editorial to Volume #20 by Jeffrey Inaba

Storytelling communicates facts, but it also builds upon real-life accounts to enrich public expectations and elevate beliefs. To these ends, it is worthwhile to get reacquainted with the children’s story. Although regarded as a vehicle to escape reality, the children’s story, and in particular the fairy tale, could again help to elucidate larger social and political storylines. This issue of Volume responds to the global crisis, continuing a series of inquiries started in Volume 9, Urban China 31, Urban China Bootlegged by C-Lab and Volume 19. Here, we present storytelling as a means of understanding our time and constructing a narrative of response.
Crisis creates confusion. It is a situation in which all avenues of recourse fail. Actions taken to remedy catastrophe have little tangible consequence. There is no discernable correlation between cause and effect, and as a result disorientation arises. In some cases the environment may continue to look the same, yet because its behavior can’t be grasped there is a perplexing disconnect. A crisis is when space can’t be explained.
After the immediate shockwaves, when the unpredictable events ebb and the climate regulates, there is much that is left to be explained. Gathering information and forming it into descriptions is the first step towards regaining bearings. Narratives explain space.
Stories are important to architects because they form the foundation of architectural proposals. It is through these episodes that a project’s general challenges and constraints are outlined and an architectural strategy and formal outcome are determined. For this reason, we need to know how tales are told. Journalism experts Nicholas Lemann and Jay Rosen lend a helping hand by discussing the particular challenges of writing stories about our precarious times. Lemann notes the inherent contradiction involved in analyzing facts and constructing a coherent narrative, while Rosen describes data collection resources and our social obligation to explain. Both encourage us to engage stories with indulgence and scrutiny. They offer practical suggestions for crafting timely stories while remaining skeptical of received reporting and conscious of actions an account may provoke from its readers.
Storytelling could involve writing a new public script about space. In addition to the classic narrative elements that Gustav Freytag observes on page four – including the statement of a problem, an exposition of its context and a proposal of resolution – such a script could make probable complications known through disclosure and qualification. As interest in new infrastructure grows and as cases for its realization take shape, now is a good time to create a planning narrative that borrows lessons from earlier, problematic propositions made in the name of technological advancement and urbanization. With the help of Christopher A. Scott, Stephanie von Stein and Jiang Jun, C-Lab breaks down general claims made for the implementation of large-scale technology.
In professional contexts there is little incentive to disclose a project’s cons along with the pros. Instead, there is almost an expectation that a proposal makes unqualified positive claims. In ‘The Technostrich’ and ‘The Technology Narrative’, we contend that it would not be so bad to make the potential problems of new technologies publicly known. It may behoove proponents to come clean and to build trust by divulging technology’s limitations. Moreover, it would be opportune to write a script that avoids grandiose promises and instead solicits experts to help solve problems that may arise along the way. The disclosure of possible complications, conflicts and the particulars of the decision-making process may in fact contribute to a project’s realization rather than its demise.
In the following pages, C-Lab shows the ability of the children’s story to make sense of hard-to-describe events, given that its format addresses emotionally difficult, morally complicated and ethically charged issues with concision. We argue that such constructions are especially relevant today since simple public narratives set the tone for actions in response to the very events (like crisis) which challenge our ability to distinguish fact from fiction.
While truthfulness has it value, the same can be said for fantasy. The children’s story is well suited to counteract the resignation and incapacitation that often accompanies trauma, since its fantastical plots aim to summon the imaginative potential of the reader’s captive mental state. Rather than try to discern reality from fantasy, contributors like Lewis H. Lapham, Neil Denari, Catherine Hardwicke, Dave McKean, Tom McCarthy, Smiljan Radic, Lucia Allais and Roger Dean would encourage us to cycle between conscious and unconscious states, work-life and dream-time, desire and disappointment, material reality and history because to do so is essential to an enhanced experience of the physical environment. For good reason, people say a story isn’t worth telling if it can’t be told to a child. A simple, distilled story that clarifies the crisis, and that aids the formulation of policies to better understand and animate the physical environment, is definitely worth telling.

This past year numerous dramas have competed for our attention: sub-prime mortgages, banking meltdown, bailout, stimulus, pandemic, bankruptcy. The all-consuming effort to follow these events seldom leaves a moment to contemplate the explanations themselves. What is the stated dilemma, context or motive for any one of these problems? And most importantly, how does a problem’s formulation determine its proposed solution? Volume 20 is dedicated to the art of storytelling. It presents the storylines of current events and architecture to show that while the truth is important, so is the ability of fiction to elevate fact. Perhaps the best way to understand our era is through narratives that distort, pervert and animate reality?

First of all, I must make a warning: I will not recur to airing a quick succession of 140 characters tweets, nor will I use the latest live-feed technology to try and let you understand how Beyond Media felt to me like a festival haunted by its very initial premises. Nope. Instead, I’ll go back to the very old means of putting up one word after the other, and one paragraph after the other, and try to telescope you into the heart of that simple argument by means of a very personal interpretation.

When I say that this Festival is “haunted by its very initial premises” I do not mean that showing the audiovisual media which are today quintessential to architecture representation should bear any special problem. On the contrary, it is only natural and logical that someone should be doing it. At its 9th edition, the Florence festival also has it in its curriculum to be one of the first to do so. The ghosts I am referring to, instead, are those of the so-called digital culture. When Beyond Media was initiated by multitasking Marco Brizzi in 1997, it was only too obvious to a given few that digital tools were there to change the way we worked, the way we designed reality, the way we represented it and also thought about it. By then, it was also acceptable to let yourself immerge in the fascination that is due to the enormous possibilities granted by these new tools.

Digital tools, though, have by now been culturally absorbed and are now part of the everyday banal of (almost) everybody: think of TV, if not of the means we deploy to pursue any design or technical profession. This banality – what we may expect when what I will call the digital turn is complete – is intrinsically good. It means that, by now, and even if in permanent development, the digital paradigm is, like taste, already acquired. Of course one can, still today, be locked into the early thrills of those who once were at the forefront of digital culture. Just think of blobtecture: a formal approach to architectural shape that is still locked into the early inception of what the digital should look like. But one may also be looking beyond the processes that today invisibly drive architecture’s creation.

In this sense, the effective object of the festival’s – film, videos and digital visualizations of the most varied nature – revealed this year that maybe we are indeed at the turning point of the digital turn. The point in which we can start accepting that the digital turn -the process of passing from an analogue mode of culture production to a digital one- is reaching the point in which the digital is completely overruling the analogical, and that this is definitely influencing our behavior – although, at the same time, this doesn’t have to be the main focus of our attention.

This means something like what Francis Ford Coppola achieved instantly when he did one of the first digital movies back in 1982: One from the Heart. (The other was Tron) Do you remember Coppola’s for being “digital” or just for being a great film, with great characters and great music? (But, then, that is why Coppola is a genius)

Spot on Schools exhibition in the Stazione Leopolda

Being at the turning point, though, also means that, even if we may start looking forward to a more mature approach to digital tools and looks, we must still bear some typically naive flirtations with the medium. In this sense, many of the films and participants in Beyond Media’s “Visions” – the event’s theme for 2009 – were still too obviously encapsulated in the discussion of the digital tools’ nature and possibilities, rather than stepping onto the next platform of the reflection and production of visions that the digital turn welcomes. This was perhaps most explicit in the case of the teaching departments selected to integrate the Spot on Schools exhibition – a quite valuable initiative that kind of offers a background for the festival, occupying two floors of the cave-like, discontinued halls of Stazione Leopolda. It is certainly true that, in terms of architectural education, the learning of the tools should be a major concern. It is true that the most efficient design instruments are now inevitably digital. But are the school departments heavily focused in parametric design the only ones that reflect the consequences of the digital turn? Indeed, for me, it would be far more interesting to explore the subtler ways in which the digital tooling affects the thinking behind architecture and everything else– because it structurally does.

On the other hand, the symposium held through the Festival’s long opening weekend did attempt to drive the debate into the 2.0 aspects of this issue… A well-tempered media historian such as Mario Carpo revealed the ambition to bring in the long perspective – the fact that you can look back at history and anticipate that the digital fad is just… like any other fad. But he was paired with a group of panelists – John Frazer, Furio Barzon and Alvise Simondetti from ARUP – who, as centered as they were in the wondrous updates of the tooling aspects, certainly made it difficult to achieve a more philosophical and distanced approach.

It was only when the starring bright minds came pouring in, that a jump could be felt in this direction. Like in some fast paced talk-show, both Derrick Kerckhove and Marcos Novak raised the political aspects of the new digital social networks. And with the aid of Beatriz Colomina’s historical rereading of little magazines, the core discussion of vision and communication was finally redirected into aspects of radical action towards the whole of society, rather than to a strict focus on the technical apparatus of the “selfless” digital architect aimed at analysis, standardization and cybernetic reproduction of building.

Happily, the symposium curated by Pietro Valle confirmed that there are many possible avenues into the achievement of vision in a digital world – including power, writing, exhibiting and the hidden mission of the festival: archiving. In the benefit of diversity, there was a contribute of those who, in these different areas, are immersed in digital technology, but also a presence of those who haven’t even arrived at the heart of digital, or let’s say, network thinking – although they inevitably use digital tools as a sort of upgraded craftsmanship. This was the case of Tony Fretton, for example, as opposed to Martin Rein-Cano, from Topotek1, on a panel on art visions… While neither addressed the digital turn, their practices certainly reflected a generation gap coming from the eruption of a new interaction, network paradigm. As such, in one of the very few moments in which a spicy confrontation arose, Fretton revealed how the minimalist frame of view is today acquiring a conservative and reductive overtone, as opposed to Rein-Cano’s hybrid linking of nature, technology and social space. Fretton wants to stick to an architectural world of autonomous abstractions, Rein-Cano wants to immerge in the everyday flow of contemporary information. This where the digital turn leaves its less obvious imprints.

“Concerto for infrastructures” by Gilles Delalex (Muoto Architects)

Palimpsest by Eva Sommeregger

Back to the movies, though, these demonstrated with bewildering diversity how digital tools are indeed around the corner, but in the end can simply provide for any world vision you may want to pursue. As you may preview in YouTube, the more revealing pieces in Beyond Media perfectly illustrated that even if digital tools are the rule, freedom of expression is once again the thing. As such, films reached from resolute experimental pieces by the likes of Pilar Ortiz or StudioMuoto to interesting graphic “documentaries” like Eva Sommeregger’s Palimpsest, Maki Gherzi’s Dalla Casa all’Abitare, or Anthony Burke’s States of Convergence.

Squint Opera’s Adamstown

MongoPalace by Interaction Design Lab

And video-portfolios by architects went from the classical digital professionalism of the “viewmasters” such as Zaha Hadid, UnStudio and MVRDV, to recent attempts at developing narrative devices such as those in Lavarita-Navarro or in BIG’s clever take on parkour’s architectural appropriations as filmed by Kaspar Astrup Schröder The best videos selected by Beyond Media thus revealed a clear assumption of existing digital tools, while willing to take these onto their next logical phase: visual originality, narrative, and a more humane approach. Whether corporate or subversive, whether institutional or personal, these films were, after all, looking back into the visual cultures of animation, cartoons and film… so as to discover the new/old paths that may lie beyond the digital turn. This again reveals the impact of the long, historical perspective: history constantly repeats itself through new instruments and media. As such, the sooner we achieve a critical distance from what is hitting us right now, the better we are using the repertoire of past and present to make the new technologies work for our everlasting and recurrent human needs.

The waning revenue of print-publishing in the arena of newspaper’s and magazine’s would suggest that the future looks grim for architectural journalism on paper, but the magazines and journals that have been launched over the last months would suggest otherwise. Why would one start a new publication when magazines are dying, and advertising revenues are down. Big advertising dependent boys like Domus are surely having a hard time right now. Although when one follows this argument: “When the markets are down and the economic indicators turn south, the architect begins to think, to write, to theorize. When the markets are up we “do” and don’t think much” which makes David Gissen wonder how to actually map this. Some of this seems to make sense, introducing this argument at least makes a good excuse to make a list of the periodicals that have captured my attention lately.

First up is Conditions, a Scandinavian quarterly and perhaps the best to prove the above theory, since it’s founded by three architects and not by historians, academics or full-time theorists.

The driving idea behind beginning a new magazine for them as stated in their manifest:

In opposition to ignorance and superficiality this magazine is conceived in order to search for knowledge and predicaments of our continuously evolving society. It is organized in a fluctuating network of agents reflecting the present globalized state of a dynamic society, economics, politics and culture which are the motivators of architecture. Through a play of thoughts in an open ended forum, predefined “facts” will be unsecured and constantly reinvented. The forum will gather the architect, client, politician and the public, a communion of ideas creating conditions for evolution.

Clearly a reaction against the bubble before it bursted. Their first issue is themed: “A Strategy for Evolution” which already bolsters a contradiction between conscious planning and the unconscious processes unfolding in nature. The issue is not a making a single argument but presents a variety of voices, approaches and interpretations to the theme. Check out the table of contents of issue #1, and their call for submissions for their second issue “Interpretation & Copy”

While Conditions’ existence is dependent upon advertising the next series of publications are supported by institutions.

Bracket is an annual publication with their first issue on Farming coming up this Winter, so we’ll have to wait and see what will be delivered. I’m curious what kind of publication it will be, because it the brainchild of not the smallest names on the web: Archinect and InfraNet Lab. Bracket will cover:

(…) issues overlooked yet central to our cultural milieu that have evolved out of the new disciplinary territory at the intersection of architecture, landscape, urbanism and, now, the internet. It is no coincidence that the professional term architect can also now refer to information architects, and that the word community can also now refer to an online community. [bracket] is a publishing platform for ideas charting the complex overlap of the sphere of architecture and online social spheres.

P.E.A.R, Paper for Emerging Architectural Research is the most recent addition to architectural publishing, they had their launch in London roughly a month ago. I haven’t seen it yet, but they call themselves an architectural fanzine which sounds refreshing: “P.E.A.R. aims to re-establish the fanzine as a primary medium for the dissemination of architectural ideas, musings, research and works.”

New Geographies is a new journal published by Harvard University Press, while I haven’t held one in my hands yet, the first striking encounter was that their first issue had an identical title to one of Volume’s, namely “After Zero.” Besides titeling, New Geographies also seems to be in sync with Volume’s efforts to go beyond the disciplinary boundaries of architecture, and to seek out new terrains which are mostly bigger in scale (‘geographies’) for the application of architectural intelligence.

New Geographies journal aims to examine the emergence of the geographic —a new but for the most part latent paradigm in design today—to articulate it and bring it to bear effectively on the agency of design. After more than two decades of seeing architecture and urbanism as the spatial manifestation of the effects of globalization, it is time to consider the expanded agency of the designer. Designers are increasingly compelled to shape larger scales and contexts, to address questions related to infrastructural problems, urban and ecological systems, and cultural and regional issues. These questions—previously confined to the domains of engineering, ecology, or regional planning—now require articulation through design. Encouraging designers to reexamine their tools and develop strategies to link attributes previously understood to be either separate from each other or external to the design disciplines, those questions have also opened up a range of technical, formal, and social repertoires for architecture and urbanism. Although in the past decade different versions of landscape and infrastructural urbanism have emerged in response to similar challenges, this new condition we call “the geographic” points to more than a shift in scale. (more here … )

Finally there is the already a bit older Footprint, established at TU Delft’s DSD in Fall 2007 (thus a pre-crash publication) is a typical academic journal. What makes it special is that all content is available for free download (pdf), all you need is a free registration.

Of course this is just a list, that happens to end here. I’m curious to know if there are more recently initiated publications worthy of knowing about? Leave a comment!

Register deadline: July 24, 2009 / Submit deadline: August 7, 2009
Student Edition Register deadline : October 16, 2009 Submit deadline: November 2, 2009

WPA 2.0 “Whoever Rules the Sewers Rules the City”

Paraphrasing the earlier WPA (Works Progress Administration) of 1939, this WPA (Working Public Architecture) is seeking to exploit the potential of the infrastructure investments of the Obama administration as a opportunity to exhibit the power of architecture’s imagination is applicable to more than generating icons. Architects are called upon to take back the streets, to apply their architectural intelligence beyond the traditional boundaries of their discipline.

cityLAB, an urban think tank at UCLA’s Department of Architecture and Urban Design, announces a call for entries to “WPA 2.0: Working Public Architecture.” WPA 2.0 is an open competition that seeks innovative, implementable proposals to place infrastructure at the heart of rebuilding our cities during this next era of metropolitan recovery. WPA 2.0 recalls the Depression-era Works Projects Administration (1935-43), which built public buildings, parks, bridges, and roads across the nation as an investment in the future—one that has, in turn, become a lasting legacy. We encourage projects that explore the value of infrastructure not only as an engineering endeavor, but as a robust design opportunity to strengthen communities and revitalize cities. Unlike the previous era, the next generation of such projects will require surgical integration into the existing urban fabric, and will work by intentionally linking systems of points, lines and landscapes; hybridizing economies with ecologies; and overlapping architecture with planning. This notion of infrastructural systems is intentionally broad, including but not limited to parks, schools, open space, vehicle storage, sewers, roads, transportation, storm water, waste, food systems, recreation, local economies, ‘green’ infrastructure, fire prevention, markets, landfills, energy-generating facilities, cemeteries, and smart utilities.

Beyond the mere replacement of obsolete or overtaxed infrastructure, WPA 2.0 seeks design ideas that exploit the opportunity for such solutions to be leveraged, through nested scales of thinking, into strategies that catalyze a larger and more visible public benefit. In this respect, it is looking for proposals that put architecture back to work through designs that:

- are embedded with added value (multifunctionality, imageability, public presence),
- represent potential prototypes, adaptable for use in numerous locations,
- are locally self-regulated and controlled (i.e. which “unlock” the grid),
- strategically attract investment and/or generate community stability, and
- generate new sustainability practices.

The full brief for the competition can be found on the WPA 2.0 website, and to get your brain up and running on the vast realm the competition is engaged with check their infrastructure matrix, reference projects and resources.

Too good, not to share. A beautifully crafted animated infographic clearly making the point in favor of eating local produce, and illustrating the consequences of our globalized food industry. The video was produced by Canadian food movement mayonnaise brand: Hellmann’s

Hellman’s – It’s Time for Real from CRUSH on Vimeo.

via information aesthetics

International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam: Open City
from 24-9-2009 to 10-1-2010

Sao Paulo (via IABR)

With its young architecture biennale, Rotterdam will again make an effort to grasp the attention of the architecture world. After three architecture biennale’s on mobility (2003), ‘the flood‘ (2005) and power (2007) on the 24th of September the fourth biennale will open, themed: Open City and curated by Kees Christiaanse

(…) an Open City is a place where different social groups co-exist, cultural diversity is present, differences in scale are visible, and urban innovation and probably economic development are taking place. When all these factors come together, it can have a positive effect. We can then speak of an Open City.
Open City is not a city; it is a condition of a part of the city. The word ‘condition’ indicates that the situation is finite, that the situation changes owing to other influences. And I’m only talking about parts of the city because it’s an illusion to think that the whole city can be designed as an Open City, or that this can be engineered. Usually for political reasons, every city contains areas that are potentially open, and other areas that will never be open.

- Kees Christiaanse, interviewed by Archined

This main theme will be worked out by international teams of curators in six sub-themes: Community, Collective, Refuge, Squat, Reciprocity and The Make-able City

Volume will work with sub-curators Bart Golhoorn of Project Russia and Aleksander Sverdlov, who work on the theme ‘collective’ to make a collaborative Volume issue (#21). Also Partizan Publik‘s project Social Housing after the Soviets will be part of this issue and the IABR exhibition.

Currently at the printer (dieKeure), and early next week distribution (Bruil & Van de Staaij) starts and subscribers can start to expect the next issue of Volume on Storytelling in their mailboxes:

This past year numerous dramas have competed for our attention: sub-prime mortgages, banking meltdown, bailout, stimulus, pandemic, bankruptcy. The all-consuming effort to follow these events seldom leaves a moment to contemplate the explanations themselves. What is the stated dilemma, context or motive for any one of these problems? And most importantly, how does a problem’s formulation determine its proposed solution? Volume 20 is dedicated to the art of storytelling. It presents the storylines of current events and architecture to show that while the truth is important, so is the ability of fiction to elevate fact. Perhaps the best way to understand our era is through narratives that distort, pervert and animate reality?

From next week on be on the lookout for an issue bringing old and new narratives evoking strangely familiar feelings.

Deadline: 1 august 2009

Crisis! What Crisis?

Suburbia is getting its fair share of attention currently and with reason. As prophesied Volume’s 2006 #9 issue, the urgency to reinvent the suburban mode of living has never been greater. In order to address this urgency Dwell Magazine and Inhabitat.com have announced the Reburbia competition: a design competition dedicated to re-envisioning the suburbs.

With the current housing crisis, the sub-prime mortgage meltdown, and rising energy costs, the future of suburbia looks bleak. Suburban communities in central California, Arizona and Florida are desolate and decaying, with for sale and foreclosure signs dotting many lawns. According to the US Census, about 90% of all metropolitan growth occurred in suburban communities in the last ten years. Urbanites who loathe the freeways, big box stores and bland aesthetics stereotypical of suburbia may secretly root for the end of sprawl, but demographic trends indicate that exurban growth is still on the rise.

In a future where limited natural resources will force us to find better solutions for density and efficiency, what will become of the cul-de-sacs, cookie-cutter tract houses and generic strip malls that have long upheld the diffuse infrastructure of suburbia? How can we redirect these existing spaces to promote sustainability, walkability, and community? It’s a problem that demands a visionary design solution and we want you to create the vision!

Calling all future-forward architects, urban designers, renegade planners and imaginative engineers:
Show us how you would re-invent the suburbs! What would a McMansion become if it weren’t a single-family dwelling? How could a vacant big box store be retrofitted for agriculture? What sort of design solutions can you come up with to facilitate car-free mobility, ‘burb-grown food, and local, renewable energy generation? We want to see how you’d design future-proof spaces and systems using the suburban structures of the present, from small-scale retrofits to large-scale restoration—the wilder the better!

for more information check the Reburbia competition website

Platform21 Prinses Irenestraat 19, 1077 WT Amsterdam (view on map)
13 March – 30 August 2009 / Friday, Saturday and Sunday, 12:00 – 18:00 / Free entry

Marty’s Camera Repair (via platform21)

Platform21 keeps on celebrating the DIY attitude, after they showed us how we could hack Ikea (as did some blogs), they now bring us a re-appreciation of the ‘repairing‘.

Platform21 = Repairing starts with the idea that repair has been underestimated as a creative, cultural and economic force. If we don’t start looking at repair as a contemporary activity soon, an incredibly rich body of knowledge – one that contributes to human independence and pleasure – could be lost. The situation is especially puzzling when you consider current global interest in other ideas related to sustainability, such as recycling and the cradle-to-cradle philosophy.
With Platform21 = Repairing we aim to raise awareness of a mentality, a culture and a practice that not so long ago was completely integrated into life and the way we designed it. It is not too late.

Also check out Platform21′s Repair Manifesto in English or in Dutch and the commentary it got.