Portfolio Fa14 Part2

8/11/2019 Portfolio Fa14 Part2

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A SELECTION OF PUBLICATIONS

PUBLICATIONS


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ARCHITECTURAL ALCHEMY, THE NEW CITY READER, BUSINESS SECTION


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HOUSING AND THE MORTGAGE CRISIS

A NETWORK ARCHITECTURE LAB PROJECT

WITH KYLE HOVENKOTTER


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ARCHITECTURAL ALCHEMY, JUNK JET NO.4: STATISTICS OF MYSTICS


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What is architecture if it is not alchemy? Take basematerials: stone, wood, sand, water, metal and,following a set of cryptic instructions, impenetrableto common folk, turn it into a dwelling. No wonderthen, that masonry is not just the art of constructingbuildings, both rather a guardian of arcane secrets,passed down orally from time immemorial.Still, until recently, architecture itself was but apale shadow of the arcane sciences. Setting outto transmute base metals into gold, alchemistspromised not mere buildings but boundless riches,eternal youth and a universal solvent.

A NETWORK ARCHITECTURE LAB PROJECT

WITH KYLE HOVENKOTTER

HOUSING AND THE MORTGAGE CRISIS

ARCHITECTURAL ALCHEMY


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PERSONAL LUBRICANTS, NEW GEOGRAPHIES 2: LANDSCAPES OF ENERGY


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Suddenly, everythings grim. In the face of the currentglobal environmental and nancial crisis, the futureno longer promises boundless economic growth andtechnological innovation, but resembles a strangelyfamiliar landscape fraught with potential danger andimminent collapse. If green shoots offer hope, onlythe most nave proceed with the reckless abandon ofprevious years.

Global economic crises are tied to the internalcontradictions of capitalism; overinvestment andoverproduction produce an unsustainable bubblethat eventually bursts. After a crash, overproductiontypically inspires a shift in planning from the physicalto the temporal. Realizing that it did not plan aheadproperly, society concerns itself not with designing andproducing things but rather with drawing up plans tosafeguard that such crises do not recur in the future.

These images, produced using the Sim City 2000Urban Renewal Kitrunning only on iOS classic tocreate familiar iconic buildings depict an exampleof scenario planning in which big architecture and theBilbao effect fail.

AUDC / Network Architecture Labwith Robert Sumrell and Kazys Varnelis

PERSONAL LUBRICANTS


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PERSONAL LUBRICANTS, NEW GEOGRAPHIES 2: LANDSCAPES OF ENERGY


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SIM CITY


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BLACKOUT!, THE NEW CITY READER, CITY SECTION

City Edition of the New City ReaderEdited by the Network Architecture Labwith Kazys Varnelis, Kyle Hovenkotter,Momo Araki, Brigette Borders, AlexisBurson, Daniel Payne, Pantea TehraniProject Manager: Leigha Dennis

BLACKOUT!


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WHEAT PASTED AT THE STOREFRONT FOR ART AND ARCHITECTURE IN NEW YORK

The Blackout Issue is an illustrated historyof the 1977 power failure in New York City,telling the story of the New York Timesduring the blackout.

When power went off, eight copies ofthe next days edition had rolled off thepresses at 220 West 43rd Street. Beingon a different grid, New Jersey hadnot lost power, so publication shiftedto a Times plant in Carlstadt, where it

normally printed sections of the Sundayissue. Editors took these eight copiesand reassembled them into a new mastercopy, in the process shaving off half of thenewspapers customary forty pages andadding two pages on the blackout. Sincethe 43rd Street plant was letterpress andthe Carlstadt press had new photographicoffset machines the Times used a cameraat the Hackensack Record to takephotographs of the paste-up for printing.


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THE DISTRIBUTED KITCHEN, THE NEW CITY READER, FOOD SECTION

Although the kitchen occupies a central place intodays houses, ats and domestic imagination,much of what we eat is prepared and cookedelsewhere. Some tasks, such as baking yourmorning croissant, have been outsourced forcenturies. Other services, such as pre-slicing yourapple snack or ash-freezing your pre made potpie,are more recent innovations. We asked eight NewYorkers to document their diet for a week, recordingboth what they andmore importantlywhereit was made. The result is a map of the city as adistributed kitchen, a public food preparationnetwork tied together by intersecting individualstomachs.


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MAP AND INFOGRAPHICS

WITH WILL PRINCE AND NICOLA TWILLEY


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THE ARCHITECTURE OF COLLAPSE, THE NEW CITY READER, BUSINESS SECTION


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TOP 10 FORTUNE 500 COMPANIES IN NYC WITH LOSSES DURING HOUSING CRISIS

The economic collapse of 2008 was the product of the greatestattempt to turn architecture into capital to date. Thesephotographs show the entrances to the ten largest nance andmedia corporations in New York at the time of the collapse,reminding us of the role of architecture in the crisis and howthese corporations understood it.

CITIGROUP399 PARK AVENUE

Revenues (change from 2007): -29.4%Prots (change from 2007): -865.4%Total return to investors 2008: -75.6%

J.P. MORGAN CHASE & CO.270 PARK AVENUERevenues (change from 2007): -12.8%Prots (change from 2007): -63.5%Total return to investors 2008: -25.2%

AMERICAN INTERNATIONAL GROUP70 PINE STREETRevenues (change from 2007): -89.9%Prots (change from 2007): -1701.4%Total return to investors 2008: -97.1%

GOLDMAN SACHS GROUP85 BROAD STREETRevenues (change from 2007): -39.1%Prots (change from 2007): -80.0%Total return to investors 2008: -60.3%

MORGAN STANLEY1585 BROADWAYRevenues (change from 2007): -29.2%Prots (change from 2007): -46.8Total return to investors 2008: -68.8

MERRILL LYNCH4 WORLD FINANCIAL CENTERRevenues (change from 2007): -73.9%Prots (change from 2007): N/ATotal return to investors 2008: -77.1%

note: Merrill Lynch was absorbed by Bankof America in September 2008.

LEHMAN BROTHERS HOLDINGS745 SEVENTH AVENUE

Revenues (change from 2007): N/AProts (change from 2007): N/ATotal return to investors 2008: N/A

note: Lehman Brothers led for Chapter11 bankruptcy protection on September15, 2008. This marks the largestbankruptcy proceeding in U.S. history.

METLIFE200 PARK AVENUERevenues (change from 2007): 3.6%Prots (change from 2007): -25.7%Total return to investors 2008: -42.0%

TIME WARNER1 TIME WARNER CENTERRevenues (change from 2007): 0.8%Prots (change from 2007): -405.5%Total return to investors 2008: -37.9%

AMERICAN EXPRESS

200 VESEY STREETRevenues (change from 2007): -1.4%Prots (change from 2007): -32.7%Total return to investors 2008: -63.6%

THE ARCHITECTURE OF COLLAPSE


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NEW LOCAL EXPLORERS, THE NEW CITY READER, LOCAL SECTION

As an outsider traveling to Jackson Heights, Queens, for

a taste of traditional Indian food, stepping off the trainat Roosevelt Avenue requires a moment to reorient tothe grid and then another to absorb the neighborhoodsparticular density, scale and culture. While most of theestablishments between Broadway and 37th Avenue couldsufciently eclipse any amateur expectations, a quickGoogle search will highlight and locate the most notablerestaurants, providing a sense of ease and comfort to theanxious in the face of many options.

In one example, two shops which sell similar items, RajbhogSweets and Raja Sweets, are adjacent to each other. Theentrance to Rajbhog, which has been widely featured asa Jackson Heights destination, is decorated with articlesfrom the New York Times, New York Magazine, TimeoutNew York, and Yelp!, acting as indicators of credibility forthe casual or hesitant passerby. The young men behind thecounter instinctively know what will be ordered, becausethey too have read the articles and because many othershave ordered the same. Next door, at Raja Sweets, there areno Zagat or Yelp! stickers, only local and handmade signsdescribing the food and pricing. The interior is noticeablymore informal and disorderly, yet there are considerablymore customersmost seeming to be regulars dining withtheir coworkers or families. Meanwhile, the older womenpreparing the food speak just enough English to take theorders, although not without a little confusion.

In both cases, to the globalized citizen with a developingpalette the food is unquestionably authentic. The overallexperiences, however, vary in such ways that one wondershow certain levels of online publicity and media exposurecould alter authenticity as the result of an expandednetwork. Does Raja Sweets have a more local existencesimply because there are more local patrons and didRajbhog once have a similar clientele?

New Methods for navigating the city have generated a newcategory of roving citizen: the local tourist in search ofauthenticity. These are tourists that are actually residentsas well. With the help of easily accessible internet content,crowd-sourced ratings and reviews, top-ten lists andcustomized maps, knowledge of the best restaurantsand bars across the city is no longer exclusive to thosesomehow in the know, that elusive status previouslybestowed upon a given neighborhoods residents. Today,all parts of the city are open for exploration. With mobiledevices at hand, anyone can venture into an unfamiliarneighborhood with the basic knowledge of a localexperiencing what is perceived to be authentic after a fewminutes of preliminary research. Why take the risk of tryinga restaurant that might turn out disappointing when youcan nd one that has been inspected and approved by manyothers?

As mobile culture proliferates parallel to online tools for

navigating the city, the relationship between locality andthe particularities of place will to continue to reconcile.What is considered local may no longer be restricted to itslocation, but rather to a growing community of online andword-of-mouth connections. Local establishments will gainpopularity, their networks expanding beyond the bordersof their neighborhoods. The caf down the street may notalways feel so familiar, especially when the wait for coffeeextends to thirty minutes. Meanwhile, like many region-specic cookbooks, the recent New Brooklyn Cookbooksuggest that a part of this trendy food borough can berecreated at any home, anywhere.

In the pursuit of a truly local authenticity, the very qualitiesthat merit recognition are those that diminish withincreased exposure, perpetuating the need to search harder.Fortunately, the methods for discovery are easy, accessibleand constantly updatedbecause for this reason, thesearch must go on.

NEW LOCAL EXPLORERS


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ANOTHER GREEN WORLD, POST SUSTAINABILITY: BLUEPRINTS FOR A GREEN PLANET

FOUR SEASONS RESTAURANT, SEAGRAMS BUILDING, NYC

Summary:

Sustainability is another way to look at economics. Both disciplines focus on how scarceresources are allocated. For economics, the problem is adjusting the system by whichthings are distributed. For sustainability, the problem is determining which things in thesystem can be allowed to disappear in order to make more valuable resources last.

Marked by the end of modernity, the 1970s experienced a widespread pessimism aboutthe future, perhaps best embodied in a series of science ction movies starring CharltonHeston Soylent Green , The Planet of the Apes , and the Omega Man depicting the worldafter it fallen victim to environmental devastation.

Architecture had two responses. The rst, more familiar but ultimately less inuential,was a nihilistic postmodernism, celebrating the death of modernity by montagingclassical symbolism with modernist forms and leaving both ruptured. The second wasa frank response to the situation, addressing an increasingly toxic urban environmentby replicating NASAs self-enclosed space capsules, creating sealed, conditioned

ANOTHER GREEN WORLDAUDC / Network Architecture Labwith Robert Sumrell and Kazys Varnelismodels by Leigha Dennisincluded in forthcoming Post Sustainability: Blueprints for a Green Planet


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FORD FOUNDATION, NYC

environments that could exist anywhere. Unlike space capsules, however, these were greeninteriors, home to new, post-sustainable landscapes lled with living plants to make themmore natural. Ofces became regured as ofce landscapes, bars became fern bars, andhomes became colonized by spider plants, ferns, philodendrons, and avocado trees.

Like the space capsules of the Apollo program, sealed interior gardens promise us an escapefrom the wasteland of the city, leaving it behind for either a suburban world of self-contained

corporate parks or an urban renaissance in which we are ever more divorced from the urbanconditions around us. Green interiors, then offered a transitional device toward completelysealed interior environments. The novelty of working among plants waned again in the 1980sas the introduction of personal computers and online messaging boards promised a radicalnew form of community not based on proximity, personal interactions or shared space. Onceagain ofce life shrank to the space of a desktop, where monotony could be successfullyalleviated with potted desk plants and an occasional window box. The remnants of atriumgardens and lobby plantings remind us when there was an exteriority to modernism and aneed to interact as a groupa romantic notion of pre-industrial life and a pastoral providedby some higher agency looking over us. But green interiors were more than an alibi, theywere always intended to fail. Their inability to sustain themselves means that we must takecare of them, providing us with a memory of our relationship to the natural world. Without asystem in place to encourage propagation and free growth, all but the hardiest of plants haveto be constantly replaced, either with newer versions of the same species or with articialsimulations that no longer need care. In this, they reect our own lives: as astronauts aboardSpaceship Earth, traveling the cosmos in a sealed environment as our systems slowly andinevitably fail. Locked indoors sitting at the computer, we busy ourselves sustaining thesystem while putting off the inevitable day of reckoning.

MODELS OF POST-SUSTAINABLE INTERIORS


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FERN BAR

ANOTHER GREEN WORLD, POST SUSTAINABILITY: BLUEPRINTS FOR A GREEN PLANET

Portfolio Fa14 Part2

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