It is a very seductive argument in a time such as the present when people living in wholly artificial and unnatural cities, far from aboriginal landscapes, often feel overwhelmed by abstractions of every kind, from the dry statistics of global financial crises to the impassioned but still cerebral ideological debates that dominate our politics. Many of us yearn for experiences that take us out of the narrow human world and reconnect us with the less constrictive, richer and in a sense more hopeful world of Nature. The Green movements emerging today testify to this need, as do trends in architecture that emphasize sustainability and the pre-eminence of the organic. It is a mistake to consider them as strictly pragmatic.

The last time this approach was taken up in full force was in the period during and immediately following the First World War. Lasting only a few years, it constituted a movement that was called by critics and later historians “Expressionism.” The natural forms that inspired architects such as Bruno and Max Taut, Hans Poelzig, the Luckhardt Brothers, Hans Scharoun, and others were not so much from the organic world reflecting today’s concerns, but rather from the inorganic, mineral world of rocks and crystals that underlay the industrial revolution then in full swing. Still, the idea of a reconnection with a deeper level of Nature was—and remains—the driving impulse. (left) The interior of the Grosses Schauspielhaus, Berlin, 1919, by Hans Poelzig. A design inspired by  stalactite formations in a mineral cave.

My point here is not to dismiss these architectural movements and trends as merely passing fashions. To the contrary, they are critical counterpoints to dominant trends of our society that—carried too far—become more destructive than creative. Their short-lived nature indicates, however, the limits of trying to embody this need for reconnection only in architectural forms.

LW

(above) Tod’s retail store, Tokyo, by Toyo Ito.

January 7, 2012

SEEING THE BUILDINGS FOR THE TREES

By Sarah Williams Goldhagen

A REVOLUTION in cognitive neuroscience is changing the kinds of experiments that scientists conduct, the kinds of questions economists ask and, increasingly, the ways that architects, landscape architects and urban designers shape our built environment.

This revolution reveals that thought is less transparent to the thinker than it appears and that the mind is less rational than we believe and more associative than we know. Many of the associations we make emerge from the fact that we live inside bodies, in a concrete world, and we tend to think in metaphors grounded in that embodiment.

This metaphorical, embodied quality shapes how we relate to abstract concepts, emotions and human activity. Across cultures, “important” is big and “unimportant” is small, just as your caretakers were once much larger than you. Sometimes your head is “in the clouds.” You approach a task “step by step.”

Some architects are catching on to human cognition’s embodied nature. A few are especially intrigued by metaphors that express bodily experience in the world.

Take the visual metaphor of a tree as shelter. Most people live around, use and look at trees. Children climb them. People gather under them. Nearly everyone at some point uses one to escape the sun.

Recently, architects have deployed tree metaphors in many different settings. At the Kanagawa Institute of Technology in Japan, Junya Ishigami created an elegant “forest” out of slender, white-enameled metal saplings that congregate in clusters and open into clearings of vocational work spaces. In Seville, Spain, a German architect, Jürgen Mayer H., gave definition and shade to the city’s Plaza de la Encarnación with his Metropol Parasol, a lilting, waffled construction of laminated timber.

Such projects follow earlier, very different tree-inspired buildings, like Toyo Ito’s well-known Tod’s, a retail store in Tokyo, and the Mediathèque media library, an exhibition space and cinema in Sendai, Japan, which is so well supported by irregular, hollowed-out, sinuous “trunks” (housing elevators and staircases) that it survived the enormous earthquake last March.

Why should tree metaphors appeal to architects? Why should they be useful, even good, for people? In the Seville project, tree imagery helps construct a distinctive public place that offers shelter and areas to congregate. As under spreading trees, the boundaries defining these spaces are permeable; easy to enter and exit, they offer nature’s spatial freedom yet help people to feel more firmly rooted where they are. And tree metaphors, deployed architecturally, simultaneously lament nature’s absence and symbolically insert its presence.

Tree metaphors also refer to the experience of living in a body on earth. Trees are static, stable objects. Someone connected to a community is “rooted” there; a psychologically sturdy friend’s feet are firmly “planted” on the ground. We use trees to describe human bodies and souls: the area from our neck to pelvis is our “trunk”; someone reliable is “solid as an oak”; someone exploring a new area of inquiry is “branching out.”

Buildings aren’t nature, of course. Tree metaphors like the branching-out facade of Mr. Ito’s Tod’s surprise people. But because the surprise comes along with the implied reassurance of structural integrity (they’re trees, after all), it prompts us to focus on the built environment, perhaps to reconsider its role in our everyday lives.

Architects may also like tree metaphors because a tree’s overall structure is regular, while its fine-grained composition, its tangles of branches, are irregular, an arrangement conducive to the kind of design experimentation offered by new digital technologies.

But the design opportunities that tree metaphors present fail to explain their appearance in such a diverse range of buildings. Trees are familiar. Tree metaphors allow for an architectural inventiveness that stretches people without estranging them.

Trees are just one of the growing number of embodied metaphors used in contemporary architecture: Zaha Hadid builds riverlike spaces, while the Japanese firm Sanaa offers up a habitable mountainscape of a student center at the École Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne, Switzerland.

How many designers are clued in to the ongoing cognitive revolution and its potential for the built environment is unclear. But this collection of architects and projects herald more than just another stylistic or pyrotechnic, technology-driven trend. They point toward how the built environment could — and should — be radically reconceptualized around the fundamental workings of the human mind. We need, and are ever more in a position to create, a richer built environment, grounded in the way people actually experience the world around them.

Sarah Williams Goldhagen, the architecture critic for The New Republic, is writing a book about how people experience the contemporary built environment.

Following are projects referenced in the article:

(above) Metropol Parasol, Spain, by architect Jürgen Mayer H.

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(above) Kanagawa Institute of Technology, Japan, by Junya Ishigami and Associates.

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(above) Mediatheque, Sendai, Japan, by Toyo Ito.

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(above) Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, France, by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa (SANAA).

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Related post on the LW blog: http://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2010/09/13/building-landscapes/

Enough time has passed for us to not feel like voyeurs of disaster, or guilty exploiters of human tragedy. Rather, we can look at these images with a more objective eye, seeing them as types rather than only as documents of a shocking human catastrophe. As types, they give us enough emotional distance to learn something that may stay with us and become useful in the future, rather than be overwhelmed, immobilized by emotion. Ultimately, tears only cloud our vision.

What exactly can we learn from these images of the Honshu quake and the tsunami that devastated the coast of Japan on March 11, 2011?

“Many things” seems too easy an answer—yet it is true. Every branch of human knowledge is affected by what these images portray. As our concern here is the field of architecture, the first thing we need to acknowledge is that it is a field embracing and depending upon many other fields, from sociology to engineering, from law to art—the list is long and tangled. At the same time, architecture is not merely a summation of these many parts, but a synthesis of them, transcending any one to create a holistic idea of human existence.

The predominant thing we architects may learn from viewing and.thinking about these images is that we are helpless to prevent significant damage to buildings and towns caused by even relatively moderate natural upheavals. The 9.0 earthquake in the ocean floor some sixty miles off-coast and resulting tsunami that inundated the east coast of Honshu Island were severe by everyday standards, but nowhere near the intensity of the planet-shaping releases of energy that occasionally convulse the Earth’s surface, extinguishing living species or changing global climates. Human beings and their communities are fragile because they are sustainable only within a narrow range of conditions and possibilities. It is the main task of architecture to maintain this range or to create it where it has not existed before. To some extent it is also architecture’s responsibility to expand this range when people require it not only for survival but also to flourish within the demands of change brought on by catastrophic events such as earthquake and tsunami.

Here are some questions to consider, when looking at these photographs, if we working in the field of architecture want to learn anything from the Honshu disaster:

Much has been destroyed; has anything new been created?

If so, is it evident in the photographs; or is it something the photographs might help us to express?

To what extent is destruction necessary for creation?

Are creation and destruction two separate, opposing things, or are they the same thing, expressed in different ways?

Do the photographs convey beauty of any kind? Or, are they just ugly?

If conveying beauty, what does this tell us about the qualities that constitute beauty?

If conveying the ugly, what does this tell us about the qualities that constitute the ugly?

Do the photographs portray “Nature against the Human?”

If so, is Nature an enemy, to be defeated, conquered, and controlled by Humans?

If not, is Nature’s destruction of what Humans have made serve any conceivable Natural or Human purpose?

What are Nature’s purposes, as embodied in earthquakes and tsunami?

Can architects somehow design for earthquakes and tsunami, or only against them?

I invite the readers of this blog to ask questions relevant to architecture and design—in the Comments section below—that these photographs might suggest….

LW

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Of these and other interpretations I would imagine them as objects yet to be made in a coming world, one in which people have no choice but to work with whatever materials can be scavenged, simply because the manufacture of new materials, even for entirely new purposes, no longer sufficiently occurs.

I admit that this is rather trite and shop-worn scenario—the stuff of pulp science-fiction—but that doesn’t make it less vivid or even less valid. Just from reading the daily newspapers and the spate of new books on various global crises, including the population explosion and a growing scarcity of natural resources, including food, anyone can imagine a coming world in which the overcrowding of cities and the careless squandering of natural and human resources forces the kind of unexpected recycling that Yendo’s work depicts.

So what? we might say. There are plenty of Jeremiads and Cassandra-like predictions out there—who needs another?

In my view, Yendo’s designed objects are much more than a warning. While they are not the solution to a problem whose causes lie far beyond the realm of architecture, they effectively strive to go around the problem, rather then engage it head-on, by addressing not its causes but its effects.

This is a classic problem-solving tactic. Albert Einstein employed it in his postulation of the Special Theory of Relativity. The big debate at the end of the 19th century was about the nature of the “aether,’ an elemental substance that was believed to pervade all of space, enabling everything from the movement of elemental particles like light  to that of the planets. Physicists were at a loss to explain much about it, so they were also unable to effectively address other elemental problems. In developing his theory of “the electrodynamics of moving bodies,” Einstein simply ignored the aether as a hypothesis, constructing his hypothesis in terms independent of it. As a result of the verified success of his theory, the aether became irrelevant in all future discourse. Also—most importantly—entirely new vistas in physics, such as quantum theory, were opened for exploration.

A less exalted example is everyday algebra. If you have an unknown in an equation that you cannot solve for, you simply define it in terms of what you do know, and you will solve for the problematic unknown by indirection.

A downright vulgar example is from American football. If you have a great runner who keeps slamming into a wall of defensive players without any forward progress, you devise a play where he runs around the end of the defensive line, effectively avoiding the problem at the center.

Science and art and daily life are filled with such end runs, and that is what Yendo does with the projects shown here. Rather than throw up his hands in frustration over running up against intractable social and economic problems, he chooses to work with the given conditions and make of them the best he can in human terms. The structures he has designed under the general title of EX-PROSTHESIS are spatially cramped and aesthetically ugly by contemporary standards. Still, they emanate  a peculiarly affirmative quality related to their necessity and not their desirability. The inventive human spirit can and will, Yendo` seems to tell us, prevail under even the most limiting and difficult of conditions.

LW

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“You must be joking!”

Postmodernism is dead and buried.

“But what have we got HERE?”

A Resurrection, or

a remake of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD….

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For more from beyond the grave:  http://www.domusweb.it/en/architecture/reconsidering-postmodernism/

LW

THE GRID AT 200: LINES THAT SHAPED MANHATTAN

By Michael Kimmelman

In the old photograph, a lonely farmhouse sits on a rocky hill, shaded by tall trees. The scene looks like rural Maine. On the modern street, apartment buildings tower above trucks and cars passing a busy corner where an AMC Loews multiplex faces an overpriced hamburger joint and a Coach store.

They are both the same spot. Not so long ago, all things considered, the intersection of Broadway and 84th Street didn’t exist; the area was farmland. “The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan, 1811-2011,” now at the Museum of the City of New York, unearths that 1879 picture of the Brennan Farm among other historic gems. The show celebrates the anniversary of what remains not just a landmark in urban history but in many ways the defining feature of the city.

After all, before it could rise into the sky, Manhattan had to create the streets, avenues and blocks that support the skyscrapers. The grid was big government in action, a commercially minded boon to private development and, almost despite itself, a creative template. With 21st-century problems — environmental, technological, economic and social — now demanding aggressive and socially responsible leadership, the exhibition is a kind of object lesson.

Simeon De Witt, Gouverneur Morris and John Rutherfurd were entrusted with planning the city back in 1811. New York huddled mostly south of Canal Street, but it was booming, its population having tripled to 96,373 since 1790 thanks to the growing port. Civic boosters predicted that 400,000 people would live in the city by 1860. They turned out to be half-right. New York topped 800,000 before the Civil War.

The planners proposed a grid for this future city stretching northward from roughly Houston Street to 155th Street in the faraway heights of Harlem. It was in many respects a heartless plan. There were virtually no parks or plazas. The presumption was that people would gravitate east and west along the numbered streets to the rivers when they wanted open space and fresh air, and not spend lots of time moving north or south. That partly explains why there were only a dozen avenues.

In the abstract, the idea was really nothing revolutionary; grid plans went back to ancient Greece and Rome. But installing one in Manhattan was deeply subversive because, while still undeveloped, the island was already parceled into irregularly shaped, privately owned properties.

This meant the appropriation of land and reconstruction. First, Manhattan had to be surveyed, a task that took years. Property lines had to be redrawn, government mobilized for decades on end to enforce, open, grade and pave streets. Some 60 years passed before the grid arrived at 155th Street. Streets were still “rough and ragged” tracks for a long while, as one diarist observed in 1867, describing a recently opened stretch around 40th Street and Madison Avenue as a mess of “mud holes, goats, pigs and geese.”

Even so, the grid gave the island a kind of monumentality and order.

Was it monotonous? Yes. Frederick Law Olmsted was among those who thought so. Other city plans are certainly more sophisticated (Paris) or elegant (Barcelona) or stately (Savannah, Ga.).

But New York’s grid had its virtues. For one thing, it proved flexible enough to adapt when the city’s orientation did shift north-south, flexible enough to accommodate Olmsted’s Central Park, the genius of which lies in the contrast between its own irregularity and the regularity of the grid.

For another thing, the grid turned out to be, far beyond what anyone could have envisioned in 1811, a windfall for those same landowners who first opposed it, but then whose newly rejiggered lots on subdivided blocks came to be worth fortunes. New York property values boomed thanks to the grid, which effectively created the real estate market. In 1965 John Reps, an urban historian at Cornell, wrote in “The Making of Urban America” that the city commissioners “were motivated mainly by narrow considerations of economic gain.” Professor Reps thought they put money before aesthetics.

They did, but that view now seems a little uncharitable. Money and aesthetics aren’t antithetical, and the grid has proved itself oddly beautiful.

I’m referring not just to the sociability it promotes, which Jane Jacobs identified, or to the density it allows, which Rem Koolhaas celebrates, or even to the ecological efficiency it sustains, which now makes New York, on a per-capita basis, a very green place. I’m also referring to a kind of awareness it encourages.

It’s true that Manhattan lacks the elegant squares, axial boulevards and civic monuments around which other cities designed their public spaces. But it has evolved a public realm of streets and sidewalks that creates urban theater on the grandest level. No two blocks are ever precisely the same because the grid indulges variety, building to building, street to street.

Painters from Poussin to Seurat, Picasso to Mondrian, Pollock to Chuck Close have exploited the special power of grids to create order yet also highlight small differences. Manhattan’s grid is not perfectly regular. Some blocks are longer than others. Some avenues are wider. Broadway cuts diagonally across six north-south streets, and those cuts have made room for public spaces (Union Square, Madison Square, Herald Square, Times Square, Columbus Circle, Verdi Square).

We feel all these shifts in the grid, alert to changes thanks to the expectation of sameness.

The grid also makes a complex place instantly navigable. This isn’t a trivial benefit. Cities like Berlin and London, historic agglomerations of villages, include vast nowhere stretches, and they sprawl in ways that discourage easy comprehension and walking. An epicenter of diversity, Manhattan by contrast invites long walks, because walkers can judge distances easily and always know where they are. The grid binds the island just as New Yorkers are bound by a shared identity.

That is, the grid gives physical form to a certain democratic, melting-pot idea — not a new concept, and probably not exactly what the planners had in mind, but worth restating. In the same way that tourists who come to Manhattan can easily grasp the layout and, as such, feel they immediately possess the city, outsiders who move here become New Yorkers simply by saying so. By contrast, an American can live for half a century in Rome or Hamburg or Copenhagen or Tokyo but never become Italian or German or Danish or Japanese. Anybody can become a New Yorker. The city, like its grid, exists to be adopted and made one’s own.

Hilary Ballon, a professor of urban studies and architecture at New York University who organized the exhibition (running through April 15), adds that it even affects our daily behavior. “We cross at corners with the grid,” is her example. That’s not quite the New York I know, but it’s true that when we jaywalk or take shortcuts across plazas or stroll down Broadway, we are aware of violating the grid. The grid is the ego to our id.

And for the same reason we’re conscious of the street wall, the regular line of building facades, so that when one building is set back and breaks that line, our equilibrium is disturbed. (See the erratic sidewalk of 57th Street.) Like the neighborhoods it circumscribes, the grid has its integrity.

“It would have been easier not to destabilize the landownership on the island,” Ms. Ballon concludes in her introduction to the show’s catalog. “The commitment to prepare New York for the future sets an example for our times: do we have the capacity to address climate change, build 21st-century infrastructure and promote sustainable growth?”

That’s the question. Put another way, the grid was a leap for government and private enterprise united by faith in urban development. It was also proof of how adaptable citizens, and cities, can be. Generations of humane and progressive New Yorkers lifted it from the drawing table to greatness. An equitable and just city today depends on a vigilant populace keeping tabs on our planners and politicians.

More and more people want to live in cities now. New York remains a model.

Can it live up to the grid?

Michael Kimmelman

This article was originally published in the New York Times.

LW

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from THIS HOUSE: REAL ESTATE

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the house clings to its

architecture the way

a drowning man clings to a

distant memory—beyond

all reason or the limits

of its tensile strength,

beyond the rudiments

of its machinery; the logic

of its fiction, nails

and screws, the principles

of balance and the figures

of its personal geometry

all serve no conscious

end, no matter what the

wind cries, what the

weather wreaks.

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.**********

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i am not a house.  these are not

my windows, not my doors, not my

ceilings, walls or floors.  nothing

that grows upon me grows upon me.

weather does not ride my spine,

does not cascade into my gutters.

no, not the walk, the drive strip,

terrace, port or shutters is

me or anything that i own

nor is the redgold sky-sheen that

reflects, nor are the settling creakings

or its wringing groans; the birds

do not nest in my nest; the squirrels

do not scrabble through my home.

nothing of it carries forward

into the abyss that transpires;

some thing else inspires, some thing

else, though hiding.

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***********

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Foundation

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the foundation,

rigid figure

dug out of the ground

of its own desire,

guards an empty space,

though set upon defensible

bedrock.

all illusion

has its place, this one

under the house,

with earth and stone

and all the deeper,

all the real immutables.

even now there is a liquid warfare

going on, guerilla seepage

into the basement through concrete,

insidious as ideas wearing away the rock

of reason or the walls of disbelief.

the basement ceiling sweats and sags;

the floor puddles, unable to rest.

finally, a wound appears, a crack,

its lips turning to chalk, crumbling

wetly, decaying like flesh, water

starting like slow thin blood:

welling from stone, the patient

desire of nature will not end.

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**********

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Snow settles in about the eaves;

the house protests the white, the chill,

the onslaught of this season with so much undone,

so many windows still shut tight, so many rooms left

dark, so many flights unchecked.

the shutters slap at the wind.

shingles shudder though still nailed in place.

the house remembers the smell of fresh earth newly turned,

the subtle dust of new concrete, the pitch of raw pine,

paint, paste, plaster, sun and light.

it can’t remember the day the air turned hard,

the day the wind grew teeth, the day the putty

and the paint began to line, to crack, to peel.

winter rings like a bell in its ears,

pealing away illusion.  there is nothing left to feel

but darkening of the sky and shortening of day.

somewhere in the house a door slams for the last time,

solid, ineluctable as night.

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.***********

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in the middle of the night

the house would ponder the

ineffable—if it could

for the gurgling in its boiler

hungry for coal, for the rattle

in its windows telling a tale

all too old the way loose

teeth tell it.

sideways slipping

the roofbeams sag; the gutters warp;

the weather wrings the house to its

foundation like a worn-out rag.

cars, people, clouds scud;

seasons whistle by.

all sense—

the pregnancy of meaning in

the luminescence of each twilight—

slips past, drifting on the wind—

skywriting—wispy glyphs

whipped steadily west.

and

memory, that could inform, lies

tucked into a  bed riddled with

dreams.

in the dawn, in the

twilight, stories go untold;

arguments linger, diaphanous

and drift into darkness; idea

migrates, avian in extreme,

beyond meaning, beyond

architecture, ignorant of design.

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***********

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no house

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the house you see

is not the house

the house thinks it

projects; no, nor

the house dissected

when the house,

mired in leisure,

impassioned in despair,

wields the lancet of

language, deft and dreaded.

no, but some thing else

emerges that resembles

neither dream nor notion—

what it is—how to say

it—uncontrolled, unwitting

miss the mark.  the windows

do not see it, nor the doors

open onto what transpires.

the wainscoting, wallpaper,

semi-gloss trim conspire

skin-deep impression only.  at

the edges all is tidy, tacked

down, spruce, but at the

center is a hovel of straw,

a shack of sticks, and a

wind, like the breath

of a wolf, always howling.

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Les Von Losberg

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SPOILER ALERT: The following reveals the surprising ending to the 1955 movie Kiss Me, Deadly.

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Ten years after atomic bombs were dropped by the United States on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in August of 1945, the American public had little understanding about what made these bombs different from so-called normal bombs, other than the demonstrated fact that their destructive power was much greater. Americans’ lack of understanding that the true difference was qualitative as much or more than quantitative, created an atmosphere of acceptance for nuclear weapons—Americans had no problem with bigger bombs that brought about more destruction so long as they had more of them than their enemies. If they had understood, though, that atomic—nuclear—bombs had aftereffects in some ways more devastating than their explosive power, the public might have been less enthusiastic about building ever more powerful weapons. If they had known, for example, that a powerful bomb—many times more devastating than the Hiroshima bomb—would not only obliterate a city in a stroke, but also poison the earth it had rested on, making it uninhabitable for perhaps twenty thousand years, then plans for rebuilding and restoring a society as it had been, or maybe even better, would have been seen for what they are: dangerous fantasies justifying using the bombs in the first place. This understanding, fortunately, is what eventually happened, thanks to the educating efforts of many individuals who took it upon themselves to wake people up to the real dangers of nuclear weapons. The U.S. government deserves no credit in this regard and, in fact, spent more energy playing down the dangers, so it could leave open its options for future use of nuclear weapons.

One example of this educating effort is the 1955 film, Kiss Me, Deadly, a Robert Aldrich production based on a novel by then-popular writer Mickey Spillane. With a good script, it’s a well-directed and well-acted crime thriller (despite its lurid advertising), involving the hunt for “a great whatsit,” that costs many people their lives at the hands of a shadowy international conspiracy trying to get hold of it. This whatsit is small enough to be hidden easily and contains something very precious.

“Diamonds, rubies, perhaps?” asks the mastermind of the conspiracy, but only rhetorically, as he already knows what it is. “Even narcotics?” The whatsit turns out to be a cubic leather case that contains a metal box. Mike Hammer—the archetypal Spillane private detective—is the first to find the coveted box hidden at the bottom of a gym locker. Eventually it winds up in the hands of the mastermind and a woman he used to get the box away from Mike. “What’s in it?” she asks. The foreign-accented conspirator, who has a penchant for quoting parables and adages, answers with the story of Pandora’s Box that, when opened, “let loose all the evils in the world.”

“I don’t care about the evil—what’s in the box?”

“Did you ever hear of Lot’s wife?” he replies obliquely, telling the story of the woman killed by her curiosity.

Unsatisfied with the Biblical reference, she persists. He then tells her that it contains “the head of the Medusa, and whoever looks upon it will be turned not into a pillar of salt, but of brimstone and ashes.”

Out of patience, she just shoots him, taking the box for herself. With his dying breath, he begs her—“like Cerberus barking with all his heads at the gates of Hell”—not to open the box.

But she does.

The intense light streaming from the box emits a sound more sinister and terrifying than any I have ever heard in cinema. It ranks as one of the artform’s greatest special effects, lending the iridescent substance in the box a quality at once utterly alien and familiar, like hellish, primeval screams long suppressed within ourselves. By now, as the woman is incinerated by what is clearly some form of radiation, we feel deeply the meaning of the ancient parables of annihilation and are confronted by the dreadful reality of the manmade radioactive material we know is at the core of every nuclear weapon: it doesn’t need to explode to kill us, or to destroy the world.

LW

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(below) “I don’t care about the evil….”

The coveted box contains“the head of the Medusa, and whoever looks upon it will be turned not into a pillar of salt, but of brimstone and ashes.”

Mike Hammer and his secretary, Velda Whitman, looking “at the end of the world.”

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For an interesting discussion of the history of the film’s ending that is highly relevant to this post, follow this link: http://www.dvdtalk.com/dvdsavant/s2356kiss.html

(above) Site of the Arnold Engineering Development Center (AEDC) near Tullahoma, Tennessee, c. 1950, showing the Elk River Dam and Woods Reservoir, named in memory of Colonel Lebbeus B. Woods—my father—officer in command of its construction (portrait photo inset on the right).

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I am the son of a distinguished Air Force officer and bear his name. He died in 1953, at the age of fifty-two, from a rare form of blood cancer caused by his involvement with the development and testing of the atomic bomb, though his service record blandly states his cause of death simply as “a result of service.”

He was born to parents who were school teachers in the wilds of South Dakota, on a large Sioux reservation. After joining the U.S. Army in 1918, he took the highly competitive exams to enter West Point and with only his equivalent of an eighth-grade education, got in. Graduating as an officer in 1925, he resigned his commission to become a civil engineer for the Pennsylvania Railroad, designing and directing the construction of railway bridges until the outbreak of the Second World War, in 1942.

He continued his engineering work in the Army, building airfields, bridges, and other necessary facilities in England and Europe as the Allies steadily advanced against the Axis forces. In 1944 he was assigned to the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico, to construct the buildings and other structures needed by Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Teller, and other scientists there, to develop the atomic bomb. His first exposure to radiation was the bomb’s test at the Trinity site; his second, in 1948, was at the Bikini Atoll in the Pacific. Five years later, he died a painful death—as had hundreds of thousands of others, both Americans and Japanese.

In that brief period, he accomplished a final mission: the building of the Arnold Engineering Development Center (AEDC), a sprawling experimental facility in southern Tennessee, that, since its completion in 1953, has been vital to the invention and development of air- and spacecraft and their jet or rocket propulsion systems not only for the military but also for NASA projects such as the Space Shuttle. A large manmade  lake, made to supply enormous quantities of water needed by the Center, but also famous for its ecologically protected woodlands and wildlife, is named in his memory.

I was born into and spent my early years during a time of war, first a hot one and then ‘cold,’ but my childhood experiences unfolded—oddly enough—in a milieu of creative engineering, problem-solving, and construction. Patriotism was a given so there was no ideological contention at home. My parents were both FDR Democrats—he was also as good as given—so there was little political debate, either. What was important was getting the job done for good reasons. Up to age thirteen, I spent my free time reading, drawing, hanging out around jet aircraft and their pilots. I and a few other officer’s chldren used to sneak down to the flight-line, watching jet fighters and bombers take off and land, then have cokes in the flight-line café where their pilots went for coffee, still dressed in their flight gear. Once, at the air-base in Ohio that was my father’s last command,  I climbed some fences and wandered for hours in a vast field of derelict fighters and bombers, exploring them inside and out, until MPs showed up and took me into custody. It seems that some of these planes had been used in the Bikini atomic tests, and it took hours of medical exams, interrogation, and my father’s high rank, before I was returned home to the officers’ quarter of the base.

I also grew up around a certain kind of architecture, though I’m certain I didn’t call it that or have much of an idea of what the term meant. I suppose that I would now call it functional architecture, because its uses dominated the genesis of its form; still, it had a self-conscious aesthetic and a design intent that included its visual qualities and the emotions they evoked. The building forms and their meanings are in a way romantic and fantastical—wind tunnels, transonic circuits, gas dynamics laboratories—-a kind of architecture for opening up and exploring new worlds. Even the more conventional industrial forms of steam plants and other support buildings reflect traces of the glow of a great adventure, experienced in this context of immensely consequential invention. All of it stayed with me, though was not to emerge—radically transformed—until many years later.

LW

General Carroll, Colonel Woods (second from the right) and their group inspecting the landscape of the AEDC.

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Colonel Woods with building contractors on one of the construction sites. A telling bit of trivia: In those days, a military officer’s everyday uniform was clean, well pressed, and plain, and not so different from the everyday business clothes of civilians. Today, the everyday uniforms of officers anywhere are crumpled camouflaged  combat fatigues, worn as though they were ready to go into combat at any moment.

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The Transonic Circuit—a wind tunnel for testing air- and spacecraft in dense atmospheres at extremely high speeds.

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The Gas Dynamics Facility is most heavily involved with developing jet and rocket propulsion systems.

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A newly developed jet engine being tested.

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One of several shops devoted to making scale models of air- and spacecraft prototypes and components for testing.

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Related posts:

http://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2008/11/13/big-bang/

http://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2010/09/14/terrible-beauty-3-i-am-become-death/

Note: This article was originally published in the New York Times on December 28, 2011.

 In One Slum, Misery, Work, Politics and Hope

By Jim Yardley

MUMBAI, India — At the edge of India’s greatest slum, Shaikh Mobin’s decrepit shanty is cleaved like a wedding cake, four layers high and sliced down the middle. The missing half has been demolished. What remains appears ready for demolition, too, with temporary walls and a rickety corrugated roof.

Yet inside, carpenters are assembling furniture on the ground floor. One floor up, men are busily cutting and stitching blue jeans. Upstairs from them, workers are crouched over sewing machines, making blouses. And at the top, still more workers are fashioning men’s suits and wedding apparel. One crumbling shanty. Four businesses.

In the labyrinthine slum known as Dharavi are 60,000 structures, many of them shanties, and as many as one million people living and working on a triangle of land barely two-thirds the size of Central Park in Manhattan. Dharavi is one of the world’s most infamous slums, a cliché of Indian misery. It is also a churning hive of workshops with an annual economic output estimated to be $600 million to more than $1 billion.

“This is a parallel economy,” said Mr. Mobin, whose family is involved in several businesses in Dharavi. “In most developed countries, there is only one economy. But in India, there are two.”

India is a rising economic power, even as huge portions of its economy operate in the shadows. Its “formal” economy consists of businesses that pay taxes, adhere to labor regulations and burnish the country’s global image. India’s “informal” economy is everything else: the hundreds of millions of shopkeepers, farmers, construction workers, taxi drivers, street vendors, rag pickers, tailors, repairmen, middlemen, black marketeers and more.

This divide exists in other developing countries, but it is a chasm in India: experts estimate that the informal sector is responsible for the overwhelming majority of India’s annual economic growth and as much as 90 percent of all employment. The informal economy exists largely outside government oversight and, in the case of slums like Dharavi, without government help or encouragement.

For years, India’s government has tried with mixed success to increase industrial output by developing special economic zones to lure major manufacturers. Dharavi, by contrast, could be called a self-created special economic zone for the poor. It is a visual eyesore, a symbol of raw inequality that epitomizes the failure of policy makers to accommodate the millions of rural migrants searching for opportunity in Indian cities. It also underscores the determination of those migrants to come anyway.

“Economic opportunity in India still lies, to a large extent, in urban areas,” said Eswar Prasad, a leading economist. “The problem is that government hasn’t provided easy channels to be employed in the formal sector. So the informal sector is where the activity lies.”

Dharavi is Dickens and Horatio Alger and Upton Sinclair. It is ingrained in the Indian imagination, depicted in books or Bollywood movies, as well as in the Oscar-winning hit “Slumdog Millionaire.” Dharavi has been examined in a Harvard Business School case study and dissected by urban planners from Europe to Japan. Yet merely trying to define Dharavi is contested.

“Maybe to anyone who has not seen Dharavi, Dharavi is a slum, a huge slum,” said Gautam Chatterjee, the principal secretary overseeing the Housing Ministry in Maharashtra State. “But I have also looked at Dharavi as a city within a city, an informal city.”

It is an informal city as layered as Mr. Mobin’s sheared building — and as fragile. Plans to raze and redevelop Dharavi into a “normal” neighborhood have stirred a debate about what would be gained but also about what might be lost by trying to control and regulate Dharavi. Every layer of Dharavi, when exposed, reveals something far more complicated, and organic, than the concept of a slum as merely a warehouse for the poor.

One slum. Four layers. Four realities.

On the ground floor is misery.

One floor up is work.

Another floor up is politics.

And at the top is hope.

“Dharavi,” said Hariram Tanwar, 64, a local businessman, “is a mini-India.”

Misery

The streets smell of sewage and sweets. There are not enough toilets. There is not enough water. There is not enough space. Laborers sleep in sheds known as pongal houses, six men, maybe eight, packed into a single, tiny room — multiplied by many tiny rooms. Hygiene is terrible. Diarrhea and malaria are common. Tuberculosis floats in the air, spread by coughing or spitting. Dharavi, like the epic slums of Karachi, Pakistan, or Rio de Janeiro, is often categorized as a problem still unsolved, an emblem of inequity pressing against Mumbai, India’s richest and most glamorous city. A walk through Dharavi is a journey through a dank maze of ever-narrowing passages until the shanties press together so tightly that daylight barely reaches the footpaths below, as if the slum were a great urban rain forest, covered by a canopy of smoke and sheet metal.

Traffic bleats. Flies and mosquitoes settle on roadside carts of fruit and atop the hides of wandering goats. Ten families share a single water tap, with water flowing through the pipes for less than three hours every day, enough time for everyone to fill a cistern or two. Toilets are communal, with a charge of 3 cents to defecate. Sewage flows through narrow, open channels, slow-moving streams of green water and garbage.

At the slum’s periphery, Sion Hospital treats 3,000 patients every day, many from Dharavi, often children who are malnourished or have asthma or diarrhea. Premature tooth decay is so widespread in children that doctors call them dental cripples.

“People who come to Dharavi or other slum areas — their priority is not health,” said Dr. Pallavi Shelke, who works in Dharavi. “Their priority is earning.”

And that is what is perhaps most surprising about the misery of Dharavi: people come voluntarily. They have for decades. Dharavi once was known for gangs and violence, but today Dharavi is about work. Tempers sometimes flare, fights break out, but the police say the crime rate is actually quite low, even lower than in wealthier, less densely populated areas of the city. An outsider can walk through the slum and never feel threatened.

Misery is everywhere, as in miserable conditions, as in hardship. But people here do not speak of being miserable. People speak about trying to get ahead.

Work

The order was for 2,700 briefcases, custom-made gifts for a large bank to distribute during the Hindu holiday of Diwali. The bank contacted a supplier, which contacted a leather-goods store, which sent the order to a manufacturer. Had the order been placed in China, it probably would have landed in one of the huge coastal factories that employ thousands of rural migrants and have made China a manufacturing powerhouse.

In India, the order landed in the Dharavi workshop of Mohammed Asif. Mr. Asif’s work force consists of 22 men, who sit cross-legged beside mounds of soft, black leather, an informal assembly line, except that the factory floor is a cramped room doubling as a dormitory: the workers sleep above, in a loft. The briefcases were due in two weeks.

“They work hard,” Mr. Asif said. “They work from 8 in the morning until 11 at night because the more they do, the more they will earn to send back to their families. They come here to earn.”

Unlike China, India does not have colossal manufacturing districts because India has chosen not to follow the East Asian development model of building a modern economy by starting with low-skill manufacturing. If China’s authoritarian leaders have deliberately steered the country’s surplus rural work force into urban factories, Indian leaders have done little to promote job opportunities in cities for rural migrants. In fact, right-wing political parties in Mumbai have led sometimes-violent campaigns against migrants.

Yet India’s rural migrants, desperate to escape poverty, flock to the cities anyway. Dharavi is an industrial gnat compared with China’s manufacturing heartland — and the working conditions in the slum are almost certainly worse than those in major Chinese factories — but Dharavi does seem to share China’s can-do spirit. Almost everything imaginable is made in Dharavi, much of it for sale in India, yet much of it exported around the world.

Today, Dharavi is as much a case study in industrial evolution as a slum. Before the 1980s, Dharavi had tanneries that dumped their effluent into the surrounding marshlands. Laborers came from southern India, especially the state of Tamil Nadu, many of them Muslims or lower-caste Hindus, fleeing drought, starvation or caste discrimination. Once Tamil Nadu’s economy strengthened, migrants began arriving from poverty-stricken states in central India.

Later, the tanneries were closed down for environmental reasons, moving south to the city of Chennai, or to other slums elsewhere. Yet Dharavi had a skilled labor force, as well as cheap costs for workshops and workers, and informal networks between suppliers, middlemen and workshops. So Dharavi’s leather trade moved up the value chain, as small workshops used raw leather processed elsewhere to make handbags for some of the priciest stores in India.

During this same period, Dharavi’s migration waves became a torrent, as people streamed out of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, the teeming, backward northern states now at the locus of rural Indian poverty.

“After 1990, immigration was tremendous,” said Ramachandra Korde, a longtime civic activist commonly known around Dharavi as Bhau, or brother. “It used to be that 100 to 300 to 400 people came to Dharavi every day. Just to earn bread and butter.”

Leatherwork is now a major industry in Dharavi, but only one. Small garment factories have proliferated throughout the slum, making children’s clothes or women’s dresses for the Indian market or export abroad. According to a 2007 study sponsored by the United States Agency for International Development, Dharavi has at least 500 large garment workshops (defined as having 50 or more sewing machines) and about 3,000 smaller ones. Then there are the 5,000 leather shops. Then there are the food processors that make snacks for the rest of India.

And then still more: printmakers, embroiderers and, most of all, the vast recycling operations that sort, clean and reprocess much of India’s discarded plastic.

“We are cleaning the dirt of the country,” said Fareed Siddiqui, the general secretary of the Dharavi Businessmen’s Welfare Association.

Mr. Asif, the leather shop owner, is a typical member of Dharavi’s entrepreneur class.

Now 35, he arrived at the slum in 1988, leaving his village in Bihar after hearing about Dharavi from another family. He jumped on a train to Mumbai. He was 12.

“Someone from my village used to live here,” he said. “We were poor and had nothing.”

Mr. Asif began as an apprentice in a leather shop, learning how to use the heavy cutting scissors, then the sewing machines that stitch the seams on leather goods, until he finally opened his own shop. As a poor migrant, Mr. Asif could never have arranged the loans and workspace if Dharavi were part of the organized economy; he rents his workshop from the owner of the leather-goods store, who got the order from the supplier for the briefcases for the bank.

Today, nearly all of Mr. Asif’s workers are also from Bihar, one of the myriad personal networks that help direct migrants out of the villages. Mohammad Wazair earns roughly 6,000 rupees a month, or about $120, as a laborer in Mr. Asif’s workshop. He sends about half home every month to support his wife and two children. He is illiterate, but he is now paying for his children to attend a modest private school in their village. He visits them twice a year.

“In the village, what options do we have?” he asked. “We can either work in the fields or drive a rickshaw. What is the future in that? Here, I can learn a skill and earn money. At least my children will get an education.”

Politics

“Now the place is gold,” said Mr. Mobin, the businessman.

He is sitting on the top floor of his building, surrounded by men’s suits in the apparel shop. His family began in the leather business in the 1970s and has since moved into plastic recycling, garments and real estate. Slum property might not seem like a good investment, but Dharavi is now one of the most valuable pieces of real estate in Mumbai. Which is a problem, as Mr. Mobin sees it.

“People from all over the city, and the politicians, are making hue and cry that Dharavi must be developed,” he said. “But they are not developing it for the people of Dharavi. They will provide office buildings and shopping for the richer class.”

As Mumbai came to symbolize India’s expanding economy — and the country’s expanding inequality — Dharavi began attracting wider attention. Mumbai grew as Dharavi grew. If the slum once sat on the periphery, it now is a scar in the middle of what is a peninsular, land-starved city — an eyesore and embarrassment, if also a harbinger of a broader problem.

Today, more than eight million people live in Mumbai’s slums, according to some estimates, a huge figure that accounts for more than half the city’s population. Many people live in slums because they cannot afford to live anywhere else, and government efforts to build affordable housing have been woefully inadequate. But many newer slums are also microversions of Dharavi’s informal economy. Some newer migrants even come to Dharavi to learn new skills, as if Dharavi were a slum franchising operation.

“Dharavi is becoming their steppingstone,” said Vineet Joglekar, a civic leader here. “They learn jobs, and then they go to some other slum and set up there.”

Dharavi still exists on the margins. Few businesses pay taxes. Few residents have formal title to their land. Political parties court the slum for votes and have slowly delivered things taken for granted elsewhere: some toilets, water spigots.

But the main political response to Dharavi’s unorthodox success has been to try to raze it. India’s political class discovered Dharavi in the 1980s, when any migrant who jabbed four posts into an empty patch of dirt could claim a homestead. Land was scarce, and some people began dumping stones or refuse to fill the marshes at the edge of the Arabian Sea.

Rajiv Gandhi, then India’s prime minister, saw the teeming slum and earmarked one billion rupees, or about $20 million, for a program to build affordable, hygienic housing for Dharavi’s poor. Local officials siphoned off some of the money for other municipal projects while also building some tenements that today are badly decayed. The proliferation of shanties continued.

Three decades later, the basic impulse set in motion by Mr. Gandhi — that Dharavi should be redeveloped and somehow standardized — still prevails. But the incentives have changed. Dharavi’s land is now worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Private developers do not see a slum but a piece of property convenient to the airport, surrounded by train stations and adjacent to a sleek office park.

A sweeping plan approved in 2006 would provide free apartments and commercial space to many Dharavi residents while allowing private investors to develop additional space for sale at market rates. Many Dharavi civic and business leaders endorsed the plan, even as critics denounced the proposal as a giveaway to rich developers.

For now, the project remains largely stalled, embroiled in bureaucratic infighting, even as a different, existential debate is under way about the potential risks of redeveloping Dharavi and shredding the informal networks that bind it together.

“They are talking about redeveloping Dharavi,” said Mohammad Khurshid Sheikh, who owns a leather shop. “But if they do, the whole chain may break down. These businesses can work because Dharavi attracts labor. People can work here and sleep in the workshop. If there is redevelopment, they will not get that room so cheap. They will not come back here.”

Matias Echanove, an architect and urban planner, has long argued that Dharavi should not be dismissed as merely a slum, since it operates as a contained residential and commercial city. He said razing Dharavi, or even completely redeveloping it, would only push residents into other slums.

“They are going to create actual, real slums,” he said. “Nobody is saying Dharavi is a paradise. But we need to understand the dynamics, so that when there is an intervention by the government, it doesn’t destroy what is there.”

Hope

Sylva Vanita Baskar was born in Dharavi. She is now 39, already a widow. Her husband lost his vigor and then his life to tuberculosis. She borrowed money to pay for his care, and now she rents her spare room to four laborers for an extra $40 a month. She lives in a room with her four children. Two sons sleep in a makeshift bed. She and her two youngest children sleep on straw mats on the stone floor.

“They do everything together,” she said, explaining how her children endure such tight quarters. “They fight together. They study together.”

The computer sits on a small table beside the bed, protected, purchased for $354 from savings, even though the family has no Internet connection. The oldest son stores his work on a pen drive and prints it somewhere else. Ms. Baskar, a seamstress, spends five months’ worth of her income, almost $400, to send three of her children to private schools. Her daughter wants to be a flight attendant. Her youngest son, a mechanical engineer.

“My daughter is getting a better education, and she will get a better job,” Ms. Baskar said. “The children’s lives should be better. Whatever hardships we face are fine.”

Education is hope in Dharavi. On a recent afternoon outside St. Anthony’s, a parochial school in the slum, Hindu mothers in saris waited for their children beside Muslim mothers in burqas. The parents were not concerned about the crucifix on the wall; they wanted their children to learn English, the language considered to be a ticket out of the slums in India.

Once, many parents in Dharavi sent their children to work, not to school, and child labor remains a problem in some workshops. Dharavi’s children have always endured a stigma. When parents tried to send their sons and daughters outside the slum for schooling, the Dharavi students often received a bitter greeting.

“Sometimes, the teacher would not accept our children, or would treat them with contempt,” said Mohammad Hashim, 64. “Sometimes, they would say, ‘Why are you Dharavi children over here?’ ”

Mr. Hashim responded by opening his own school, tailored for Muslim children, offering a state-approved secular education. He initially offered the curriculum in Urdu but not a single parent enrolled a child. He switched to English, and now his classrooms are overflowing with Muslim students.

Discrimination is still common toward Dharavi. Residents complain that they are routinely rejected for credit cards if they list a Dharavi address. Private banks are reluctant to make loans to businessmen in Dharavi or to open branches. Part of this stigma is as much about social structure as about living in the slum itself.

“They all belong to the untouchables caste,” said Mr. Korde, the longtime social activist, “or are Muslims.”

But money talks in Mumbai, and Dharavi now has money, even millionaires, mixed in with its misery and poverty. Mohammad Mustaqueem, 57, arrived as a 13-year-old boy. He slept outside, in one of the narrow alleyways, and remembers being showered with garbage as people tossed it out in the morning. Today, Mr. Mustaqueem has 300 employees in 12 different garment workshops in Dharavi, with an annual turnover of about $2.5 million a year. He owns property in Dharavi worth $20 million.

“When I came here, I was empty-handed,” he said. “Now I have everything.”

Dharavi’s fingerprints continue to be found across Mumbai’s economy and beyond, even if few people realize it. Mr. Asif, the leather shop owner, made leather folders used to deliver dinner checks at the city’s most famous hotel, the Taj Mahal Palace. The tasty snacks found in Mumbai’s finest confectionaries? Made in Dharavi. The exquisite leather handbags sold in expensive shops? Often made in Dharavi.

“There are hundreds of Dharavis flourishing in the city,” boasted Mr. Mobin, the businessman. “Every slum has its businesses. Every kind of business is there in the slums.”

But surely, Mr. Mobin is asked, there are things not made in Dharavi. Surely not airplanes, for example.

“But we recycle waste for the airlines,” he answered proudly. “Cups and food containers.”

Hari Kumar contributed reporting.

A day or so after the posting of his “sidewalk manifesto” (as I, not he, calls it) Michael Sorkin sent along the images shown below, requesting that I simply add them to the original post containing only his text. I felt uncomfortable doing this, and will try to explain why.

The text attracted me because it immediately sparked my imagination. The words alone offered many possible interpretations. It is this range of design implications that validate the concepts’ place in the idea of a better, more egalitarian New York, making them worthy of being written into law.

However, when I received the renderings of the specific design proposals of the Michael Sorkin Studio that implement the text’s concepts, the potential of the text to serve egalitarian or democratic purposes was diminished. Indeed, appearing next to these design images, the text can be read as only an argument for these particular designs, and not as broad statements of principle.

For me, the text “manifesto” and the designs are both worthy of our attention and critical evaluation. The only solution to presenting them without compromise to either text or designs, is to post the design images separately, allowing the blog’s readers to relate them as they choose.

LW

(above) Amsterdam Avenue.

(above) 147th Street, Harlem.

For more than thirty years, Michael Sorkin has been a strong, constructively critical voice in the field of architecture. His many books and articles have opened our eyes and minds to the social and political issues lurking behind the often too-fancy facades designed by the famous for the rich and powerful. He blithely refuses to be seduced. At the same time, he has been the stalwart champion of a more egalitarian urbanism, in his writings, his urban planning practice, and his teaching. His book Local Code…. is a landmark in all these venues.

The following piece, which he has generously given for publication on this blog, challenges us both in its content and its form. The concepts require us to throw off our complacency and seriously consider what we mean by the term “public space.” And, rather than entertain us with an impassioned polemic, he presents these concepts as a document ready to be written into law. Just think how much time he is saving all those wrangling politicians on the City Council! But it takes a bit of chewing to digest.

LW

The Sidewalks of New York

1.     The Streets belong to the people!

2.     So do the Sidewalks.

3.     A minimum of 50% of the Street space of New York City shall be taken out of the realm of high-speed and mechanical locomotion and assigned the status of Sidewalk.

4.     This minimum shall apply on a Block by Block basis.

5.     The entirety of a given Street may be transferred to the status of Sidewalk with the consent of 75% of the membership of the Block Committee.

6.     A Block Committee shall be comprised of all of those of voting age whose primary work-place or residence is accessed from a given Block.

7.     All New York City Sidewalks, including these additions, shall revert to ownership by the City of New York, which shall assume primary responsibility for their maintenance.  Notwithstanding this obligation, the right to control the disposition of uses on each Block shall be shared by the Block Committee and the City of New York, subject to the over-riding general rights of Passage and Assembly.

8.     A Block shall be understood to be the space from corner to corner defined by a single Street, not a square block, and shall encompass the Sidewalks on both sides of the Street.  Each square block shall be understood as including portions of four different Blocks.

9.     Block Corners, the junctions of Blocks, shall be assigned to one of the impinging Blocks such that each Block shall control two out of the four Corners it engages.

10.  Such assignment shall be random.

11.  The consolidation of Blocks for purposes of the administration by the Block Committees of elements of the blocks that exceed that space of a single Block shall be permitted as long as the consolidation is of Blocks that are contiguous.

12.  In no case may this consolidation be permitted to exceed four contiguous Blocks.

13.  All uses on the Sidewalk shall be public or accessible to the public.

14.  Neither the Right of Passage along the Block nor the Right of Assembly within the Block shall be fundamentally infringed or impaired.

15.  No Assigned Public Use (APU) shall impede walking or standing rest within the area of the designated minimum Territory Of Passage (TOP).

16.  The use of Sidewalks, other than for Passage or Assembly, including loitering and standing rest, shall be determined by Block Committees which may assign rights to their use other than for Public Passage or Assembly.  Such subsidiary public rights shall be assigned on a rotating basis.

17.  In no case may more than 5% of the area of any Block be occupied by a use that requires direct payment by the public to access its benefit.

18.  Fees from the assignment of public rights shall profit the Block from which they are derived except in the case of High-Income Blocks.

19.  A High-Income Block shall be understood to be a Block on which revenue from fees shall exceed by more than 50% the median fee collected from all Blocks, city-wide.

20.  25% of the revenues from High-Income Blocks shall be tithed to the Block Bank.

21.  The Block Bank, the directors of which shall be composed of representatives from the Block Committees, shall make Block Grants for improvements to Blocks that do not qualify as High-Income Blocks.

22.  Permitted uses shall include sitting, the playing of games and miscellaneous other recreational activities, gardening and agricultural activities, the storage of bicycles, the capture of rainwater, the care of children, the management of waste, the planting of trees, public toilets, and the sale of books, journals, newspapers, and snacks.

23.  The area of any Block necessary for access to the New York City Transit system, including both street-level and underground operations, shall be designated a corpus seperatum and its maintanence shall be the responsibility of the Transit Authority.

24.  Uses of sidewalks shall be classified as either Grandfather or Sunset uses.

25.  Grandfather uses are to be permanent.  Sunset uses are subject to annual review by Block Committees.

26.  Grandfather uses shall include Minimum Passage and Street Trees.

27.  Minimum Passage shall be a lateral dimension between ten feet and half the width of the expanded Sidewalk, whichever is greater, and shall be harmonized with the dimensions of contiguous Sidewalks.  These dimensions shall be established by Department of City Planning with the advice and consent of the Block Committees.

28.  Street Trees shall be planted such that they shall, within five years of their planting, provide adequate shade over the full area of the Block during the months of summer.

29.  The location and species of these trees shall be established by the Department of City Planning with the advise and consent of the Block Committees.

30.  Sleeping on sidewalks shall only be permitted by permission of the Block Committees on application no less than one day in advance of bedtime.

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 Michael Sorkin

This is hardly the place to explain Freud’s theories or argue for or against their validity. A great many books doing just that have been written in the hundred or so years since the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams, a founding text for the field of psychoanalysis. It must do for now to know that over this past century Freud’s theories have been applied with success to aid in the treatment of various forms of mental illness—including everyday stress, anxiety, and depression brought on by the demands of modern living. Of equal importance, perhaps, is that these theories have entered our culture in ways that enlighten our understanding of what it means to be human, influencing both our critical and creative capacities in art and science.

I feel fairly certain that Federico Fellini, one of greatest film-makers in the history of cinema, which just happens to span the same century as psychoanalysis, knew all about its theories and even spent time on the psychoanalytic couch. Regardless of whether he did or not, he did spend a great amount of his time recording his dreams, in exactly the way Freud would have appreciated: noting every detail he could remember in words and drawings. The good Doctor would have had a field day with them!

If you can read Italian, there are Fellini’s notes in the samples below from a recent publication entitled Federico Fellini: The Book of Dreams. If, like me, you cannot, you can refer to English translations in the book’s appendix, or, have your own field day with appreciating the drawings, both for their startling originality and freedom of technique, and as points of departure for making your own psycho-analysis of Fellini and his films. For example: what part of the human anatomy does he seem most obsessed with? And why? That, as they say, is only the beginning.

LW

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LW

(above) The front cover of War and Architecture, an issue in the Pamphlet Architecture series that I took with me to Sarajevo in late November, 1993, when the city was under attack. I must thank Clare Jacobson, its editor, and Kevin Lippert, its publisher, who worked hard to ensure that I would have it on the date of my departure for Sarajevo. The text is in English and Croatian, thanks to Aleksandra Wagner, who made the translation of my text in English to what was then still called Serbo-Croatian.

This post is a continuation. 

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I am revisiting the work I did some fifteen years ago for an unhappy reason. Originally intended to address the destruction of buildings in Sarajevo, Bosnia—which I and many others hoped would prove to be an isolated catastrophe—it has instead turned out to be only the beginning of a new trend resulting from globalization, a proliferation of  regional, often insurgent-driven wars that have resulted in the piece-by-piece destruction of cities and the killing of their inhabitants that characterized the torturous three-year attack on Sarajevo.

In going over what I wrote about this work at the time—in 1993—I find it inadequate in its explanation of what inspired the designs, drawings, and models and what I hoped to achieve by making them. No wonder, I say in hindsight, that they were accused of “aestheticizing violence,” and merely being exploitative of a tragic human condition. I failed to put the work in the broader human context that it needed to be understood as proposals for architecture serving rational and needed purposes. I hope to correct—to the extent I can here—this failure.

Because of my work concerned with the Sarajevo crisis long ago, people have often asked what I was working on for Baghdad, or Kabul, or Tripoli, or a growing list of cities that have shared its fate. My answer is always the same: nothing. While each is different, the destruction they have suffered is so similar to that suffered by Sarajevo that the principles I established there apply as well to the more recent catastrophes. This is a crucial point. My “war and architecture” work was not aimed at proposing the reconstruction of particular buildings—that should be the work of local architects—but at deriving guiding principles. The specific buildings I addressed with my designs were meant more as demonstrations of how these principles might work in particular cases, rather than as actual building proposals. Again, I strongly believe that reconstructions should be designed by local architects, who understand the local conditions far, far better than I ever could. I did and still do feel, equally strongly, that I and other ‘conceptualists’ can make a contribution to reconstruction on the level of principle, because we can more readily have a broader view, not having directly suffered the trauma of our city’s destruction and its lingering emotional and intellectual effects.

So, to the principles.

Before attempting to address the reconstruction prospects forced upon us by the destruction of Sarajevo, I studied the history of modern cities attacked in the Second World War. There is a massive literature on this heart-wrenching but crucial moment in human history. However, there is a small literature on the rebuilding of the damaged cities—many of which were severely damaged—and even less about the actual concepts that guided their reconstruction. From my studies, I can see only two guiding principles shared by the majority of post-war reconstruction projects.

The First Principle: Restore what has been lost to its pre-war condition. The idea is to restore ‘normalcy,’ where the normal is the way of living lost as a result of the war. The idea considers the war as only an interruption of an ongoing flow of the normal.

The Second Principle: Demolish the damaged and destroyed buildings and build something entirely new. This ‘new’ could be something radically different from what existed before, or only an updated version of the lost pre-war normal. Its application is very expensive financially, at the least.

Both of these concepts reflect the desires of most city inhabitants to ‘get back to normal,’ and forget the trauma they suffered as a result of the violence and destruction. Yet, both concepts ignore the effects of the war and destruction on the people who suffered through them, not only the personal psychological effects, but also those forcing changes to people’s social, political, and economic relationships. Before the war, Sarajevo was the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, one of the states in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. After the war, it was the capital of an independent country and no longer Socialist. The impact of this change alone on people’s everyday lives has been enormous, and particularly so in the ways they perceive each other and themselves. In this sense, it is not possible to get back to normal. The pre-war normal no longer exists, having been irrevocably destroyed, Still, this does not mean that many—even most—people will not desire to do so. In such a society, wise leaders are needed to persuade people that something new must be created—a new normal that modifies or in some ways replaces the lost one, and further, that it can only be created with their consent and creative participation. In effect, a new principle of reconstruction needs to be established.

We’ll call it the Third Principle: The post-war city must create the new from the damaged old. Many of the buildings in the war-damaged city are relatively salvageable, and because the finances of individuals and remaining institutions have been depleted by war and its privations, that salvageable building stock must be used to build the ‘new’ city. And because the new ways of living will not be the same as the old, the reconstruction of old buildings must enable new ways and ideas of living. The familiar old must be transformed, by conscious intention and design, into the unfamiliar new.

It is worth mentioning that the most needed buildings are the so-called ordinary ones—apartments and office buildings, primarily. Symbolic structures, such as churches, synagogues, mosques and those buildings of historical significance that are key to the cultural memory of the city and its people, must also be salvaged and repaired. With these latter buildings, the First Principle—restoration to the pre-war state—is almost always justified, whatever the cost, which is always high. However, the application of this principle to ordinary buildings makes no sense, because there is nothing especially memorable to restore. To the contrary, the apartment and office blocks that survive destruction must provide the day-to-day spaces for the new ways of living to be enabled by their ‘radical reconstruction.’

The projects for Sarajevo that demonstrate exactly what is meant by this term, accompanied by extended captions, are presented below. I think it is possible, and just, to project the Third Principle into the reconstruction of today’s war-damaged cities.

(above) A typical residential block, badly damaged in places, reconstructed with new types of spaces for residents’ use. The principle here is that reconstruction integrates people’s experiences of the destruction into needed social changes, as well as architectural ones.

(above and below) Typical residential blocks, damaged and reconstructed as described above. It is important to remember that most of such ordinary buildings are damaged only in part and can be salvaged by reconstruction for the post-war city and its new ways of living.

(below) The UNIS twin office towers, attacked in 1992, and burned. The buildings’ structural and floor systems survived and were suitable for ‘radical reconstruction.’ The new types of office space will be used in ways that will be unique to the post war conditions.

(below left) The burning Electrical Management Building, and (right) the badly damaged, but salvageable Parliament of Bosnia and Herzegovina:

(below) The purpose of the New Parliament is not simply to replace the old, Socialist parliament, but—in the first place—to study and debate what a post-war Bosnian parliament should be and do. New types of spaces woven into the surviving Cartesian structural frame, create a dialectic between timeless and timebound, a network of the unknown that inspires both dialogue and innovation:

(below) Like the “Sarajevo window,” the scavenged construction materials are carefully reshaped and reconfigured, then fitted together with a high level of craft—a technique appropriate to the New Parliament’s methods and goals. 

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The book Radical Reconstruction, for all its textual deficiencies, does present demonstrations of the Third Principle, stated above, in Sarajevo; Havana, Cuba; and San Francisco, USA.

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LW

(above) Prototypical wall and window repair for Sarajevo, Bosnia, c. 1994, view from inside. Concept by LW, design and construction by architect Paul Anvar.

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Some twenty years go, I wrote:

 Architecture and war are not incompatible. Architecture is war. War is architecture.I am at war with my time, with history, with all authority that resides in fixed and frightened forms. I am one of millions who do not fit in, who have no home, no family, no doctrine, no firm place to call my own, no known beginning or end, no “sacred and primordial site.” I declare war on all icons and finalities, on all histories that would chain me with my own falseness, my own pitiful fears. I know only moments, and lifetimes that are as moments, and forms that appear with infinite strength, then “melt into air.” I am an architect, a constructor of worlds, a sensualist who worships the flesh, the melody, a silhouette against the darkening sky. I cannot know your name. Nor you can know mine. Tomorrow, we begin together the construction of a city.

This manifesto was read aloud on the steps of the burned-out Olympic Museum in Sarajevo on November 26, 1993, in full view of Serbian snipers and artillery gunners. Happily, no fire rained down on the assembled audience, of which I among many others was included. Coming to the last line, one of the two gifted actor-readers objected “Why wait until tomorrow?” Typical Sarajevan humor, candor, and bravado in the face of overwhelming odds.

Over the two decades since this manifesto was written, I have had much time to consider the words I wrote and what I meant by them.

At that time, I was responding to an urgent situation in Sarajevo, Bosnia—a city under a sustained terrorist attack that, in the West, was considered a siege, as though it were part of a normal war, which it was not. Snipers had turned streets into lethal shooting galleries and artillery gunners had turned ordinary buildings where people worked and lived into incendiary death traps. It was clear that architecture was part of the problem—the killing of thousands of innocent men, woman, and children—and I felt strongly that as long as the attacks continued (it turned out to be for more than three years) architecture also had to be part of the solution.

Without the help of architects, people had built temporary walls as shields against snipers and thrown up all sorts of improvised repairs to their homes and workplaces. I reasoned that these makeshift structures, though more or less effective for their purposes, created a degraded environment, which was exactly the goal of the terrorists. To survive, and to frustrate the enemies of their refined culture, people need a sense of order in their world, one that is consciously created, or designed. Sarajevans nobly showed this need by the way they dressed, in spite of the lack of water, heat, or lighting, somehow always in clean, pressed clothing, the women elegantly coifed and made up, incongruously strolling in the parts of the city center that were screened from snipers if not from mortars and cannons in the hills above, like players from an Alain Resnais film. Inspired by this and a dash of Michelangelo’s designs for the fortifications of Florence, I set out to consider how to repair damaged houses and offices in ways that embodied the elan of their inhabitants, as well as kept out the rain, snow, and cold. These were extremely modest designs, made from scavenged metal, wood, and even cardboard.

One principle I adopted in the beginning was that such found materials would be reshaped, piece by piece. More than anything, I wanted this small-scale architecture to avoid becoming ‘junk sculpture,’ or a collage of detritus. Intention is important, even at the smallest scale, and the intention in Sarajevo was to consciously reshape its world, turning ruins and battered remnants into a new kind of architecture, a uniquely Sarajevan architecture, and something of which the city’s people could be proud. The goal was also to establish some basic rules of reconstruction, keeping in mind the enormous task of rebuilding the damaged city that would begin when the terrorists were defeated and people could turn their energy to building the new city I had forecast in my manifesto, and a new way of civic life.

To be continued.

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LW