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See here. Nice cover, wow….

NYT on a new and enormous Koolhaas project in Dubai. (We’re all going to have to start thinking and talking about Dubai one of these days, aren’t we?) Apparently, though we don’t have all that much to work on and Ouroussoff gives us very little, this is meant to be something like an materialization of the “generic city” idea from Koolhaas’s S/M/L/XL.

I know I have a lot to say about this “generic city” business, which is a concept as complex and ambiguous as the ad without products (whatever that is…) and in perhaps just the same ways. But my copy of S/M/L/XL is in storage and won’t be available to me till I move into my fractional piece of this not-quite-generic place where I am now. Soon enough…

From the NY Times today:

About a year and a half ago, Mr. Cruz received an unexpected call from David Deutsch, an artist who runs a nonprofit foundation that sponsors arts programs in Hudson, N.Y. Mr. Deutsch was worried about the effects of gentrification on the town’s poorest residents, many of whom live in decaying neighborhoods just out of view of the transplanted New Yorkers and weekend antique shoppers ambling down its main strip.

Together Mr. Cruz and Mr. Deutsch set in motion an unconventional redevelopment plan aimed at reintegrating the poor and the dispossessed into Hudson’s everyday life. (The plan, which is being supported by the city’s mayor, Richard Scalera, is scheduled to go before the city council in the next few weeks.)

Looks really lovely, this. Let’s hope it makes it through the city council….

Unfortunately, this is all of the Maison de Verre that most of us will ever be able to see….

See the tiny little bit of verre there in back, through the window? It was a bit consoling to know that in standing before the locked front door, I was standing where some of my heroes, like Benjamin, once stood. But a building as important as this one really shouldn’t be in private hands…

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So you end up broken in half, as a student of modernism, by the split in the period and in its emblematic works. On the one hand, the hyper-psychologized dystopias of individual complexity and political ineffability. On the other, the union of form and function under a banner of progress (even real progress). The former is the reflexive stance of the modernist literary text; the later, of modernist architecture and design. Think Joyce vs. Corbusier. Woolf vs. Niemeyer, Kafka vs. Tiege. You find the architectural / progressive motif more attractive - more potentially useful today - as a seed for revivification. But, on the other hand, you work with literature - this is what you do for a living.

It is tough to mine the latter from the former, the simple from the complex, the beautiful utility from the gratingly indifferent. It is tough to find, in short, the other modernism in literary texts. After all, literature doesn’t love hopeful contentment, and work (vs. dark dreamlife) toward that end - and most of all, it does not love utopia, whether actual or anticipated, whether exuberant or fadedly just OK.

Or maybe it’s just you, er, that is, me, as Owen Hatherley has found it hiding in plain sight in a J.G. Ballard’s Vermilion Sands.

[T]here is only one instance of a speculative community approaching a Ballardian ideal – a site where we definitively leave the Anglo-Saxon tradition of the cautionary, anti-Modernist dystopia – and that is in Vermilion Sands. This is a 1971 collection of stories spanning his first published story, ‘Prima Belladonna’ (1956) to 1970, all set in the same community: a dead or dying desert resort, populated entirely by the elegantly, wanly idle, most of whom are involved in strangely calm psychodramas. Vermilion Sands is a synthetic and synaesthetic landscape of psychotropic houses that respond to their inhabitants’ desires and fears, singing sculptures, and a place where everything in sight seems to glitter, to take on the qualities of crystal, a flickering chromaticism suffusing everything from stairways to hair colour and eye pigments. It is, as Ballard writes in the 1971 introduction, a picture of an ideal he wanted and expected to see realised. The dystopian tradition is refuted in this introduction: ‘very few attempts (in SF) have been made to visualise a unique and self-contained future that contains no warnings to us. Perhaps because of this cautionary tone, so many of science fiction’s notional futures are zones of unrelieved grimness.’ So could there be here a sort of affirmative retort to the insistence that all Modernist or utopian communities inevitably end up in dystopia?

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(Xposted to Long Sunday….)

The current configuration of the fields of journalism, academia, and publishing - plus the advent of the blogsphere - have produced in turn a new configuration of public intellectualism. There’s something of a long tail effect at work - there are probably more PIs listened to by fewer than any time in history. All manner of blogpundits, evangelists, and visionaries abound.

One of these (actually, he’s officially the Visionary in Residence at the Art Center College of Design in California) is Bruce Sterling, who has recently produced his very own youtubed guide to Belgrade:

Let me clip in what I think is the key passage here:

OK. so bear around the corner of the street, and this Tito-era workers housing building with its crumbling substandard concrete, we have what’s basically an ideological declaration here: business, technology, communication. You notice it doesn’t seem to be actually selling much of anything, it’s more like a placard for the 21st century way of life. Just a layer, a thin layer, on top of an older building. But it is this layer, this thin layer, that actually allows me to live within this particular city and earn a living here… via internet. Oh but what kind of person am I? Well, you know, look at my clothing. Look at my possessions. Business, technology, communication. What are these objects, actually attached to my body. This one in particular, wireless communication, completely changes people’s physical relationship to the city grid. In order to assemble my crew here on this street corner, we had to make about 30 different wireless phone calls just this morning and this afternoon. And yet, thanks to wireless communication, this is it. Thanks to the internet, that’s what allows me to be here.

Dear Christ. So, let’s consult the scorecard. The public housing of the old regime sucked, sure, but now there’s, what, a weird placard and Sterling with a fucking cellphone. For a proper celebration to ensue, you’d think we’d catch sight of all the fabulous new housing for the underclasses since the arrival of the free market chez Belgrade. After all, one guesses that there still are, like, people living in the crumbling workers housing building. Just as the failure of the American welfare state doesn’t mean that no one has to live in towering projects, it’s just that the idea of building new residences for the working class has been abandoned.

I suppose it does change “people’s relationship to the city grid” to have a well-paid speculative fiction writer cum freelance consultant strolling the streets of your city, making 30 calls a day on his phone, escorted by a movie crew. The rise of communism. The death of Tito. The fall of the Wall. The arrival of Bruce Sterling in your city. It all makes sense now, no?

More seriously: the illogic of the paragraph I’ve typed in speaks to the strange situation of the nearly-depoliticized public intellectual in 2007. The past, its utopian politics, are recognized and then derided. Guffaw, guffaw. But when the part of the paragraph arrives when you’re meant to explain why you’re smiling and carrying on, the part about the world actually being a better place now that the nasty specter of communism has slinked back into the grave, you simply stare into the face of your cellphone, or flip it out for all to admire. You register the amazingness of the fact that you’re actually here, wherever you are: a post-communist city that still bears the scares of US bombing, or a Pizza Hut in Bangalore, or the Department of Defense media center in the green zone, wherever. Your voice rises, you get excited, but there’s nothing to show but a civic-boosterist information economy poster splayed across the face of a Worker’s Residence, gutted into condos.

In short, the past and its potentialities are everywhere confronted, but only to be at once disowned with a shrug….

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(xposted to Long Sunday…)

From sit down man, you’re a bloody tragedy, a brilliant piece that explores prospects and dangers of Chavez via das Rote Wien and its architecture:

For all the bourgeois media’s myth-making of him as some sort of semi-literate caudillo, the policies of Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela seem to have some historical affinity with the rather ambiguous experiment in ‘municipal socialism’ made in Vienna between 1918 and 1934, an oasis of Socialism in a desert of Catholicism and Conservatism: however curious it might be curious to imagine Chavez and Austro-Marxists Otto Bauer or Rudolf Hilferding meeting up in a Viennese coffee house. In Victor Serge’s peerless Memoirs of a Revolutionary (which I will write about more fully when someone tags me with a ‘what are your 5 favourite books’ meme) there’s some wonderful passages where this professional revolutionary winds up in Red Vienna with fellow Comintern refugees like George Lukacs and Gramsci, enjoying the political largesse in a decidedly comfortable seeming Social Democracy: ‘playing for time, building workers’ flats and enjoying sweet music in every cafe down to the smallest”.

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Amazing little piece in the Times today, reporting that São Paulo will ban outdoor advertisements of every sort come January 1:

SÃO PAULO, Brazil — Imagine a modern metropolis with no outdoor advertising: no billboards, no flashing neon signs, no electronic panels with messages crawling along the bottom. Come the new year, this city of 11 million, overwhelmed by what the authorities call visual pollution, plans to press the “delete all” button and offer its residents an unimpeded view of their surroundings.

But in proposing to transform the landscape, officials have unleashed debate and brought into conflict sharply differing conceptions of what this city, South America’s largest and most prosperous, should be.

City planners, architects and environmental advocates have argued enthusiastically that the prohibition, through a new “clean city” law, brings São Paulo a welcome step closer to an imagined urban ideal.

The law is “a rare victory of the public interest over private, of order over disorder, aesthetics over ugliness, of cleanliness over trash,” Roberto Pompeu de Toledo, a columnist and author of a history of São Paulo, wrote recently in the weekly newsmagazine Veja. “For once in life, all that is accustomed to coming out on top in Brazil has lost.”

As you might guess from the title of this site, I have a somewhat ambivalent relationship to advertisements, but this seems like an amazing, almost revolutionary idea, at least to this American.

….but then again, one might start to wonder how exactly the Paulistanos will find a way to navigate the city…

(think I’ve posted that video before… sorry if so…)

(There’s an update here…)

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Russian Utopia: A Depository

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7) The drawings themselves. Any chance you want to take a harder look at your plans? When unveiling the latest, you explained the appearance of the spearhead tower, which you’ve named “Miss Brooklyn” (spurring the inevitable quip, We’ll miss it, all right). You explained: “When we were studying Brooklyn, we happened upon a wedding, a real Brooklyn wedding. And we decided that ‘Miss Brooklyn’ was a bride. She’s a bride with her flowing bridal veil—I really overdid it. If you had seen the bride, you would—I fell in love with her.” Pardon me, but bleeechh. I don’t know whether many great buildings have been founded on notions at once so metaphorically impoverished and so slickly patronizing. But somehow I doubt that any have.

Bleeechh indeed. Every time I’ve seen Gehry open his mouth about Brooklyn, this sort of shit comes out. Tony and Tina. Moonstruck. Cheezecake. Fuhgeddaboudit. What is it about Bklyn that makes him so soft in the head?

Unfortunately, I’m not sure I can even categorize this one as “multinational capitalist chic.”

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What began as a shocking development, as unsettling as it was enlivening -

La rue assourdissante autour de moi hurlait.

Longue, mince, en grand deuil, douleur majestueuse,

Une femme passa, d’une main fastueuse

Soulevant, balançant le feston et l’ourlet;

Agile et noble, avec sa jambe de statue.

Moi, je buvais, crispé comme un extravagant,

Dans son oeil, ciel livide où germe l’ouragan,

La douceur qui fascine et le plaisir qui tue.

Un éclair… puis la nuit! — Fugitive beauté

Dont le regard m’a fait soudainement renaître,

Ne te verrai-je plus que dans l’éternité?

Ailleurs, bien loin d’ici! trop tard! jamais peut-être!

Car j’ignore où tu fuis, tu ne sais où je vais,

Ô toi que j’eusse aimée, ô toi qui le savais! (translations)

- becomes the fix that we missed, what we’ll move mountains and monuments to have again. We’ll pay handsomely for it, this love at last sight. We will, we say, plan contingency into our plans.

Diventity: Identity, Density and Diversity

I propose one simple caveat urban design should strive to implement:

“Good urban space optimises Diventity” *.

Diventity is a concept that links diversity, density, and identity, and I define it as such:

Diventity allows identity to recursively emerge from the density of diversity, when that density reaches a critical mass.
[snip]

A city is much more than its stones, a city is memories and relationships and friendships and fears and ambitions; it is stories and histories interacting in the society-space-time continuum.

We form these subjectivities only if the city provides us the right opportunities, because a city is first and foremost our memory-forming medium. We remember our first kiss through who we kissed and when and where we were when we kissed.

[snip]

A place with enough differentiated identities (spatial, social, etc), distributed in the right proximity (or density) to allow them to interact without obliterating one another, might create enough such moments to allow for identity-shaping memories to emerge. We can say that such a place has Diventity.

It is worth remembering that Les fleurs du mal was published during the early years of Haussmann’s transformation of Paris. An anti-”diventity” plan if there ever was one…

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Eerie paragraph in a nifty piece by Geoff Dyer in today’s FT. He’s talking about the model of Shanghai 2020 at the Urban Planning Exhibition Hall (which I was lucky enough to visit when I was there 2 years ago. The picture above is mine…) :

Government is a top-down process in China, which the city models also reflect. It is part of the folklore of the Shanghai museum that when it opened in 2000, many local visitors discovered for the first time that their neighbourhood was to be razed to make way for some new high-rise.

In a similar vein…

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Owen Hatherley, at The Measures Taken (one of the best blogs going, btw), on just what’s so disturbing about the Victoria & Albert Museum’s new exhibition, Modernism: Designing a New World 1914-1939.

Rather, what disturbs here is what Jenkins, quite rightly, calls politics in the guise of art. One scribbled comment in the book asks why the connection between modernism and Nazism wasn’t emphasised (well, that would be because there wasn’t one), others use phrases like ‘cold’ or ‘brutal’…what the detractors have noticed is that much of this essentially comes from, or supports, the possibility of a system other than the one we are perpetually told is the only possible. Whether it’s the photos of militant stronghold siedlung Karl-Marx-Hof in Vienna, a huge model of the Vesnin’s Pravda building, Rodchenko’s oddly alluring workers’ overalls, Corbusier taking a pen and scribbling out the centre of Paris…there are hundreds of possibilities dotted around these Victorian corners.

UPDATE: And today there’s more, complete with a very provocative quotation from Stalin:

“The combination of the Russian revolutionary sweep with American efficency is the essence of Leninism in Party and state work.”

Joseph Stalin, Foundations of Leninism, 1924

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From an interview (not as yet online) with Oscar Niemeyer in this month’s Metropolis:

You built you personal driver’s house in a favela here in Rio. Is it a good example of architecture helping those who are excluded?

Yes, but we are talking here about my driver - my dear friend for more than half a century. He is a Brazilian man, a poor man, one who was born poor and will die poor. Of course his life is improved with his new house, but this is an exception. Housing is always the beginning of any change in someone’s life. One needs to have a worthy place to live, and the state should provide it to everybody. But I insist that the answer to this change is not architecture. It is revolution.

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