VISIONARY

A storm off the coast of Brunei from a just close-enough distanceAs Europe lay in ruins in the aftermath of World War I, the scrupulously practical Walter Gropius remarked, "The future architect would make gardens of the deserts and heap wonders into the sky."  

Architecture is an instrumental discipline: it is directly concerned with the minutiae and matter of quotidian existence and completely folded into the prevailing cultural, technological, and economic winds of its time.  As torch-bearers of the cultural critique, architects perch just outside the realm of society from a vantage point just far enough to maintain a critical distance, but still close enough to raise a wet finger to the sky and feel which way the wind is blowing.  When those winds are blowing strong with a robust economy and extraordinary technological advancement enabling an accelerated proliferation of methods of cultural production, architects are busy responding, reacting, and scrambling to maintain the critique in a storm of progress.  It is in times of crisis and calamity when the engine of progress stalls that architects can stop responding just long enough to anticipate something new, to imagine, to be visionary.

We find ourselves in the faint dawn light of the future.  The global economic expansion of the last 15 years has produced vast global flows of capital and raw industrial material that have pooled in various eddies around the world making extraordinary technological leaps possible.  Past utopian visions of the future have been realized under different names in seemingly less conspicuous ways (flying cars are airplanes, robot assistants are iPhones and Blackberries that keep track of personal and professional lives, and our conquest of the galaxy has begun with strange mechanical creatures roving the surface of Mars).  In many ways, less utopian ways, technology has caught up with our collective imagination of the future.

The gift of imagination is truly a wonderful thing in times of great upheaval.  Only when the presiding zeitgeist becomes unhinged can an architect's imagination have free reign.  Only when the winds of progress are still can visionary work become unfettered and establish a new collective imagination of the dawning future.  Only in these times can an architect act in anticipation of the future rather than in reaction to the present.

It is interesting to note that this current crisis, the global economic crisis, is a crisis of imaginary structures. The capital lost never really existed, it was simply collectively imagined and that faith in the value of imaginary capital produced the boom and the loss of that faith brought on the bust.  In fact, this hits even closer to home: the imaginary capital was imagined into buildings through over-inflated real estate speculation and irresponsible property-backed credit gymnastics.  Imagination is clearly a powerful player capable dramatically and tangibly affecting the course of human history when it metastasises in buildings and cities making the maintenance of that imagination seemingly essential to the health of civilization.  Hmm, I think that's our job.

Get to work architects.

ZC

santiago de chile in section

Santiago de Chile | Lingering smog trapped in the thermal inversion created by Los Andes

We are now entering the second decade of the 21st Century.  Globalization has produced the first-ever global economic crisis slowing the economies of the developed world to an unpalatable pace. Architects, along with all other producers of culture, are turning their attention to the developing world where the massive global currents of capital and resources are shifting to fuel the rapid growth and transformation of cities.  The question of the city is reaching ever expanding levels of complexity as rapid urbanization accelerates on the African Continent, Southeast Asia, China, and Latin America where extraordinary opportunities are born out of extreme constraints.  The question at hand is no longer how to generate urban complexity, but rather how to understand and act within this new confluence of urban crises by making the existing complexity evident in ways that produce systemic gains for the city.

I recently spent time in two Latin American Capitals, Santiago de Chile and Buenos Aires, Argentina.  These two Mega Cities are 691 miles apart from each other and on opposite sides of the cone of South America.  The histories of these two cities formed together in the Spanish Empire's conquest of the South American continent.  Each were once seats of Spanish Viceroyalty power and economic hubs, and today they are very different cities.

In architecture, "Section" is understood as a method of drawing where single cut through a structure reveals its organizational vectors.  Of the word's 14 definitions offered by Merriam Webster, three are of interest in understanding Santiago de Chile: 

1) The action or instance of separating by cutting 
2) A distinct part or portion of a larger body
3) A distinct part of a territorial or political area.

Santiago de Chile is a city of sectional extremes.  The city is spectacularly staged where the earth is heaving itself into the sky: a one hour drive to the 13,000ft border with Argentina in Los Andes and a one hour drive to the 0ft Pacific coastline.  When flying from NYC to Santiago de Chile, one flies south along the sliver of land that comprises Chile.  On the left side of the cabin, the view is of los Andes and the border with Argentina.  On the right side of the cabin, the view of of the Pacific coast.  My friend Rodrigo cleverly noted that in effect, Chile is as wide as an airplane fuselage.  Santiago de Chile sits on an ancient lake bed valley in Los Andes that creates a massive thermal inversion making for a massive air quality issue that only clears up when it rains.  Of course the rain then turns the air quality issue into a water quality issue...

Santiago de Chile has no mayor, but rather is a 6.6 million person agglomeration of 32 different municipalities and the Chilean federal government creating an extraordinary, sectional, bureaucratic nightmare.  40% of Chile lives in Santiago and the city generates 45% of Chile's GDP.  The value in Chile's economy is generated from the land.  Copper, agriculture, and tourism are the major exports with copper serving as the counry's economic backbone.  Huge economic disparity is evidenced in Santiago by the extremely wealthy sections in the Northeast of the city and the very poor informal settlements in the South and the West sections of the city.  Wealth is extracted from the land in the north of the country in the form of copper ore and exported globally.  Consequently, Santiago and Chile more broadly never evolved a developed manufacturing sector of it's economy that could produce a middle class.

Politics in Chile is extremely polarized.  Augusto Pinochet ascended to power in the 1973 C.I.A. backed Chilean coup d'état that ousted Marxist President Salvador Allende. He left La Moneda Presidential Palace in Santiago de Chile on March 11th 1990 after 26 years in power in a bloodless transition back to democracy.  Statistical accounts of the Pinochet dictatorship are as contoversial as the dictatorship itself, but is seems that more than 3,000 Chileno dissidents were executed, 80,000 inprisioned, 30,000 tortured, and some 200,000 exiled.  The political pendulum swings wide in Chile and the living memories of dictatorship keeps the left far left and the right far right.  A side-effect of this polarization is a lack of understanding of complexity as the milieu of politics rarely contains any discussion of content, but rather continuous establishment of position.  When coupled with the sectional bureaucracy of Santiago, the result is a city that does not understand it's own complexity: a provincial, alpha-world city.

An interesting side effect of globalization seems to be an anxiety for local identity.  "Traditional" atesianal tchochkies clog every port-of-call as some sort of consumable artifact of local identity and culture.  This anxiety applies to cities as well.  Santiago de Chile has public space, but no public identity.  That is to say, the city has no vision of itself and consequently public spaces are largely unprogrammed or the existing programs are not positioned in any sophisticated relationship to the city.  Clearly, this is a direct result from a lack of complexity in the identity of the city itself.  In fact, Santiago has many "cultural centers," artifacts of various political legacies, that sit empty and are used for corporate expos and parties.

So... what?

The issue is identity.  Santiago de Chile requires both a Metropolitan Identity and a Cosmopolitan Identity for this second decade of the 21st Century.  What it doesn't need is a complex project or a project that generates complexity.  What it needs is project that makes visible existing complexities: a visionary project that could illuminate the sectional extremes as parts of the whole of the city.  A project that transforms a city denizen into an active participant in the city giving rise to a collective sense of public identity.

ZC

IMMATERIAL BREAKFAST

Poached Egg, Image courtesy of Photobucket

Brad Stone had an article in the Technology section of the NY Times today entitled, Breakfast Can Wait. The Day's First Stop is Online. My interest was piqued about the state of information today and how we value it (or if we even can). Stone's article documents a few trends shaping the American morning through the morning ritual of the Gude's: a family of four from Lansing, Michigan who's morning ritual has been invaded by tweets, facebook statuses, and emails. At the Gude house, Dad even goes so far as to text his son's to wake them up in place of an alarm clock. As I read, I began reminiscing on venerated childhood memories of my parents waking my brother and I up in our bunk beds by tickling our feet until we couldn't stifle the laughter anymore. An oddity about the situation began to reveal itself: you see, I was placing more value on my memory of the analog version of being awoken by my parents culled from my childhood than on its digital counterpart in Michigan while I slowly realized that reading this article on my laptop was the first, strike that, second thing I did after waking up (first I checked my email). We all, it seems, are victims of our laptops and iPhones.

Value is produced by a scarcity. My memory of being tickled awake is finite, that is to say, it happened when I was much younger and it doesn't come to mind particularly often, making it scarce and therefore valuable. Today, the New York Times costs $2 for a Weekday edition which is a price settled on after taking into account the cost of production / distribution and the fact that 1,039,031 weekday papers are circulated in New York City. A paper can be valued at $2 because there is a finite number of them, albeit a large number. I read the article, the same one printed in the $2 Monday paper today, on nytimes.com for free. What then is the value of the article? Is it $2 or $0? It seems that the $0 price tag doesn't imply that the article is somehow worthless, but rather that it is invaluable. Our semantic equation for understanding value breaks down when something becomes infinite, endlessly accessible, and divorced from space itself. The value of a physical object is self evident, we understand how to value something that can be held in our hands, something that occupies space significantly, something made of matter. When confronted with the same content in the form of a streaming set of 1s and 0s we are unable to value it the same way, there is no scarcity because the content becomes infinite, part of the ether that the Gude's and I (and in all likelihood, you) are eating for breakfast.

Architecture is a discipline fundamentally tied to value. The idea for Architects, after-all, is that we are better educated than you, more world-weary than you, better dressed than you, know more celebrities than you do, were just at a party that you could never get into, and eat things that you've never even heard of - all in service of some mystical capacity to enhance your quality of life in ways you couldn't possibly imagine. Of course, the only real reason the lay-world tolerates Architects is that the discipline adds capital value to real estate. That's all: for the last 500 years, Architecture has usually been a pretty good investment. Which brings us back to the Gude's. As Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and Google are reconfiguring the way we construct an identity, interact with each other, and building an ever larger "realm of the invaluable," Architects and Designers are uniquely positioned to act on behalf of breakfast. I mean to say, to engage the matter of everyday life where the stakes for interpreting value in new ways are the highest. Perhaps a text message that tickles would temper the Gude's rushed strides toward evolving us all into Kubrickesque Star-children. Or maybe a New York Times Online article that smells like coffee would do the trick... At any rate, tomorrow morning I'm not going to check my email until I have a couple poached eggs next to my laptop.

ZC

CONSTRUCTION DUST

Tokyo, Japan | photo by Zachary ColbertIt could be said that every time in history is defined by its own quality of light. This light is the result of specific airborne particulate pieces of dust floating in the atmosphere that reflect, refract, bend, and modulate the sunlight passing through the air and the clouds down to the ground making a very special light on each day, in each place.  This dust comes from us.  Our activities and our machines on the ground produce particles that ascend to the jet stream and linger, producing the light of our time, unique in each place.

The dust in the air is, in a way, an index of economic exchange and flows, as different modes of production make different types of dust.  The pieces of things we burn to make energy and move people pool in the atmosphere and bend the light according to their material composition and chemical properties.  The Pittsburgh of 1911 left its street lights burning all day in the central business district while the steel smoke of progress blocked out the sun. The bread basket of the American Midwest in the 1930s saw how the ecological effects of aggressive farming practices combined with years of severe drought to produced large scale ongoing dust storms that literally blew the scenery into the air. The air in Dubai today is thick with construction dust, blocking out its own skyline, and that dust is settling on abandoned Mercedes and BMWs at the airport where the credit crunch has ex-patriots fleeing for their homelands and funding for construction projects has frozen.

The light of our time, the light of the global economic crisis, would seem to be made by the dust settling.  Today the building industry is central to the global economy, during times of expansion it is the first thing to boom, and during times of economic crisis it is the first thing to bust.  Furthermore, a building is the best kind of collateral one can have.  The credit bubble in the United States was built on an unprecedented mobilization of a property owning middle class who leveraged mortgages for equity in financing the American Dream on debt: extraordinary amounts of debt, which brought the neoliberalist economics of the 20th century to a period of unprecedented building followed by the biggest economic downturn since 1929.  There is no more construction dust being kicked up into the air.  It drifts back to earth as architecture firms in cities around the world layoff staff and put projects on hold, commuters consider public transportation and bicycles over their automobiles, and the exponential growth in material consumption wanes, slowing factory assembly lines around the world.

As the air clears, a case can be made for the role of the architect in focusing the light of our time in the building boom of the last 15 years, today, and indeed tomorrow.  Architects produce value by building, representing ideas visually, thinking critically and using these tools to productively imagine future lifestyles.  During this building boom, the architect produced value by adding capital value to real estate investment, with less regard for the future lives being imagined.  There was so much money to be made in building that architecture itself became a commodity.  The perfect example is Dubai, an instant city literally built within the confines of the building boom, littered with star architect signature projects.  It is a city full of homes in which no one lives.  The Burj Dubai apartments sold out within 48 hours of hitting the marketplace, bought up by international real estate speculators who flipped the properties multiple times amongst themselves without ever setting foot in Dubai or breathing in the construction dust on the building site.  Architects today are grappling with a professional identity crisis.  We have learned to be ambitious builders during the economic expansion, but are trained to be curious intellectuals.

In an interview predicating the publication of Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin, Robert Irwin said to Lawrence Weschler that he realized he was truly an artist once his ambitions gave way to genuine curiosity.  For me, it seems in the development of a creative mind there is a relationship between ambition and technical instrumentality and a relationship between genuine curiosity and innovation.  Ambition powers the acquisition of technical expertise and mastery of the functional aspects of the architectural discipline and ambition makes an instrumental architect.  Curiosity powers productive experimentation and invention of new, future lifestyles and makes for an innovative architect.  Instrumentality leads to Innovation as Ambition leads to Genuine Curiosity.  What if an architect could operate as both instrumental and innovative?  Both ambitious and curious?  If the goal is a new value which synthesizes the architect’s stake in architecture with the architect’s role in the economy, then the architect capable this would be both instrumental and innovative, both ambitious and curious, and both productively imagining the future and responsibly imagining capital assets.  

After the dust settled in Pittsburgh, it saw the construction of the USX Steel Co. Tower downtown in 1970. The building was skinned in corten steel and during the first rain after its construction; the streets ran red with iron oxide, the last of the steel dust.  After the dust settled in the American Midwest, it saw a massive suburban migration of the largest property owning class in human history giving birth to the type of capitalism that redefined architecture.  The light of tomorrow will certainly be made in part by construction dust, even if there is a bit less of it, and architects will have everything to do with making that dust.  Let’s hope our curiosity catches up with our ambition while the dust is settling.

ZC

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

Food for Thought is a project that seeks to identify architectural opportunities for the amelioration of negative social, economic, and environmental impacts of rapid urbanization in two Southeast Asian metropolises in relation to agriculture.   The research is a collaborative project between Zachary and Egbert Chu funded by a Columbia University William Kinne Travelling Fellowship.