October Site Updates

I added the following books to my library:



Unlike the following, this book is a fairly easy read on the topic of the role of architecture in regards to rampant capitalism. Should architects actively consider their work as "product" or "holistic branding" (ie sell out like Kevin Erwin Kelley) or maintain a more skeptical view of the carnival of commodification while attempting to position the concrete elements of the built environment in opposition to unchecked consumption? BONUS: Great introduction by Kenneth Frampton




I tend to read multiple books at the same time. One advantage of this is it helps me to draw serendipitous parallels between divergent texts. Another advantage is it allows me to take a mental break after running my cerebrum at a wall for a hundred pages. Like Henri LeFebvre's Urban Revolution this is one of those books. Two essays written a period apart by Negri, referring to earlier writings, many of which were written while he was in jail in Italy, (some are non-existant) this writing examines the importance of time in Marxist thought within the framework of Italian post-Marxism. Difficult enough perhaps to begin with the sheer prolixity and demanding concepts ensure that I will probably be nursing this one through New Years but I have gained some valuable insights so far... BONUS: Sexy cover that has no relation whatsoever to the thought inside!



The classic mental gymnastics of one of the most original thinkers of the past century, this collection of essays uses the paintings of the surrealist Réné Magritte to argue that, within the system of Modern thought, people falsely equate mere visual representation with reality. I find this question quite pertinent in these current times of War received by video feed and government by dubious proxy. Perhaps the scandalous antics of the present administration are just the defining culmination of modern systems of thought in action? Terrifying! BONUS: confuse the hell out of fellow passengers on the metro/bus/plane etc who are convinced that there is indeed a pipe on the cover!

I'm aware that most of you have probably read this already... we'll I haven't so cut me some slack!


Also, if there are any books you would like to recommend please leave them in the comments section as I love a new read.


In addition I added the following blogs and journals to the links bar:

Freedom of Spoke

A good friend from high school is riding over 3,000 miles from California to St. Augustine Florida on his bike to raise money for research into Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. This is his blog.

Abstract Dynamics

Adam Ash

AnArchitecture

Street Use

Architecture (establishment) as totalitarian dystopia

I've been busy with a lot of petty annoyances (more on that in a future post) and projects, so I just ran across a fascinating part by part comparison of the architectural establishment and Oceania in George Orwell's 1984. Leave it to Norman Blogster over at Part IV to break it down like this:

“‘The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought.’

Orwell divides society into three segments - the Inner Circle, the Outer Circle and the Proletariat. The Inner and Outer Circles are different levels of membership of the Party. The Party is quite clearly the architectural establishment, not the RIBA as you might think. The following quotes are taken from Part 1, Chapter 7.

‘Life, if you looked about you, bore no resemblance not only to the lies that streamed out of the telescreens, but even to the ideals that the Party was trying to achieve. Great areas of it, even for a Party member, were neutral and non-political, a matter of slogging through dreary jobs, fighting for a place on the Tube... The ideal set up by the Party was something huge, terrible, and glittering - a world of steel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons - a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting...’

You can think of the proles as the general public - those who are unfettered by the brainwashing of architectural education:

‘...the Party taught that the proles were natural inferiors who must be kept in subjection, like animals, by the application of a few simple rules. In reality very little was known about the proles. It was not necessary to know much. So long as they continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance... To keep them in control was not difficult.’

The Outer Circle are the architects and the students of architecture. They tow the Party line, not really questioning why, just happy to be members in a privileged position (last paragraph of Part2, Chapter 5):

‘In the ramifications of party doctrine she had not the faintest interest. Whenever he began to talk of the principles of Ingsoc, doublethink, the mutability of the past, and the denial of objective reality, and to use Newspeak words, she became bored and confused and said that she never paid any attention to that kind of thing... Talking to her, he realized how easy it was to present an appearance of orthodoxy while having no grasp whatever of what orthodoxy meant. In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.’

Finally, the Inner Circle. This is where the real power lies and is composed of the starchitects, the architectural press, the RIBA (FAIA) and the architectural academics. There is an implicit agreement between this set who direct the Party.
In 1984, we learn most about the Inner Circle and its relation to the Outer Circle when the hero Winston Smith starts to read a smuggled copy of "The theory and practice of oligarchical collectivism" - the book of the Party. It's online here. I'm quoting from Chapter III - War and Peace:

‘In practice the needs of the population are always underestimated, with the result that there is a chronic shortage of half the necessities of life; but this is looked on as an advantage. It is deliberate policy to keep even the favoured groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another. By the standards of the early twentieth century, even a member of the Inner Party lives an austere, laborious kind of life. Nevertheless, the few luxuries that he does enjoy his large, well-appointed flat, the better texture of his clothes, the better quality of his food and drink and tobacco, his two or three servants, his private motor-car or helicopter -- set him in a different world from a member of the Outer Party, and the members of the Outer Party have a similar advantage in comparison with the submerged masses whom we call 'the proles'’

...and...

‘War, it will be seen, accomplishes the necessary destruction, but accomplishes it in a psychologically acceptable way. In principle it would be quite simple to waste the surplus labour of the world by building temples and pyramids, by digging holes and filling them up again, or even by producing vast quantities of goods and then setting fire to them. But this would provide only the economic and not the emotional basis for a hierarchical society. What is concerned here is not the morale of masses, whose attitude is unimportant so long as they are kept steadily at work, but the morale of the Party itself. Even the humblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war... In his capacity as an administrator, it is often necessary for a member of the Inner Party to know that this or that item of war news is untruthful, and he may often be aware that the entire war is spurious and is either not happening or is being waged for purposes quite other than the declared ones: but such knowledge is easily neutralized by the technique of doublethink. Meanwhile no Inner Party member wavers for an instant in his mystical belief that the war is real, and that it is bound to end victoriously, with Oceania the undisputed master of the entire world.’

It is this inert orthodoxy of power and intellectual control that causes those outside the status quo to either lose faith and crumble or, otherwise, become ridiculous characters of themselves through their advocacy of their own position. I was present at a lecture recently by one of these "outsider" thinkers who was hellbent on convincing everybody that his position was the way of the future. After the lecture finally ended somewhere past the three hour mark an influential member of the audience was heard to comment "the longer he tried to convince us of his intelligence, the less I believed it." If unyielding self-advocacy becomes a parody then how is one to fight the entrenched mass of the overlords establishment?


That is a question I may address in the future, but until then I remain open to suggestions.


Read more here:
Part I: The Party
Part II: Doublethink and Duckspeak
Part III: Hate Week, Hangings and More

On the subject of torture...

Time I weighed in on the political events of last week:

Back in 1996, a vote for the War Crimes Act, which passed both houses with overwhelming support, could have been considered a vote for the U.S. to follow the Geneva Conventions to the letter. When a House Judiciary Committee panel first considered the War Crimes Act in June 1996, John McNeil, then a senior deputy counsel at the Department of Defense, testified that the bill was "an opportunity for members of Congress to endorse the idea that the United States, as a political matter, should be seen as fully in conformity with its international obligations in this very sensitive area."

But at the time Republicans were really focused on making sure U.S. courts would be able to prosecute war crimes committed against American citizens, not by them. Inhofe took to the Senate floor that August to say the War Crimes Act would protect "our young troops" in the event "a crime is perpetrated against them."

It was unthinkable back then that it might be the United States that was systematically violating the Geneva Conventions. "There was never any hint or clue that this might be applied to us," stated Gary Solis, an expert on the law of war at Georgetown University. Elisa Massimino, Washington director of Human Rights First, explained, "No one ever questioned that the U.S. would comply with the full range of the Geneva Conventions obligations."

That is, no one doubted the U.S. would comply until early this month...

So, therefore, when being part of the international community will help protect the lives of our soldiers the Geneva Convention is our friend, but when we are busy killing our own troops through incompetence and negligence and we justify torture as being a good PR tool that will help Joe Sixpack wrongly believe that the actions of this administration (and its war on a philosophical construct) have made us safer, then it is perfectly acceptable to pull a bigger about face than Lieutenant Kerry ever perpetrated.

Torture, as so many have noted, is simply in the worst interests for our country by not only inspiring (and rightly so) hatred around the world, but by also empowering out darkest motivations:

Granted such liberty in dealing with prisoners, some officers started to enjoy themselves. They made up games, forcing prisoners to dance, smearing glue on their heads, stripping them naked, pouring frigid water over them. Sometimes guards had too much fun and a prisoner died. Then prison-appointed doctors, who often participated in the interrogations, wrote up fictive autopsy reports.

America?
No. This passage describes Soviet Gulags.

Taken from an interview in Harper's historian Kate brown notes that

Declassified FBI and U.S. Army files detailing abuses of detainees in U.S. detention centers uncannily echo Soviet NKVD reports. They recount late-night roundups of civilians and describe prisoners held in chambers of extreme heat or cold, chained naked to the floor without food and water for days on end, defecating on themselves, beaten (some to death), forced to dance, to lick their shoes and body parts, to crawl around, and to bark like dogs. American doctors and psychiatrists helped devise methods of inflicting pain and fear to elicit confessions, and they signed false reports when detainees died in custody.

Frightening.

But as Paul Rieckhoff (an infantry officer who served in Iraq) explains the new stance on terror has soldiers, well, terrified:

IN 2002, I attended the Infantry Officer Basic Course at Fort Benning, Ga. At “the Schoolhouse,” every new Army infantry officer spent six months studying the basics of his craft, including the rules of war.

I remember a seasoned senior officer explaining the importance of the Geneva Conventions. He said, “When an enemy fighter knows he’ll be treated well by United States forces if he is captured, he is more likely to give up.”

A year later on the streets of Baghdad, I saw countless insurgents surrender when faced with the prospect of a hot meal, a pack of cigarettes and air-conditioning. America’s moral integrity was the single most important weapon my platoon had on the streets of Iraq. It saved innumerable lives, encouraged cooperation with our allies and deterred Iraqis from joining the growing insurgency.

But those days are over. America’s moral standing has eroded, thanks to its flawed rationale for war and scandals like Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo and Haditha. The last thing we can afford now is to leave Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions open to reinterpretation, as President Bush proposed to do and can still do under the compromise bill that emerged last week...

But the fight over Article 3 concerns not only Al Qaeda and the war in Iraq. It also affects future wars, because when we lower the bar for the treatment of our prisoners, other countries feel justified in doing the same. Four years ago in Liberia, in an attempt to preserve his corrupt authority, President Charles Taylor adopted the Bush administration’s phrase “unlawful combatants” to describe prisoners he wished to try outside of civilian courts. Today Mr. Taylor stands before The Hague accused of war crimes.

via Adam Ash
More in the LA Times

But what do I know?
I'm just a useless architecture student not an omnipotent congressman...

...and we must be safer sine we red-stamped torture last week because today liquids have been allowed back on planes

An Open Letter Concerning Play

Sir - As professionals and academics from a range of backgrounds, we are deeply concerned at the escalating incidence of childhood depression and children’s behavioural and developmental conditions. We believe this is largely due to a lack of understanding, on the part of both politicians and the general public, of the realities and subtleties of child development.

Since children’s brains are still developing, they cannot adjust – as full-grown adults can – to the effects of ever more rapid technological and cultural change. They still need what developing human beings have always needed, including real food (as opposed to processed “junk”), real play (as opposed to sedentary, screen-based entertainment), first-hand experience of the world they live in and regular interaction with the real-life significant adults in their lives.

They also need time. In a fast-moving hyper-competitive culture, today’s children are expected to cope with an ever-earlier start to formal schoolwork and an overly academic test-driven primary curriculum. They are pushed by market forces to act and dress like mini-adults and exposed via the electronic media to material which would have been considered unsuitable for children even in the very recent past.

Our society rightly takes great pains to protect children from physical harm, but seems to have lost sight of their emotional and social needs. However, it’s now clear that the mental health of an unacceptable number of children is being unnecessarily compromised, and that this is almost certainly a key factor in the rise of substance abuse, violence and self-harm amongst our young people.

This is a complex socio-cultural problem to which there is no simple solution, but a sensible first step would be to encourage parents and policy-makers to start talking about ways of improving children’s well-being. We therefore propose as a matter of urgency that public debate be initiated on child-rearing in the 21st century this issue should be central to public policy-making in coming decades.
(emphasis added)
- Letter to the Daily Telegraph (and response here)

Perhaps it is time we not only address the welfare of our children, but also of ourselves. When is the last time you engaged in an activity not related to work, school, socialization with the opposite sex (or same for those of you who swing that way), or personal gain? Oops.. too late

It appears I'm too late on this one too

I feel that architects, especially academics and students, are at the greatest risk as we are all rallying under the same deluded masochistic banner of production; it might be curious to ask how many times did the person with the better project lose to the one who spent 86 sleepless hours working on theirs? Very rarely does this happen in my experience because the one who spent endless hours throwing together pieces of cardboard and hoping the form looks good are far less invested in their design then those who approach it from a philosophical and/or intellectual framework. Architecture is of the world and we need to experience it in its fullness so that we may adequately design for it instead of just sexing up form in the solitary confinement of our studios.

Play is immersion, training, understanding, action, and so much more that adds up to the common denominator of life.

Sunset on Collins Ave

Architecture/Philosophy blog begets Photoblog:
Exquisite Struggle presents FotoFriday

Sunset on Collins Ave

Originally uploaded by postmodern sleaze.

Sunset behind the famed hotels of Miami Beach: the Delano (redesigned by Starck -- I love the original windows), the National, The Sagamore, The DiLido (closed for renovation) and the Ritz-Carlton.

Catalina

Architecture/Philosophy blog begets Photoblog:
Exquisite Struggle presents FotoFriday

Catalina

Originally uploaded by postmodern sleaze.

Courtyard Garden of the Catalina Hotel on Collins... site of so much inebriation during happy hour. Nice architectural use of bamboo and lighing...

Moonglow Neon and Oculus

Architecture/Philosophy blog begets Photoblog:
Exquisite Struggle presents FotoFriday

Moonglow Neon and Oculus

Originally uploaded by postmodern sleaze.

Oculus in another shade structure designed by Morris Lapidus on the Lincoln Road Mall

Miami Modern (MiMo)

Architecture/Philosophy blog begets Photoblog:
Exquisite Struggle presents FotoFriday

Miami Modern

Originally uploaded by postmodern sleaze.

One of the shade structures designed by Morris Lapidus on the Lincoln Street Mall (one of the few successful pedestrian malls in America)

Colony Theater and Saxophonist

Architecture/Philosophy blog begets Photoblog:
Exquisite Struggle presents FotoFriday

colony theater and saxophonist

Originally uploaded by postmodern sleaze.

Lone street musician playing under the canopy for the Colony Theater on Lincoln Road

Sterling Building

Architecture/Philosophy blog begets Photoblog:
Exquisite Struggle presents FotoFriday

sterling building

Originally uploaded by postmodern sleaze.

Interesting typology with a Design Within Reach store behind the main block accessible from a sizable courtyard. Nice radiused glass and lighting...

Surfcomber

Architecture/Philosophy blog begets Photoblog:
Exquisite Struggle presents FotoFriday

Surfcomber

Originally uploaded by postmodern sleaze.

The Surfcomber Hotel on Collins. Again lighting works to emphasize the setbacks and horizontal detail of the building.

Miami Beach Skyline

Architecture/Philosophy blog begets Photoblog:
Exquisite Struggle presents FotoFriday

Miami Beach Skyline

Originally uploaded by postmodern sleaze.

Skyline, Miami Beach (Loew's/ The Palms in far background)

Claremont

Architecture/Philosophy blog begets Photoblog:
Exquisite Struggle presents FotoFriday

claremont

Originally uploaded by postmodern sleaze.

Artful use of neon to liven up an otherwise bland art deco hotel. Note the art deco-ish a/c unit covers... nice!

Simply Terrifying!

One key can crack open our "democratically elected" government... the key to the mini-bar?

The access panel door on a Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine — the door that protects the memory card that stores the votes, and is the main barrier to the injection of a virus — can be opened with a standard key that is widely available on the Internet.

...We did a live demo for our Princeton Computer Science colleagues of the vote-stealing software described in our paper and video. Afterward, Chris Tengi, a technical staff member, asked to look at the key that came with the voting machine. He noticed an alphanumeric code printed on the key, and remarked that he had a key at home with the same code on it. The next day he brought in his key and sure enough it opened the voting machine.

This seemed like a freakish coincidence — until we learned how common these keys are.

...A little research revealed that the exact same key is used widely in office furniture, electronic equipment, jukeboxes, and hotel minibars. It’s a standard part, and like most standard parts it’s easily purchased on the Internet. We bought several keys from an office furniture key shop — they open the voting machine too. We ordered another key on eBay from a jukebox supply shop. The keys can be purchased from many online merchants.

Of course the C.E.O. of Diebold lived in a suburb of my hometown and actively campaigned and recruited donors for Bush in 2004 (including writing a letter promising to deliver GOP votes for the president) while simultaneously deploying his flawed machines all over Ohio thanks to an agreement with Ken Blackwell who is now running for governor.

My head hurts...

It's all just a little bit of history repeating

Angela Voulangas notes a fascinating phenomena in her blog (what is this?)



The photo on the left is from the June 06 Martha Stewart Living, on the right is the Baldizzi kitchen as recreated to c.1935 in the Lower East Side Tenement Museum.


The Martha aesthetic rarefies the commonplace and defamiliarizes it. It takes the everyday and makes it exclusive.

This is a poignant example of the capacity of capitalism to subsume anything and everything. As the whirlwind of style continues to accelerate (in part due to manufactured obsolescence and the need to keep fueling consumption in order to stay solvent, let alone turn a profit) everything and anything may be appropriated for unlikely ends. What is surprising is that a brand (like Polo/RL) based so solidly on marketing the fictive lifestyle of landed gentry circa 1920 to suburban cul-de-sacs and double-wides throughout the land would be brash enough to sell the dwindling middle class and the working poor an image of themselves... or rather their forebears. I suppose the convenience imagery of the electric iron and egyptian cotton towels are more than enough to succeed but I really hope this is the over the top result of someone's deliberate sense of irony here. (It seems the design equivalent of a stunt Mr. Cameron Giles might pull.)

I'm resolved to the fact some photo layout designer was low on ideas and dropped by the tenement museum though... oh what a world we live in!


(what is this?): aesthetic laundry: notes

Sayonara Suckers!

Sorry for the lack of adequate blogging, but I wrapped up my project yesterday and will be jetting off to Miami's South Beach for a weekend of debauchery drunkenness Photography and an excuse to recreate Site Visit.

The site for our next project is at the end of Lincoln Road, a Morris Lapidus designed pedestrian street in the heart of SoBe. I plan to drop by his legendary Fontainebleau Hotel (beginning setting for Goldfinger)and possibly the Delano (if this silver-toungued blogger can get past the door staff).

Expect results in a future installment of FotoFriday.

Adios...

reawakening: ending dreaming through experience of reality

Evan at Tenuous Resilience recently had a post that caused me to reflect further on a number of issues and perhaps reconsider subcultural praxis. Evan wrote that, in his experience, the most engaging fragments of architecture are the ones that are considered the most dangerous from a conventional viewpoint.

He continues:
"So, what is the essence of this problem? Is the US legal system so rife with frivolous lawsuits that building codes must comply to ridiculous standards that forsake any possibility of personal responsibility? Is the protection of our populous so important to our policymakers that we must eliminate every possible source of harm? What happened to the America that was wild and exciting, where anyone could strive for their dreams or die trying, where the very real possibility of failure made the win that much richer? How did we become a nation of frightened hermits, isolated in our armored cul-de-sacs and SUVs? What happened to ambition? Where are the foolhardy?

I think the illusion of safety perpetuated by building codes, warning labels, commercial drugs, and the security-obsessed government is killing our national spirit... Despite the state of the middle east, the American people have not been asked to make any sacrifices, and though we are a "nation at war" you certainly can't tell by the home front. Would a "Manhattan"-scale project for sustainable, green power be enough to wean our economy from unstable foreign oil? Perhaps more importantly, who would benefit from such a project?"

I would first like to address the dialectical relationship between control (vis-a-vis safety codification) and responsibility. This happens to be the one point that I can agree on with my friends who also happen to be professed anarchists. While I hold deep reservations (stemming from my Conrad/Golding influenced conception of human nature) about the human repercussions of abandoning codified strictures of behavior, I will readily admit that too much control yields an immature and potentially irresponsible citizen.

The more that the dangers of the world are kept at arm's length, the more people slip into a protracted state of infantilism. This trend has dire repercussions for the future as it has in the past; as Evan alluded, our current war is essentially a war by proxy for there is no reciprocal war on the homefront. Currently in Iraq the proportion of mercenaries to soldiers and official government representatives is 1:6. Not unlike the end centuries of Rome when the legions were staffed with the same barbarians who would shortly sack the eternal city, (their salaries paid by rich senators who disdained the risk of battle) this phenomena will only grow more severe in the coming years. This unfortunately is a self perpetuating cycle; as we continue to wage wars and inflect misery around the globe without any meaningful correlation at home, we, as a population, can easily forget the devastation occurring far away and can become distracted by Bennifer, TomKat or whatever other trifling matter grabs headlines and seizes our collective (un)conscious.

Our utter disconnection and distraction will only serve to get us more embroiled as we fail to fulfill our role by asking difficult questions of our leaders. Furthermore, as other peoples see our inability to concentrate on what our very own government (or elite) is perpetrating, our problems will only worsen. Could it not be argued that the strictures, rules, and codes that protect us ourselves, and by extension, the pain of life can be understood not only to maintain, but to enhance the status quo by allowing us to be distracted by our bread and circuses?

There is a fascinating inversion to the menace of complacency brought about by the metastasizing illusion of safety and all-consuming desire for this chimera that occurs primarily on a subcultural level; as our species has dealt more or less successfully with danger for millennia a need for it has become ingrained in our psyche. Such subcultural phenomena as ultimate fighting or even extreme sports (although at this point their ability to generate profit seems to have made them defacto cultural components of the status quo) exist to fulfill the basic need for danger vis-a-vis the "rush" or adrenaline high generated as a protective impulse due to extreme stress.

In addition to the segment of pure adrenaline junkies there is a large proportion of seemingly rational people who place themselves in harm's way simply for the emotional and mental immediacy generated through such an action. I have heard climbers describe that the joy they get from conquering a vertical cliff face stems from the complete mental focus and utter lucidity they experience as they contemplate where to find safe handholds. I can personally attest that the experience of having to vault off of a impassable catwalk to the flange of a rusted generator thirty feet above the floor in a derelict power station cut like a hot knife through the butter of the fog of everyday life. Before I ramble on for too long I would like to close with a question: if we agree that the unexamined life is not worth living, can we also posit that a life safe from harm and challenge is not a life at all?

I referenced it in the last post, but this is cool!

Commissioned for the 2006 Kwangju Biannale in South Korea, this map traces the myriad threads that link the United States, a myriad of private military contractors (PMC's), and the countries of Columbia and Iraq. (Currently 1 in 6 personnel in Iraq are private contractors) We certainly are living in the age of mercenary war, when
"The coalition of the willing has become the coalition of the billing"

This definitely has serious implications for the future of the Geneva convention as well as the future and viability of State actors in the face of a dominating majority of loyalty-impaired private forces.

Full Image here (50'x9')

via Critical Spatial Practice

The man is on fire!

Banksy hits again...
This time bringing a slice of Gitmo to Disneyland.



From Wooster Collective:

"Families visiting Disneyland on their holiday this week saw a life-size Guantanamo bay inmate standing inside the Rocky Mountain Railroad ride at Disneyland in Anaheim California.

The sculpture, consisting of an inflatable doll dressed in an orange jumpsuit with its hands and feet manacled remained in place for one and a half hours before Disneyland's security staff shut down the ride and removed it amid fears over public safety."

As regular readers know, I'm a strong advocate of Banksy's illicit deployment of art to challenge societal norms and foster social advocacy. It seems he must have been in LA to set up his upcoming secret art show and taken some time off to conflate those caught in the catch 22 of macronational, post-globalized prison camps and the happy spectacle-blinded apathetic citizens who allow the phenomena to persist.

RELATED:

What is it about designers?

(and I ask that being something even worse, a design student, myself...)

Lauren Collins has an interesting article in the upcoming issue of the New Yorker concerning a partnership between the New York School of Visual Arts and the World Monuments Fund to restore a Katrina-ravaged home for a widowed grandmother living on fixed means in Bay St. Louis Mississippi. This idea intrigues me (just as Rural Studio is a continual source of inspiration) as it should help to buttress a design education anchored in the rarefied realm of aesthetics with the practical experience of innovating with limited means, and one hopes, a healthy dose of social concern. While I am the last person to advocate a historicist approach to such a project, it seems preferable to the designs that did emerge:


"Adam Greco, a junior wearing a white leather belt and matching loafers, was first up. Using a PowerPoint slide show, he suggested a kaleidoscopic Clarence House wallpaper (“The swirl kind of really evokes the weather and what you’ve been through”) for the center hall, along with six light fixtures (“Seaglass nods to the beauty of nature’s reclamation”) and, in every room, hurricane lamps..."


"Stephen Honeywell, who in normal circumstances considers himself more of a “high-end residential person” than a preservationist, went next. He apologized for having junked the tête-à-tête chair, but he did suggest that Phillips might want to paint the kitchen seafoam green and install a stainless-steel refrigerator with a built-in TV. “I didn’t even know they had that,” Phillips said."


...you know what I'm not even going to continue; you people fill in the critique.

Weekend News: Banksy takes on Paris Hilton

Lost deep in my slumbers on this last golden three day weekend of summer, (or more actually struggling to come up with a garden design that is radical enough for my aesthetic... ironic that the first landscape project I've ever done is the first project in architecture grad school) I pretty much missed this story when it broke. British graffiti/street art/media jamming superstar BANKSY previously known for his amazing stencil work, illegal art installations in world famous museums, murals on the Israeli Containment Wall, and industrial re-designs has locked his sights on America's sluttiest, richest, most notorious ex-debutante.

First a quote, then my analysis:

"The secretive artist has smuggled 500 doctored copies of Paris Hilton's debut album into music stores throughout the UK, where they have sold without the shops' knowledge.

In place of Ms Hilton's bubble-gum pop songs, the CDs feature Banksy's own rudimentary compositions. On the cover of the doctored CD, Ms Hilton's dress has been digitally repositioned to reveal her bare breasts; on an inside photo, her head has been replaced with that of her dog. On the back cover, the original song titles have been replaced with a list of questions: "Why am I famous?", "What have I done?" and "What am I for?" Inside the accompanying booklet, a picture of the heiress emerging from a luxury car has been retouched to include a group of homeless people. In another shot, Ms Hilton's head has been superimposed on a shop window mannequin beneath a banner reading: "Thou Shalt Not Worship False Icons."

Instead of Ms Hilton's own compositions, the replacement CD features 40 minutes of a basic rhythm track over which Banksy has dubbed Ms Hilton's catchphrase "That's hot!" and other extracts from her reality TV programme The Simple Life.

--The Independant 03 September 2006


This is a fortuitous confluence for this mild-mannered blogger. Last autumn I actually wrote and presented a paper using Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition as the starting point for a discussion on radical attempts to retake recently privatized realms back to the public sphere. Using concepts dating to Situationist International (derive, detournement, etc...) I exposed such actions as Urban Exploration, Shop-Dropping, and graffiti as inherently public and controversial due to their inherent opposition to a hyper-capitalized, privatized culture.

And what happens?

My example of "post-graffiti radical practitioner" goes and pulls what might be the greatest shop-dropping stunt ever. (Well the Barbie Liberation Organization's operation was pretty sweet too...)

With gleeful abandon Banksy photoshopped a dog onto Paris Hilton's neck (a nice surrealist move if ever there was one) and devised an unforgettable soundtrack (download below). Banksy's questions are blunt, unforgiving, and cut through the simulacra (vapid image of pop stardom rooted in vapid stereotype of spoiled heiress) that is Hilton: Why Am I Famous? What Have I Done? What Am I For? With these three questions Banksy, who has made a career of graphical social activism under illegal to life threatening conditions, challenges not just Ms. Hilton, but her target demographic as a whole to reconnect and involve themselves within the world and focus their illusionary lives around a concrete goal of social justice.


LINK TO IMAGES

LINK TO BANKSY's MUSIC

WATCH BANKSY IN ACTION [YouTube]:

Thor's Hammer

Exquisite Struggle presents FotoFriday
Thor's Hammer

Originally uploaded by postmodern sleaze.

The top of a three story tall generator as seen from catwalk.

(Photo taken from July expedition with Hannah and Rhetoric to CCF)

Space

Exquisite Struggle presents FotoFriday
Space

Originally uploaded by postmodern sleaze.

Architecture is Light and Space
(apologies to S. Gideon)

(Photo taken from July expedition with Hannah and Rhetoric to CCF)

Rosette

Exquisite Struggle presents FotoFriday
Rosette

Originally uploaded by postmodern sleaze.

(Photo taken from July expedition with Hannah and Rhetoric to CCF)

Vertigo (mine)

Exquisite Struggle presents FotoFriday
Vertigo (mine)

Originally uploaded by postmodern sleaze.

So this was taken leaning off a rickety catwalk about 50' above the ground... about half the landings were missing, so we had to find alternative ways up... and I was reminded for some reason I'm afraid of heights indoors.

(Photo taken from July expedition with Hannah and Rhetoric to CCF)

Erector Set

Exquisite Struggle presents FotoFriday
Erector Set

Originally uploaded by postmodern sleaze.

(Photo taken from July expedition with Hannah and Rhetoric to CCF)

Impact

Exquisite Struggle presents FotoFriday

Impact


Originally uploaded by postmodern sleaze.

Looking through a skylight...

(Photo taken from July expedition with Hannah and Rhetoric to CCF)

Detrius

Exquisite Struggle presents FotoFriday

Detrius

Originally uploaded by postmodern sleaze.

(Photo taken from July expedition with Hannah and Rhetoric to CCF)

Charred

Exquisite Struggle presents FotoFriday

Charred

Originally uploaded by postmodern sleaze.

(Photo taken from July expedition with Hannah and Rhetoric to CCF)

The New Cityscape of Fear [via Salon]

With the 5th anniversary of 9/11 looming upon us, Salon has begun a series if articles reflecting on the changes that have overtaken the nation. Farhad Manjoo delineates the intense spatial change as the "Cityscape of Fear". Jersey Barriers, Bollards, and French Barriers-cum-Lousy Bikeracks are everywhere defending even the most unlikely of targets. Manjoo references Paul Goldberger's observation that in the past

" ..you used to be able to walk around Manhattan, both on the sidewalks and through the lobbies of large buildings, without showing any credentials. Today that's nearly impossible because entering nearly every building requires passing through a security checkpoint. The checkpoint culture weighs on the soul, reminding us at every point that we live in a dangerous time, and that anyone we see might seek to do us harm."

Interestingly enough, the article points out that Jersey Barriers are actually the urban structural interventionist equivalent of plastic sheets and duck tape because

"The barriers, which were designed as lane separators by New Jersey's state Highway Authority in 1955, are intended to be placed on roads parallel to the direction in which cars are traveling. A vehicle that nudges too close to the barrier will ride up its tapered edge and slide back onto the road, suffering minimal damage. But placed the opposite way -- in front of a building to protect against oncoming attack -- a Jersey barrier is no match for a fast car or truck. In crash tests, speeding vehicles that hit the barriers at obtuse angles simply knock them over or vault over them straight at the target."

Given this revelation we must stop and consider how many extremely inconvenient security measures are simply in place to convey an appearance of protection, or perhaps more darkly, to circumvent traditional freedoms with greater control. After all, we are currently at war (no, not that one... and that one is technically our weapons, not our war). No the earlier war, the Long War, you know the war against the intangible act? Well, seeing the smashing success we had the LAST time we tried that we should redouble advocacy for intelligent safety solutions rather than half measures that compromise safety through false security while depriving us of the communal life we have more or less enjoyed for 230 years.