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 including historian Nathan Masters and filmmaker John Carpenter. Primarily installed in the Doheny Memorial Library at the University of Southern California, L.A.T.B.D. is “a nonlinear look at the future of Los Angeles, told through endlessly branching narrative chains.”
It’s part game and part research project – the fruits of Manaugh’s work as the recipient of the 2015 USC Libraries’ Discovery Fellowship, a program established in 2011 to activate the archives as a space for creative exploration and interdisciplinary collaboration. The game-aspect takes form primarily in a “choose your own adventure”-style guide, printed as an accordion pamphlet and available at the entrance. Meanwhile, the spoils of Manaugh’s adventures in the USC archives (his “Raiders of the Lost Ark experience,” as he described it during a panel preceding the opening) are laid out in vitrines and primarily include books and ephemera, both new and old. Excerpts of interviews conducted by Manaugh line the walls.
But this division hardly holds – some of the objects displayed as artifacts are in fact artifice, and the game extends into the exhibit design, notably in a series of dashing architecture models crafted by Smout Allen in wood, plastic and glass. One such model imagines a massive “seismic lighthouse” buried beneath the city, measuring the movements of tectonic plates. Another envisions power plants that harness this seismic activity. Shared interests as well as narrative elements weave together the fictional and nonfictional elements – an infrastructural invention is both imagined as a model and figures into the guide – but they also seem relatively capable of working as stand-alone elements.
The guide, designed by David Mellen Design, is sectioned into parts, each with a series of possible scenarios to choose, randomly or otherwise. As you make your way linearly down the page, the scenarios coalesce into a narrative. Some wax Ballardian, while others are more prosaic. The first part of the guide frames the context and the rest orients around a character of your choosing: a property lawyer, a private investigator, a retired historian, a seismologist, an astronomer, or an environmental scientist. These, in turn, are adequate stand-ins for the central concerns of the project, as well as the portrait of Los Angeles it paints.
And, frankly, this portrait is clichéd: sprawling, crime-ridden, historically-amnesiac, earthquake-prone, “star-strewn,” ecologically unsustainable. These descriptors figure into just about every representation of the second largest city in the United States. But in this, they also constitute the ideal ingredients for a film noir – that trope-heavy, most LA-of-LA genres (and a direct inspiration for the project).
On his own BLDGBLOG, Manaugh recently characterized L.A.T.B.D. as a “a kind of architectural or infrastructural noir,” asking, “if this is a city known for its conspiracies and crimes—whether it's Chinatown, O.J. Simpson, bank heists, or the novels of James Elroy—can we use that same narrative register to explore the city's future infrastructure?”
Manaugh and his collaborators skillfully mobilize these narrative elements, taking advantage of the familiarity of the genre to perform the difficult task of converting cinematic conventions into a predominantly spatial and textual project. The noir tropes greatly help propel the game aspect (really – it’s quite fun to play), without rendering the project hackneyed. 
At the same time, noir invariably invokes the past, while L.A.T.B.D. purports to consider the future. Figure in the musty, old-library context, and the exhibit can feel more retro-futurist, along the lines of Disneyland’s Jules Verne-inspired Tomorrowland, rather than a vision of the city’s actual future. There are no glowing screens and not a single drone.
Instead, the city’s (largely forgotten) contributions to astronomy merge with its proclivities for astrology, as well as its production of celebrity. Its seismic instability becomes a metaphor for its morphological mutability (and vice versa), but also its fluctuating demographics (about 40% of the city is foreign-born, according to the 2005-2009 American Community Survey). “LA is an always moving city,” Manaugh said during the panel. “Even when you can’t feel it moving.”
Rather than a video game set against a photorealistic background, L.A.T.B.D. seems to suggest the act of urban interpretation can itself be a game. Manaugh and his collaborators set up the parameters with the exhibit and accompanying text, but it’s up to the user to decide where and when the game should end.
During the panel that opened the event (which comprised Mark Smout, Laura Allen, and Watson, moderated by Manaugh), an attendee asked the panel for their thoughts on augmented reality technology, suggesting it as the obvious future of urban gaming. Watson, the game design professor, noted the historical novelty of any apparent division between a “game world,” as mediated by a screen, and the real, physical world.
“There’s always been a commerce between what happens in a game and what happens outside,” he stated, making reference to “mob football,” the medieval progenitor of modern soccer that had few rules and no delimited field. Instead, these games actively involved the architecture of their villages – goals were often scored by passing a ball through the opposing village’s church balcony – and inevitably left traces, usually in the form of property damage. Of course, the same could be said of the live-action role playing scene or, reversely, professional online poker playing. A game doesn’t ever exist in strict isolation, but rather bleeds into the rest of life, whether in the form of physical damage, money owed, or hurt feelings.
Manaugh took the opportunity to suggest that futurism, despite its name, can be a “reenactment of something that’s 1,000 years old.” After all, he stated, “augmented reality was the logic of haunted or sacred spaces in the city.” It’s a lovely idea, and helps illuminate the apparent anachronisms of Manaugh’s brand of futurism, as well as the slippages between fiction and reality that so heavily factor into L.A.T.B.D. Manaugh, alongside his team of collaborators, offer a futurism more literary than technocentric, and therefore with recourse to less rigid and linear temporalities, as well as the powerful strategies of metaphor and metonymy (among others). Here infrastructure is not merely utilitarian (or standing reserve), but also a potent site of mystery and play.
For Manaugh, Los Angeles is “more like a force field than a city – you throw things in there and they change.” His game operates according to a similar, bricoleur logic: taking all these different ideas of the city, pushing them together, and seeing what comes out. Ideally, this also works in reverse, with the sense of playful urban interpretation suggested by L.A.T.B.D. continuing past the confines of the USC Library. That, however, seems to be up to the player.
L.A.T.B.D. will be on display in the first-floor Treasure Room at the Doheny Memorial Library until Jan. 31, 2016. Admission is free and open to public during the library's regular hours. For more information, visit the libraries' website here.
41 Comments
What is gained from this kind of project? What is the theory behind it all? How is it relevant to architecture? Manaugh's work is sort of like a low-budget Cremaster Cycle for architects. It meanders and weaves together various elements with an appearance of serious research but without ever really landing on anything illuminating.
yeah, but he hates frank gehry, so, yeah, you know . . . whatever.
I think it has something to do with archigram... or ballard....or augmented reality... or something.
It does represent the narrative design that is popular now in design circles. The process has become more marketable than products, which are of little importance (Ghery didn't quote the right authors).
Tech conference synergied, panel discussion optimized....
Beautiful and interesting fine art sculptures. Let's call a spade, a spade.
Reading through this, I made the realization that people - the very reason why and why we're able to design and make buildings - are nowhere to be seen. Literally or figuratively. Which kind of misses the point but what do I know?
I'm sure there are some interesting ideas of you read all of the text.. It's the intellectual gymnastics of the nostalgia for 70s futurism through today's lense. Ok, the stands are a reference to an archigram drawing....cool! Sadly this is about 95% of what passes for discourse.
Conclusion: architecture is harder than it looks, bloggers
I have no issue with, and in fact enjoy this kind of work. However, what i do not enjoy is when it is figuratively placed on a pedestal as how work should be done, particularly in an academic setting. There is space in the world for theoretical and practical, but they should not displace the other. It's a lot easier to make something "cool" this way though.
I have nothing against theoretical work. I'm just left wondering what the theory is behind this. Much like BLDG BLOG, it seems like an incoherent pile of informational tidbits and references.
"I started referring to this as a kind of architectural or infrastructural noir, and I've come to really like the phrase: the accompanying exhibition text is thus not at all what you'd expect to see in a typical gallery setting, but instead tells an endlessly branching "noir" about the next Los Angeles—by, in some ways, revealing what Los Angeles really was, all along."
Or is it just a very elaborate cop out?
but can Frank Gehry Blog?
BLDGBLOG is best when it uncovers the beauty of utilitarian, invisible buildings. I'm not dismissive because of anti-intellectualism--actually it's the opposite. It's the same thing that sucks about the BIG Google rendering--it's a hodgepodge of retro 70s futurism thrown together for no reason other than hipness. It's actually really boring. Le Corbusier ran into the same problem after studying industrial architecture--you actually have to use these tools to build something good. "part game, part research project," yes, similar to much design discourse, it has been game-ified becoming a tool of amusement rather than enlightenment.
Even reading this, it's not even necessary to see it because it's all about the narrative. Much like the Chicago Biennal, each piece has a narrative that becomes it's own self-referential endpoint.
Architectural theory is most often the justification of nonsense. Especially when it is so far removed from the science or practice of architecture.
Embarrassing, both for those putting it on, thinking that they're doing something important and for the audience that is fed this crap as if it were a nutritious meal.
Compared to the theoretical work being done in other fields like physics, medicine, engineering, etc...this stuff is silly...a strong theoretical work should be applicable and ground breaking in some way, or should add to the overall body of knowledge by discovering, revealing something new...otherwise it is a huge waste of time..,
Perhaps this is a hyperbole, but any architectural experiment that doesn't start with the body is probably going to end up as a pseudo-intellectual BS. The Black in Design conference is actually more interesting as a way into discussing architecture culture, when they are looking into the relationship of people and space.
I like thinking of this exhibit as a novel made physical. It looks beautifully made, and like a brief escape into a story.
I don't understand the dislike and confusion around it. This is an installation, not a building; it doesn't *have* to be some kind of important statement on architecture as a discipline.
Wired Magazine did a cool "speculative future" issue on pandemics twenty years ago; it wasn't hard science but it did teach me about pandemic spread and control (it had a terrifying image of an entire transatlantic flight full of scientists returning from a conference on, ironically, pandemics being immolated on a runway because they'd been infected - that image stuck in my brain for real) through an entertaining narrative.
Geoff is a writer, not an architect, but he illuminates all kinds of bizarre and lovely interpretations of built space through his writing. This project seems great; I'm hopeful I'll be getting to LA this fall and if so I'll definitely go see it (because Nicholas also said the game is, just simply, fun to play!).
Well, I'm glad anti-critical people like above like it. But for me, it's another reason why I can't take my friends to architecture/design exhibits anymore. But I guess the target audience is the hippy overeducated people and those that like the "idea" of a game-fied exhibit or the "idea" of a narrative architecture... if you want to be an architect, have the balls to stand behind your work at least.
(Someone referenced Matthew Barney before, I think his work is much more accessible).
Every so often I check out Manaugh's writing hoping that I will find a thorough and persuasive argument that connects to other important (or what I consider important) discussions. And I'm almost always disappointed with brief tidbits, random curiosities and reposts disguised as original articles. BLDG blog's website aesthetic, with its promising headlines and images and and dense texture of type, suggests dense and serious writing (also remember that very thick book that was sold a while back), but I keep finding the writing to be surprisingly light and shallow. He has a similar way of speaking in public, with high-speed mentions of factoids that ultimately add up to very little. I wish that he would work on being concise and developing clear ideas that contribute to the discourse in precise ways.
Nate, honey, don't call me anti-critical or I'll turn all condescending I'm-old-enough-to-be-your-mom on you. Oh, oops, already did.
I will agree with you, and meant to in my original post, that the Black In Design conference was and is a FAR more critically important analysis of contemporary architecture, practice and space. But as a design conference it had at its heart the goal of being a critical analysis and conversation seeking solutions around a discrete set of topics. Geoff's work, and this exhibit in particular, don't have the same goal. Bravo for Black In Design, and I would have loved to attend it, but I wouldn't go into it looking for the same flavor of intellectual sustenance that I would expect from an exhibit put on by the Library Discoveries Fellowship.
Do you have the balls to stand behind your built work? Geoff isn't an architect, so his balls don't need to be applied to a building (BTW please don't consider that as a directive, Geoff or any other architect).
I think it's naive to think that this isn't a "Goal" -- if Geoff is being invited to speak on behalf of architecture at design conferences (Like the Google Design conference) his dystopian fetishes might have more of an ethical impact than you think. So, this is what architecture is? Think there needs to be a critical pushback against this in favor of more social and ethical issues. We need to be careful about what we are doing. Is architecture a game? I'm sure that's the message that is being delivered.
...and Patrick Schumacher thinks there needs to be more pushback against social and ethical issues in architecture in favor of pure formal stylization masquerading as apolitical data. My opinion, his opinion, yours...what's that thing they say about opinions?
Ultimately I plant my flag here: there is room for all of this in architecture; our discipline is not a zero-sum game.
Maybe the problem is that Manaugh never seems to get beyond conjecture.
As frustrating as Schumacher's position is, at least he has taken a position that can be understood, debated and elaborated on.
had to look at bldg blog, it seems like manaugh likes to write about a lot of things he knows nothing about in a highly patronizing tone.
Maybe that's why I like him then; I also tend to get highly patronizing, even when I'm talking about balls. Sorry for that.
davvid, I think of it like super-high-fashion ideas. No one is going to wear the craziest things they show on the runway, but the notions behind them trickle down. When I was Cranbrook in 1993 people were talking about urban agriculture on all of Detroit's vacant land, which at the time seemed totally pie-in-the-sky. Twenty-two years later it's real. Narrative, speculation, fantasy, spit-balling of ideas - they influence the discussion.
My issue with Schumacher is he says there is NO room for speculation in any realm except the one he believes is the One True Way of Parametricism.
It's like the Force, There's the side with serious people who believe in the power of form, space, connection and material to change the quality of life. Then there's the Dark Side, who go for amusement, junk space, disposable ideas, meme values, and plagiarize nostalgia [archigram, which is second rate metabolism anyway]. Those that are on the good side can easily be seduced by the power of the dark side...
You prove my point, be careful about what you fantasize, it probably will happen.
Nate, I don't see it that way. I think that theory is extremely important to the profession. I take issue with the Manaugh's unfocused and meandering conjecture. I can understand Junk Space. I can understand Parametricism. But I don't understand the meaning behind what Manaugh does and how it connects to the architectural issues of today.
His work is very well suited to the Internet, notice how the Google Design conference didn't invite a single architect because architects usually have different values, like sustainability over time, empathy, and social impact. So how to solve this problem? Invite bloggers, and "thinkers" to pine about architecture. Or just rebrand it in your own image.
So Nate, are you saying no one should ever do work like Archigram did in their time, because it's not architects' place to be critical? That we should continue to only exist in very serious relationship to gravity, longevity, and form because those things are important? What about delight?
I've said frequently on this forum that architecture *is* first and only a physical art, and that it *always* starts from the human body and our physical and sensual relationship to materials. But I also think fun temporary pavilions are things that should exist, as should speculative drawings like Tom Mayne's and Lebbeus Woods', and that articles like Peter Schjeldahl's calling concrete the "slut of materials" are all valid ruminations on the discipline.
None of those are theories.
a supposition or a system of ideas intended to explain something, especially one based on general principles independent of the thing to be explained.
"Darwin's theory of evolution"
________________
I can understand Parametricism.
Parametricism isn't theory, it's a manifesto. Huge difference.
Speculative pieces stretch our minds and our imagination. I am reminded of Pericoli's exhibition, where architectural students made models of works of fiction:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/03/writers-as-architects/?hp&_r=1
Excerpt:
The exercise is a process of reduction. In architecture, once you remove the skin — the “language” of walls, ceilings and slabs — all that remains is sheer space. In writing, once you discard language itself, the actual words, what’s left? Thus we also work toward the questions that architects, knowingly or unknowingly, must always address: how does one design and build using emptiness as a construction material? How do we perceive space? And how does it affect us?
There are pictures there—I can't pull one. His reflection on the models is fascinating.
this is an art project...Thats ok...just stop trying to rationalize it.
Speculative pieces are awesome. Mayne and Woods are imaginative geniuses. This is.. Hey remember the 70s? Archigram plagarism. Maybe he'll come up with something original someday...
I have no problem with narrative or conjecture or art (I volunteer at an architecture gallery that would give it's left nut to host this exhibition). The head of my M.Arch department was literally a student of Smout and Allen. I come from this stock, I'm a descendant. The problem I have is that none of these people have ever built anything. Who gives them a say? They are fine artists and bloggers whose medium pretends to be architecture. In truth, it's writing, drawing and model making, not much different than a writer who writes a novel that is tangentially related to architecture. Which doesn't make the writer any more an architect than these folks.
"They are fine artists and bloggers whose medium pretends to be architecture."
They can't be blamed for thinking this way. It's what gets promoted so often.
There are plenty of people who explore the themes that Manaugh and his collaborators are mentioning (like Augmented Reality, Game Design, Narrative etc.) and they do it with more precision and with the goal of advancing our understanding of something specific. It seems like this project is just a psuedo-intellectual mashup of interesting themes but without any substantive critique or any real point to make at all. There are some people out there who will always get frustrated with theoretical projects or sculptural installations. I am not one of those people. I'm just trying to point out that Manaugh's work seems to always promise more intellectual rigor and more depth than it ever seems to deliver.
It's that 70s Exhibition. Where the sincere hippie utopian architecture has been replaced by the hipster blogger, mugging for a live Twitter audience wearing the clothes but an Ashton Kutcher wink wink ironic grin for laughs.
The gamification of museums is another disturbing trend. A truly enlightening exhibition doesn't have to use terms like "interactive text" (isn't all text interactive) .... pretty soon we are going to be seeing movies where the crowd chooses between endings. Where's the art in that?
It's a kind or moral relativism where nobody has a position on anything. Instead we just see a collage of pop culture references meant to generate clicks. You can read this in my gizmodo article, "Why the BLDBLOG guy is the worlds worst architecture [thinker?]"
It's entertainment culture, where everything is packaged to sell. Substance not required.
This kind of entertainment posturing as intellectual effort reminds my of the mess that is the Republican party. They've worked themselves into a corner following the lead of some hustlers and now need to reform themselves to get out of it. A bloody mess no one wants.
OK, davvid, you got me thinking. On closer inspection, the models fall apart. I wonder if the same criteria of depth and rigor can't be applied to architecture now actually built, especially the forward looking designs.
"I wonder if the same criteria of depth and rigor can't be applied to architecture now actually built, especially the forward looking designs."
It depends...
If the built work seems to say, through its design aesthetic, "i'm deep, complex and intellectually rigorous" then it should be held to that standard. Some architects present themselves as public intellectuals and their work as cultural artifacts. Other architects take a different approach and present their work as humble and straightforward buildings. I don't expect Tod Williams or Billie Tsien, for example, to go on and on about theory to justify their actions. Koolhaas, on the other hand, does present himself as a public intellectual and cultural critic, so I do expect him to be able to explain his actions in the context of his own theories and positions.
In the 'rigorous' art world, this show would be passed as decorative gallery show which equates to some people's engagement with art around here.
davvid et al.—
Much thanks.
There have to be many different sets of criteria. The successful humble building will still be satisfactorily grounded in some cultural and human context and satisfy esthetic demands I don’t want to define rigorously.
The building I especially want reviewed is Apple Campus 2, a Norman Foster+ project, which has made appearances here. I mentioned it in my piece on Cupertino a few weeks ago:
http://archinect.com/features/article/137361206/site-context-cupertino-s-rate-of-change
Wired provides full renderings:
http://www.wired.com/2013/11/a-glimpse-into-apples-crazy-new-spaceship-headquarters/
From one point of view, I predict the design will be wildly successful. It attracts attention yet is easily grasped and reflects popular notions of nature and progress and our open, upbeat sense of ourselves. It should do much to enhance the Apple brand in the public eye and increase sales. The $5 billion will be well spent. This is not necessarily negative criticism.
Such standards are not different from what I’m seeing in the commercial writing scene, where fiction should not tax but be accessible and readable, and should touch on popular trends. Chad Harbach talks about the NYC publishing house influence here:
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2010/11/mfa_vs_nyc.html
I’m an outsider, but I wonder if architecture has the same inbreeding from the schools as writing does from the MFA programs, a constant complaint among critics.
I should recuse myself from criticism, as I’m biased. As a corporate office, Apple 2 isn’t bad—how would it compare with Wright’s Johnson Wax? But it is also the most dominant work of architecture in a city Apple commands, and I find it simplistic and trendy and unsubstantial. We’re getting a superficial message about ourselves and our future. I have no idea how it might actually function as an office, though I understand it will take much time to circle the thing.
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