Shared Purpose: Collaboration for Successful Design

Dean of Parson’s School of Constructed Environments William Morrish provides an intriguing discussion of the importance of combined efforts for understanding the infrastructure of a city. Focusing on post-Katrina New Orleans in After the Storm, Morrish describes the  necessity of collaboration across the fields of design, science, and government. Moreover, he describes nature itself as an aid to quicker rebuilding. 

Morrish first explores why New Orleans was not prepared for the 2005 disaster brought by hurricane Katrina. The city’s vulnerability was not apparent until after the storm (Morrish, 2008, 6). Overall the reason for New Orleans’ problems with rebuilding may be rooted in its lack of planning. Morrish cites art historian Wolfgang Braunfels: “Anyone who planned only for necessity did not even achieve what was necessary” (9). Marketed as “The Big Easy” the city also reflects Arjun Appadurai’s discussion of  the relationships between imagination, nostalgia and consumption: behind the tourist’s illusion of a relaxing, carefree lifestyle was a weak government making hierarchically biased decisions. The city’s politicians were acting independently when their decisions could have been improved with designers and scientists as allies. The system, with its “single functions” and “private sectors” needs to be reformulated to facilitate the complex intertwining of the designer, the official, and the “fully engaged citizenry with a strong sense of shared purpose” (12).

An example of fully engaged citizenry, where designers and citizens combine efforts is New Orleans’ Global Green/The Holy Cross Project, which added an online system per house (called “Building Dashboard”) which allows residents to see their energy, water, gas, etc. usage in real time. Imaged here is a screenshot of what the residents would see when they log on to their Building Dashboard.

Other examples of the possibilities opened by the joining of diverse minds are shown by finding a new function for an already existing object. Morrish provides the example of the bicycle-friendly retaining walls of the low-lying Netherlands (pictured above), and the use of solar panels on renovated New Orleans rooftops (12-15). The recycling of functions relates strongly to theories of sustainability (see also Michael Thompson’s Rubbish Theory). When objects and functions become cyclical rather than linear, multiple rather than singular, then a lot of time,  material — and thus money, can be saved. Often nature has already provided the object that humans can manipulate for their use, or what engineers call “non-structural alternatives”, as seen here, where shrubs have been planted to prevent runoff (16).

Perhaps the most distressing issue with non-structural alternatives, is that they often go unused because they produce less profit than fully-human engineered objects. Simple and sustainable solutions that help community and nature are often overlooked or ignored due to economic issues. Yet, as in the case of New Orleans, the fault in this kind of decision-making is seen only after human casualties and physical devastation that a disaster like Katrina could cause. And still, even after the weak backbone of New Orleans’ infrastructure was revealed, rebuilding efforts risk regression to overspecialization — even when some serious thought, collaboration, and a sense of unity would result in a better infrastructure and future prevention.

— Sonia Scarr

Morrish, William H. After the Storm: Rebuilding Cities upon a Reflexive Urban Landscape. New York: New School for Social Research, 2008.

Beyond the Superficial: Meanings of Surface

In The Fabric of Fabrication, Gevork Hartoonian examines  notions on the topic of surface in light of architectural images produced with digital technology.  In order to do so, he uses the ideas of German architect, Gottfried Semper, and the theory of dressing.  Explaining the historical function of textiles to provide shelter, he considers surfaces in terms of covering or wrapping. Professor Susan Yalevich also walked us through the history of textiles, emphasizing their impact in the development of architecture.

Historically, textiles were hung to divide space (think of a tent or a yurt). Later they were used to cover floors, which preceded the transference of their motifs to the exterior, as if to dress or ornament surface.  Semper sees a distinction between the “core form” of the building and its “art form.”  Semper attributes the use of motifs in designing tectonic forms to textiles.  Fabric and walls are both “coverings” dividing what is inside against what is outside.  In dressing, the form of the body always dictates the appearance of the surface because of the inherent contours necessitating cuts and folds.  It is what one does with such forms that marks the distinction between what is “dressed,” or what is “dressed up.”

Today we see Semper’s ideas about excess in relation to new computer generated forms, animated surfaces, and a mass culture at times described as a culture of spectacle.  I appreciate Semper’s belief that architecture should be considered within a broader cultural experience.  Notions of excess and ornament are similarly inherent in other art forms, like music and dance.  Architecture is as other cultural products, from textiles, to ceramics and music.  There is inherent theatricality in architecture, and as long as it does not transfer into the realm of pure spectacle, wastefulness, or tackiness (the last being subjective, I realize), then I enjoy this placement of architecture within other art forms, even if it is situated within our culture of excess.  We are surrounded by so many eye-soars and cookie-cutter enclaves, that even if a building is an “ugly” blob or a baffling stack of cubes, they reflect some element of culture.

Hartoonian’s essay The Fabric of Fabrication makes us consider what our choices of coverings represent and mean to us within our current culture.  It is a worthy exercise to consider for ourselves what our personal preferences of surface fabrication or decoration say about us on an individual level and as a society.

Similarly, in her recent talk at Parsons, Professor Yalevich described fabric and dressing at the heart of architecture.

And, for your consideration, here are some architecture blogs brought to my attention by Ansley during a discussion about blob architecture and notions of “covering”.

http://thesartorialist.blogspot.com/

http://www.designboom.com/contemporary.html

-Deborah Engel

Graphic Novels as means to understand Race Relations

Questions of race are central to Mat Johnson’s graphic novel, Incognegro.  At Parsons, Johnson’s lecture explored the evolution of the comic book in relation to race and  cultural history.  The novel explores Black/White relations and lynchings in the South.  The use of comics, illustrated by Warren Pleece, allows the story to be presented in both theatrically and literally.  Johnson continually stresses the mixed race experience as it links it to his own personal life as a light-skinned Black male.

Cornel West — whose support for Incognegro appears on the book’s cover —  is a prominent intellectual figure known for championing the cause of racial justice.  His books address topics such as race, religion, family and democracy.  He graduated from Harvard and currently teaches at Princeton.

From the 1950s to the 1970s numerous movements shattered the ascribed cultural homogeneity in the United States and as a result, three changes took place: the shun of postmodern thinking, the revisioning of American history, and the development of a new popular culture. These change advocated democracy, diversity, multiplicity, and heterogeneity to stress the expansion of freedom. In his article, The New Cultural Politics of Difference, West reviews these changes in light of the Black artistic and intellectual community through focusing on what he identifies as a new cultural worker.  According to West, the cultural worker faces three main challenges: intellectual, existential, and political.

The Black community has faced continuous oppression and stereotyping from other groups.  As a result, the community holds identity specific values that were derived of, but also challenged normal European standards.  Through  shared experiences framed by language and music, they rejected oppression and found strength within their communities.

The New Cultural Politics of Difference provides a discussion of four responses common to oppression. However, ultimately West encourages only one, which depends on culture specific involvement in mainstream ideas and experiences.  This revision of modernity promotes “prospective and prophetic vision with a sense of possibility and potential,” stressing that the new cultural worker must address “politics of representation” to discuss diversity.

If you are interested in the mixed race experience or topics of otherness I suggest reading Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison.  There is also a collection of primary sources written by Ida B. Wells about the lynchings in the South (On lynchings: Southern horrors, A red record, Mob rule in New Orleans), which closely relates to both Johnson’s novel and his lecture.

 

RyanMassey

Do Ho Suh’s Altermodernity

Artist, Do Ho Suh explores the relationship between the individual  and shared space. In particular, Suh’s sculptures question the notions of   transnationalism as he may have experienced them himself. Born in Korea and having come to the United States in the early ‘90’s, Suh has  pursued studies at Seoul National University, The Rhode Island School of  Design and Yale University. Suh’s highly personal work thus relies on  process, the transparent, and transitional spaces.

In “My Thirty-Nine  Years”, a collection of eleven uniforms worn  throughout his life, the  transitions Suh has made becomes evocative of a  passageway. It is as Suh  describes, a coming out of the body and into the  space. Suh’s negotiation  with space is especially evident in “Seoul  Home/New York Home”,  wherein the artist has re-created his American and Korean homes in  delicate fabrics such silk-organza and polyester, connecting the two with a fictional corridor. For Suh, the corridor becomes the most important part of the piece — a transitional space connecting his lives across geographic boundaries. In their attempt to erase conventional notions of a singular rooted experience, Suh’s works can be related to the ideas of Nicolas Bourriaud, author of Relational Aesthetics and Postproduction (both 2002), and curator of the Fourth Tate Triennial (2009).   In his most recent publication, The Radicant, Bourriaud addresses postmodernism as merely another system of representation (which ultimately offers little to voice the plurality of global culture).

Similarly, while modernism is arguably faulted at fundamental levels, its persistence, Bourriaud says, deserves some reconsideration. In coining the “altermodern” to save us from the chaos of postmodernism, Bourriaud thus focuses on engendering a new kind of modernity, shaped by the present and constant flow of pluralities. Suh’s work brings us that much closer to this envisaged modernity, because rather than flattening cultural differences he values his diversity among an increasingly standardized world. As such, Do Ho Suh exemplifies Bourriaud’s radicant; leaving his single root in Korea to advance his identity on multiple surfaces and spaces.

 

 

 

Do Ho Suh’s work can be viewed at his representative  gallery http://www.lehmannmaupin.com/#/artists/do-ho-suh/.

-Shea Goli

Gianni Vattimo and Emerging Utopias

Gianni Vattimo begins The Transparent Society (1992) by giving a definition of modernity which I really appreciate; he writes, “…modernity is the epoch in which simply being modern became a decisive value in itself.”  This statement has clarified the idea of modernity for me, as a moment when humans began to be aware of the idea of modernity as a phase of human existence — the beginning of modernism.

Modernism can also be characterized as a time when artists were valued for their creativity and originality, a notion obvious today but a novel for the late 15th century. Implied is human  development or progress, which further suggests that there is somehow an end to our improvement.  This perspective places history on a singular path. Vattimo writes “a conception of history as the progressive realization of what is genuinely human requires that it be seen as unilinear.”  It is problematic to view history in such a manner since it ignores much that occurred outside of the mainstream of those in power.  Therefore, modernity ends, according to Vattimo, when it becomes impossible to consider history in linear terms. 

One of Vattimo’s main points surrounds the proliferation of media and the transition to post-modernism. He writes, “…modernity ends when—for a number of reasons—it no longer seems possible to regard history as unilinear.” He further explains how “newspapers, radio, television, what is now called telematics—have been decisive in bringing about the dissolution of centralized perspectives.” Vattimo sees this idea of de-centralization as both good and bad. The good is that it gives a voice to previously mute minority—it levels the playing field. The bad is that it can be chaotic and disorienting. Reading between the lines of Vattimo’s writing, I suggest that the benefits of postmodernism are best utilized when one is aware of their condition—the potential chaos and disorientation. These qualities are not inherently bad, but can be harmful if they are not consciously considered because a loss of one’s identity is at stake. 

 In chapter 5, Vattimo introduces the idea of utopia and heterotopia, particularly as these terms relate to the aesthetic experience. Relating back to his ideas on the valences between modern and postmodern moments, he writes, “Even from an aesthetic perspective, utopia implied a framework of universal history as unilinear. Yet utopia has disappeared, even from aesthetics, with the advent of certain ‘universality’ in the channels different models of value and recognition have found to express themselves.” Reading this chapter, I tend to think about the idea of “taste”—how we define good and bad taste, and its social role. Vattimo uses the phrase “mass aesthetic experience,” which, to me, relates to the idea of taste and also to his perception of postmodernism.

The following videos may represent current thinking on utopia in design. William McDonough, Cameron Sinclair, and Janine Benyus each present design methods that are underutilized, but that incorporate ideals of today’s designers demonstrate the possibility of utopia based on the generatation of change.

William McDonough: http://www.ted.com/talks/william_mcdonough_on_cradle_to_cradle_design.html

Cameron Sinclair: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/54

Janine Benyus: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/18

Pictured above: Failed Dawn, 2008 sculpture by Oscar Santillan, an Ecuadorian artist pursuing an MFA in Sculpture at VMA

 

— Ansley Whipple and Deborah Engel

 

everyday balkanization

Architect and visiting scholar at Parsons, Ivan Kucina explores relationships between the constructive, and de-constructive processes of everyday urban landscapes. Addressing the recent history of New Belgrade, which since the 1990s has been transformed through privatization and bottom-up, illegal building, Kucina suggests that systems of self-management exist within any larger ideology. The Art of Balkanization is based on the designer’s archives created during a 2006 expedition through the capitals of Southeastern Europe such as Ljubljana, Slovenia; Tirana, Albania and Belgrade, Serbia. In his presentation of informal structures and data clouds, Kucina explains how the built environment emerges from political/social/economic changes; how groups organize disorder through the creation of concurrencies: a grammar, if you will, of nodes, hubs, and cells.

While Kucina’s work may be explored using the dialectics of the everyday as espoused by French sociologists Henri LeFebvre and Michel de Certeau — dominant strategies and informal tactics — mapping changes in the Balkans onto oppositional structures is complicated. As Kucina suggests, sometimes the strategies become very flexible, while other times, tactics are instituted. In a particularly salient example, resistance to the construction of a 60 thousand square foot house on a public park in Belgrade exemplifies a park-becoming-battle-ground as well as a first-successful-community-action.

If, as Kucina suggests by 2030 most populations will live in self-made environments — what used to be known as “slums” — architects are rightly eager to learn from and facilitate community efforts. In support of wild builders combining sources as well as signifiers, who seek creative opportunity within actually existing entropy, the architect remarks: “It’s not important that it’s true, but it is important that it works.”

More on Kucina’s works can be found at Lexicon for the Provisional Future(s), exploring “how (else) can we imagine the future today?”

You may also enjoy The Art of Balkanization

–Sarah Butler

Sean Donahue, A Rebirth in Design

Sean Donahue is a designer and educator whose current initiatives include projects with the Media Design program at Art Center College of Design, and Research Centered Design, a Los Angeles based design practice pioneering the appropriation of ethnographic methodology towards socially conscious design.

In his Parsons lecture October 13, Donahue asked, “how do you make somebody understand the realities of someone else’s life?,” a question he strives to answer throughout his projects. Discussing research-centered design through a 2003 graphic design project to serve low-vision communities, Donahue shows how outcomes of the project — including graphic/tactile aids which are legible to a range of groups, and the Touch typeface — address the gaps dividing normal- low- and no-vision groups. Ultimately, community awareness leads to better design as, he says, “it brings to the foreground a significant difference between designing artifacts that establish a role and designing a role for an already established artifact.” As such, hybrid graphic/tactile aids facilitate communication across communities, as well as assist learning Braille.

As Donahue writes, “Design is a discipline that has room for a depth and breadth of practice and education beyond what is acknowledged by most designers and by society at large.” This could be construed as a cosmopolitan approach, as per philosopher Anthony Appiah, who suggests that with globalization comes a greater awareness and empathy for common human concerns, despite (and perhaps in relation to) greater diversity.

See: Brenda Laurel, Design Research: Methods and Perspectives, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004.

–Catherine Rocco

Crafting Liquid Modernity

Educator, industrial designer and architect Stefano Mirti may be known for his 2000 Polycarbonate House, a temporary, transluscent structure made using inexpensive, everyday materials in a minimum of space. As such, Tokyo’s disposable home embodies theoretical concern for what sociologists like Zygmunt Bauman have described as liquid modernity — the dissolution of traditional social structures in exchange for the “mind-boggling speed of circulation, of recycling, ageing, dumping and replacement,” (perhaps not only of things, but of interpersonal relationships). Liquidity, the “leading metaphor for the present stage of a modern era,” describes new technologies of power valuing speed, mobility and individualism as freedom.  Counter to solid modernity, which, according to Bauman was stable, slower, more secure and more communal, in liquid modernity “it is the high and mighty of the day who resent and shun the durable and cherish the transient, while it is those at the bottom of the heap who — against all odds — desperately struggle to force their flimsy and paltry, transient possessions to last longer and render durable service. ” (14).

Whether you consider these designs as though belonging to “the high and mighty” or to “those at the bottom of the heap” Mirti’s projects aim to embrace what he calls Design for a Low-Cost World. Another, more recent example  is the 2008 Museo Arti Femminili (MAF), the Vallo della Lucania exhibition of a private collection of textiles, designed and curated (both on-line and off) by Mirti’s Milan-based Interaction Design Lab (and pictured above). Again made using standard parts (such as ready-made IKEA units to produce exhibition designs), the MAF exposes the intimacy between economic and aesthetic realities by reinterpreting the museum using inexpensive, vernacular materials.

Perhaps since the birth of American modernity consumers have desired objects appearing fast and progressive. The success of streamlining, advanced by early industrial designer Raymond Loewy, shows how objects that work the same as more rational models can be made to appear more efficient (and in that way inspire demand), such as this prototype for a 1933 pencil sharpener. Today, however, notions of power and strength no longer derive from steam ships or engines, but the stuff of nanotechnologies: increasingly lightweight, even invisible designs at the level of genetic engineering. Increasingly mobile, new products such as laptops, cellular phones and iPods may answer the demands of consumers hoping to add a dash of liquid to their lives.

So, let’s not be too anxious about the total disintegration of social networks. While individualist, designs for liquid modernity  do not exist in a vacuum. As Richard Sennett describes in The Craftsman (2008), the role of cultural producers has not vanished, “it has merely migrated to other regions of human enterprise, so that the delicate form of skilled cooperation that once produced a cathedral now produces the Linux software system.” Young designers, for better or for worse, must often work in today’s market without years of apprenticeship experience but through the sucessful negotiation of quick changing, multiplying relations and forms. Mirti would agree, “Anyway, now it is great, because normally no-one would listen to you…now you succeed or fail because of the quality of your ideas, not because of your connections, because of the capital you have, or because of external factors.” For example we might look to Mark Zuckerberg, 23-year-old founder of Facebook — the youngest ever self-made billionaire.

-Sharon Shaked

The Paradox of Postnationalism

In a period marked by concerns for the environment, pandemic diseases, large-scale terrorism and human rights crises, the image of the Nation-State may be loosing sway as the primary organizing force. As a generation characterized by social networking systems, transient/instant communities, “commuter relationships”, instant messaging and serial migrations (whether forced or not), we may need to imagine new ways of identifying who we are as groups of people, perhaps not limited to the ideologies of the State. As this installation by German artist Herman Josef Hack, entitled Climate Refugee Camp may express: when basic human needs such as the availability of fresh water are at odds, questions of nationalism may become moot. As Shea Goli, a graduate student in our group writes, “Signs are no longer limited to narratives with an Enlightenment sentiment, but are read and understood differently by each culture within a nation to create multiplying signifyers.”

However, just as the nation-state becomes less capable of resolving global issues, a renewed tribalism emerges which pits fragmentary, deterritorialized groups against traditional majorities. Indeed, the more diasporic nationalism(s) become, the more intense minority commitment becomes to the homeland, while, simultaneously, the greater the imagined justice of the majority rule (hegemony) (Appadurai, 1996). This central paradox of postnationalism is explored by Professor Jilly Traganou’s research surrounding National and Post-national in the Olympic Design, describing, for example, the 2004 Athens Olympic closing ceremonies. The ceremonies, which featured the dramatized dance of the Rom, or gypsy communities of Athens  — choreographed around a red pick-up truck and baskets of watermelons — was derided in national press as an indecent exposure of Greece’s “dirty laundry”. Meanwhile, the actual Roma had in fact been forced to relocate in order to make way for the construction of the Olympic stadium. Whether you see the Rom dances as a mere spectacle of inclusion or a legitimate attempt towards peaceful integration, the Rom where not intended as real participants.

A similar controversy arose surrounding Santiago Calitrava’s design for the Athens stadium. An “alien”, or a “fellow Mediterranean”, the Spaniard architect made frequent allusions to the Greekness of his designs, pointing to similarities between his plans and the layout of the Acropolis. Again, from any vantage it may be significant to remember that the building was built by local populations — which included Greeks, Italians, Spanish, Chinese, Poles, etc…

Throughout her research Traganou grapples with these contradictions of postnationalism, for instance: does the 6th century marble kouros seen here on the left exhibit essential Greekness, or, can it be used to symbolize universal human-ness? If no, then what?

As anthropologist Arjun Appadurai remarks, “This vicious cycle can only be escaped when a language is found to capture the complex, nonterritorial, postnational forms of allegiance” (166). Through design, these questions may also be explored beyond language, through creative, performative applications such as these installations by UK based, Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare: perhaps not only postnational, but, as Shonibare intends, postracial. (Pictured above right: The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (America), 2008)

Traganou, Jilly. “National and Postnational Dynamics in the Olympic Design: The Case of Athens 2004 Olympic Games.” Design Issues (2008):1-25

Appadurai, Arjun. “Patriotism and Its Futures” In Modernity at Large, 158-177. University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

 

— Sarah Butler

Teddy Cruz + Border Urbanism

In Modernity at Large, anthropologist Arjun Appadurai writes that imagination plays a large part in modern cultural exchanges. This imagination is driven by influences Appadurai describes as “perspectival constructs”: ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes. He writes:

“It is the imagination, in its collective forms, that creates ideas of neighborhood and nationhood, of moral economies and unjust rule, of higher wages and foreign labor prospects. The imagination is today a staging ground for action, and not only for escape.”

Architect Teddy Cruz, whose work is often inspired by conflicts at the Tijuana/SanDiego border, may exemplify this type of cultural imagination. Cruz has spent a great deal of time observing the “-scapes” at the border, which have informed his work as a designer (work, he says, includes involvement with local non-profits and politics).

Highly critical of the suburban sprawl of San Diego, Cruz claims:

“The massive and expensive eradication of topography in the periphery of San Diego for the purpose of creating the one-dimensional infrastructure that can support the (even cheaper) construction of housing projects by private developers not only neutralizes the character of the ground and erases its political, historical, and cultural meanings, but also imprints on it, as Mike Davis has pointed out, an ecology of fear that ultimately flattens, along its path, a crucial sense of political will and social responsibility.”

Conversely, he finds inspiration in the informal landscapes of Tijuana where, “distinctions between the urban, suburban, and rural,” are blurred. He writes, “The imitation tract housing developments in Tijuana are inspiring and liberating in their search for strategies of improvisation, layering, juxtaposition, and negotiation of a territory conceived as an operative and flexible horizon.” Here is a photo collection I found that demonstrates this imagery:

Cruz is not exalting the image of poverty, but the ingenuity demonstrated by people in conditions of emergency; advocating,  “the political and cultural dimension of housing and density as tools for social integration in the city….” Where previously designers and architects have either totally ignored, or sought to eradicate micro- and community-based infrastructures, Cruz seeks to faciltate their capacity to innovate and survive — through enforcing factory/community reciprocity; the provision of pre-fabricated building supports; and the re-design of public policy through participation at the level of the community and not-for-profit organization.

The image here depicts Cruz’ graphic installation commissioned for the American Pavilion of the Architecture Biennial, as it was installed at Parsons earlier this year. To give you further ideas of the border culture in this specific place, I found this video (having crossed the border myself at this location, I find this interpretation to be very accurate of the sensory experience of the place):

There are many issues tied to the examination of border of conflict. We should not be disheartened by cultural clashes; instead, like Cruz, we can find points of conflict to be mines of design inspiration —  fuel for the imaginations. Cruz’ work reminds me of a “guerilla-architecture” group in Atlanta (where I am from), called the Mad Housers. Their mission is to improve the quality of life of homeless people around the city through the design and realization of small, provisional plywood huts for temporary housing. Other examples may include Maker Faire Africa, which particularly applies to industrial designers and inventors.

-Ansley Whipple