Thesis Draft Proposal in ~800 words…

FOOD OPERATIONS

THE ISSUE
In his October 9th 2008 letter to the prospective President-Elect, Michael Pollan lays out the imperative of reforming the entire national food system:
“…unless you [reform], you will not be able to make significant progress on the health care crisis, energy independence or climate change.”

As this and much other current journalism and authorship indicates, food is at the epicenter of impending crises as well as integrally related to the current economic one.  The issue has operations and implications locally and globally, politically and culturally.  What we eat and where it comes from, how it is grown/produced, processed and distributed: these questions affect us at an individual, local, national and international scale.  In Room for Debate: A Running Commentary on the News last week, the New York Times published a piece entitled “Do We Need a Department of Food?”  Questions to and by the media and government related to the issue of food are increasing.  The need for action across disciplines and at all scales is necessary.  Food as a critical, contemporary issue is well positioned for a thesis investigation and proposition.

THE CONTEXT
Launching from this present situation, I am interested in engaging urban ecologies to propose an alternative to current development projects and a counter to the usual patterns of gentrification.  My project begins to locate a position within the discourse of architecture in opposition to the trajectory of “already made” as described by Michael Hays in Praxis 5:
“…Frank Gehry’s [work] after Bilbao… is for an audience that is everyone and everywhere (not so much an architectural ready-made in the sense of Duchamp, as an architecture already made, a clone that is its own template).”

The insular, polarizing scheme proposed by the Bruce Ratner/ Frank Gehry partnership for the forthcoming redevelopment of Brooklyn’s Atlantic Yards is representative of the creation of a post-modern, mono-cultural milieu thinly veiled under the guise of public space and glossed-over programmatic diversity.  (As designed, the ‘public’ space is as inaccessible as a pie in the sky, and the low-income housing units are only for face-value, jammed amidst luxury condos, a boutique hotel and more shopping.  No schools or public-service amenities here.)

In tandem with this sort of capitalist architecture is the all too typical course run by gentrification.  The boutique-ization and concurrent soaring of rents in Williamsburg and Fort Greene represent model cases of the dilution of culturally vibrant neighborhoods in the wake of gentrification. The homogenization of architecture, and communities, creates too many imbalances, is unstable and unsustainable; we need a paradigm shift.

There is latent opportunity for intensification of diversity in neighborhoods that appeal to new populace.  In fact, the trail-blazers are often seeking a reprieve from the lack of difference (and unaffordable- read: unsustainable- lifestyles) elsewhere.  Entrance of new residents does not need to equal invasion and ultimate deposition or displacement.  However, the challenge to generate an alternative reality is unfortunately rarely met creativity at all or at large enough scales to counter driving economic forces.  More typical encounters are laced with animosity or resignation.

In yet another op-ed piece directed at the presidential candidates last fall, sustainable agriculture expert Fred Kirschenmann asserts, “the core issue here is to shift our food policy from subsidizing commodities to supporting communities.”   Food has the potential to mobilize and support sustainable, diverse development within a community, establishing a measure against dilution of difference and conquer of monoculture. My thesis sets out to investigate-design a project based on urban food production and distribution in order to both directly address pressing issues related to food and to imagine a more inclusive and sustainable model of urban redevelopment.

THE PROJECT
To focus attention at the community scale, the project will operate by way of strategic neighborhood intervention(s).  I have identified the Clinton Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn as a suitable site, particularly because of its shared border with the recently booming Fort Greene.  This location with transit access and a steady trickle of young professionals into its housing stock means it is also primed for gentrification.  Numerous empty warehouses and lots as well as an observable lack of access to fresh food cinch its appeal.

Alice Waters  and Michael Pollan both insist that change must start in schools.  There is obvious potential for my project to manifest within this program-type.  However, I am also interested in identifying other programmatic sites and methods for operative interventions.  It is possible the project could become a system of “lite” (mobile or temporary) interventions rather than or in conjunction with a more fixed architecture.

THE METHODOLOGY + THE PLAN
March/April:
*Reading/writing: ongoing research into the history and theories of food and its associated systems.  -See bibliography
*Precedent analysis: researching and cataloging projects (friends + enemies on the architectural, educational and agricultural fronts) through indexing and diagramming.   (creation of a catalog)
-Atlantic Yards, Edible Schoolyard, Park Slope Food Co-op, Union Square Farmer’s Market, Chinatown
*Typology Analysis: researching and cataloging existing NYC typologies:
-NYC Bodega, Street Cart, Farmer’s Markets, Community Gardens, boutique  grocery stores
*Site analysis: researching and mapping current conditions and patterns in Brooklyn.  For example, food consumption habits and paths.  (creation of a map)

Sometimes I think I should’a stayed in Brooklyn.

and taken on a food venture like these folks.

I guess I still can.

After thesis.

Question 4: Baudelarian Ambivalence?

Readings:

Koolhaas: “Globalization” “What Ever Happened to Urbanism” “Bigness” all in S,M,L,XL

and “Junkspace” Content pp 162-171

Speaks, Foster, Hays, Kwinter, Scott: “The Design and Crime Forum” Praxis 5: After Capitalism, 2003 pp.11-23

Question #4:

In saying Rem “surfs” (Praxis, Foster, pp15) the dialectic, I don’t think Foster is admitting Rem a position of success, exactly.  Does the Seattle Library, in which “the central proposition involves erasing the boundaries between architecture and information, the real and the virtual” (13) offer the kind of “running-room” Foster so persistently calls for?  Foster quickly turns around to remind us that “the path of capital” is defined by “a deterritorializing of image and space” expressed in this case in “[the] integration (and) erasure” (13).   I’m not sure where Foster’s hope lies; as is pointed out by his critics, he fails to offer insight into how this new way of operating might be imagined.
At the end of the day, I don’t think Rem is overly concerned with hard concepts like “autonomy” or “semi-autonomy”- he is more fluid in his writing and theorizing, more flexible in his imagining.  If that leads him to be associated with Baudelaire’s dandy, so be it.  I agree with Sarah that it offers us architects a more interesting point of departure: simultaneous in its engagement and disinterest, our work is free to launch how and whichever way we choose.  Is this- Rem’s writing- the abode of “rearticulation” (Scott, pp16), of contemporary running-room? For me, this begs the question: must the architectural project hinge on its built conclusions for ultimate cultural failure or success?
Rem seeks “to reinvent a plausible relationship between the formal and social” (Foster quoting Rem,15).  In this, he’s successful in his project.  Foster’s running-room may even reside in the ambiguous territory (I question the idea that the Seattle Library, for example, is finally ‘deterritorialized’) we witness in Rem’s writing (and building!) as he imagines various plausibilities of said relationship. Baudelarian ambivalence may be necessary to hold “notions of difference and spacing.”  (Scott, 16)
And, isn’t the argument hovering over the junkspace diatribe that although junkspace has replaced the kind of “provisional spaces” (Foster, 11) necessary for one version of running-room, we can produce another version?

Question #3: Grow New Organs

Apologies for the delay in posting.  #4 will be up shortly as well!

Readings from (last) week:

Fredrick Jameson “Postmodernism and Consumer Society” The Cultural Turn, Selected Writings on the Postmodern pp 1-20

Rheinhold Martin “Architecture’s Image Problem: Have We ever been Postmodern?” (Grey Room 22 Winter 2006) pp 6-29

Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour “Theories of Ugly and Ordinary and Related Contrary Theories” Learning From Las Vegas (Cambridge: MA MIT Press 1972)  pp 128-163

Links posted by classmates (as part of the question making/discussion generating):

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/29830
http://www.theonion.com/content/news/idiom_shortage_leaves_nation_all

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T1LIrzsgqA

Question #3:

Love all the links!  Keep ‘em coming.

Lee- I want to hear more about that lecture (Sloterdijk/Latour at the GSD) …  drat, I missed it!
Stay tuned for ‘Made in Tokyo’ presentation today!  As intended, this project will feed our discussion as to how architecture extended (or moved out of?) Jameson’s and Eisenman’s post-modernism.

As for some thoughts of mine on the reading:
Yes, “postmodernism reproduces –reinforces- the logic of consumer capitalism,” (Jameson, 20) but to retroactively address Jameson’s question of whether it “resists that logic” must also be (in the spirit of parody and pastiche), as Molly Bloom would resoundingly say, Yes.  I think the big difference is that postmodernism –ironically- empowers the populous – in ways that modernism absolutely does not – as well as the practitioner in that its main task, as Jameson explains, is one of revealing, of reflecting reality back in ways that make it uncomfortably clear that we must “grow new organs” (11) in order to inhabit the space of this new world and ultimately survive- if not thrive.  The postmodern condition seems to me to be one of a struggle to see, to understand, rather than necessarily one of perpetual amnesia.  We have not “kept pace with  [the] evolution” of “new space” (11) – and time – but we inevitably do adapt and evolve, and I wonder if we think the current generation has caught up?

re-memory

i dug up these two little old drawings of mine last night.  i have a pin-up thursday for which i should have a trove of models and drawings.  the drawings should be small, apparently, and abstract and evocative.  with particular emphasis on air and water; this is our substance-focus so to speak.

anyway, i was thinking about technique, and i remembered these.  we’ll see what comes out of the memory.

Happy Hearts Day

My mom sent these in the mail.  There is something absolutely divine about receiving an envelope full of flying hearts … no words necessary.  Happy Valentine’s Day to all my loves.

THESIS PREP // FIRST IDEAS

i’m posting these from last week… these are the first ideas.  they are mostly programmatic.  the critical will come, must come.  time to be brave… and focused!

TOPIC 1: The FUTURE of URBAN FOOD DISTRIBUTION
POTENTIAL SITEs: Clinton Hill, BROOKLYN, NY // Dudley Square or East Boston, BOSTON
Food
Interest:
Challenging typical neighborhood gentrification through creation of new territories centered on shared needs.  Food is considered the center of community activity in this case.
This project could be explored through design of retail and/or cooperative store, café/restaurant, and linked warehouse distribution center.  A community garden (network) and play-spaces are also a possibility.

TOPIC 2: UTOPIA for TODAY? TOURISM + AGRICULTURE
POTENTIAL SITEs: Tuscany, ITALY // Western MASS
Local Node + Global Network:
This could occur through implementation of a working farm and related school or artist’s residency program.
Possible programs:
-working olive farm (material=olive trees) / dairy farm (material=cows)  -primary school or language school or other school (longest stay)  -bed and breakfast (short term stay)  -artist’s retreat (longer stay)  -tourist attraction  -local support  -community garden.
Precedents:
‘agritourismo’ in Italy and elsewhere.  Small farms in western mass.  Boarding schools (proposal would be to envision a new kind of live/study)

TOPIC 3: The NEW AMERICAN CLASSROOM
POTENTIAL SITEs: PROTOTYPE for MULTIPLE SITES
(based on 2009 Open Architecture Challenge: Classroom)
http://bustler.net/index.php/competition/open_architecture_challenge_2009/
Possible project:
Design a new modular classroom for America.  temporary = permanent ?
Background (from competition brief):
“In the United States alone more than 6 million students spend much of their day in “portable” classrooms. Anyone who has spent time in one of these classrooms knows that we can do better.
In 2003, the Modular Building Institute estimated that more than 220,000 K-12 portable classrooms were in use by public school systems. Because school systems cannot readily access capital funding, temporary and makeshift classrooms have become an unintended fixture of many educational campuses.
In Florida alone, 75 percent of a school’s portables are now counted as permanent classroom space.”

Question #2: The Current State of Blurring

Readings:

Various readings from: Hunch, The Berlage Institute Report 6/7, Summer 2003

Various readings from: Assemblage 41, Cambridge: MIT Press 2000

Alejandro Zaera Polo, “A Scientific Autobiography,” Harvard Design Magazine 21, p.5-15

Rem Koolhaas, “Europeans: Biuer! Dali and Le Corbusier Conquer New York,” Delirious New York (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1994 (1978), p,235-249

Stan Allen/James Corner, “Urban Natures,” The State of Architecture at the Beginning of the 21st Century (New York: The Monacelli Press, 2003), p.16-17

Question # 2

In her April 2000 article for the final Assemblage, Laura Kurgan anticipates the direction taken by many of the arguments that develop in Assemblage’s wake (as we hear this week in the -also dated- voices in Hunch).  Kurgan concludes her piece by saying “…we do not live in virtual space alone.  The same networks that build the virtual globe form and transform physical spaces along the way.  In practice, in our practices, we need to expose these visible and invisible lines- register them, archive them, perform them, remember them.  They are sometimes permanent and ineradicable, and sometimes shifting, moving, every second of every day.  A critical practice thus includes the fabrication of lines and the programming of spaces; beginning with an excess of data, it materializes in the reassembly of data to build other spaces of globalization.” (37, last para.)

Here, Kurgan raises the issue of boundaries, a thread we see throughout this week’s readings.  She also highlights architecture’s specific ability to engage with space, with the physical world (as Ando bluntly reinforces in Hunch).   Whereas Whiting reminds us that Assemblage was founded on the “blurring of boundaries… the refusal to affirm a position,” van Toorn asserts, “it is no longer acceptable for the architect to be ambiguous.”  Further articulating this stance, Allen and Arets both argue for a more “generous approach towards reality” (Allen, 66): the call for less ambiguity, less blurring, is for more engagement with the real world.
Maas’s idea that architecture “turns into a permanent testing ground that keeps in touch with an accelerating world” (322) is compelling: can architecture provide the world with a way of understanding the current “historical moment” and “simultaneously point beyond its limits, opening the way for new potentialities” (Mertins, 334) ?
But, instead of an all out rejection of the previous attitude towards blurring as a fixed, critical necessity, whether with regard to the edges of the discipline or internally as a result of ‘chatter,’ (and of course in relation to all of the concept’s built manifestations), I rather read a shift in the discipline towards a more fluid focusing in and out.  The virtual + actual world of today demands it.
So, what is architecture’s current (critical, theoretical and practical) relationship to the idea of blurring?  How do we deal –architecturally- with the flux between visible and invisible?

Question #1: On Language

This semester I will post my Weekly Questions for 4.297  Adaptations: The Architectural Project in the Age of Postproduction

This weeks readings were: Mark Wigley, “Story Time” Assemblage 27 August 1995, p.81-94 and K. Michael Hays, “Critical Architecture Between Culture and Form” Perspecta 21, 1984, p.14-29.

I agree that Wigley’s writing (and speech) is ‘cool’ and ‘easy.’ And as Ben pointed out, he is ’smooth and clever’ when it comes to delivering a tricky message. But the style is deceptive, as the content is not so easy. The thing about Wigley that always shocks me is how something so seemingly ‘easy and cool’ could actually be so dense and evasive. I love Wigley’s writing, (and his arguments) but I find myself re-reading the same sentence three times: the smoothness is slippery. I imagine listening to him (instead of reading him) would be even more spellbinding. Wigley must deliver an experience, not just a talk.

On the other hand, Hays is serious. He conveys arduousness in his task; he wants the reader to slow down and work through the argument (but not plod through it; plodding would be dull, and Hays is not dull). Hays convinces his reader through an indisputable structural logic and an unhesitating delivery. He is commanding.

Language is not transparent. John Stewart’s critique of Obama’s Inaugural Speech on The Daily Show reveals the extent to which this will always be true. Even when direct parallels are made to that which we have collectively decided is Wrong (with a capital ‘Dubya’), we are still seduced by Obama’s rhetoric, his simultaneously oratorical and conversational style. It is due in large part to this rhetorical style that historians and critics have called Obama “especially adept at framing the moment and reaching for a larger context.”(1) Is this not what we attempt to do in architecture, in our projects, in our stories? There are many questions embedded in this trajectory. But here is one: what exactly is the role of ’style’ when it comes to critique of architecture, and what is, or will be, or should be ‘contemporary’ style, the style of our time? And why? It may be that the stories we tell are besides the point. Perhaps it is the way we tell those stories that needs (and deserves) more critical attention in order to propel us consciously into the discipline’s future.