Of course, everyone is going bonkers over the iPad, announced today.   This post isn’t about the iPad, it’s about me.

Bryan Boyer, representing the editorial staff at Archinect.com, put out a call for ideas.

To address this impasse between the rightful expression of the Muslim religion and the value of Switzerland’s overwhelmingly scenic environment, we challenge you to design a solution that allows the best of both worlds. Can you design a minaret as event rather than object?

Your task is to design a deployable minaret that can attain full presence, visible from a distance, during each of the five daily calls to prayer.

A good prompt, in my mind merging the contemporary impulse of architecture as activism and some older psychedelic probes into the form, function, and agenda of architecture.  I produced two entries (really a variation on the same theme) called Mini-rets.

First, I denied the need for a “brick-and-mortar” mosque that a minaret would necessarily tower beside, insisting that the Mullah and observant Muslim themselves were all that were necessary to create a holy space.  Presumably, the call to prayer could take place over a cellphone network, with a cell tower the de facto minaret. This, however, misses the subversive aim of the competition, which is to undermine a legal change with (at least in this case) a guerrilla architecture.  In Mini-ret I, the Mullah wears a telescoping tower topped by loudspeakers and a crescent moon, which pushes into the sky five times a day for the call to prayer, wherever the Mullah may be.  The aural broadcast of a minority culture does not amount to a threat to the majority, instead it is a statement of a shared identity for the minority in strange land.

Lucky me, Mini-ret I was featured on the “results” page, with Archinect editor Heather Ring noting, “architecture already seems anachronistic – this mobilizes a collective call to prayer through a wearable network.”

Mini-ret II is more playful. It proposes that the Mullah is to hold an Alphorn upright (as if it were a periscope) to project the call to prayer.

I assume that Bryan wrote the introduction to the call for ideas result page; it at least fits with remarks he’s made previously about the architect’s potential position when so much of his or her historical duties are being apportioned away (and indeed his current position within Sitra, as far as I can tell)(I’ve been an avid consumer of all things Bryan Boyer on the internet for at least four years now.  I ran into him in person only once outside the RISD architecture building in Providence.  I wasn’t sure it was him until later…):

At the core of the Call for Ideas was an implicit question about the efficacy of architecture in the realm of politics….what does a specifically architectural mode of resistance look like? Is there even a useful specificity or perhaps architecture in the hands of an architect is nothing more than a brick – an object of resistance only inasmuch as it’s hurled forcefully into the world. Some of the entrants to this Call for Ideas are asking bricks what they want to be and hearing a much different response than Kahn could have ever dreamed.

While many of the entries are snarky (mine included), it is heartening that we at least are staking our position as inventors and innovators within a constraining condition.

I saw Daybreakers this afternoon, and found it couldn’t live up to its compelling premise.  In the world of the film, an outbreak of vampirism results in nearly the entire population becoming vampires ten years on.  In the exposition of the movie, great pains are taken to demonstrate and explain how day-to-day vampire life exists:  cars have a “daylight” mode that blacks-out all windows, forcing the driver to navigate by cameras; homes are equipped with heavy louvers; and everyone gets their sustenance from coffee laced with human blood.

Humans, of course, are a rare breed.  Large numbers are grown in CAFOs (confined animal feeding operations) designed by the art department from The Matrix. Ultimately,  I liked the film better as an allegory for industrial food production, with humans standing in for cows or pigs (others read the film as a metaphor for “creeping progressive socialism”).

Driving the vampire population’s desperation is a sudden drop in the availability of human blood.  You’d think that after ten years, the vampires would have been able to domesticate the human population more successfully, and would have an unlimited, cheap supply of humans. Maybe since they can’t go outside during the day to cultivate subsidized corn, they’ve got nothing to fatten the humans on.  Or maybe, and more to the point, maybe their human mono-culture had suffered from a destructive pestilence: staph infection from farmers who forget to wash their hands before changing the IVs on their crop, or whatever.

A large corporation simultaneously cultivates all blood for the vampire population to consume, looks for a viable artificial blood substitute their own labs, AND maintains a standing army of vampires to hunt down any free-range humans.  Its as if Arthur-Daniels-Midland (ADM) and Blackwater became the ultimate military-industrial-food complex from one of Michael Pollan’s sweaty nightmares.

Of course, these free range humans, when not being hunted by the vampire army, lead an idealized life on a Napa Valley winery, of all places (because there’s so much sun and no shade, they say).  They grow their own tomatoes.  The have great skin.   And the vampire ADM loves to hunt them down.

The vampires aren’t immoral though.  Some seem to be genuinely trying escape death (Sam Neill, who says he prefers the taste of free-range human blood over farmed because it has “fear” in it), some have been turned against their will and struggle with their existence (Ethan Hawke).  It is the internal struggle of Hawke’s character that finally drags out the solution to the vampire’s food shortage: again become human.   I won’t get into the details, but it involves allowing a vampire to eat the blood of a human that once was a vampire.

In a way then, once the vampire eats what he once was, he is saved.  The eater-vampire becomes physiologically aware of his food and is transformed (grok?).  Thankfully, in real-life the human eater only has to become intellectually aware of his food’s sourcing to free himself from the physical perils of the military-industrial-food complex.

Fittingly, Hawke’s character in the beginning of the film is a vampire who is trying to invent artificial blood (read, corn derived food products), and by the end has actually saved the world by forcing it to return to the food culture of an earlier time.

As part of their ongoing “Safety Net” series, which examines the functionality of what passes for social welfare in the United States during the current recession, The New York Times profiled several Floridians with little to  no cash income and rely exclusively on food stamps to survive.  Buried in the article was this little tidbit:

“[Kevin Zirulo and Diane Marshall] said they dropped out of community college and diverted student aid to household expenses. They received $150 from the Nielsen Company, which monitors their television.”

Thanks to the Welfare Reform Act of 1996 (the full title is the “Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996″ an insulting title for a welfare bill if there ever was one), there is very little of what amounts to social cash welfare in the United States.  In fact, the same NYT article reports that while the food stamp roles have skyrocketed, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (the main cash welfare program) has barely changed since the onset of the “Great Recession.”

Enter the Nielsen Company, which evidentially pays its Nielsen Families $150 a month for their trouble.  Does this amount to some kind of private welfare?  Perhaps we are past the heyday of the privatization of government services (jails, roads, airports, hospitals) or maybe we are at the dawn of a new era (Healthcare reform of 2010)?  If so, what other kinds of welfare could the private sector offer?  For instance, maybe Walmart’s artificially low prices are already a form of back-door, private assistance?

Since I remain unemployed (now six months!) after earning a graduate degree, I am not eligible to receive unemployment insurance (which is not really welfare anyway; it is largely paid for by employers), nor do I qualify for Medicaid (not having a child or being pregnant severely hurts your chances), and I don’t even think I can get food stamps (too much money in my savings account), perhaps privatized welfare is for me. Coincidentally, Nielsen sent us a preliminary demographic survey in the mail the other day, promising that perhaps we too might represent tens of thousands of our demographic doppelgangers with our viewing choices.

Some of my work, including my degree project, was included as a part of the department’s booth/room at the 9th Annual International Festival for Architecture and Media (BEYOND MEDIA) in Florence, Italy.  The exhibition came and went early in the summer and unfortunately, not many RISD eyes were able to see it.  Our portion of the exhibition catalog is above.

The exhibition was curated by the endlessly amazing Evita Yumul and Yu Morishita.  Check out their Flickr photostream of the event and the exhibition website.

Today M.ammoth pointed me toward an article in the New Atlantis by Rand Simberg, an aerospace engineer and blogger.  Simberg lays out the fallacies as he and many in the aerospace community in NASA’s re-tread of the Apollo program.  In short, he calls the space agency and government to task for its monolithic bloated-ness, declaring NASA a stagnant protector of jobs in crucial congressional districts that needlessly monopolizes human spaceflight.  As an alternative, he suggests aggregating an orbiting and deep space fueling infrastructure, supplied and maintained by the private sector.  Thus the burden of lifting all of a mission’s fuel (read: weight) at the time of launch is eliminated, and the marginal cost of getting into orbit is drastically reduced.

Simberg loves his metaphors.  He likens his scheme for the exploration of space en-masse by any private citizen or organization that can foot the now lower launch costs to the way the “old west” was settled.  He begins:

The critical requirement of a reusable space system is refuelability. Consider a thought experiment from an earlier frontier. Imagine that, on the settlers’ hard trek to the western United States, there had been no vegetation along the way for the wagon-pulling horses or oxen to eat. To get across the country, each Conestoga would have to carry enough hay to feed the animals (not to mention supplies for the pioneers for months). The wagon would have been so large that the animals wouldn’t have been able to pull it.

And presses the metaphor into service to describe his own vision:

…we should explore the solar system the way we did the West: not by sending off small teams of government explorers—Lewis and Clark were the extreme exception, not the rule—but by having lots of people wandering around and peering over the next rill in search of adventure or profit.

To me, though, the real gem of Simberg’s article is a throw-away line. He asserts that NASA’s job should be to make it possible for any group, be it “the National Geographic Society, or an offshoot of the Latter-Day Saints, or an adventure tourism company”  to colonize Mars  (the emphasis is all mine).

The Mormons as interstellar pioneers!  It makes so much sense.  Consider:

a) Proven track record. In 1847, Brigham Young let a group of Mormons onto what is now Salt Lake City, Utah.  Only back then it was Mexican territory.

b) Plural marriage. Undoubtably,  the Mormon settler’s success in Utah owes something to this strong family structure developed for the rapid production of children.

c) Fastidious record keeping. An obsession with geneology has inspired a vast collection of birth and death certificates, kept within a mountain in Utah, and tended to by impeccable Mormon archivists.  Exploring new planets demands a fair amount of data collection, indexing, and storage, I’d imagine.

Nope, it’s not.  The image is coded in Javascript/HTML/CSS and made of 1,750 colored 10px x 10px <div>’s.

I extracted the hexadecimal information as XML from a RAW file, fed it through a short bit of code and out pops this.  Its totally a project from the first week of a Javascript class at community college, but it was fun.

I’d like to write a whole set of tools, make an HTML photoshop emulator.  Don’t like the exact blue on facebook.com?  Fire up the Hue/Saturation or Replace Color tool and change it!  Want to get George W. Bush out of your favorite picture of Condi Rice?  Good thing you’ve got HTML Clone Stamp!

The first prize went to Evita Yumul’s degree project “Architectures of Nonchalance, In Five Parts.” Super, super amazing project. No archi-babble, just a literary project of mysticism, rumors, and Borgian-intrigue (you can check it out at the 2008 RIBA Presidents Medal site, for which the project was submitted). Evita’s series of drawings, rotating through axonometric space, really are aspirational.

Unfortunately, the book is only available for purchase directly from the RISD Architectural Series, and they don’t offer super-saver shipping.  Save your money, my dear readers (all three of you), because I’ve included my submission to the competition below (which is better, anyway.  My layout got a little mangled somewhere on the way to publication).

…a continuation of post #17.

Thoreau’s cabin on Walden Pond stands as a kind of domestic proto-manifest destiny: the thinness of the envelope he builds for himself allows for a psychological and physiological closeness to the environment.  Thoreau presents his hut as painfully obligatory: he didn’t plaster his walls until November, allowing the wind and weather to pass between the boards and through the cabin, on cleaning day he loves seeing his things in the sunlight outside his cabin, delaying the task of putting them back inside as long as possible. Pollan points out that this desire to fling out is in direct opposition to the mindset of Bachelard in The Poetics of Space, in which the comforting hearth-enclosure of the home is most prize. He posits that Thoreau represents an American domestic manifest destiny toward the exterior, while Bachelard represents an European interiority.

America’s trips to the moon in the late 60’s and the early 70’s could be read as an ultimate manifestation of manifest destiny.  It is fitting that the skins of spacecraft seem periliously thin, given the hostile environment they must protect against.  The image in my mind then is Bachelard’s warm Poetic Space infinately small against the relentless wilderness of outer space.  A tension between the sustaining, coddling environment of the craft and the thinness of enclosure it offers is maybe the ultimate expression of American domesticity?

I should re-read Walden (since the last time I read it was like 8th grade) actually finish The Poetics of Space…

Above:  four Daniel Libeskind buildings: (from l to r) the graduate center at London Metropolitan University, the Jewish Museum, the ROM, and the Denver Art Museum addition.

Former Boston University president John Silber’s book The Architecture of the Absurd, set off a tacit rebuttal by Nicolai Ouroussoff back in December of 2007, and rightfully so.  The book is a predictable condemnation of the work of several starchitect including Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind, and Steven Holl, that reads more like the ranting of a crotchety old man than a measured professor of philosophy and son of an architect.

Indeed, the author has a unique and knowledgeable point-of-view: as the former president of Boston University, his administration oversaw a large building program, adding umpteen million feet of built area to the campus.  He has worked with architects entrusted with the large, complex capital investment of a university building.  Unfortunately, Silber falls flat on his face by presenting a one-dimensional argument which seeks to expose the con-men who use David Copperfield-ian “theoryspeak” to distract attention while Gehry et al, rob 501(c)3 organizations blind.

By implication, Silber must think that starchitect clients are either so stupid they are easily taken by the shell game played by the starchitect or guilty by association in the architect’s crimes of megalomania, poor taste, and flitching the hard-earned money of non profits in the first degree.  Fortunately, we have blueprint-reading university presidents like Silber to stand up to these amoralists in our ranks (forgetting of course that Silber refused to add a non-discrimination on sexual orientation provision in the university’s hiring practices, lest they be forced to allow those who practice “pedophilia, incest, and beastiality”).

I’m not going to get into it, because Ouroussoff isn’t the only one who’s been here before (he is proud because he decided to cap an atrium in a new BU building with an artificial skylight, rather than waste money with a real one).  Blind pragmatists could add depth to their arguments by examining some undeniable contributions that architecture as sculpture has necessitated.

For instance, Gehry’s drive to realize his models and sketches brought CATIA, a software package developed to fabricate aircraft fuselages, into architecture.  At the time, CAD software was being used as a simulacrum for hand-drafting.  With CATIA came the potential of parametric design and today we have BIM, for good or for bad.  BIM, or building information modeling, of course, allows architects to create a 3-d parametric model of a building from which schedules and drawings can automatically be pulled, greatly streamlining and improving portions of a design process.

To be fair, I do find Libeskind’s endlessly repetitive buildings a little tiring (though his forgotten masterplan for Ground Zero was very uplifting).  And I’m glad that MIT didn’t have to waste any of my tuition or slice of endowment to pay for maintenance, repairs, and legal fees for the Stata Center.  But there is plenty of shit to be spread around here, and Silber seems to suggest that only he has the sense to wear the rubber gloves.  At the heart of his argument seems is that Silber simply finds the architecture he rails against distasteful.  He and Prince Charles should be pen pals.

Probably not an original thought, but at least an original image. Reading Michael Pollan’s A Place of my Own in which he reminds me of Thoreau’s description of his thin-walled cabin and connects it to American domestic architecture’s “centrifugalness.” The Lunar Lander’s skin was as thin as a few layers of mylar. It encloses an atmosphere in an inhospitable environment, but is perhaps the ultimate expression of Thoreau’s thinness.