The forthcoming Fall issue of Crit, journal of the American Institute of Architecture Students, includes a brief article by me on the history of performance as an architectural paradigm:

Advertised as a scientific, “expert” way to solve problems, systems analysis was highly influenced by the emerging discipline of cybernetics, which taught that the behavior of a system could be modified gradually by successive iterations of feedback. In 1967, Progressive Architecture coined the term “performance architecture” as the architectural application of systems analysis….

All those factors in excess of the purely utilitarian were to be rigorously quantified, and would stand or fall based on their marketing potential. “Value analysis techniques in the very basic approach recognize two classes of functions,” wrote [value engineer Lawrence Delos] Miles: “those functions which cause the product to work and those functions which cause the product to sell.” Form, in other words, would only be considered in terms of economy of effect. The overriding goal was to maximize the intended outcome for the lowest possible cost….

In the 1990s, a “performative turn” in the humanities sought to bracket questions of meaning and shift the focus in various disciplines to the ways in which reality is actively constructed. The architectural applications of this new way of looking at art, language, and society deserve further exploration. However, an oversimplified adoption of the paradigm of performance amounts to a reversion to technocratic design. Society’s most pressing problems—environmental destruction, poverty, the status of human and other life—are fundamentally political, because they concern the allocation of limited resources. Frequently, the locus of these problems’ material manifestation is architecture, but it would be foolish to think that they could be solved if we just had better digital modeling and simulation tools. Delineating problems is often preferable to promising solutions, and a refusal to perform is sometimes the most constructive act.

In a new article, I trace the parallel architectural histories of the American megachurch and the corporate-organizational complex.

The image of rural America as the paragon of morality and social harmony was buttressed by the specter of a nuclear attack on a major city. In the 1950s, municipal governments went out of their way to locate train stations, hospitals, shopping centers, and other critical infrastructure beyond the anticipated blast radius. While most mainstream religious leaders responded to the atomic threat with sermons denouncing nuclear weapons and grappling with the morality of war, many evangelical preachers exploited the apocalyptic mood to further demonize cities. Two days after President Truman announced the first Soviet atomic test, a young Billy Graham warned in a fiery sermon: Do you know the area that is marked out for the enemy’s first atomic bomb? New York! Secondly, Chicago; and thirdly, the city of Los Angeles!

After WWII, the mass-production technologies used by wartime factories were employed to churn out prefabricated houses, as American families migrated by the hundreds of thousands to fields of tract housing that now ringed most major cities. The church was essential to suburbia, as it provided a sense of purpose for residents who might otherwise feel consigned to anonymity as they commuted between far-flung offices, commercial strips, and residential subdivisions. Corporations addressed the same problem by adopting the doctrine of human relations, which sought to boost productivity by giving each employee–each “organization man”–a sense of his personal value to the company.

Full article

(image: Charles Spurgeon preaching at the Crystal Palace, 1854)

My latest article, in this month’s issue of Frieze, is about new concepts for urban mass housing in China:

China stopped providing housing as welfare about 10 years ago and instituted a mortgage industry through state-owned banks; since then, real estate has become its most profitable industry. For many middle-class families, the housing market seems to offer the freedom to select their own lifestyle, the chance to “Live Your Dreams,” as one advertising campaign has it, and this is reflected in a blossoming of gated neighbourhoods in various faux-European styles. While the majority of new housing developments are cookie-cutter designs churned out by architectural firms in two or three days, a small coterie of progressive Chinese architects and Western designers are rethinking how architecture can achieve higher density, accommodate an increasingly diverse market, and tread lightly on existing vernacular architecture. But what sort of place-making can possibly address the needs of citizens uprooted from their rural homes and transformed into anonymous consumers of residential space in the city?

Full article

Philip Beesley uses robotic architectural installations to imagine fantastic and sometimes terrifying intersections of technology and organic life. I have a new article on Beesley’s work at core.form-ula:

The realization that an organism’s life is bound up with its milieu is a product of late 18th century zoology and the nascent science of biology; well into the 20th century, however, architecture continued to accord the human organism the privileged stance of the Cartesian subject, a rational occupant of a submissive exterior world. The Bauhaus radicalized the human subject’s isolation from the environment by reducing objects to technical elements of a potentially infinite, analytic system.

Beesley’s work, by contrast, attempts to challenge the occupant’s sense of self-possession by evoking the uncanny. His earlier installation Hylozoic Soil–named for hylozoism, the belief that matter is alive–inspired a sense of uneasiness as its pores breathed and rippled in response to motion. Epithelium was similarly unnerving: as the spectator walked between skeletal columns and vaults, tiny whiskers began to wave and the whole installation started to rustle and hiss. The computer that controlled the installation was distributed, simultaneously processing the input of many sensors in multiple locations (the system is called Arduino, and was implemented with the help of the MIT Media Lab). The result was a biomimetic environment whose lifelike behaviors implicitly threatened to “depersonalize” the occupant by blurring the lines between human life, animal life, technology, and environment.

Full article

The Kitchen
512 W 19th St, Manhattan
7PM Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Free

http://www.canopycanopycanopy.com/programs

Here’s a handy e-postcard about the event:

Described as a “Hegel in tight jeans,” American architect Joshua Prince-Ramus has taken to the pages of a style magazine to rail against the stereotype of the visionary starchitect:

“All the great architects–every one of them–says, ‘It represents. . . .’ I say to students, ‘Don’t you think it would be great if architecture just started doing again? Why are we representing? Do–it’s much more powerful. I’ve never seen a client give a shit about my personal vision. I had to figure out how to piggyback what my vision was onto their issues. I’ve never been comfortable”–he grabs a sheet of white paper, uncaps his pen, and starts whorling in black ink–”doing Frank Gehry. I would never suppose that someone would look at my sketch and go, Aaahhhhhhhhhh. No wonder architecture’s dead–because that’s what everyone thinks architecture is now. When Calatrava and Gehry die, it’s done–no one’s gonna pay us to do that. So it’s terrifying for me to look at schools trying to bring out your personal vision.”

http://www.esquire.com/features/best-and-brightest-2008/joshua-prince-ramus-1208

From my new essay at Triple Canopy on northern Kentucky’s Creation Museum:

The tacit message is that the archetypal godly environment is a Christian arcadia, free of the violence of natural selection. This idyll’s most memorable occupants are the dinosaurs. According to wall-mounted placards, they were created on the sixth day along with the other animals and lived alongside humans until recently. A staple of the traditional natural history museum, the dinosaur has long loomed large in the American psyche, often expressing fears related to capitalism’s corporate monsters, unchecked scientific meddling, and imminent global calamity. Yet the Creation Museum’s animatronic models evoke Barney and Friends as much as Jurassic Park as they frolic with biblical characters and munch on plants. (In the museum’s account, the consumption of meat was not part of God’s design for the world and began only after the Fall).

Every natural history museum presents the terrestrial environment as its own age experiences it. The institutions of the nineteenth century defined nature in terms of romantic landscapes, endlessly branching phylogenetic trees, and fossilized remains of immense creatures from the distant past. So, too, the Creation Museum, anti-modern and postmodern at once, offers insight into contemporary America’s very different experience of the rural landscape and organic life, with their attendant collective anxieties.

Full article

Jubilation on Harlem’s 125th St. at 2:00 AM, hours after Barack Obama was elected president.

In recent years, New York City has not only proven singularly incapable of executing innovative large-scale architectural designs, but has also set about obliterating some of its most significant mid-twentieth century buildings.

Three years ago, New York’s Museum of Arts and Design was given the green light by the Landmarks Preservation Commission to redesign 2 Columbus Circle, an iconic 1960s building by Edward Durell Stone. The old 12-story structure had represented a unique path for modernist architecture, its design language softened by the incorporation of historically-derived ornamental details but still grounded in modern urban reality. A strikingly unadorned central surface on the front facade expressed simultaneously the building’s program as a container for artwork and its civic function as an urban icon, with a slight inflection along the traffic circle’s curve showing subtle deference to the public realm. The renovation by Brad Cloepfil unveiled earlier this year has been widely panned (see my previous comment).

Today, the same Landmarks Preservation Commission (whose name is beginning to sound as Orwellian as Bush’s Environmental Protection Agency) authorized St. Vincent’s Hospital to demolish its iconic O’Toole building on Seventh Ave between 12th and 13th Sts, designed in the 1960s by Albert Ledner, to make way for a new hospital tower. St. Vincent’s had first applied to the Commission last May, arguing that its proposal at the time was the only possible way for the hospital to continue its charitable mission. After the Commission demurred, however, St. Vincent’s returned to the drawing board and produced a revised scheme within two weeks. In a gross breach of the public trust, the Commission has decided to allow the erasure of a vital piece of the city’s architectural fabric.

The building is an opaque white ceramic box floating above the street, its envelope serrated at the top where two overhangs are cantilevered out from the main volume. The scalloped edges are an effect of the viewer’s shifting and incomplete street-level perspective; in the ideal elevation view of the facade, they align to form complete circular “portholes.” The detailing of the facade reflects a forward-thinking concern for shading, energy efficiency, and natural ventilation. Ledner, who had worked for Frank Lloyd Wright, is also the designer of a number of structures in New Orleans and of New York’s Maritime Hotel on 9th Ave between 16th and 17th Sts.

Here’s the story from the New York Times’ City Room blog. DOCOMOMO, which advocates for the preservation of modernist architecture, has created an informative PDF backgrounder on the building.

Several months ago, the new exterior of 2 Columbus Circle in New York City was unveiled with relatively little fanfare. Located at the conjunction of the rectilinear Manhattan grid, the oblique line of Broadway, and the traffic circle that marks the southwest corner of Central Park, the building has been the topic of much controversy for the past few years. The facade makeover is part of the radical alteration of the modernist Edward Durell Stone’s beloved 1960s building by the Museum of Arts and Design and its architect, Brad Cloepfil.

Stone’s original design included ornamental roundels, “lollipop” columns (derisively so named by Ada Louise Huxtable), and an arched opening at the top — orientalizing motifs meant to recall Venetian design and probably influenced by the architect’s previous commissions to design U.S. embassies in India and elsewhere.

Most striking, however, were the central expanses of unarticulated gray marble surface that spanned six floors on each facade. This unusual architectural composition was quite specifically tied to the building’s function: it’s only because 2 Columbus Circle was an art gallery — and thus didn’t need windows — that it could be built with load-bearing concrete walls. The surfaces were modulated only by the main facade’s slight curvature (which showed deference to the building’s particular urban site) and the “porthole” perforations at the corners (which ensured that the composition would read as four individual surfaces rather than a single monolith). Furthermore, by conspicuously “veiling” the interior, these walls conveyed the building’s function of containing something precious.

According to John Ruskin, the great 19th-century critic and historian of Venetian architecture, the visual energy of sublime Gothic structures came from their “wide, bold, and unbroken” walls. In Ruskin’s account, the integrity of Gothic architecture began to degrade when architects grew fearful of bare surfaces and started to decorate them with frippery that had little to do with the basic spatial and structural concepts. Ruskin’s theories helped influence the modern movement’s distaste for excessive ornamentation. At 2 Columbus Circle, the facade’s audacious blankness gave the building its strong urban presence and safeguarded it from lapsing into exoticist pastiche.

The new exterior retains vestiges of the impressive central surface, but large vertical strips of glass have been added at the top and zig-zag channels snake down to the bottom. It’s hard to believe that the lower slits of glass significantly alter the interior character; their primary effect is to slice up the formerly unadorned facades as seen from outside. Instead of reading as a hollow box whose taut surfaces self-consciously trace the tension between the urban forces around it and the program of the museum within, the building now reads as a solid object, decoratively inscribed or perhaps inadvertently fractured.