donovan to HUD

As you've likely heard by now: Barack Obama has nominated Shaun Donovan, present head of NYC HPD, as his Secretary of Housing & Urban Development. Now I know ShaunDon wasn't on my wishlist of potential HUD nominees [posted in the comments section of one of Nick Kristof's posts from last month), but it should be noted for the record that this Progressive Reactionary did politely suggest hiring an architect to head up HUD—a position unknown to most but that could loosely be defined as supervising the American built environment. And while ShaunDon is not really a practicing architect, he was indeed trained as one, so I suppose that's close enough. [As if my insane suggestion of Michael Sorkin ever had a chance...] The mere fact that he doesn't come from the development side of things, that he has in large part dedicated his career to public investment in housing and urban issues—this alone should ease our nerves, even just a little. Here's hoping that the new HUD chief will heed the call to bring more architects and planners into the fold with regard to housing construction and urban growth.

It's an exciting time, seeing all these cabinet appointments come to light. But my word, what a lot of work there is to be done.

"by the time one future's there, there's another one being imagined"

I am presently reading Tom McCarthy's Remainder— a brilliantly complex novel that will merit its own post once I complete the book. But in the meantime, I thought I'd share a passage from the beginning of the novel that today is eerily poignant. The book's narrator, recently recovered from an accident and awarded generous compensation by those responsible (it's all very vague), meets with a stockbroker named Matthew Younger to discuss investment strategies for this newfound fortune. Younger begins by explaining the workings of the stock market to his new client:

"Over the last century the stock market has outperformed cash in every decade apart from the thirties. Far outperformed. As a rule of thumb, you can expect your capital to double over five years. In the current market conditions, you can reduce that figure to three, perhaps even two."
"How does it work?" I asked him. "I invest in companies and they let me share in their profits?"
"No," he said. "Well, yes, that's a small aspect of it. They give you a dividend. But what really propels your investment upwards is speculation."
"Speculation?" I repeated. "What's that?"
"Shares are constantly being bought and sold," he said. "The prices aren't fixed: they change depending on what people are prepared to pay for them. When people buy shares, they don't value them bu what they actually represent in terms of goods or services: they value them by what they might be worth, in an imaginary future."
"But what if that future comes an they're not worth what people thought they would be?" I asked.
"It never does," said Matthew Younger. "By the time one future's there, there's another one being imagined. The collective imagination of all the investors keeps projecting futures, keeping the shares buoyant. Of course, sometimes a particular set of shares stop catching people's imagination, so they fall. It's our job to get you out of a particular one before it falls—and, conversely, to get you into another when it's just about to shoot up."
"What if everyone stops imagining futures for all of them at the same time?" I asked him.
"Ah!" Younger's eyebrows dipped into a frown, and his voice became quieter, withdrawing from the room back to his small mouth and chest. "That throws the switch on the whole system, and the market crashes. That's what happened in '29. In theory it could happen again." He looked sombre for a moment; then his hearty look came back—and, with it, his booming voice as he resumed: "But if no one thinks it will, it won't."
"And do they think it will?"
"No."
"Cool," I said. "Let's buy some shares."

I should also mention that this book was published in 2005.

derivative of what?

Finally. John Lanchester, of whom I must admit I have never before heard, has a stunning piece buried in the back of Nov. 10 New Yorker on the credit crisis as it relates the broader cultural paradigms of modernism and postmodernism. Although I've appreciated the commentary of Krugman (who just today so succinctly declared: "This is an economic emergency"), Reich, and others these past few months, this is really the first piece of critical analysis that I've read that situates the credit crisis within a larger cultural and philosophical context.

Lanchester's article, which uses the format of a book review of recent books on the credit crunch as an excuse to analyze its cultural/theoretical dimension, is as revelatory as it is simple. Of course derivatives, credit-default swaps, and all those other bizarre financial instruments are nothing more than financial incarnations of the classic late twentieth-century disjunction between the signifier and the signified. And of course the root of the crisis lies in the escalation of this disjunction to the point where the signifier no longer retains any connection whatsoever to the original signified. Lanchester's piece echoes critic/philosopher/writer Mark C. Taylor (see his book Confidence Games from a few years back) in this idea of how money has essentially become nothing more than a floating signifier. All value is relative—or derivative, if you will. It's all a house of mirrors. Lanchester's key line:

It seems wholly contrary to common sense that the market for products that derive from real things should be unimaginably vaster than the market for things themselves.

Now forgive me for my sudden, euphoric lapse into the language of post-structuralism and deconstruction; nobody should have to parse such nonsense. But in all seriousness, most people have no idea what the hell is going on with this credit crisis, and hopefully Lanchester's reading of the situation can help to encourage a broader understanding. It sure did for me.

link: "Melting Into Air" by John Lanchestor, in the New Yorker

urban policy in the whitehouse

Following up on an earlier post... there's an interesting rumor going around about President-Elect Obama's plans to establish a Whitehouse Office of Urban Policy. This is a good sign for the 70% of us Americans who dwell in urban areas! Dare I suggest that maybe an architect or planner should be appointed to head up such an office? Stay tuned for more....

on hope, redux

I'll spare you, dear readers, my own gushing post-election thoughts. Instead, I point you to a fitting coda to the tremendous milestone of Tuesday's election and to my own ruminations from a while back on the possibility of an Obama presidency. From TomDispatch.com: a followup by Rebecca Solnit to her beautiful 2003 essay "Acts of Hope." Read it.

"holy urbanism"

From our friends @ MONU Magazine:

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS FOR MONU - magazine on urbanism #10 - HOLY URBANISM

The one thing that all religions on our planet have in common is their distinction between the holy and the profane. All religions appear to be organized as systems of beliefs with distinctive practices and all have built structures in relation to things holy. And those distinctive practices and structures have always shaped our cities in a profound way.

The list, for example, of well-known holy practices - not even mentioning the city-shaping and structuring effects of holy constructions such as mosques, synagogues, temples, shrines, churches, or other holy facilities, that take place within cities, whether inside or outside holy constructions, whether performed individually or within groups - is endless. Just think of the terrifying urban intensity of the annual Christian celebrations during the Holy Week in Sevilla, or the tremendous density of Islamic prayers surrounding the Kaaba during the Hajj period in the world's largest mosque in the city of Mecca, which can accommodate up to 4 million worshippers as one of the largest gatherings of people in the world.

But apart from those obvious and well-documented relations between religions and cities, our urban life is probably even more deeply penetrated by all kinds of rather unknown and hidden religious moral codes, sacred values, faith traditions, holy communal organisations, supernatural spiritualities, devine beliefs, or superstitious institutions that pervade and shape our urban realm continuously. But what do those unfamiliar penetrations actually look like and what kind of effect do they have on cities? How do the effects differ between the different religions and how do they coexist in our cities? How are they manifested in built-up form?

The upcoming issue of MONU will unveil those effects and investigate the impact of holiness, faith, and religion on cities. How does religion influence urbanity and in what way does it shape our cities? Which religion's deep-rooted influences have we taken for granted already, so much so that we cannot even trace their roots anymore? What kind of extraordinary urban phenomena are created through religion and how could we define Holy Urbanism in general?

We invite uncompromising texts, untamed speculations, refined analysis, bold photography, and heroic projects on the topic "Holy Urbanism" for our next issue of MONU. Contributions or questions should be sent to info@monu-magazine.com by the end of November 2008. MONU #10 will be published in the winter 2009.

Promises to be interesting. Maybe I'll take it upon myself to write up an architectural critique of the Wasilla Church of God, which specializes in (among other things) the Rapture and praying for oil pipelines.

humanitarianism at the cooper-hewitt

I haven't had a chance to see this show yet at the Cooper-Hewitt, but Christopher Hawthorne (who, by the way, is consistently besting his counterpart at the New York Times as an effective architectural critic) has a piece in the LA Times on the exhibit "Design for the Other 90%." It's a short review, but Hawthorne manages to get his point across - along with some quick barbs at Koolhaas and Hadid, which I, of course, could not help but enjoy.

I've been traveling but should be back with some new posts in the coming weeks. Until then -

PR.

"freedom from fear"

Just read a fantastic op-ed piece in today's Times by structural engineer and Princeton professor Guy Nordenson. Direct from a key player in the design of the Freedom Tower, it's the strongest indictment yet of Pataki's total incompetence and negligence with respect to the reconstruction at the WTC site. If this doesn't make it clear how the last five years have been such a missed opportunity, then I don't know what will.

link: "Freedom From Fear" by Guy Nordenson in the New York Times

haecceity: critical architecture theory?

FOLLOWING UP SOMEWHAT on the previous post: via Archinect, I just heard about this relatively new site called Haecceity Inc., supposedly an enterprise dedicated to investigating critical theory's role in architecture. Seems a bit suspect, considering the Advisory and Editorial Board includes Michael Speaks, an avowed post-critic who has on more than a few occasions called for an end to theory's relevance in the wired, globalized world in which we find ourselves. Sounds interesting, though -- I'll definitely stay tuned.

link: Haecceity, Inc.: Critical Architecture Theory

muschamp madness

FOLLOWING UP ON EARLIER POSTS regarding the weakness of contemporary architectural criticism:

Herbert Muschamp returns to the pages of the Times today with a rambling, stream-of-consciousness reflection on Edward Durell Stone's 2 Columbus Circle, claiming it as an icon for New York's 1960s gay culture. How this tiring and somewhat senseless article -- actually, more of a diary entry -- slipped past the Arts editor, I have no idea. The strangeness of this aimless piece approaches -- yet does not match -- the absurdity of his article on Zaha Hadid from 2004, which contains one of my favorite moments of architectural "criticism" ever printed:

You might find Hadid lying by the pool at the Delano in South Beach, where she often goes to chill out, her body glistening with oil, hands swatting at imaginary flies. She could almost be a British housewife letting her hair down at Butlin's Holiday Camps. And her laugh is a real ah-hah-hah!

I leave you with that image...

link: The Secret History of 2 Columbus Circle by Herbert Muschamp

goldberger, again

I FORGOT TO MENTION Paul Goldberger's equally strange review of Norman Foster's new Hearst Building in midtown Manhattan. Sure, the building's diagrid structure is certainly impressive, as is the effort to enhance the skyline of a city so inundated with generic highrise construction. But is Foster really the "Mozart of modernism"? Goldberger, as is usually the case, seems overly enthusiastic and hardly offers any critical reading of the project. Shouldn't the New Yorker, a magazine with such potent weekly political, literary, and cultural criticism, find an architectural critic who has something else to bring to the table, other than wide-eyed awe and fascination?

link: Triangulation: Norman Foster's thrilling addition to midtown Manhattan

goldberger: rouse as radical?

CHECK OUT THIS WEEK'S New Yorker for a (typically) strange piece by Paul Goldberger on the Disneyfied "festival marketplace" of Shanghai's Xintiandi district. I don't really understand his logic here, but it seems to me as if Goldberger is trying to say that that the recent fascination with Rouse-ian kitsch in Shanghai somehow has radical architectural implications for the city. Is it radical simply because it is a different urbanistic approach than the standard Shanghai development? Does that simple difference discount the enormous amount of cultural and symbolic baggage that these festival marketplace-like developments bring along with them? Maybe someone can help me here... am I missing something?

link: Paul Goldberger's Shanghai Surprise: The radical quaintness of the Xintiandi district