This drawing by Ludwig Hilberseimer has been fascinating me recently.  Most architects with any interest in urban planning in the USA know the story of RAND corporation doing post-World War II consulting on the dispersal of the American city.  The assumption was that the kind of weapons deployed in WWII constituted implicit threats to American cities, as nodes of infrastructure and economy significant to the entire country. NYC for finance, DC for governance, Chicago for goods, etc.   The defensive solution was to disperse American economy and institutions as much as possible.

It all sounds like post-rationalization for the subsidy of the segregated post-WWII suburb. 

But this Hilberseimer drawing defines the terms of the argument so well. The archival title of the drawing is "Effect of H-Bomb on the size & distribution of cities ."  The drawing demarcates blast range, freshwater resource, the territory of major cities as hatched areas. The potential of the gridded dots dominates the page, an evasive maneuver hidden in plain sight.  The matrix offers up a hyper rationalization of Broadacre City-- its principals reduced to its most minimal spatial assumptions, almost a geometric proof.  Plain sight, plains site, plane site.

Of course, the implementation of this flat decentralization in actual urban space demanded extensive territory claims, eminent domain and slum clearance, demolition and displacement. Urban renewal decimated neighborhoods across the country.  The Hilberseimer-Mies collaboration that I've been living in for the past 3 years - Lafayette Park - was designed on the tabula rasa of what had been Black Bottom-- a vibrant Black neighborhood famous for jazz and record shops and Detroit's speak-easy style cosmopolitanism during its peak population.

This drawing of bomb blasts across an expanse of the country can be read as a 'blue print' (as non-architects say) for the slow unfurling of effects, effects that -- other than their speed-- might be indistinguishable from firebombing.

This musing on time travel comes from notes that I jotted down in February of this year.  With the beginning of the illegitimate real estate developer presidency, my only way of making sense of this moment in America was to think of travelling back in time (What if Comey hadn't done that, What if... View full entry

Back in December I posted an entry about the White Flight from American Democracy, where I predicted that this new President wouldn't be using the White House and the L'Enfant Plan the way it was designed.  Rather:The axes of legislative authority and executive power must be extended dramatically... View full entry

http://mcewenstudio.com/web/vmm-on-whiteness-descartes-and-grids/Here's a mini-podcast on Descartes, whiteness, and grids.  Let's liberate geometry from empire.  Especially in honor of today's American holiday.  View full entry

[This is an excerpt from a forthcoming article to be published later this year in Yale Perspecta #50]This study of water in Detroit and its intersection of racialized geographies of inner city and suburban sprawl uncovers parallels between water infrastructure and transportation planning as... View full entry

[I wrote this at the end of the summer, as I was mulling over certain relationships between aesthetics and warfare and image-making.  At the time I was thinking of it as a sort of historical line of research I wanted to do....   Now it feels related to many weird and horrifying things, including... View full entry

The full interview is here - http://www.sampsoniaway.org/interviews/2017/01/12/recognizing-hungers-that-are-already-there-a-conversation-with-architect-mitch-mcewen/  Interview by Leah Wulfman    /  January 12, 2017  Excerpts below: LW: You are opening up and engaging architecture outside... View full entry

"The city in L'Enfant's Washington is really new nature. The models derived from the Europe of absolutism and despotism are now expropriated by the capital of democratic institutions, and translated into a social dimension certainly unknown at the Versailles of Louis XIV."-Manfredo Tafuri... View full entry

NO ONE CARES ABOUT AMERICA’S STUPID ARCHITECTURE PROBLEMSThe United States is accustomed to being the center of global networks in pretty much any field: film, finance, the art-world, pop music, development economics, tech start-ups, military strategy, and much more.  Architecture, though, is... View full entry

What is the relationship between representation and fabrication today, between drawing and building, or thinking and making? When are we building indications of a process or an idea, representing something, and when are we building the actual thing? If we no longer have to represent in order to... View full entry

Last month I visited Miami and witnessed the carting away of Art Basel.  On the Sunday evening that Art Basel wraps up, as well as the morning after, Miami Beach looks like a truck stop ran into the ocean.  Tents are being dismantled, beach signage points to furniture that's no longer there, and... View full entry

Detroit is now my home city, so I am thrilled that next year's U.S. Pavilion at the Venice Biennale will be dedicated to exploring the intersection of Detroit and architectural imagination.  As excited as I am that The Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of... View full entry

House Opera video

Assistant Professor of Sociology at University of Southern California, Veronica Terriquez received her Ph.D. in sociology from UCLA. Her research focuses on educational inequality, immigrant integration, and organized labor. Her work is linked to education justice and immigrant rights organizing... View full entry

Thank you Archinect Sessions podcast for featuring me on the first podcast of 2015.  It looks like with everything happening in December I missed a chance to post here on Another Architecture.  Let's catch up.    Mimi Zeiger wrote a great opinion piece for Dezeen last month asking why... View full entry

Posting this much about Mies makes me feel like this blog is circling back to where it started two years ago, when I posted about Modernity and Ideology from my studio in Germany.  Somehow this recent time in the MidWest, transitioning from Brooklyn to Detroit, does remind me of settling into... View full entry

One of the principles that guides my approach to architecture and urban design is the sense that architecture has much more to offer than luxury.  Whether you consider our field professionally in comparison to doctors and lawyers, or as a discipline comparable to art, we have a lot of room to be... View full entry

Keller Easterling is an internationally-recognized architect and theorist working on issues of urbanism, architecture, and organization in relation to the phenomena commonly defined as globalization. Her latest book, Subtraction, is published by Sternberg Press.  Easterling is a Professor of... View full entry

My collaborators and I have recently secured an office space in downtown Manhattan to lease for $1.  That's one dollar.  It's a pristine storefront, ideal location between the Lower East Side and Chinatown (easy biking from Brooklyn and 1 block from the Grand St subway).  Wifi and utilities... View full entry

Perhaps we are so accustomed to hearing architect's present their designs as inspired by clothing -- whether the drape of a veil in Abu Dhabi or the flair of a skirt in Prague -- that we do not consider the intersection of architectural output and costuming to be newsworthy. The two modes of... View full entry

Mahalia C. Gayle is from Seattle, WA. She completed her undergraduate studies at Princeton University and her graduate work at Harvard University, both in Romance Languages and Literatures with a specialization in French. She has taught at Harvard University, Boston University, Emmanuel College... View full entry

In honor of Her winning best original screenplay in the Oscars last weekend, I am going to finally post this.Spike Jonze's Her is a masterpiece of a movie that lends itself to comparison to Brazil.  At least, architecturally and urbanistically, it does. One could also develop a comparison in... View full entry

What is it about failure that is so seductive in art and such anathema in architecture?  Perhaps there is something about the relationship between client and architect that makes failure so…. taboo, so unthinkable, and un-seductive.For the past few months I have been part of an... View full entry

Inspired by the flexibility of uses for houses in Detroit, in proximity to the major cultural institutions for opera and diverse forms of performance, this project stages an opera as a house, the house and its dramas of occupancy and vacancy, demolition, and re-purposing, as an... View full entry

This "Another Architecture" blog started as an intermittent chronicle of my architecture fellowship at Akademie Schloss Solitude.  I was back in New York for the summer, preparing for the next phase of my fellowship in Zagreb Croatia, when I got a call from U. of Michigan to teach the Fall... View full entry

This summer in New York we are having a rare dose of major works from the West coast's "Light and Space" movement.  That phrase Light and Space always makes me think first of Light and Air, that penultimate duo of Depression-era tenement reform and the 1916 New York City zoning.  The... View full entry

This is a brief summary of Primate, the plugin that I created to integrate Leap Motion with parametric design in Grasshopper.    For me there are 3) big break-throughs that Leap enables.  1) bringing to digital processes an intuitive access to 3 dimensions.  That is very... View full entry

Primate demo

My residency at Akademie Schloss Solitude has ended for the moment.  I am back in New York for the summer, will be in Europe again in the fall. Here in NY my office is mobile.  I am mostly at either the main library at Bryant Park in Manhattan or at one of the Goethe Institute... View full entry

How much of the history of urban design as a discipline can be traced back to Corbusier's reading of foreground and background in Istanbul? He took his first research trip abroad to Istanbul in 1911 and wrote of the relationship between the massive forms of the mosques and the repeated typology... View full entry

Crossing Bosphorous by taxi

It's sort of 2 and a half buildings in one.  A functional envelope that might remind one of the Eames' house, if the Eame's house were 4 stories and all glazed.  Outside of that are the overlapped panels of glass that come all the way down to the sidewalk. Inside is concrete - interior... View full entry

There is not much I could add to Herzog + de Meuron's own description of their Messeplatz Basel project, which is quoted in length here on Dezeen, along with photos.  Often in our field a project description can sound a bit like an artist statement, heavy on intent and concept, but maybe... View full entry