the word 'organic' lies the meaning of this discourse." â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Frank Lloyd Wright, The Living City, 1958

2028

What shape would the new American suburb take on? How would this change the conventional center-periphery structure of the American city?

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–21:00:00 UTC DIO Time Sharing across the Bering Strait Diomede Islands, Alaska-Russia 65° 45’ 59.95” N 168° 59’ 28.89” W 1.00m ASL

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Rezoning Time as Territorial Synchronization. Similar to synergism, a process Chukchi where two or more biotic and abiotic substances or processSea es interact at one time, or in A Proposal sequence for greater effecs.d for a Transoceanic Reinforcing the reciprocity of the Rescue Station & Ice Airfield two islands as a shared region in the Bering Strait and ice port, the synchronizaS S I A tion of their different time zones is proposed to restructure its Arctic Ocean collective future. Overturning the ) on century old boundary of Greengi Re r wich Mean Time (GMT) from the la po Old World that has historically um c split the Bering Strait and divided in two islands with two different zones, the strategy involves a Si be modification of the boundary of ri an Anchorage -A the International Date Line that si an cuts through the Strait. Bridging Fl yw the 2.6 nautical mile distance ay between both islands, a gulf 60 60 S i of 21 hours separates the Big hk uc h Diomede (the “Tomorrow Island”) C from the Little Diomede (“Yesterday Isle”), the strategy adBering Sea nd e Isla dresses the fallout of an arbitrary, Diomed Little ern Island st luk ce na Krusen non-binding reliance on the Ig a name sp 00'W native 'N 169E Victorian-era Greenwich Mean 655 47 2 square km : 5. n ea 6 e l Ar 14 e U Time instituted over the past 120 tion: Popula Wales years. Borrowing the boundary Naukan ty Tin Ci York limits of the seasonal airspace a nsul ytlino n i u n T e P and the perimeter of ice crust otka Chuk that encircle the islands, a new o ehznev 10 U.S. circular boundary wraps around Cape D Sea Current D ing ire e Ber both islands offering a new time ct Diomed g а Bi ид n io Диом Puote Острова Diomida n zone. Placing them in between A á q ov li L E ostr Imaq S me na D Russian and American U T differential native 169°03'W N A I A N I 6'N km °4 S S L A re I 65 S RU 29 squa time zones, the 1882 InternationArea: 0 tion: Popula al Date Line splits open and the two islands are finally joined in time, perpetually. tiya

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PACIFIC

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Deepest Free Deepest Dive Free Dive

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Light Combat Helicopter 268 km/h

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Thermosphere

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Thresher nuclear submarine explosion

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Bathypelagic 88%Seawater Oxygen 40308.6 kPa 11% Hydrogen 1% Chloride, Sodium, other Ions 4°C

MHHW

Airspace Class E

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MHW

101.3 KPa

MSL

18000 MSL (5.5 km) 18000 MSL (5.5 km)

MLW

+160 km

Mesopelagic 10153.1 kPa MLLW 5°C

MHHW

Bathypelagic 88%Seawater Oxygen 40308.6 kPa 11% Hydrogen 1% Chloride, Sodium, other Ions 4°C

-1km

Tuna Hook Depth Tuna Hook Depth

-4km

+6.5 km

MHW

Mid-Level Clouds (Atocumulus, Altostratus)

MSL 101.3 KPa

International Waters > 200 nm

50°C

690km

50°C

690km

Exosphere

6,400km

-150°C

Medium Earth Orbit

Orbital Debris (300,000pcs < 1cm)

+2000km

2,000km

-150°C

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Beidou Navigation System +2000km (China) Orbital Debris (300,000pcs < 1cm)

-200°C

6,400km

-200°C

Beidou Navigation System (China)

+21,150km

Beidou Navigation System (China)

+21,150km

Medium Orbit Earth (MEO) Satellite

Beidou Navigation System (China)

+2,000 km

+21,150km

+2,000 km

-3.51km

Felix’ Freefall: 4’20” 25.2seconds of absolute weightlessness 3.5 G of acceleration for more than six continuous seconds Highest Exit (Jump) Altitude: 38,969.4m - 127,852.4 ft Vertical Freefall Distance: 36,402.6 m / 119,431.1 ft

Galileo Navigation Satellites (European)

+23,222km

Galileo Navigation Satellites (European)

Geosynchronous Orbit Satellite Communications 11,160 km/h

+35,786km

Geosynchronous Orbit Satellite Communications 11,160 km/h

+35,786km

Comet 32,187 km/h

Medium Orbit Earth (MEO) Satellite

Orbital Debris (300,000pcs < 1cm)

+2000km

Orbital Debris (300,000pcs < 1cm)

Topex/poseidon Sea Level Measurement System (USA, France)

+1,330km

Topex/poseidon Sea Level Measurement System (USA, France)

+1,330km

+35,786 km

Deppest Well: Alaminos Canyon 95 (Toledo,2003)

International Waters > 200 nm

Airspace Class B, C, and Airspace D. Class B, C, and D.

Highest Manned Balloon Flight Felix Baumgartner

Low Orbit Earth (LEO) Satellite

O3b Satellite Networks “Internet for the other 3 billion”

+ 8,063km

O3b Satellite Networks “Internet for the other 3 billion”

Rockwell Block I GPS Satellite (1978)

+23,222km

Galileo Navigation Satellites (European)

+23,222km

+35,786 km

Deppest Well: Alaminos Canyon 95 (Toledo,2003)

+6 km

+39km

+663 km

DMC, NigeriaSat-NX

+ 19,100km

Glonass Satellite

+35,786 km

-3.51km

10000 MSL (3 km)10000 MSL (3 km)

Mid-Level Clouds (Atocumulus, Altostratus)

Highest Manned Balloon Flight Felix Baumgartner

+39km

+160 km

Mir-1 Submarine Under North Pole (Russia)

High Altitude Surveillance Drone

MLW

-4.20km

High Level Clouds (Cirrus, Cirrostratus)

Altitudinal Ecologies Remote sensing across the radio wave spectrum of electromagnetic environments.

Low-Level Clouds (Nimbostratus, Stratocumulus)

+9km

Mesopelagic 10153.1 kPa MLLW 5°C

Thresher Nuclear Submarine Explosion (1963)

-2.6km

+9km

High Altitude Surveillance Drone

Highest Manned Balloon Flight Felix Baumgartner

+39km

Tardigrades (Water Bear) First living animal to survive in space (10 days)

-1km

-3km -4.20km Feeding depth of Mir-1 Submarine sperm Under whale North Pole (Russia)

+6.0 km High Level Clouds (Cirrus, Cirrostratus)

+8.0 km

Vertical Development Clouds (Fair weather cumulus, Cumulonimbus)

+8.0 km

Low-Level Clouds (Nimbostratus, Stratocumulus)

+10.0 km

Thresher Nuclear Submarine Explosion (1963)

+10.0 km

-2.6km

+12.5 km

Feeding depth of sperm whale

+13.5 km

+12.5 km

Air 78 % Nitrogen 21% Oxygen 1% Carbon dioxide, Water Vapor, ther Gases

Vertical Development Clouds (Fair weather cumulus, Cumulonimbus)

Class G

-3km

Exclusive Economic Zone 24 - 200 nm Air 78 % Nitrogen 21% Oxygen 1% Carbon dioxide, Water Vapor, ther Gases

+13.5 km

-150m Great Barrier Reef (Australia)

14500 MSL (4.5 km) 14500 MSL (4.5 km)

Hydrothermal Vents: Mining Using Hydraulic Pumps

Highest Manned Balloon Flight Felix Baumgartner

+39km

+258km

Tardigrades (Water Bear) First living animal to survive in space (10 days)

Bathypelagic 40308.6 kPa 4°C

-3km

Hydrothermal Vents: Mining Using Hydraulic Pumps

Class G

-3km

+792m São Paulo

Contiguous Zone 12 - 24 nmEconomic Zone Exclusive 24 - 200 nm

+9 km 800-1000 km/h +18.2 km

Contiguous Zone 12 - 24 nm

Territorial Waters 0 - 12 nm

7.8 km/s

Arctic Oil Deposits

+1.5m Bangkok

-4km

-3m AMS Schiphol Airport (Netherlands)

+4m Shanghai

synchronization: process of causing to occur or operate at the same time or rate.o

+4m Dhaka

+100.00 km

Laika Sputnik first animal in space. (1957)

Abyssopelagic 60412.2 kPa 2°C

-3.0 km +7m Singapore

Class A

+5m Istambul +5m Alexandria

600 FL (18.3 km) 600 FL (18.3 km)

+8m Karachi

+9 km 800-1000 km/h

Laika Sputnik first animal in space. (1957)

+100.00 km

+110km

Virgin Galactic Space Tours 4023 km/h

-6km

-150m Great Barrier Reef (Australia)

+4m Dhaka

+4m Shanghai +1.5m Bangkok +8m Jakarta

+18.2 km

-3m AMS Schiphol Airport (Netherlands)

-423m

Dead Sea (Israel)

+7m Singapore +5m Istambul +5m Alexandria

+110km

Virgin Galactic Space Tours 4023 km/h

+982.00km Sputnik II Laika, first animal in space (1957)

DMC, NigeriaSat-NX

+663 km

+982.00km Sputnik II Laika, first animal in space (1957)

Ice Airfield as Power Park

-500m

Arctic Oil Deposits

-500m

-423m

Dead Sea (Israel)

+8m Karachi

+8m Jakarta

Class A

Hydrothermal Vents: Mining Using Hydraulic Pumps

Deep geologic waste Depository for nuclear waste (Onkalo Finland)

-400m

Ozone Layer Hole

Hadopelagic

-3km

Hydrothermal Vents: Mining Using Hydraulic Pumps

Deep geologic waste Depository for nuclear waste (Onkalo Finland)

+100m Istambul

+2420m Mexico City

Airspace Class E

-400m

+133m Lima

+100m Istambul

-3km

+150m Moscow

+133m Lima

London Underground (England)

+213m Delhi

+150m Moscow

-100m

+237m Chongqing

+213m Delhi

Tautona Mine [South Africa]

+240m Kinshasa

+237m Chongqing

+1189m Tehran

Polar Lights

(Aurora borealis)

100619 kPa -1°C

-3.90km

London Underground (England)

+542m Hyderabad

+520m Santiago

+240m Kinshasa

+938m Ankara

Ozone Layer Hole

-10km

Tautona Mine [South Africa]

-100m

+542m Hyderabad

+520m Santiago

+920m Bangalore

Airport

+6.0 km

-2 km

Highest Commercial Daocheng Yading (China)

+4.4 km

High Altitude Marathon [Tibet]

+3.5km

+18.2 km

Shale Gas (United States)

+1189m Tehran +938m Ankara +920m Bangalore

Polar Lights

(Aurora borealis)

International Space Station

+370km

International Space Station

+370km

Glonass Satellite

+ 19,100km

Subsurface Gas Field

-3.90km

-2 km

Shale Gas (United States)

+4.4 km Highest Commercial Airport Daocheng Yading +5.0 km (China) Highest Train Station (Tanggula, China)

+3.5km High Altitude Marathon [Tibet]

+2420m Mexico City

Mount Everest Bumble Bees

+5.60km

+30 km

Luke Geissbuhler launches Iphone into space (first DIY space mission)

Elevation

Neutrino Observatory (Sudbury)

+792m São Paulo

+488m Big Diomede Island (Russia)

+5.0 km Highest Train Station (Tanggula, China)

G. Finch And G. Bruce Mount Everest Climb Without Oxygen

+8.85km

G. Finch And G. Bruce Mount Everest Climb Without Oxygen

+30 km

Luke Geissbuhler launches Iphone into space (first DIY space mission)

Pressure Temperature

-1.98km

Neutrino Observatory (Sudbury)

-1.98km

Bald Eagle

Malampaya Natural Gas Pipeline Fire

+3 km

High Altitude Marathon [Tibet]

-3km

Bald Eagle

+3.5km

Duck and Goose

High Altitude Marathon [Tibet]

+4.5 km

Duck and Goose

+3.5km

+3 km

210,,437 kPa -1°C

+488m Big Diomede Island (Russia)

+4.5 km

-30m Bering Strait Tunnel (Proposal) (USA/ Russia/ )

+6 km

Bar Headed Goose

Mount Everest Bumble Bees

+6 km

+5.60km

+8.85km

+9 km

+427m Little Diomede Island (United States)

Eagles, Vultures, Hawks Eagles, Vultures, Hawks

+9 km

-20km

Malampaya Natural Gas Pipeline Fire

-30m Bering Strait Tunnel (Proposal) (USA/ Russia/ )

+427m Little Diomede Island (United States)

Bar Headed Goose

Birds Migration

Highest Alpine Tree Line Queñoa De Altura (Western Cordillera, Andes Bolivia)

+5.2 km

Highest Alpine Tree Line Queñoa De Altura (Western Cordillera, Andes Bolivia)

400,000,000 kPa 10,727°C

-300m Commercial Trawlig

+2.3m DIO Bearing Sea Ice Landing Strip

(-6,371km Center of the Planet)

-3km

-2 km Shale Gas (United States)

Base Operations +35,786 km

—Rosalind Williams, Cultural Origins and Environmental Implications of Large Technological Systems, 1993

“Systems of connection—the pathways of modern life—transformed the natural landscape in ways that were immediately visible and often dramatic…These pathways are also corridors of power, with power being understood in both its technological and political senses. By channeling the circulation of people, goods, and messages, they have transformed spatial relations by establishing lines of force that are privileged over the places and people left outside those lines.”

-35°C

Troposphere -45°C

12km 22 kPa -55°C

Stratosphere -55°C

50km 0.1kPa 0°C

Mesophere Karman Line

100km 0.0032 KPa -80°C

Thermosphere

690km 50°C

Exosphere

2,000km -150°C

Medium Earth Orbit

6,400km -200°C

November - January Seasonal rescue, operations, and energy resources

51,200km -250°C

+18.2 km

-250

51,

Geosy Satellit

+35,

Geosy Satellit

+35,

Below Zero: Under the Sea Ice (Rob Robbins, National Science Foundation, USAP, 2005) 50

The Beringian Future Originating from, and beginning with the Strait of Bering, the logistical and nodal landscape of Beringia—eponymously named after its Ice Age antecedent—not only epitomizes regional peace, it edifies global democracy for the 21st century. Both ecological and culturally significant, the ice sheet bridges the two islands, the two nations, the two oceans and the two cultures. Temporary and cyclical, the ice becomes structurally, spatially, and politically programmatic.

1,484 m/s

“I believe that national sovereignties will shrink in the face of universal interdependence.” —Jacques Cousteau, Undersea Explorer, 1981

299,792,458 m/s

Time Zones

Live Correspondence with Keller Easterling Architect, Writer, and Professor at Yale University 12:01:00–13:59:43 1 hour 58 minutes 12: 09 : 02 pb

A 1995 essay you wrote titled “Network Ecology” contained many notions that you have been writing about ever since.1 The pretext for the issue was the theme of Landscape(s), during a period when the explosion of the internet and major political events, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1987 and the end of Apartheid in 1994, opened on the world stage. Is there a context from which that short, dense piece emerged, which then led later to your Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways and Houses in America and Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and its Political Masquerades?2 12 : 16 : 07 ke

I did learn a lot from all the things that were in the air at Columbia at that time. Saskia Sassen was teaching there then, so I heard about important research about globalization even if I didn’t yet know how to absorb it. Neither did the discipline of architecture. She and I have recently talked about that.

“Geddes and Mackaye shared the use of higher elevations as vantage points for surveying and planning. Geddes had his outlook tower and, Mackaye had his Appalachian mountain top. Both considered ‘seeing’” to be more than simply the faculty of vision. ‘Survey then plan’ was Geddes' watchword. From new French geographers Elisée Reclus and Paul Vidal la Bache and the French sociologist Frédéric Le Play, Geddes borrowed an instrumental technique for mapping the landscape—the valley section. The valley section indexed the various strata of flora, fauna, and minerals present in the landscape, and Geddes mixed a sectional and a panoramic view in his visual surveys. But surveys invented not only inventorying the components of a landscape but understanding the relationships among these components over time. [...] Geddes view of the landscape expanded upon repeated surveys and over the depth of time lent b historical information. This perceptual practice reflected his admiration of French philosopher Henri Bergson. For Bergson, the mind was function of time and experience—an expanding whole within a temporal continuum. The practice also referenced the work of American pragmatists like William James and John Dewey.” —Keller Easterling, Organization Space, 1999

12 : 26 : 35 ke

Working on organization and landscape at Columbia was a gamble. In jockeying for intellectual positions, it was a risky

move. But I wasn’t reacting against the digital work at Colum12 : 41 : 45 pb bia in the ’90s—I admired it and engaged it. Besides, the work Why were ideas of the nonmechanical, the nonlinear, and the in Organization Space was started before I got to Columbia. nonstructural so avant-garde? Was there a generational jump over an era when everything that seemed solid was dissolving? 12 : 35 : 50 ke Was there something in the air in 1993? I had recently been working with Rick Prelinger on a big laserdisc about suburbia (Call it Home: The House That Private 12 : 46 : 24 ke Enterprise Built, 1992). Prelinger had a huge, and growing film That single year does not stand out although many of the archive and, beyond selling clips, he was keen to see the foot- fascinations you mention floated through the '90s. You asked age used in scholarly compilations. So when we met and he about James Corner. After I left Columbia in 1998, James found out that I was working on the RPAA (Regional Planning Corner organized a seminar that would be of interest to you. Association of America), he showed his copy of “The City,” the The seminar explored organization and landscape, and he documentary that some members of the group produced for invited people (Kwinter, Allen, Mohsen Mostafavi, myself, and the 1939 World’s Fair. Over time, Prelinger and I realized that others) to participate. I think he had been interested in Orgawe could put together a large collection of footage and stills nization Space but by then, I was working on Enduring Innoon a laserdisc. I learned an enormous amount about archival cence and offered some of those stories to the class. James research from Prelinger. I was so incredibly lucky to meet him was working on large scale practice and territorial thinking that and later he also introduced me to the Center for Land Use combined representation, strategy, and planning— something Interpretation and the work of CLUI founder and director Matt like Ian McHarg regional practice with the benefits aesthetic Coolidge. I could talk to Prelinger about the MacKaye research practices from visual art. He was Chair of the Department I had been doing, and he was very encouraging about it. A of Landscape Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania little bit of that work even made it into the disc.4 Kathy High Graduate School of Design (then the Graduate School of Fine (she and Prelinger were partners at the time), edited the FELIX Arts), where he could strategize his own curriculum, define Journal of Media Arts & Communication in 1995, the journal in projects, engage new collaborators and articulate some interwhich the “Network Ecology” essay appeared. esting experiments in landscape thinking.

VFR Aeronautical Chart Symbols (Federal Aviation Association, 2015)

That essay is similar to a talk that I gave titled “Reconditioning Networks” at the University of Toronto. I had been working on Benton MacKaye for a long time, and that work would appear in Organization Space. I was leading one of the first paperless studios at Columbia (GSAPP), but also trying to correct what I thought was a late twentieth-century amnesia about network thinking. I wanted to write not about only digital networks but also spatial networks as information systems. MacKaye was theorizing spatial networks in a way that was so similar to the ways that we were all theorizing digital networks. It seemed there was a way to expand on that intelligence. Even though the paperless studios were largely focused on the manipulation of geometry on the screen, my studio was also trying to focus on the space behind the screen extending the mechanisms of network interactions into space. Things have since changed, but at that moment at Columbia—I was there from 1993 to 1998—working on environment, ecology, or what one might call “green architecture” was frowned upon. I was already concerned that I did not “fit” or was not performing the way I was supposed to, so I almost hid some of the “landscape” stuff I was working on. The book I was writing, Organization Space, probably did not fit the school’s agenda at the time. But sometimes being invisible in a school can be liberating. I don’t remember directly speaking or teaching about the material in Organization Space at Columbia, but I did teach a course called something like “From Interstate to Internet,” and it probably included some of this material, however obliquely. Gradually it became acceptable to talk about the infrastructure research that I had been doing—on MacKaye and also on the Interstate Highway— perhaps because there were others (Stan Allen among them) who were also interested in infrastructure. But I didn’t talk much about the rest of the research in the book, and worried that research about suburbia was somehow considered to be “women’s work.”

Also I had not yet really studied Deleuze and was instantly fascinated by his work. Bernard Cache or Sanford Kwinter had been introducing Deleuze into architecture culture, but I didn’t know them then. Deleuze’s relationship to Bergson was a secret model for me. Deleuze wrote that he used Bergson to introduce material into philosophical orthodoxy. He said that he gave Bergson a “bastard child.” I was probably similarly using MacKaye—using the evidence of his work to make an argument about a contemporary condition. MacKaye embodied Bergson’s ideas, and he also deployed techniques from theater. Coming from a theatrical family, he also deployed techniques from acting. Perhaps because of my own training in theater, I recognized something in these techniques.

“Almost alone among the key players of this century’s history, the landscape remains silent. But in truth it may be the most expert witness of all. In its broadest sense, “landscape” is a stage on which struggles occur—where humans extract resources from the earth, suburbs drain people and wealth from cities, and territory is contested between warring groups. Landscape is also a kind of slate upon which the evidence of culture, habitation and labor is written and may be read.”

—Rick Prelinger, Our Secret Century, 19955

12 : 37 : 46 ke

So Rick was your confidante, a way to talk about landscape? 12 : 37 : 59 ke

He thought the MacKaye research was worthwhile, and he encouraged me to apply for grants to fund it. I was so intrigued by MaKaye—a prescient figure who I also saw as a bit of an underdog. After I started working with MacKaye’s virtually untouched archives at Dartmouth College, I became obsessed with him—underdogs always have more information than the designated mouthpiece of what is later regarded as a “movement.” These are the bullying fictions of history-making. The story of MacKaye was what I really wanted to share in Organization Space. The embarrassing truth about that book is that it doesn’t have a proper bibliography. It’s an odd book, with holes and mistakes, and it is perhaps naïve.

12 : 53 : 30 pb

So when you left from Columbia in 1998 and were able to present your work in more open areas, was Enduring Innocence an extension of Organization Space? 12 : 53 : 43 ke I was a little embarrassed about having a book that contained only American research. The idea of spatial products that had been developed in Organization Space was applicable in a global context. In 1999, I worked on an exhibition and website called Wild Cards: The Components of Global Development. Before doing that research I had naively thought that the United States was exporting U.S.-style spatial products around the world, but the Wild Cards research demonstrated that spatial products were moving all around the world in every direction and from every part of the world. And then, one day, I opened the paper, and read about the I Love Cruise, a cruise ship resort in the DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea). Eventually, it became clear that I could write a book about a collection or suite of global spatial products that, while designed to be apolitical, were landing in the crosshairs of political conflict. Every book is an experiment in narrative structure. Every research question finds its own particular document. I work until I find a number of things that seem convincing enough to stand as a suite.

“Error is only the reverse of a rational orthodoxy, still testifying on behalf of that from which it is distanced—in other words, on behalf of an honesty, a good nature and a good will on the part of one who is said to

—Gilles Deleuze, “The Image of Thought,” 1994

There’s a moment in your research from Enduring Innocence to Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space, where your work goes from Deleuzian to McLuhanesque in the characterization of infrastructure as “media”.7 Can you describe this shift and evolution of your work?

—Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft, 20149

13 : 01 : 28 ke

In Enduring Innocence, I was thinking of spatial products as technologies—even as media. The companies that invent them treat them as intellectual property. Space is a technology, much like software. (As I stare at stack of Detlef’s collection of Marshall McLuhan books, I remember asking him to read some material that eventually made its way into Extrastatecraft. He thought that the reference to McLuhan in that draft was helpful in making an argument about space as a medium of polity.) I wanted to unfocus eyes to see not only buildings with shapes and outlines but also the almost infrastructural matrix space in which buildings are suspended. Since McLuhan had modeled a similar shift, referencing him helped to communicate the idea.

“The truth of the matter is that every circuit of causation in the whole of biology, in our physiology, in our thinking, our neural processes, in our homeostasis, and in the ecological and cultural systems of which we are parts—every such circuit conceals or proposes those paradoxes and confusions that accompany errors and distortions in logical typing.”

—Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature, 19798

I had a decent introduction to media theory, I suppose, but the most nourishing and thrilling speculations about information and organization, for me, came from Gregory Bateson. The connections between Bateson and Deleuze and Guattari were also very important for me—the habits of mind, the ways of thinking. I am not a monist, but I learned from the ways in which they struggle with monism by recognizing, even enjoying the collisions between multiple logics. For me Patrick Geddes, perhaps via Bergson, is another character who is friendly with these habits of mind. He is someone who remains fresh.

“When the object of design is not an object form or a master plan but a set of instructions for an interplay between variables, design acquires some of the power

13 : 18 : 31 pb

Can you speak a little more about the zone and the scales of influence that you identify in your new book Extrastatecraft? 13 : 18 : 46 ke

The free zone is a dominant spatial software in the world at the moment. It has changed so rapidly in the last thirty years that it makes the world seem pliable. And those changes are often not based on cast-iron logics of economy or law, but on crazy, irrational desires and scripts that become contagious within cultures. Also, for zones and the spatial products they incubate, often the levers or toggles of change don’t register in things like master plans. Sometimes they are temporal. Spatial products are often made from time: flight times, tee times, time shares, shipping times etc. along with other routines and schedules that determine how space will be organized, distributed and multiplied. We can manipulate these spaces with not only object forms but also active forms that are “time-released.”

“Subtraction economies can be both destructive and productive. The reductive dreams of utopia are often the first subtraction-monism masquerading as betterment. The least spectacular deletions, without dynamite or bombs, like those associated with disenfranchisement, may even be the most violent. However gentle the tone of the rhetoric, the desire to purify or eliminate contradictions or threats to the prevailing power usually generates the least productive forms of subtraction. Yet while some forms of subtraction deliver aggressive, debilitating attrition, others gradually recondition and strengthen urban relationships. Some subtraction economies are not the disposal of failure and error or the eradication of contradiction but rather deliberate tools for managing building exchanges.

They do not erase information, but rather release a flood of information, association, and interplay. For architects, subtraction offers an expanded artistic repertoire of form making as well as a new territory for spatial enterprise and ingenuity. Like the cultivation of crops or the use of one microorganism to counteract another, subtraction may use both active forms and object forms to change not only the shape, but also the constitution or organization of pace. If every building is both an addition and a subtraction, every act of unbuilding is also both a subtraction and an addition. The subtraction economy almost exists. The creative trick likes in designing its political disposition—the spin that gives the idea enough traction and scale to interrupt the free-market doom loops of other political stalemates. Subtraction is a heavy industry, a source of deployment, a material resource, a global environmental protocol, and an alternative market that escapes the dominance of the financial industry. An interplay of spatial variables demonstrates that subtraction can be growth.”

—Keller Easterling, Subtraction, 201410

13 : 33 : 09 pb

So if information technologists have become the new systems scientists or civil engineers of the twenty-first century, can organization be made through time? Or, as subversion of dominant forms of engineering and administration, can there be design of time as intermediary space? 13 : 34 : 03 ke

Exploiting that power of active forms seems to require another mind habit of mind. In Extrastatecraft, I write about disposition—a conceptual apparatus that is really very simple, and practical. Disposition is tendency or propensity within a context. It describes the potentials latent in an organization. Philosopher Gilbert Ryle, used the idea of disposition to make a distinction between what he called “knowing that” and “knowing how.” Correct answers or knowledge conjured through a single executive decision are examples of things that involve “knowing that”. For Ryle, It was a subject of some sport that “knowing that” is treated as more real by the modern Enlightenment mind, while “knowing how”—knowledge reliant on an unfolding interplay in time—is treated as a kind of “occult” or blur of unknowable

disposition rather than an identifiable event. For instance you can’t know the right answer to being funny you can only know how to be funny. Similarly extending the power of form in time might seem to make form fuzzy and impossibly indeterminate. But, ironically, “knowing how” often directs the most practical action. Anyone who knows how to make bread or navigate a ship relies on active form and disposition.11 Yet this idea is still very hard to communicate in architecture culture where objects and things are privileged. But in the past few years, I’ve been working really hard with my students: we make not only things, but the interplay between things. The subtraction protocols I have been working on (not the architectural murder of tabula rasa, but the process of subtraction as growth) is reliant on this kind of interplay. Beyond making master plans we can introduce a ratcheting or counterbalancing interplay between urban components. We can introduce governors, identify linkages and orchestrate interdependencies that can play out in time, spatially and politically. This is, for me, so powerful. 1. See Keller Easterling, “Network Ecology” in FELIX Journal of Visual Media and Communication Vol.2 No.1 Landscape(s) (1995): 258–265. 2. Keller Easterling, Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways and Houses in America (MIT Press, 1999) and Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and its Political Masquerades (MIT Press, 2005). 3. Easterling, Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways and Houses in America, 21–22. 4. Keller Easterling and Rick Prelinger, Call it Home: The House That Private Enterprise Built (New York: Voyager, 1992). 5. Rick Prelinger, Our Secret Century - Volume 12: The Uncharted Landscape (New York: Voyager, 1995), cited in Kathy High, “(Pre)Text” FELIX 2-1 (1995): 8. 6. Gilles Deleuze, “The Image of Thought” in Difference & Repetition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994): 148. 7. Keller Easterling’s McLuhan-esque reference to the medium of infrastructure is critically important to her latest work. See Easterling’s Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (Verso, 2014): 13. 8. Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1979): 109. 9. Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (London: Verso 2014): 80, referencing the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “On Several Regimes of Signs” in A Thousand Plateaux (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1987): 141–142, and Gilles Deleuze, Foucault translated by S. Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988): 37. 10. Keller Easterling, Subtraction - Critical Spatial Practice 4 edited by Nikolaus Hirsch & Markus Miessen (Berlin, Sternberg Press, 2014): 73–74. 11. On the spatial agency of infrastructure as productive and projective medium, there is a critical difference, comparing knowing what something is (description of object as product) and knowing what it does (expression of effect as process). See Easterling’s “Introduction” to Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (Verso, 2014): 11–23.

FELIX Journal of Media Arts & Communication (Kathy High, ed.) 2-1 LANDSCAPE(S), 1995

13 : 00 : 44 pb

and currency of software. This spatial software is not a thing but a means to craft a multitude of interdependent relationships and sequences—an updating platform for inflecting a stream of objects. Like the engine of interplay that philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari call ‘a diagram,’ an active form does not represent a single arrangement. It is an ‘abstract machine’ generative of a ‘real that is yet to come.’”

Wild Cards: The Components of Global Development, detail (Keller Easterling, 2007)

be mistaken. Error, therefore, pays homage to the ‘truth’ to the extent that, lacking a form of its own, it gives the form of the true to the false.”

Seed

Safety Pin

Plant Graft

Nail

Rock

Battery

Gabion

Raised Ground

Roofs

Road

Drainage Canal

Whistle

Padlock

Concrete Block

Power Charger

Tire

Warehouse

Rope

Cellphone

Wood Board

Ladder

Greenhouse

Cold Chain Depot

Bell

Hatch

Bag

Gas Tank

Sports Court

Bus Parking/Junction

Suitcase

Well

Suspension Bridge

Overpass

Ingress-Egress

Sleeping Mat

Power Generator

Motorcycle

Concrete Bridge

Gully/Ravine

Kiosk Bank

Stairwell

Pickup

Dikes

Tree Nursery

Ramp & Rail

Tap Tap

Wall

Baz

Shade Tree

Livestock

Park

Stilt

Light

Water Tank

Airfield

Open Spaces

1:647

CAP Plateau Central Artibonite Valley, Haiti

Galata

River Bed

Shore

19° 15’ 35.91” N 72° 30’ 55.03” E 30.00m ASL

School

Western Union

Community Center

Church

Cooperative

A Thousand Little Pieces Breakdown of scales, systems, and elements across the urban landscape of Haiti where infrastructure is micro-scaled. They come in the form of everything from a radio tower for communication, a stone stairwell for evacuation, a tree for fuel wood, a borehole for drought safety, a pig for economic liquidity, or a lock for goods security. Life, without these elemental systems, is impossible.

Market

Wholesale Market

Secure High Points

Night Club

Citadel/Fort

Health Center

Cemetery

101

Farm

Waste Management

Land Use

Crop

National Highway

Mangrove

Harvests School Year Floods

Market Fair

Park Networks

Radio Broadcasting

Logistics Hub

Slopes & Hills

Forests & Fields

Calendars & Seasons

Site Equipment (Lighting, Play Fields, Platforms, Landing Pad, Voice System, Radio Antenna, Water Tower)

Providing protection against a range of climatic and seismic hazards (hurricanes, droughts, floods, earthSite Structures & Facilities quakes), this prototype (School, Market Area, Dormitory, Storage Shed) for the creation of over 5,000 evacuation parks across Haiti brings together the everyday spaces of schools, Transportation Infrastructures markets, and trans(Bridges, Ramps, Overpasses) portation with disaster risk management. The project employs a range of small-scale micro-elements (topography, illumination, pathways, Protective Vegetal Systems ramps, planting, water (Plant Structures, Grazing Fields, supply, sanitation) to Hedges, Pastures, Orchards, Fuelwood, create large-scale, Shading & Micro-Climates) macro-effects where daily and essential needs (schooling, playing, trading, commuting) are combined with the Surfaces & Ramps security of evacuation (Access, Egress, required during periods Service, Stairs) of environmental extremes.

+1000.00 - 3000.00m ASL

A Million Plateaus Profile of nine prototypical strategies across the topographic gradient of the Central Plateau and Artibonite Valley Region of Haiti where droughts, as much as floods, pose considerable risks throughout the growing seasons and extreme altitudes for the population of more than 1 million people who form the backbone of Haiti's agronomy.

+500.00 - 2000.00m ASL The Next Billion?

Does the weakening of the State necessarily entail the weakening of society?

Site Topography (Retention Walls, River Bank & Drainage Flows)

+100.00 - 1000.00m ASL

+30.00 - 100.00m ASL 58

59 Vallée de l’Artibonite

+20.00 - 100.00m ASL +10.00 - 100.00m ASL 0.00 - 30.00m ASL

plateau: an elevated plain. Its surface is often deeply cut by stream channels, but the summits remain at a general level. The same topographic form may be called a plain and a plateau, and be both. An elevated tract of considerable size and diversified surface.w

Marché de l’Artibonite

Rou

te N

0.00 - 20.00m ASL 0.00 - 10.00m ASL

Rivière de l'Artibonite

atio

nale

Cyclone, Vilaire Rigaud, 1999 (Courtesy of Ned Hopkins)

209-251km/h

"Death by drowning has honor If the wind picked you up and slammed you Against a mountain boulder This would not carry shame But to suffer a mango smashing Your skull or a plantain hitting your Temple at 70 miles per hour is the ultimate disgrace."

—Victor Hernández Cruz, The Problem with Hurricanes, 2001

Saffir-Simpson wind scale: a 1 to 5 categorization based on the hurricane's intensity at the indicated time. With winds upward of 200km/h, a category 4 wind storm results in catastrophic damage.o

Bending moment: as monocots, the wood content of palm trees (overlapping leaf bases) makes them less rigid, but more flexible to prevailing winds−leading to more bending, without breaking. During hurricane force winds, the architecture of palm trees enables them to bend, for hours on end, to the point where their leaves touch the ground.

Eucalyptus 20m Soil Stabilization / Lump Charcoal

+2680.00m ASL

Vetiverre 1-2m Roof Material

“Back to our valley diagram which called up for us the main make-up of the great world. Hunter and shepherd, poor peasant and rich: these are our most familiar occupational types, and manifestly successive as we descend in altitude, and also come down the course of social history. And as our urban studies progress, we shall find them, even in every city; and there not simply with their produce in the open market-place, or in the resulting shop rows which are its modern development; but also as evolved into correspondingly developed urban vocations. Against the background of our valley section we shall understand them better than has the economist or the lawyer, the politician or the historian.”

Mango Francisque 10m Fruit Exports Mango Tree 6-9m Lump Charcoal Palm Tree 15m Hanging Structure Avocado Tree 15m Fruit / Local Market Banana Tree 3-7m Wind Buffer Candelabre 3m House Fencing Dwarf Palm 2m Plot Delineation

+2165.00m ASL

+1735.00m ASL

—Patrick Geddes, The Valley Plan of Civilization, 1925

Royal Palm 20-30m Bridge

+1000.00m ASL

Latan Palm 9-12m Donkey Bag

+783.00m ASL

Vetiverre 1-2m Sleeping Mats Moringa Olifera 10-12m Nutritional Powder

1.5 : 1

lateral root

Tamarind 12-18m Market Shade for Pigs

+251.00m ASL

Lalu - Corchorus Trilocularis 1.50m Leaves used for Cooking

sinker root

Rice 1-1.8m Rice husk for Ice Preservation

3.25m ASL tap root

fibrous root

Mesquite 6-9m Shade for Fishermen / Lump Charcoal

0.00m ASL

Mangrove 30cm-3m Coastal Erosion Protection

Cyclical Risk Almanac across a Valley of Economic Vulnerabilities & Environmental Vectors

M Rain Season I

J Dry Season II

Sowing Season I

slope: the inclined surface of a hill, mountain, plateau, or plain or any part of the surface of the earth; the angle which such surfaces make with the level.w

A Rain Season II

Harvest Season I

Hurricane Hazard

Harvest Season II

Dry Season I

Sowing Season II

Drought Hazard

Harvest Season III

A Farmer's Facebook, and other Lifeforms across the Slope of Civilization The botanical innovations, agronomic cultures and plant economies across the valley of vulnerabilities in the Artibonite region where the geographic distribution of vegetation serves as a risk reduction and recovery system.

Hunger Risk

+ +

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + +

+ +

+ + + + + + + + + + +

+ germination: the early stage of growth of a seed or spore into a new plant; sprouting; + shoots after a period of dormancy; putting out come + into existence and develop.j,o

+ + +

+ +

+ + + +

+ +

+ + +

Work Force Women as potomitan (central pillar) of regional agricultural economies where according to Susan Buck-Morss, "universal history is visible at the edges...the mutual recognition between the past and present that can liberate us from the recurring cycle of victim and aggressor can occur only if the past to be recognized is on the historical map. It is in the picture, even if it is not in place...we need to see a historical space before we can explore it. (Hegel, +Haiti, and Universal History, 150-151)

+ +

+ + +

+ +

+ + ++

+ +

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

+ +

+ + +

+ + ++ + + + +

+ +

+ + +

+ +

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + ++ + + + + + +

+ +

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + ++ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

+ +

+ â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Abraham Lincoln, 1864 quoted in Ludwig Hilberseimer, The New Regional Pattern, 1949

++ +

+ +

"The great fine art in the future will be the making of a comfortable life from a small piece of land.â&#x20AC;?

19Â° 00' N

+ +

+ + +

+ +

+ + +

+ + + + +

+ +

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

+ +

+ + + + + + + + + + ++ + + + + + + + + ++ + + + + + ++ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + ++ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + ++ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + ++ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + ++ + + + + + + + +++ + + + + + + + + + ++ + + + + + + ++ ++ + + + + + + + + + + + ++ + + + ++ + + + + + + + ++ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + ++ + + ++ + + + + + + + + + ++ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + ++ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + ++ + + + + + + + + + + ++ + + +

+ +

+ + + +

+ +

+ + + +

+ + + + + + + + + + + +

+ +

+ + + + + + + + + + + ++ + + + +

+ +

+ + + + + + + ++ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + ++ + + + + + + + ++ + + + + + + + ++ + + + + ++ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

+ +

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 64

+ +

+ + + +

+ + +

+ +

+ + +

Seaweed Farming, Indonesia (Geoimage Australia 2008)

±0.90m 6:00h

VCE Rebooting the Benthic Ecologies of the Venice Lagoon with the Marco Polo International Airport 45° 28’ 31.06” N 12° 20’ 21.90” E 2.00m ASL 66

Nova Laguna Premised on the 2,000 year old industry of aquaculture (acquacoltura), the tidal dynamics of the lagoon are harnessed for the cultivation of a contemporary lagunal economy. Modeled on fish farms and coastal societies in China, Indonesia, Scandinavia and South America, the strategy deploys a simple cellular device for the organization of the lagoon, based on water depths and benthic geology, cultivation of hydrological life becomes the infrastructure of a new economy for the Lagoon region, where the islands – the new Venices – become the locus of intense commercial activity and public life.

05:52am – 0.10m

lagoon: A shallow bay cut off from a sea or lake by a barrier; often stagnant with ooze bottom and rank vegetation. It may be of salt or fresh water.w

Could we look away from the City of Venice, and closer towards the Lagoon for the reclamation of the region's ecology and economy?

MSL +0.60m (15:00:00)

1:25 - 1:150 As one of the fastest-growing organisms on Earth, giant kelp (Macrocystis pyrifera) can grow in excess of 45 meters, at a rate of 0.5 meter per day. Known as kelp forests, dense stands are home to key marine animals dependent on algae for food and shelter.

MSL +0.30m (14:00:00)

MSL +0.00m (13:00:00)

mid rib

blade

Formations and deformations of reefs and beds over time creating underwater meadows and submerged forests.

MSL -0.30m (12:00:00) bulb

sti

synodic month

16 thallus

MSL -0.60m (11:00:00)

ho l

hyll

p sporo

intertidal inundation for intermediate economies: a regime of that exhibits periodic flooding, characterized by submergence and subsequent emergence of land surfaces and supported vegetal strata.d

MSL -0.90m (10:00:00)

2014

Can cultivation and growth exist and persist without industrialization?

50.00m

+24.00m ASL

25.00m +2.05m High 0.00m

NAP

0.00m Mean Sea Level -0.50m Low Tide

| 100m

| 50m

| 0m

| 150m

Intertidal inundation of cells and lagoon farms Sand waves and sand spits generated by complex seagrass landscape (Zostera marina)

Acqua Alta: Lagunal Histories

1687

1889

| 200m

| 250m

Intertidal

| 300m

| 350m

1.5m Mean Depth deformation: the action or process of changing in shape or distorting, especially through the application of pressure.o 2013

73 freestyle: types of bends with seagrass waving action involving different water velocities and intertidal drifts

bedform: the floor or bottom on which any body of water rests.w

"We must plant the sea and herd its animals using the sea as farmers instead of hunters. That is what civilization is all aboutâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;farming replacing hunting." â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Jacques Yves Cousteau, The Ocean World, 1979

2116

Waste Ecology: the first hot steam bath in Europe where people literally bathe in the warm comfort of their own shit.

Venice Lagoon 2100 Across the gulf between urban culture, industrial production and regional living systems, emerges a contemporary synergy between ecology, economy and energy. The Venice lagoon becomes a sentinel of global climate change, instituting estuarine hydrodynamics as its most important infrastructure. People will arrive from all over the world at Marco Polo Airport to engage in the spectacle of a thriving lagoon economy. Sharply contrasting the petrochemical industries of the 20th century, production and performance replace pollution and preservation, while questioning the Old World picturesque idea of Venice as museum or archive. Prospering under the pressure of global warming, sea level rise, geologic subsidence and international outsourcing, the Venice Lagoon emerges as an economic motor and ecological rejuvenator, the surface representation of a submergent ecology of cells, fields, islands, cultures and lives for the 21st and 22nd centuries.

"The bottom of the ocean is not just rocks and mud, or mud and sands, although that is an image a lot of people have. On a sea floor that looks like a sandy mud bottom, that at first glance might appear to be sand and mud, when you look closely and sit there as I do for a while and just wait, all sorts of creatures show themselves, with little heads popping out of the sand. It is a metropolis."

â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Silvia Earle, Oceanographer, 2010

Organizational Ecologies Afterword by James Corner "Since it is out of control, the urban is about to become a major vector of the imagination. Redefined, urbanism will not only, or mostly, be a profession, but a way of thinking, an ideology: to accept what exists. We were making sand castles. Now we must swim in the sea that swept them away." —Rem Koolhaas, “Whatever Happened to Urbanism?,” 19951

The Älvsjö Flatbed: An Operational Field for Fluid Planning & Operational Design (detail), James Corner/Field Operations, 2001

Part of what is invoked by landscape, architectural, and urban design are concerns for formal beauty and cultural meaning (representation), concerns that bring order and discipline to an otherwise unruly world. Spatial schemes of organization—gridded, axial serial, layered, etc.—have been historically valued for the intrinsic aesthetic effects and the cultural meanings they embody. Often overlooked and undervalued, however, are the organizational effects of such regimes—how invisible frameworks (diagrams, codes, regulations, representations, etc.) set up spaces, distribute programs, and orchestrate the performance (and emergence) of life. Of particular interest here is the twofold nature of any project: on the one hand, the physical form of the project (its layout, materiality, geometry, and spatial organization) and, on the other, the practices that both generate and sustain the project (techniques of production, negotiation, management, representation, and construction). In either case, the world is clearly shifting toward forms and practices that are increasingly flexible, pliant, inventive, adaptive, and capable of responding quickly to changing circumstances. Ecology provides instruction in these various regards, less for its naturalistic and moralistic content but more so because the concepts, vocabularies, and ideas describe complex, dynamic systems—systems that do not have predictable or linear mends but that endlessly evolve, adapting, changing, emerging. Far from amorphous, chaotic structures, ecology shows how the complexity of emergent systems belongs to highly ordered series of organizations—both physical and regulatory. New concepts for managing emergence in complex systems are not only valid in the design and planning arts but have already found their way into current business management, information, and communications sectors, where a diverse range of operational frameworks has been devised to help develop organizational regimes that are adaptive. Indeed it is now almost commonplace in many sectors of both commerce and discourse to accept that though the complexity of today’s world can no longer be controlled, it can be guided, siphoned, harnessed, and steered. In landscape and urban terms, the questions, circle around how we might make open-ended, or “coherent/incongruent” plans (without contradictions in terms), what might the character and “effects of the “dynamic” or “emergent” plan be, and what techniques are available for practicing in newly adaptive ways. The aim is to produce not only a critical understanding of what is at stake when practicing in a world of constant change and uncertainty, but also to develop new vocabularies and techniques pertinent to more openly fluid forms and practices. Both landscape and ecology serve as useful strategic models for three primary reasons: 1) they accept the often messy and complex circumstances of the given site, replete with constraints, potentials, and realities, and they have developed techniques—mapping, diagramming, planning, imaging, arranging,

and so on—for both representing and working with the seemingly unmanageable or inchoate complexities of the given; 2) they both address issues of large-scale spatial organization and relational structuring among parts, a structuring that remains open and dynamic, not fixed; and 3) they both deal with time open-endedly, often viewing a project more in terms of cultivation, staging, and setting up certain conditions rather than obsessing on fixity, finish, and completeness. Landscape and ecology understand projects as dynamic, grounded temporalities, as context-specific unfoldings— becomings, durational emergences, themselves seeding potentials that go on to engender further sets of effect and novelty. Landscape architects tend to view the specificity of a given site—its environment, culture, politics, and economies—as a program unto itself, a program that has an innate tendency or propensity with regard to future potentials. This is why practices of agriculture, silviculture, horticulture, and other techniques of adaptive management of material systems is so interesting and pertinent to urbanism. Subsequently, once seeded, set up, or staged, ecological succession presents one site state that establishes the conditions for the next, which in turn overwrites the past and precipitates a future, not necessarily in foreseeable or prescribable ways. In a sense, the landscape project is less about static, fixed organizations than it is about—to borrow biologist Stuart Kauffman’s terms—“propagating organizations,”2 provisional sets of structures that perform work to construct more of themselves in order to literally propagate more diverse and complex lifeworlds, invoking imaginative, programmatic, and urban, as well as the natural or biological, dimensions. The very performance of life is dependent upon a highly organized material matrix, a landscape ecology both robust and adaptable, strategic by virtue of its material cunning in diversification and survival. Fluid, pliant fields—whether wetlands, cities, or economies—are able to absorb, transform, and exchange information with their surroundings. Their stability and robustness in handling and processing movement, difference, and exchange derives from their organizational configuration, their positioning, their arrangement, and relational structuring: in sum, their 'design intelligence.' Contemporary urban projects demand a new kind of synthetic imagination—a new form of practice in which architecture, landscape, planning, ecology, engineering, social policy, and political process are both understood and coordinated as an interrelated field. The synthesis of this range of knowledge bases and its embodiment in public space lies at the heart of a strategic landscape practice. Working inclusively and collaboratively across multiple scales and with broad scope, strategic design intelligence can surely move toward a more effective and powerful form of urban design. But while strategic thinking aids design intelligence, it is design intelligence that ultimately gives shape and form to the grounds—the very landscape substrate (or the fuller environment more broadly)—that both supports and instigates future emergent forms and novel effects. In this sense, both strategy and design are crucial for evolving new forms, new programs, new publics, new natures, and new urbanisms. That is design intelligence, with its broad reach and its extraordinary creativity, not unlike life itself.

1. Rem Koolhaas, “Whatever Happened to Urbanism?” in S,M,L,XL (New York: Monacelli Press, 1995). 2. Stuart Kauffman, The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

Published by Princeton Architectural Press 37 East Seventh Street New York, New York 10003 Visit our website at www.papress.com.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the publisher, except in the context of reviews. Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify owners of copyright. Errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions. Editor: Marielle Suba Designer: OPSYS / Pierre Bélanger

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data ISBN 978-1-61689-361-3 Acknowledgements Pamphlet Architecture Design Team: Martin Pavlinic, Mark Turibius Jongman-Sereno, Foad Vahidi, Danika Cooper

Current members of the OPSYS team include: Christopher Alton, Alexander S. Arroyo, Séréna Vanbutsele, Martin Pavlinic, Chris Bennett, Anya Domlesky, Danika Cooper, Vineet Diwadkar, Alexandra Gauzza, Sara Jacobs, Anne Clark Baker. Past collaborators include: Oscar Malaspina, Einat Rosenkrantz, Tracie Curry, Adriana Chavez, Elena Tudela, Xiaowei Wang, Hana Disch, Stephan Hausheer, Christina Milos, Chen Chen, Pamela Ritchot, Chris de Vries, Curtis Roth, Kimberley Garza, Kees Lokman, Luke Hegeman, Fadi Masoud, Behnaz Assadi, Hoda Matar, David Christensen, Brett Hoonaert, Andrew tenBrink, Sarah Thomas, Kimberly Garza, Aisling O'Carroll, Jacqueline Urbano, Ed Zec, Maya Przybylski, Joshua Cohen, Daniel Seiders, Deborah Kenley, Daniella Bacchin and Tawab Hlimi. Sincere thanks to Keller Easterling, Sanford Kwinter, James Corner, Rosalind Williams, Stuart Kauffman, and Heidi Nepf for their contributions in this volume. Special thanks to David Carson (Ray Gun) for his inspiration in the layout and design. Additional gratitude to close colleagues: Charles Waldheim, Nina-Marie Lister, Chris Reed, Edward Eigen, Anita Berrizbeitia, Antoine Picon, Mohsen Mostafavi, Niall Kirkwood, Michael Hays, Patricia Roberts, Ashley Schafer, Todd Reisz, Kiel Moe, Sonja Dümpelmann, Neil Brenner, Bobby Pietrusko, Kelly Doran, Sergio Lopez-Pinerio, Peter Del Tredici, Luis Callejas, Rosetta Elkin, Andrea Hansen, Brad Cantrell, Silvia Benedito, staff at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (Jackie Piracini, Jen Swartout, Erica George, Caroline Newton, Sara Gothard), University of Toronto Faculty (George Baird, Robert Wright, Ted Kesik, Ed Fife, Larry Richards, Fred Urban, Brigitte Shim, Bruce Kuwabara), and friends Peter and Alissa North, Alexander Reford, Ricardo Pappini, Nazrudin Hiyate, Louis-Martin Villeneuve, Aliki Economides, and Luc Dandurand. Finally, this body of work would not have been possible without the inexhaustible inspiration and tireless support that Gloria, Miho and Nina bring to life's every living, breathing minute.

1977 - 2015

S. Holl M. Mack L. Lerup L. Dimitriu S. Holl L. Woods S. Holl Z. Hadid S. Holl A. Sartoris J. Fenton R. McCarter S. Holl K. Kaplan, T. Krueger L. Woods E. Martin M. Caldwell M. Silver M. A. Ray Lewis. Tsurumaki. Lewis Michael Sorkin Studio J. S. Dickson D. Ross J. Cathcart et al. J. Solomon Aranda/Lasch Smout Allen Naja & deOstos InfraNet Lab / Lateral Office S. Holl Stasus L. Callejas / LCLA Office N. Chard & P. Kulper Pierre Bélanger / OPSYS

Special thanks to: Nicola Bednarek Brower, Janet Behning, Erin Cain, Megan Carey, Carina Cha, Tom Cho, Barbara Darko, Benjamin English, Jan Cigliano Hartman, Jan Haux, Lia Hunt, Mia Johnson, Valerie Kamen, Stephanie Leke, Diane Levinson, Jennifer Lippert, Jaime Nelson, Rob Shaeffer, Sara Stemen, Marielle Suba, Kaymar Thomas, Paul Wagner, Joseph Weston, and Janet Wong of Princeton Architectural Press —Kevin C. Lippert, publisher

1. Bridges 2. 10 California Houses 3. Villa Prima Facie 4. Stairwells 5. Alphabetical City 6. Einstein Tomb 7. Bridge of Houses 8. Planetary Architecture 9. Rural and Urban House Types 10. Metafisica della Architettura 11. Hybrid Buildings 12. Building; Machines 13. Edge of a City 14. Mosquitoes 15. War and Architecture 16. Architecture as a Translation of Music 17. Small Buildings 19. Reading Drawing Building 20. Seven Partly Underground Rooms 21. Situation Normal... 22. Other Plans 23. Move 24. Some Among Them are Killers 25. Gravity 26. 13 Projects for the Sheridan Expressway 27. Tooling 28. Augmented Landscapes 29. Ambiguous Spaces 30. Coupling 31. New Haiti Villages 32. Resilience 33. Islands and Atolls 34. Fathoming the Unfathomable 35. Going Live

This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

A brief timeline of Pamphlets published:

1977* 1978* 1978* 1979* 1980 1980* 1981* 1981* 1981* 1984* 1985 1987 1991 1993 1993 1994** 1996 1996** 1997 1998 2001 2002 2003 2003 2004 2006 2007 2008 2010 2011 2012 2013 2013 2015

PAMPHLET ARCHITECTURE Pamphlet Architecture was initiated in 1977 as an independent vehicle to criticize, question, and exchange views. Each issue is assembled by an individual author / architect. For information, Pamphlet proposals, or contributions, please write to: Pamphlet Architecture, c/o Princeton Architectural Press, 37 East 7th Street, New York, NY 10003, or go to www.pamphletarchitecture.org.

*out of print, available only in the collection Pamphlet Architecture 1–10. **out of print, available only in the collection Pamphlet Architecture 11–20. Key to Definition Sources c Dictionary of Botanical Terms (Arthur Alger Crozier, 1892) d Dictionary of Natural Resource Management (Julian/Katherine Dunster, 1996) j Glossary of Botanic Terms (Benjamin Daydon Jackson,1900)

m o w y

Methodus Plantarum Nova (John Ray, 1682) Oxford English Dictionary (2015) Dictionary of Topographic Forms (Herbert Wilson, 1900) The Foliage - Quan Fang Bei Zu (Chen Yong, 1035–1112)

Cover Image: the 12,000 weather and ocean data collection points (buoys, floats, stations) feeding live data via satellites from the oceans and continents. Data Source: NOAA/Global Argo Data Repository. Diagram: Sean Connelly, with Andy Wisniewski. For more information: www.pa35.net For live updates: opsys.net

—Rem Koolhaas, “Whatever Happened to Urbanism?,” Design Quarterly, 1995

Urbanism without Urbanists? Figure ground of Oko-Baba & Makoko, the oldest sawmill and largest fishing village of West Africa, located in Lagos, Nigeria (OPSYS/Alexandra Gauzza)

“If there is to be a ‘new urbanism’ it will not be based on the twin fantasies of order and omnipotence; it will be the staging of uncertainty: it will no longer be concerned with the arrangement of more or less permanent objects but with the irrigation of territories with potential. Since the urban is now pervasive, urbanism will never again be about the new, only about the ‘more’ and the ‘modified.’ It will not be about the civilized, but about underdevelopment.”