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LA Forum interviews Geoff Manaugh on the architecture of quarantine

2020-06-17T16:15:00-04:00

I think that, if anything, the quarantine experience that we’re having is the realization that large-scale, drastic changes are actually possible.

LA Forum's publication Delirious LA interviews BLDGBLOG's Geoff Manaugh on the quarantine as a possible enabler to change in architecture and other conjectures it may bring to architecture and urban design.

"For me, as someone who writes about architecture, it was the idea that there was a way of dealing with disease—which, from a modern point of view, I would associate with vaccines, pills, or surgery—instead you can design a building in such a way that you can prevent the spread of a disease from one person to the next. It seemed like a way to instrumentalize architecture beyond just aesthetics, or beyond just everyday use value such as, you know, this is a restaurant or this is a home. It gives architecture – and the very fundamentals of architecture, including questions of circulation and sequence, and where walls and doors might be placed – a medical effect. And it helps to avoid the need for a vaccine or avoid the need for medical treatment later.

There was something fascinati...

A bird's-eye view of LA with Geoff Manaugh and the LAPD

2016-03-23T13:11:00-04:00

The police had allowed me to fly with them so that I could see the world from their perspective. Through its aerial patrols, the division has uniquely unfettered access to a fundamentally different experience of Los Angeles, one in which the city must constantly be reinterpreted from above, in real time, with the intention of locating, tracking and interrupting criminal activity. This also means that the police are not only thinking about Los Angeles as it currently exists.

"Their job is to anticipate things that have yet to occur — not just where criminals are, but where and when they might arrive next. They patrol time as well as space. In this sense, although it has been in continual operation for the past 60 years, the division has much to tell us about policing the cities of the future."

In a fascinating excerpt from his forthcoming book A Burglar's Guide to the City, Geoff Manaugh relates his experience with the LAPD on their helicopter patrols of the city. "Cities get the types of crime their design calls for," he writes. And the sprawl of Los Angeles demands, and facilitates, a policial gaze from above.

For more from the author of BLDGBLOG, check out some articles from the archive:

Or more recent content:

The "algorithmic dreams" of driverless cars, and how they might affect real-world urban design

2015-11-12T15:43:00-05:00

The sensory limitations of these vehicles must be accounted for, Nourbakhsh explained, especially in an urban world filled with complex architectural forms, reflective surfaces, unpredictable weather and temporary construction sites. This means that cities may have to be redesigned, or may simply mutate over time, to accommodate a car’s peculiar way of experiencing the built environment...

"...The flip side of this example is that, in these brief moments of misinterpretation, a different version of the urban world exists...If we can learn from human misperception, perhaps we can also learn something from the delusions and hallucinations of sensing machines. But what?"

As self-driving cars gradually integrate themselves into urban society, Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG spotlights emerging lidar (light + radar) scanning technologies that the cars use to navigate. He weighs the possible advantages and risks that these technologies — which still have their vulnerabilities — can pose on the built environment.

More recent news about driverless cars on Archinect:

Tokyo's 2020 Olympics won't have Zaha, but it's looking like there will be "Robot Taxi"

Dawn of the self-driving car: testing out Tesla's autopilot function

Milton Keynes invests in driverless cars over public transit infrastructure

Can a loss of driver autonomy save lives?

Geoff Manaugh, Smout Allen, and co. investigate the future of Los Angeles in a new exhibition at the USC Libraries

2015-10-28T15:39:00-04:00

It’s 2040, and Los Angeles has just begun to recover from a devastating epidemic that wiped out much of its population. Former residents slowly trickle back, alongside new immigrants drawn to the city’s surplus housing stock. But at a lab in Westwood, epidemiologists fear the disease is mutating and could potentially return…

At least that’s one possibility. Alternatively, the city may triple in population and expand into the Pacific Northwest. Immigrants may flock to Southern California from Chelyabinsk Oblast in Russia. Or, contrarily, officials may exploit census data to facilitate mass deportations.

These are some of the many possible future scenarios for Los Angeles imagined in L.A.T.B.D., a project by writer Geoff Manaugh in collaboration with the London-based studio Smout Allen – comprised of Mark Smout and Laura Allen – and Jeff Watson, the Assistant Professor of Interactive Media and Games at the University of Southern California, with input from a host of other experts incl...

Meet the jury of Archinect's "Dry Futures" competition: Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG

2015-08-26T11:50:00-04:00

Geoff Manaugh is a design and architecture writer, contributing to publications such as Dwell, New Scientist and The New Yorker, as well as authoring several books and the long-running design and architecture site, BLDGBLOG.

Manaugh’s perspective on the drought focuses on the ripe opportunities for improving California’s remarkably inefficient, and in some ways, “undesigned” water systems, extending from its physical infrastructures to the economic market for buying and selling water rights. “I think that the actual pragmatic, ecosystem-based solutions to this – as well as the rethinking of agriculture on a statewide basis, as well as individual water use – I think is something that is really exciting and interesting about this contest.”

In collaboration with Smout Allen Architectural & Design Research, Manaugh will be participating at the Chicago Architecture Biennial this fall.

Have an idea for how to address the drought with design? Submit your ideas to the Dry Futures competition!

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Examining the spatial crime of burglary

2015-08-12T19:50:00-04:00

Burglary is a spatial crime: its very definition requires architecture...Indeed, burglary's architectural interest comes not from its ubiquity, but from its unexpected, often surprisingly subtle misuse of the built environment. Burglars approach buildings differently, often seeking modes of entry other than doors and approaching buildings—whole cites—as if they're puzzles waiting to be solved or beaten.

Prepping for World Cup, Brazilian police build mock favelas to train officers

2014-06-16T18:51:00-04:00

Police simulations such as these offer a peculiarly spatial insight into the ways humans attempt to make sense of the world. [...] Someone builds a surrogate or a stand-in—a kind of stage-set on which to test their most viable theories—then they control that replicant world down to every curb height and door frame. Architecture then comes along simply as ornamentation, in order to give this virtual world a physical footprint

Beautiful photo of sky cranes at WTC site, by BLDGBLOG's Geoff Manaugh

2013-05-08T12:34:00-04:00

When I walked out to get breakfast this morning, clouds had obscured all but the topmost workings of the 1 World Trade Center site, visible through our living room window—a strange vision of machines, pulleys, cranes, and gears sort of hovering in the sky, like something out of Archigram by way of Hayao Miyazaki.

Tar Creek Supergrid

2011-09-28T14:22:42-04:00

For his thesis project at the University of Toronto, Clint Langevin, in collaboration with Amy Norris, proposed "repurposing abandoned mines as renewable energy infrastructure in the U.S."

Check out more of Clint's work on his profile.

Spacesuit: An Interview with Nicholas de Monchaux

2011-04-27T18:59:30-04:00

Nicholas de Monchaux is an architect, historian, and educator based in Berkeley, California. His work spans a huge range of topics and scales, as his new and utterly fascinating book, Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo, makes clear.

Urban Hypotheticals

2011-04-09T23:54:19-04:00

Members of this organization begin the narrative process by examining city neighborhoods and commercial districts for compelling structures that appear to have fallen into disuse—“hidden gems” of the built environment. In varying states of repair, these buildings suggest only stories about the past, not the future.