Archinect - Design for the Public Sphere

Vacation Styles

2013-01-29T00:03:53-05:00

One of the best parts of being a student again is being on vacation. It affords time to think, to be outside and to have discussions with others away from both academia and the workplace. Even reading and writing are entirely different animals when one's not on deadline. Witness the start of this blog. What a luxury!

Stone catching water outside the beach cabin

I've been out of school and working for a few years now so I know the routine. Vacation style? Americans take less vacation than persons of other nationalities. Two weeks max. Even that often goes untaken. A 2010 Reuters poll found that less than 60% of employed Americans take full advantage of the paid vacation days they are offered (compared to 89% of French employees and 33% of Japanese employees). I know the feeling. One doesn't want to miss anything, be the money, the project, the pace or the job itself.

Studies show that marathon work sessions followed by lag days are less efficient than shorter stints punc...

Meditations on Smithson

2013-01-09T21:53:00-05:00

Reading Robert Smithson, lately, I cannot help but set down a few words. His writing is clearly important to his development as an artist. His language touches on the sublime. This is understandable in context of his life and work: his monumentalizing of derelict sites and objects through his sculpture, his early death, and his particular use of language. [You will forgive a long post.]

Spiral Jetty © Smithson

Smithson is fascinated with industrial detritus. In 1967, he published in Artforum an essay in which he describes his hometown of Passaic, New Jersey.* Smithson’s vision of his hometown is both an argument for his sculpture as artwork and an exposition of the industrial landscape as a sublime presence. In the text, Smithson conflates sculpture with the built environment, shifting between the objects on the river (the barge, the bridge, the pipes) and their presence as imagined monuments. In this way he approaches the limits of representational thinking and finds an u...

The Lesser of Two Evils

2013-01-06T17:14:00-05:00

Another of the more intriguing lectures delivered last Fall at Harvard's Graduate School of Design was by Eyal Weizman, a professor from Goldsmiths in London who spoke about what he calls “forensic architecture,” an emerging body of theory that utilizes architectural and spatial analysis to study politics and social relationships, especially human rights violations. Weizman’s work leverages the spatial analysis of landscapes, buildings and events to produce evidence, or what he calls “architectural testimony,” in the form of data-driven simulations, maps and videos. It is clear that his work has activated architectural tools in a public forum to study moments of change, and that it has had a direct impact on law. What is less clear is how forensic architecture differs from evidence-based analysis in archaeology, for example, where buildings, architectural ruins and landscape traces are interpreted (or cited as proof) in support of a revisionist history. As a counterpoint, one thin...

Region as Design Medium

2013-01-06T15:52:00-05:00

As I migrate over to Archinect, a few highlights from 2012:

Gunther Vogt opened his lecture last Fall with a conversation about working in Europe and went on to discuss the Swiss Alps as an urbanized landscape. Within this context, he posed a series of questions: what is the difference between a city and a landscape? How does landscape function in the formation and endurance of regional identity?

Vogt spoke about sparsely inhabited, European landscapes, especially Apulia and the Swiss Alps, and the role the Alpine region plays in Swiss culture: at once connected by a network of paths and set apart, an extension of urban life and a refuge from it. The lecture also included the striking image of vacant lands in Southern Italy. According to Vogt, abandoned and underutilized land has not been mapped by the European Union, resulting in a scarcity of publicly available data on the subject. Nonetheless, it appears to accoun...