russian airports, cured meat, and postmodernism

I'm a bit behind on the posting (as usual) - but here's a quick note on the Economist fantastic year-end issue that by now is already a month old. The fabulously British newspaper uses this annual issue as an excuse to write about odd and offbeat topics, while at the same time using these unlikely news items as critiques of or commentaries on the world at large. And it's all infused, of course, with that characteristic Economist wit that we know and love. It's always something to look forward to, and this year's holiday dispatch is certainly no disappointment. A few favorites (if the links require subscription - I apologize):

"Russian airports: Kama Sutra and feral cats." A fascinating tour of the airports of the former Soviet Union, this article reads like some sort of perverse travelogue. It's brilliant. The story begins with Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport and goes on to explore the nation's other major airports, all of which seem to be characterized primarily by a permanent state of chaos. The insanity, however, nonetheless inspires within the writer a small measure of awe and - dare i say - admiration; the Russian airport becomes a metaphor for the Russian nation itself: a chaotic state of (heretofore) untapped potential. Some choice moments:

[image: Wikipedia]

On Sheremetyevo:

Sheremetyevo is war. The international terminal was built for the 1980 Olympics, to showcase the Soviet Union's modernity; now it recalls the old regime's everyday callousness (the anarchic domestic terminal is even worse). On a bad day, the queue at passport control stretches almost to the runway.

The Sheremetyevo virgin soon meets the various species of Moscow queue-jumper: the brazen hoodlum; the incremental babushka; the queue-surfing clans who relocate in groups when one of their number reaches the front. The immigration officer—usually sporting peroxide blond hair, six-inch heels and an abbreviated skirt—offers an early insight into Russian notions of customer service. Reflecting the country's neo-imperialist confidence, the immigration form was for most of this year available only in Russian (“distributed free”, it says, in case anyone is tempted to pay).

On Mineralnye Vody (in the north Caucasus):

Mineralnye Vody airport is a lower circle of hell.... It is weirdly cold inside. Feral cats have been sighted. The floor has not been cleaned since perestroika; the toilets are hauntingly squalid. On the wall there are arrival and departure boards that no longer work, and a big, proud map of the Soviet Union.

On Irkutsk (in eastern Siberia):

Planes descend into the city's airport over identikit Soviet apartment blocks and rickety Siberian dachas. The current arrivals terminal is a hut on the apron of the tarmac. Passengers wait in the street until the baggage-handlers feel inclined to pass their bags through a hole in the hut's wall. The bags then circulate on a terrifying metal device apparently borrowed from a medieval torture chamber. The nearby departure terminal is chaos, though by ascending an obscure staircase passengers can find an interesting photographic display on “minerals of eastern Siberia”.

On a side note: some quick Google Image searching found a photo of the (in)famous Domestic terminal at Sheremetyevo -- from the article, it sounds like a nightmare on the inside, but it sure looks pretty cool.

[image: link]

"Cured meat: Feet in the trough." A survey of the long tradition of smoking and curing pork that begins with Cato the Elder and ends with the new start-up of Paul Bertolli, formerly of the famous Chez Panisse in Berkeley. Vegetarians should refrain from this one.

"Shopping and philosophy: Postmodernism is the new black." This article is a surprisingly accessible and lucid account of how the "postmodern" critiques of consumer capitalism espoused by writers like Lyotard, Foucault, and Derrida have been assimilated into and coopted by the very Establishment they sought to undermine. I'm continually fascinated by how so-called "oppositional" strategies and techniques are redeployed by those in control to undermine that opposition (and vice-versa: how reactionary strategies can be directed into progressive tactics... but that's another story). An obvious example of this is the amazing ability of the Bush administration to repackage conservative policies under the mantle of supposedly progressive aims like education and environmental concerns -- often branding them under intentional misnomers like "No Child Left Behind," "Healthy Forests," or "Clean Skies."
The Economist article, however, focuses less on politics and more on how consumer marketing has latched onto postmodern theories of difference, fragmentation, and extreme individualism as a means to reinvent marketing practices. Perhaps Apple is the most successful at this strategy -- telling its consumers to "Think Different," as if each individual iPod with its mass-customized engraving, color choice, and playlist preserves some sort of sense of individuality. Regardless - an interesting read, and it makes me wonder more and more where now (with regard to postmodernism) if a newspaper like the Economist, capitalist champion extraordinaire, is writing about postmodern strategies of mass marketing. If capitalism has absorbed and repackaged its own critique, then what's next?

eikongraphia

Michielangelo recently has re-launched his blog as Eikongraphia, an updated version of his ongoing investigations into the role of iconography in architecture. I've definitely enjoyed Michiel van Raaij's thoughts and speculations as to how a building's iconography relates to its form and meaning -- his commentary is hard to categorize but easy to appreciate. The basic premise consists of short vignettes that take on a building strictly on iconographic terms (some of my favorites include the Penis and Vagina entries), thereby attempting to reconcile traditional formal concerns with a building's actual lasting effect -- essentially, how it is consumed by its observers. Read van Raaij's "Narrative" for a more detailed description of his methodology. While I do have some concerns with reading a building simply as an object for consumption, I am intrigued by the notion of "iconicity" (a term I presume coined by van Raaij? I've never come across it before) as an architectural quality to be pursued, or even perfected. It potentially offers a new, post-Venturi Scott-Brown way of understanding architectural form, and I'm curious to see how it plays out -- and if the politics of form/iconography will come into play.

link: Eikongraphia

artkrush 41 / boeri

Check out the new issue of Artkrush (their third architecture issue) - there's an interesting interview with Stefano Boeri (of Boeri Studio, Multiplicity, and editor of Domus) in which the Italian architect talks about some of his myriad research endeavors throughout the globe. I've always had a few misgivings about Boeri's methodology -- which essentially consists of obsessive and exhaustive documentation of super-local conditions -- as it walks the fine line between studied observation and sensationalist exploitation (dare I say exoticization). While I know that Boeri's intentions are of course not to exoticize or exploit, and I appreciate his rigorous explorations of emergent urban conditions, there is always a certain ambiguity in my mind about who is actually benefitting or profiting from the research.

Regardless -- the interview is pretty interesting. In relation to my own concerns, I found this excerpt on Boeri's intentions particularly compelling:

I believe that the act of observing, describing, and interpreting the built environment helps us understand the community we inhabit. And I believe that the landscape — the territory continually defined by our movements, reinvented by our desires, punctuated by what we build — is an excellent metaphor for our society. The local is a treasure chest rich in details and clues that tell us about the forces that permeate our daily lives, forces that at times are manifest in the space that surrounds us, perhaps just for a few instants, like footsteps in the snow. Architecture's political dimension is not to be found in the labels we attach to our projects, nor in our magniloquent political declarations; rather, it lies in the production of useful and critical knowledge about the world that surrounds us — knowledge that is useful because it is critical.

I also am intrigued by Boeri's interpretation of borders and boundaries as potential sites for intervention and action: "I try to conceive of boundaries as the sensors of contemporary world dynamics — dynamic 'devices,' which vibrate with the energy and resistance that drive current history." Since it seems that the world we live in is increasingly defined by different degrees of boundaries and "devices" of separation, it makes sense to pursue architectural strategies that subvert and redirect these divisive phenomena towards a more productive purpose. The question is: how?

complexity and contradiction, revisited

[all photos: Venturi Scott-Brown Associates]

I had a chance to swing by Columbia last night for a presentation by Bob Venturi, followed by a discussion between the architect and GSAPP dean Mark Wigley. You are probably rolling your eyes, since I seem to always have Venturi and his wife/partner Denise Scott-Brown on my mind. But indulge me once again -- there were some interesting moments worth sharing.

The event was loosely structured as a celebration of the 40-year anniversary of the publication of Venturi's seminal debut book, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966). For those who haven't read this -- you should. It is absolutely one of the most essential texts (along with Venturi's 1972 follow-up, Learning from Las Vegas, co-authored with Denise Scott-Brown and Steven Izenour) for understanding the predicaments facing contemporary architecture. After a stirring introduction by Lee Bollinger, Columbia's president and Venturi's old client back at Michigan, Venturi began with some brief reflections on both the book's inception and critical reception. Reiterating comments he has made over the years in various articles and symposia, he insisted that interpretations of the book or of him as being anti-modern or postmodern are completely misguided. This has always been pretty clear to me -- the book, while celebrating the immense stylistic diversity of historical architecture, by no means prescribes a specific style. Rather, it advocates an approach of celebratory, almost hedonistic, eclecticism -- or what Venturi likes to refer to as mannerism. While much of VSB's architectural production has involved neoclassical elements or historical references, the style itself is arbitrary and almost besides the point. [And furthermore, in line with Venturi's claim last night that Complexity and Contradiction ultimately affirmed a functionalist approach to architecture, almost all of the VSB work follows a strict functionalist paradigm of boxy, ultra-efficient floorplans that often divorce service spaces from served spaces. A reference to Kahn, no doubt, to whom Venturi also paid tribute tonight. The functionalist imperative appears again and plays a huge role in Learning from Las Vegas.] Anyway, the point is that it's understandable why historicist postmodern architects latched on to Complexity and Contradiction as justification for their stylistic carelessness, but the sweet irony is that, in true form, they completely missed the intricacy of Venturi's argument.


The discussion consisted mostly of Wigley's characteristic wizardry with words that seemed to completely baffle poor old Bob. He essentially asked the same question -- why did you write Complexity and Contradiction? -- a dozen times in a dozen different ways. The hope was to elicit some sort of polemical commitment to manifesto-writing and the activist potential of theorizing (to which I fully subscribe), but Venturi simply refused to cede Wigley any ground, insisting that the book grew out of his lectures for a theory class he was teaching at Princeton in the early 60's. I wondered if Wigley was actually talking less about Venturi and more about himself: if he was trying to posit a projective role for the writer in order to justify his own career as a non-practicing architect. Maybe that's getting a little too Wigley-psychoanalytic. Who knows. Anyway, the banter continued at length until Denise Scott-Brown, who, like the rest of us, could not take any more of the labyrinthine inquisition, finally decided to tell him what he wanted to hear. "Bob writes to figure out what he thinks," she said, explaining how the writing indeed came to inform their practice. Whether she was actually sincere, or whether she was just doing us all the favor of neutralizing the debate, I'll never know. But her brief words made me want more. Even though the event was nominally in honor of Complexity and Contradiction, which Venturi wrote solo, I realized (yet again) that Venturi without Scott-Brown is really only half the story.


The most interesting part of the evening was Venturi's emphatic characterization of his own writing as purely pragmatic and realist, as opposed to purely idealistic. In other words, he claims the basis of his learning and his analysis is always the existing conditions, the ordinary, the "real" world as it is, and that conclusions are never drawn from any preconceived ideologies. Hence the "Learning from..." technique that proved so crucial in the later collaboration with Scott-Brown and Izenour.

Clearly this enchantment with the messy realities, chaos, multiplicities, and vibrancies of everyday life is what really defines the Venturi Scott-Brown legacy. It certainly explains why I identify so strongly with their work. And seen in that light, it becomes evident why a school like Columbia would kick off its heavy-hitter lecture series with an event honoring good old Bob Venturi, who is still considered a postmodern pariah by many orthodox practitioners of architecture. It's definitely time, as architects as diverse as Koolhaas and FAT have come to realize, to reconsider the Venturis and their influence over the past forty years. Not only are they "back," as I've said - but maybe they never actually left.

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

on progress

READING EMPIRE TONIGHT with Bush's State of the Union address in the background (I swear - not trying to be ironic, it just happens to be what I'm reading now!) got me thinking about the distinction between progress and reaction. At first, it seems simple: progress is going forward, proposing an affirmative agenda that moves on from the present, while a reaction is a step backwards, a negation. But isn't a belief in progress somehow rejecting the current state of affairs, and therefore a reaction to the present? And isn't there also embedded within the reactionary an equal (if perverse) belief that moving backwards will somehow make us all better off?

Not related to architecture, you say. Yet hear me out. In the ongoing disciplinary disputes over the validity of theory in contemporary architectural practice, we can oversimplify by saying there are two sides: those who value the role of criticality as a means of assessing the status quo with the hope of imagining a better future, and those who advocate more "pragmatic" or "projective" practices in which theory takes a back seat to the negotiation of real-world architectural projects. Here, at least in my assessment, the roles are reversed: the old adherents to critical theory remain committed to the greater cause of Progress (or at least maintain some sense of hope that architecture somehow can contribute to that cause), while the newer pragmatists are much more willing to sacrifice long-term vision for short-term success (monetary, fame, whatever). In other words, the post-critics are reacting to the long-term discilpinary hegemony held by the critical theorists, who, perhaps mistakenly, remain wedded to architecture's progressive imperative.

My point in all of this -- and to try to bring it back to tonight's presidential spectacle -- is that maybe the answer (or Answer?) is a hyrid of progress and reaction. Indeed, maybe the two are not mutually exclusive and are instead co-dependent -- or symbiotic, if you will. Maybe it is possible to posit a critical architecture that not only imagines, but projects and even realizes a better future. Maybe it is possible for an opposition party to do the same thing not with architecture, but with politics. Would that be a progressive reaction?

My apologies for talking in circles! It's just that kind of night. More to come, for sure - I'm working on an ongoing bibliography on the whole post-critical issue, so feel free to send links and references my way...

on empire (1)

I'VE JUST STARTED READING Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's 2000 book on the ascendancy of a supranational order and all of its political, cultural, social ramifications. After coming across the text several times during various research projects (not to mention the countless -- and often clueless -- references to the book during reviews and lectures while at school), I decided to give it a close reading. I'm especially anticipating the final section of the book, in which Hardt and Negri propose various models for opposition to the global order of Empire. (Their 2004 follow-up, Multitude, apparently picks up where Empire leaves off and continues the discussion of tactics of resistance and democratic alternatives to Empire.)

I've also been reading up a lot on the (very) current debates going in academic architectural circles on the validity of "criticality" in contemporary theory and practice. You can guess on which side of the aisle I sit with regard to architecture's capacity (imperative?) to critique the status quo (and thus imagine a better future) -- but let's not get into that just yet. Part of my goal in reading Empire is to test the relevance of Hardt and Negri's political analysis to architectural discourse. In other words: can architecture both take part in and resist/subvert/undermine the power structures of globalization? What form would such an architecture take?

Expect more posts as I further sort out my thoughts... For now, I'll leave you with a quote from the authors' preface to Empire:

Our political task, we will argue, is not simply to resist these processes but to reorganize them and redirect them toward new ends. The creative forces of the multitude that sustain Empire are also capable of autonomously constructing a counter-Empire, an alternative political organization of global flows and exchanges. (Empire, p. xv)

link: Michael Hardt on Wikipedia
link: Antonio Negri on Wikipedia