Abstract from last week…

FOOD OPERATIONS
MORGAN PINNEY // abstract // 5 March 2009

THE ISSUE

Food is at the epicenter of impending crises as well as integrally related to the current economic one.  In his October 9th 2008 letter to the President-Elect, environmental journalist and professor Michael Pollan presents the critical case for re-thinking how we think about food:
“… you will need not simply to address food prices but to make the reform of the entire food system one of the highest priorities of your administration: unless you do, you will not be able to make significant progress on the health care crisis, energy independence or climate change.  Unlike food, these are issues you campaign on- but as you try to address then you will quickly discover that the way we currently grow, process and eat food in America goes to the heart of all three problems and will have to change if we hope to solve them.” 1

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 the individual, local, national and international levels.  Questions to and by the media and government related to the issue of food are increasing.  The need for action across disciplines and at multiple scales is necessary.  Food as a critical, contemporary issue is well positioned for a thesis investigation and proposition.

THE PROJECT

Sited in Clinton Hill, between the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Fort Greene and Bed-Stuy, my thesis project seeks to address urban food production and distribution at the community scale with the intention of developing a case-model.  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.”2   This speaks to two basic principles: people need food to live and people come together around food.  I argue food has the potential to mobilize and support sustainable, diverse development within a community by establishing a measure against dilution of difference and the anesthetizing effects of gentrification.  Architecture can activate that potential spatially.  Approached as a infrastructural system, architecture may have the capacity to imagine and instigate a larger paradigm shift: an architecture of hope can start with food.

1.  Pollan, Michael.  “Farmer in Chief” The New York Times Magazine: The Food Issue  9 October 2008 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/magazine/12policy-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine&oref=slogin

2.  Barber, Dan and Fred Kirschenmann. “Menu for the Next Prez” Grist, Op-ed dialogue, http://www.grist.org/feature/2008/10/23/food_policy/  23 October 2008.

small scale / big impact urban interventions

H told me about this cool site and exhibit hosted by the Canadian Centre for Architecture:

http://cca-actions.org/search-actions/50

you can also submit!  fun fun.

maybe i will take a que and work out some smaller scale concept proposals as part of my thesis research.

Urban Farmhouse

Here’s a thesis-prep concept collage.  Testing ideas. testing images.

A Farmhouse for Brooklyn

Question #5: Running Room in the Loopholes

I’ll post the reading list soon…

there were selections from Eisenman, Silvetti, Jones, Kwinter and Rowe.

“A loophole is thus not a sign of disorder, but a core sample through order, revealing aspects of the system that the manual or rulebook may not even know.” (Wes Jones)

Isn’t the loophole another way of looking for a way to create running room? Culturally and in our specific practice? To have more fun, to escape being overly idealist or god-forbid, boring?

I definitely don’t read Wes Jones’ studio brief as prescribing another arbitrary mode to work in… I read it as an attempt to develop a practice of finding and designing the ‘running-room’ we were reading/talking about last week. I think of running-room, and the search for loopholes in which to practice as critical to “the architecture of hope” as Kwinter defines it. And if “concepts” are the key to this hope as he defines it, then I will take the liberty of mis-using Silvetti’s concluding words to assert that concepts are [also] certainly “worthy of exploration, particularly in good schools of architecture, where we are concerned, above all, with education and the advancement of knowledge.” We are most concerned with thinking, (and working in “constant contact with the culture and ethos of difficulty”) in order that we may find a way to be more than “dilettantes” and do more than overly idealist or boring work that operates within the established modes of Program or Paradigm, of function/form, of Programism, Thematization, Blobs or Literalism- depending on who you talk to. Loopholes, by definition, defy being defined. They might be one version of the ‘Possible’ Rowe is looking for.