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THRESHOLDS 40

JOURNAL OF THE MIT DEPARTMEN

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Editorial PolicyThresholds , Journal of the MIT Departmentof Architecture, is an annual, blind peer-reviewed publication produced by studenteditors at the Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology. Opinions in Thresholds are thoseof the contributors and do not necessarilyreect those of the editors, the Departmentof Architecture, or MIT.

CorrespondenceThresholds MIT Architecture77 Massachusetts Ave, Room 7337Cambridge, MA 02139

[email protected]://thresholds.mit.edu

Published by SA+P PressMIT School of Architecture + Planning77 Massachusetts Avenue, Room 7231Cambridge, MA 02139

Copyright 2012Massachusetts Institute of Technology.The individual contributions are copyrighttheir respective authors.

Figures and images are copyright theirrespective creators, as individually noted.

ISSN 1091-711XISBN 978-0-9835082-1-2

Book design and cover by Donnie Luuwww.donnieluu.com

Printed by Puritan Press, Hollis, NH

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Thresholds 40

ediTed by JonaThan Crisman

Cambridge, MA

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5 Editorial:Socio-indEmnity andothEr motivES

Jonathan criSman

11 conJuring utopiaS ghoSt

rEinhold martin

21 lE corbuSiEr, thE briSE-SolEil, and thE Socio-climatic proJEctof modErn architEcturE,1929-1963

daniEl a. barbEr

33 movE along!

thErE iS nothing to SEE

rania ghoSn

39 flowS Socio-Spatialformation

nana laSt

47 collEctivE EquipmEntS of

powEr: thE road and thE city SimonE brott

55 collEctivE form:thE StatuS of public

architEcturE

dana cuff

67 tuktoyaktuk: offShorE oil and a nEw arctic urbaniSm

pamEla ritchot

75 boundary linE infraStructurE

ronald raEl

83 diSSolving thE grEy pEriphEry

nEEraJ bhatia and alExandEr dhooghE

91 park aS philanthropy:bow-wowS rEdEvElopmEnt

at miyaShita koEn

yoShiharu tSukamoto

99 muSSElS in concrEtE: a Social architEctural practicE

ESEn gkE zdamar

105 participation and/or criticality? thoughtS on an

architEctural practicE for

urban changE kEnny cupErS and

markuS miESSEn

113 thE SluipwEg andthE hiStory of dEath

mark JarzombEk


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121 Extra room: what if wE livEd in a SociEty whErE our EvEry thought waS public?

gunnar grEEn and bErnhardhopfEngrtnEr

127 SculpturE fiEld : from thESymbolic to thE tEctonic

dan handEl

135 on radiation burn

StEvE kurtz

163 cairo di Sopra in gi :pErSpEctivE, photography,

and thE EvEryday

chriStian a. hEdrick

175 huSh

StEvEn bEckly and Jonathan d. katz

189 norcS in nEw york

intErboro partnErS

209 uncommon ground: aEthEr, body, and commonS

ziSSiS kotioniS

217 EdEnS, iSlandS, roomS

amrita mahindroo

225 thE princE:bJarkE ingElSS SocialconSpiracy

JuStin fowlEr

233 bEyond doing good:civil diSobEdiEncE aS dESignpEdagogy

hannah roSE mEndoza

237 aid, capital, and thEhumanitarian trap

JoSEph m. watSon

245 thE End of civilization

daniEl daou

255 toward a lakE ontario city

dEpartmEnt ofunuSual cErtaintiES

263 SociopathS

JimEnEz lai


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collEctivEform:

thE StatuSof public

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whEn thE courthouSE SquarEdiSappEarS, i dont SEE how thErES publica can SurvivE.

colin rowE

In 1955, Colin Rowe and John Hejdukventured out o Austin, Texas, traveling 30miles south to the town o Lockhart. There,they ound a orm o public architecturethat today seems touchingly nostalgic. InArchitectural Record two years later, theydescribed an unpretentious yet ormallydistinct courthouse, library, and prison alignedto create a civic realm that was markedly

i modestlyaspiring to be more urbane.Together, the public buildings, the courthousesquare, main street, and small town grido ered a diagrammatic coherence tothe town. 1

Something about the scale o theseturn-o -the-century buildings, miniaturizedversions o their precedents, was worthy oremark by Rowe and Hejduk. Collectionso similarly small arti acts created civicenclaves in courthouse-square towns acrossTexas. Here it is the law which assumesa public signi cance; and it is around thesecular image o the law, like architecturalillustrations o a political principle, that thesetowns revolve. In each case, the courthouseis both visual ocus and social guarantee;and in each square the reality o governmentmade ormally explicit provides the continuingassurance o order. 2 It was as much thehubris as the everydayness o small-town

America that struck Rowe, asserting a respublica, or public sphere, rom the vastlandscape o Texas by deploying a smatter-ing o little buildings over the street grid.

But where is the res publica outsideo Lockhart, in towns without courthouseor square? New Urbanists have tried toreplicate such ormal ashionings, but theresults are less public and more pretentious.The argument orwarded here regardspublic architecture as an unstable andthus ambiguous construct. Over the lasthal century, coincident with postwar urbandispersal, the public has been re ormulatedas varied communities. Counter to romantic

ideals and common wisdom, communitiesparticularly those located in suburbsundermine anything resembling a coherent,cosmopolitan expression o collective

identity. In contrast to these ragmented, localassociations, designers must now try to wringa orm o public architecture rom those lowlyin rastructures that transcend the localsewers, storm water channels, power grids,highways, and rail lines.

ExprESSing collEctivEidEntity

Typically, three criteria quali y a thingas public: use, access, and identity. Thedemocratic dimension o public space,embodied by its use and accessibility, isintrinsic to its de nition. These two criteriarefect important socio-political concernsthat have been relatively well studied. 3 Thequestion o identity is more complex, bearingdirectly on architecture and the thingnessembedded in the res publica. As Bruno Latournotes, even the thinkers most occupied byquestions about the public o er little help:Its not un air to say that political philosophyhas o ten been the victim o a strong object-avoidance tendency. From Hobbes to Rawls,

rom Rousseau to Habermas, ... their respublica does not seem to be loaded withtoo many things. 4 Any notion o publicarchitecture concerns things, or built

orms, which symbolize entities that can bedescribedsuch as the national identity

that capitol buildings exudebut also thosethat cannot. The public itsel is a phantasm,an ideological and historical imaginary that

1 Epigraph, Colin Rowe as interviewed by Richard Ingersollin 1989; republished in Colin Rowe and AlexanderCaragonne, As I Was Saying (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,1996), 3:326.

2 Rowe, As I Was Saying , 1:57.3 See, or example, Evan McKenzie, Privatopi a (New Haven:

Yale University Press, 1994); Setha Low, Behind the Gates (New York: Routledge, 2003); and Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris and Tridib Banerjee, Urban Design Downtown (Berkeley: University o Cali ornia Press, 1998).

4 Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, From Realpolitik toDingpolitik, or How to Make Things Public, in Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (Cambridge,MA: MIT Press, 2005), 16-17.

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shi ts imperceptibly, thus complicating anaesthetics o the collective, or how wepresent ourselves to ourselves. At stake orarchitects is their very history, since public

and institutional structures are the buildingtypes that advance both the discipline andindividual careers.

In terms o collective identity, Rowe andHejduk promoted a well-established politicalnotion o public space. With the courthouseand the prison as urban anchors, a socialand spatial construction o justice is mani est.The god ather o this perspective is JrgenHabermas, whose model o the public spheredepends upon political debate in the open, as

i situated in some hybrid between a Romanorum and a Parisian ca . In this view, the

crux o our collective sphere is the sociologyo di erence and when located in publicspace, we con ront others unlike ourselves.Only then do tolerance, collective identity,shared values, and social norms evolve.Marxists like Le ebvre describe a relatedright to the city, while Dutch urbanists Hajerand Reijndorp call or urban cultural riction. 5 But since when might we imagine that ace-to-

ace political debate is our collective medium?This theoretical view has outlasted ourspatial realities.

It also begs economic reality. As SarahWhiting argues, Lament-drenched, post-lapsarian narratives about a lost publicsphere ... invariably eed utile retrieve andrecover missions that share success/ ailurerates with other contemporary missions basedon myths. The public sphere in the US has,

rom its inception, been tied as much, i notmore, to business than to its presumptiveorigin in government or some variant opublic organisation. 6 The privatized publicsphere to which Whiting alludes was madeup o the kind o places that Fredric Jamesonand Mike Davis loved to hate in the 80s and90s. 7 Postmodern spaces o consumptionpreoccupied debates about the decline othe public sphere. Non-place arguments bypeople like Marc Aug, the broadly adoptedbut uninspired transit-oriented district, theinternational McDonaldization o places, andthe global competition among cities havegrown more widely recognized as dead-end

orms o public architecture. 8 These modelsthat sought to re ormulate both an idea o thepublic and the space it would inhabit havealready been reconstructed in virtual and

post-human terms that abandon physicalspace given the prevalence o social mediaand the imminent internet o things. There,material space is displaced by accessibility,speed, convenience, customizable in ormationsources, and new orms o intimacy. Thematerial place o common ground in turn hasrelocated to the networks o e ciency andutility: public in rastructure.

Physical in rastructure is a victim othe present economic conditions rom

Europe to North America, characterized byan impoverished public sector at ederal,provincial, and municipal levels. Constructionin the US is a complex indicator o economichealth but also o the nations physicalcondition. Thus, while recent increasesin construction spending are primarilyin rastructure-related, private constructionspending or non-residential constructionis down almost 40% below its peak in 2008,and residential construction is down 65%since its peak in 2006. 9 The most recentclass o state governors claimed austerityas their watchword. All this suggests thatthe oreseeable uture includes little publicarchitecture in the traditional, i idealized,sense. Today pure public spaces likeplazas and parks are likely to be historical

5 Jrgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere , trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA:

MIT Press, 1991); Henri Le ebvre, Writings on Cities , trans.Eleonore Ko man and Elizabeth Lebas (Ox ord: Blackwell,1996); Maartin Hajer and Arnold Reijndorp, In Search of New Public Domain (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2001).

6 Ra Segal and Els Verbakel with Stan Allen, Marcel Smets,Sarah Whiting, and Margaret Craw ord, Architecture andDispersal, in Cities o Dispersal, ed. Ra Segal and ElsVerbakel, Architectural Design 78, no. 1 (January/February2008): 102-107.

7 See, or example, the 1980s New Left Review debate aboutpostmodernism between Jameson and Davis using theBonaventure Hotel atrium as their case in point: FredricJameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic o LateCapitalism, New Left Review , no. 146 (July-August 1984):53-92; Mike Davis, Urban Renaissance and the Spirit oPostmodernism, New Left Review , no. 151 (May-June1985): 106-113.

8 Marc Aug, Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (London: Verso, 1995).

9 See http://www.census.gov/construction/c30/c30index.html.

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Scenario 1: Disneyrail , a networked system o ve park-development interventions along the High SpeedRail, including one at the Angel Stadium. Courtesy o cityLAB-UCLA.

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arti acts rom an earlier century. Similarly,the dignity o public buildings that were builtwith signi cant investment contrasts with theanonymous, leased space that governmento ces now occupy. The retronym publicpark is necessary since new open spaceis likely to be provided as an amenity withinprivate enclaves, whether at an open airshopping mall or new housing development.

mid-cEntury mutationS

In 1955 when Rowe and Hejduk worriedabout the disappearance o the courthouse

square, it was actually already gone, anarti act o an earlier era. In small towns acrossthe US, however, broadly scattered ruraland vaguely urban populations still containcommon ground. The space o collectivity isvisible wherever we nd what Albert Popecalls the city o orm, the gridiron urbanismo the nineteenth century that carved outblocks or squares, courthouses, and civiccenters. 10 Where the Texas Rangers concernwould have been warranted was in thecotemporaneous postwar explosion o thesuburbs. Outside Austin and other citiesacross the country, the new city o dispersalhad taken root.

Indeed, in the expanding postwarsuburbanity, the courthouse square hadalready disappeared. In the early suburbso the late 30s and 40s, collections oland, houses, and residents were built ongreen elds, with ew architectural illustrations

o collective aspiration. Instead, the individualhouse was made ormally explicit. In theseearly, postwar residential developments,Habermasian public space devolved intoa more local, less ormal community center,strip development, or neighborhood primaryschool. Consider two o the very rst modern

suburbs, one rom each coast: At bothLevittown on Long Island and Westchesterin Los Angeles, orms o community ore-shadowed the ragmentation o the public,however idealized. While the ocus was xedon the single- amily house, a new idea aboutthe collective was shaping up in peripheral view.

The early history o Levittown captureshow the public was changing in the suburbancontext. First, in Levittowns initial phasesbetween 1947 and 1951, the only privatespace was inside the house. Residents werenot allowed to ence their yards to permitthe Levitts oversight o deviant practicesthat they eared ormer slum and apartment

dwellers might bring. Among those ear ulbehaviors, nothing was more emblematic thandrying laundry. In act, although laundry blewintimately in the breeze during the week, assoon as the men came home rom work Fridayevening, women had to bring it inside. Playedup as the space o private li e, the Ur- ormo single- amily dwellings actually involved anotion o neighborly surveillance. Collectivelives depended upon each neighbor acting asa block warden to guard against misbehavior. 11

At Levittown, the public underwenta subtle shi t rom its cosmopolitanpredecessor to the neighbor, an intimatesocial and geographic construct. Ratherthan a hierarchical public institution situatedas a spatial hub, Levittown was organizedaround multiple community centers. InLevittowns and their equivalents across theUS, there would never again be a Lockhartcourthouse square or a San Francisco Union

Square. Instead, there would be a rec-center, a church or two, and an elementaryschool. These ormed the new collectivity,with local audiences that were ar morehomogeneous than the term public impliedwith its liberating anonymity coupled to civicresponsibility. At Levittown, the town breaksdown into communities; the architecture othe collective is rooted in local services; theshared landscape is surveilled, pushingeveryday li e to the interior. And just in case

the interior becomes too remote, the picturewindow allows the gaze rom and to the street.In this landscape, the terms public andprivate are no longer legitimate.

10 Albert Pope, From Form to Space, in Fast Forward Urbanism , ed. Dana Cu and Roger Sherman (NewYork: Princeton Architectural Press, 2011), 143-175.

11 Dana Cu , Enduring Proximity: The Figure o theNeighbor in Suburban America, Journal of Postmodern Culture 15, no. 2 (2005).

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This new postwar order, a collectiveidentity rather than Habermasian citizenship,evolved even urther on the other side othe nation. Slightly earlier than Levittown,a more commercial orm o suburb wastaking shape in Westchester at the handso Southern Cali ornias homebuilders. Noland was set aside because it was all realestate and thus all or sale. The dominanceo the automobile brought not only sprawl,as is widely understood, but also the

urther individuation o the landscape itsel :even movement through it, particularly incomparison to mass transit, was the purviewo the individual. The ormal patterns at

Levittown and Westchester di er enough tosee this mutation. At Westchester, boulevardsde ned groups o houses that turned theirbacks to the wider world, acing a labyrinth olocal streets. Public and private are replacedby regional and local, and the in rastructure ostreets becomes the physical material worthyo government unding and representative othe collective. 12

Westchester is an early exemplar oanother signi cant development in thecollective landscape: Lockharts courthouse-prison-square and Levittowns communitycenters are supplanted by a retail strip.Physically organized like everything else inWestchesterthat is, by principles o tra cmanagementthe shopping district sitsbetween the superblocks. Within this diagram,towns that had citizens and publics aretrans ormed into communities o neighborsand consumers. The undamental segregation

o the suburban landscape is etched intoan economic maxim: those who can shoptogether, live together. Because o the strongties between race and socioeconomic status,spatial segregation was mapped neatly byracial di erences. 13

By the mid- ties, in both Levittown andWestchester, the suburban landscape wascharacterized not by public and private, but bylocalities sharing grocery stores and schools.There was, however, a larger sphere o things

the collective shared: a utilitarian backdropo streets, sewers, power lines, phone lines,and storm water systems. Yet when thecommon ground is rendered as in rastructure,

communities are le t with an identity crisis:in rastructure is variously buried, invisible,at the margins, or ill-attended. The streetmay be the clearest exception. Where thehouse is the symbol o sel , the street is the

gure o the neighborhood. Occasionally,as with a cul-de-sac, the street can providesymbolic identity, but more o ten the road,street, and highway unction as mere serviceconnectors. In the 60s and 70s, this tacit andtroubling collective locus triggered studieslike Bernard Rudo skys Streets or People,Donald Appleyards Livable Streets, and JaneJacobss mani esto to reclaim the prewar citysstreets and sidewalks or the neighborhood.

But none o these authors took on the tougherand more prevalent condition; none cruisedthe streets o sprawl where cars dominated.

Stepping back rom Levittown andWestchester, three interrelated postwartrends have been alluded to that infuencea contemporary notion o the public withregard to architecture and urbanism. The rstis a change in subjectivity, captured by thecitizens trans ormation into the consumer;the second is a change in scale, by thecontraction o the civic into the local or thecity into the neighborhood; and the third isa change in orm, with the shi t rom a city o

orm into a city o space. 14 Each o these andtheir corollaries have pro ound e ects onpublic architecture.

citizEnS qua conSumErS

Economists, sociologists, and culturalcritics locate the onset o consumer societyat the end o WWII. When market demand isviewed as voting-by-pocketbook, commercialsuccess is a new measure o democracy. This

12 The Westchester research is documented in Dana Cu ,The Provisional City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000).

13 Early legislation against segregation was enacted in 1948when the Supreme Court ruled against racially restrictive

housing covenants, and more ollowed, but accordingto Massey and Denton, it was no more e ective. SeeDouglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 186.

14 Pope, From Form to Space, 143-175.

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Scenario 2: Train to Training , linking the largest network o US Olympic training acilities with the High Speed Rail.Courtesy o cityLAB-UCLA.

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public is no longer a collective citizenry but,instead, independent consumers aggregatedinto market sectors by their consumptionchoices. While it is o ten assumed that these

trends mark the rise o the individual, theymay also be viewed more atally, as the deatho the subject. 15

For architecture, the expanding consumerculture produced well-known changes inthe material environment, some o whichby now are clich: shopping malls arethe new collective arena; architecture iscomplicit in the production o desire; anddisinvestment killed the traditional publicsphere. In addition, when architecturesclients, occupants, and owners sel -identi y asconsumers, they seek speculative, short-termeconomic value over other objectives suchas programmatic t, symbolic expression,or durability. When economic logics oexpediency and e ciency prevail, individualprojects and even clients are less importantthan e ective management. 16

Under these circumstances, whatbecomes o the public building that de nedthe urban collective and drove the disciplineo architecture? O course, there are stillcity halls, parks, courthouses, libraries, andschools, and these continue to materiallyrender what we share. Today, these buildingsare portraits o e ciency and utility, dressedin an aesthetic that could be called thri t-washing, a thin coat o architecture thatexpresses a priority on economizing, whetheror not the building is actually cost-e ective. 17

Scaling back: civic to local

At the same time that citizens mutatedinto consumers, the conceptual scope othe public scaled down rom a civic idealto something much more geographicallylocal. As Levittown and Westchesterdemonstrate, when the city ragmentsinto clusters o neighborhoods, the publicbecomes a community. The latter is used orcollectivities o every stripe rom interestgroups (the animal rights community) anddemographics (the elderly community) tospatially coherent clusters (the Ocean Park

community). Since Toquevilles nineteenth-century characterization o Americancommunitarianism, the orce o the local hasbeen strong. But when social policy scholars

like Robert Putnam argue that communitybonds or generalized reciprocity haveweakened in recent decades, the di erencebetween civic and communitarian is elided. 18 The history o this distinction is apparent inthe history o public building.

The role o public architecture hasbeen debated since the origins o thearchitecture pro ession in America. A ormalnotion o public space reached its apex inthe US during the City Beauti ul movement,retreating to our present ideas about thedeath o the public sphere. In the sameyear as the Chicago Worlds Fair o 1893,the young American Institute o Architectssuccess ully argued or ederal regulationsconcerning public architecture, particularlythat commissions or the design o ederalbuildings be decided by competition.Since neither landscape architecture norurban planning existed as pro essions atthe time, architecture will ully shaped itsown conception o public space and publicdesign. From the mid-1800s to the early 1900s,men with no ormal training in architecturedesigned the public realm: Fredrick LawOlmsted and Calvert Vaux made urban open

15 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism and Consumer Society,in Postmodern Culture , ed. Hal Foster (London: Pluto Press,1985), 111-125.

16 One consequence is the creation o gigantic multi-serviceoperations like AECOM and Stantec. These mega- rmsgain experience by purchasing specialty rms indi erent locales, aggregating a resume that can t targetcommissions.

17 Thri t-washing is a play on white-washing and green-washing in which environmental concerns are symbolicand expressive rather than substantive. This is not anew phenomenon: when the rst public housing act in1937 authorized construction o subsidized apartments, itsteered ar rom any sign o luxury. Closets went withoutdoors, interior plumbing was le t exposed, and nisheswere minimal. Such details symbolized that public housingwas not meant to be permanent or even well-liked; it wouldsatis y as a orm o existenzminimum until the occupantscould pay their own rent elsewhere.

18 Generalized reciprocity re ers to the practice o helpingothers with no expectation o gain. See Robert D. Putnam,Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Shuster, 2001), 505.

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space; Haussmann in Paris or EbenezerHoward in England laid out streets and urbanplans. In 1897, AIA President George B. Postrecommended broadening the pro essionsagenda to ocus on public architectureand urban planning. 19 The design o thebroader cityits public space, streets, andbuildingswas to belong to the architect.With the Chicagos World Fair, architects likeDaniel Burnham sought to turn the city intoan aesthetic project. What distinguishes thisinitiative is its ocus on the whole rather thanthe ragment or component.

The courthouse, whether it is in Lockhartor Chicago, is a symbol o society at large

whereas the school is a symbol o theneighborhood. 20 The postwar surge in schoolconstruction coincides with what I suggest isthe postwar scaling back o collective identity,when the modi er neighborhood displacespublic, as in neighborhood park. Thus,as cities with citizens are ragmented intocommunities, public buildings shi t rom thosethat are typically ound downtown to thoselike schools ound in the suburbs.

from ordEr to ExpanSE

Lastly, changes in city orm parallel thedynamic notion o publicness. The ordero the nineteenth-century city, the gridiron,set a ormal pattern or urban activity anddevelopment. While the grid itsel is withouthierarchy, the built and open spaces that lledthe grid established a continuity o centers,

districts, relational distances, and acade

orientations. By contrast, postwar suburbangrowth evidenced no such order but was,instead, a horizontal expanse or speculation.In rastructural linkages between tractscomprised utilities, roadways, and commercialstrips, representing the minimal connectionsbetween them. While architectural notionso urban dispersal were ormalized, as inWrights Broadacre or Saarinens organicdecentralization, neither architects norplanners had enough power to redirectthe interests o the real estate industry. Inthe purest casesPhoenix, Houston, orLos Angelesthe postwar housing boomproduced an urban agglomeration that had

neither center nor edge. Leap- rogging acrossarmland and pushed up against the limits o

topography, the population fed the city andabandoned the res publica. The dispersedresidential landscape left no room for thevisible public.

Unsurprisingly, the increased dispersal ocities into their hinterlands parallels the rise oneighborhood associations. As cities grow toscales beyond geographic manageability, andareas within cities come to see themselves incompetition with other areas, the public in thepublic good shrinks to t. Not-in-my-backyardis a euphemism or a contemporary version ocivic interest, highly local and reactionary.

While a lingering ideal o the publiccan be discerned in architectural and urbanstudies writing, the changes above are parto a continuous evolution that was particularlymarked in the mid-twentieth century. Thepublic is a historically speci c construct that

can be monitored in the material culture o ourenvironmentour public architecture.

rES publica rEboot

thE trophy building iS So ovEr.

wElcomE to thE Era of dESignon a d iEt. 21

In June 2010, Newsweek proclaimedthat the exuberance o the previous erasarchitecture had met the recession andwas chastened. Compared to the private

19 Mary Woods, From Craft to Profession (Berkeley:University o Cali ornia Press, 1999), 43.

20 Putnam documents that the percentage o parents joiningthe PTA doubled between 1945 and 1960, ollowed byan equally steep decline therea ter. This is consistentwith a decline in active involvement in all sorts o localorganizations in the last decades o the 20th century. SeePutnam, Bowling Alone , 56-62. Similarly, over hal o allschools are now more than ty years old, suggesting thatthe majority o these schools were built in the 40s60s.See Thomas D. Snyder and Charlene M. Ho man, The Digest of Education Statistics (Washington DC: NationalCenter or Education Statistics, 2001).

21 Cathleen McGuigan, Starchitec ture: A Modest Proposal,Newsweek , June 10, 2010.

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Scenario 3: Park, Shop N Ride , solving parking requirements through the opportunistic use o neighboring vacant landand development opportunities in Orange. Courtesy o cityLAB-UCLA.

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sectors trophy building, public buildingshad been quieted ar sooner. In 2010, the

ederal government was unding courthouseand border station construction, but littleelse. Public unding o design is increasinglymiserly, demonstrated by a scaling back othe GSA design excellence program. Whileit is unquestionably important to continue toadvocate or the strong design o our publicbuildings, there is a revanchist ring to thatcause. With ew private and governmentalarchitectural opportunities available, whatpossibilities remain or a contemporary publicarchitecture in the material world and whereare the most interesting design opport-

unities located?The most provocative site to construct a

contemporary public and its architecture is allaround us if we remember that the res publica,beyond the dome and the square, contains thestreet. In rastructural space is the terrainvague where design may opportunisticallyreengage the collective. There are signs odesign attention to in rastructure, includingthe broad, enthusiastic response to cityLAB-UCLAs ideas competition, WPA 2.0: WorkingPublic Architecture (2009), and to the Van AlenInstitutes initiative, Li e at the Speed o Rail(2011). Both competitions asked architectsto bring ocus on that which had rested intheir peripheral vision: the networks o utilityand mobility. 22

With transit and in rastructure spendingthat exceeds other publicly unded e orts,architects and urbanists are clamoringto be involved. The unds authorized by

the American Recovery and ReinvestmentAct o 2009 included some $150 billion orin rastructure-related construction. The ARRAappropriation resembled Works ProgressAdministration spending at the end o theGreat Depression, with one primary caveat:while both unding programs expresslyprioritized jobs, WPA projects were expectedto contribute to the ederal governmentsbuilt legacy. Designers and communities willneed to insist that ARRA spending bring an

aesthetic other than thri t i projects rom theBay Bridge in Cali ornia to the Denali NationalPark acilities in Alaska are to express sharedvalues other than economy.

The potential to create new identitiesor localities is visible in New York, where

bike lanes as well as impromptu and morepermanent seating areas have been wrung

rom the city streets. Named New York CitysTransportation Commissioner in 2007, JanetteSadik-Khan stated We are looking at ourstreets di erently, and treating them as thevaluable public spaces that they are. With6,000 miles o streets, thats a lot o real estateto work with. 23 Projects like these that re-imagine service networks as amenities arenot without controversy. To be implemented,they require tactics that vary rom thosecommon to architecture: in rastructure sites

have inde nite boundaries; the time rameis mercurial; master plans or end-states areinadequate; hybrid programs can be invented.Perhaps most importantly, the in rastructuralintervention is conceived as a catalyst or

urther economic and urban development. Thedesigner needs to think through the possiblescenarios, with contingencies in mind.

One o the best test sites or this wayo working will be the proposed nationalhigh speed rail network, the largest publicin rastructure investment since the InterstateHighway system. Although station designis the standard architectural componento this new in rastructure, our research atcityLAB-UCLA suggests that neither stationdesign nor station-area design will produceurban consequences. The build it and theywill come model has not worked alongother rail lines. 24 Based on the experience in

22 The concept o terrain vague is discussed in Ignasi deSol-Morales, Terrain Vague, in Anyplace , ed. CynthiaC. Davidson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 118-123.The WPA 2.0 competition is discussed in Dana Cu ,WPA 2.0: Working Public Architecture, Harvard Design Magazine , no. 33 (Fall/Winter 2010): 36-44. See http://www.vanalen.org/lasr/ or more in ormation on the Van AlenInstitute initiative.

23 Sarah Goodyear, Taming the Mean Streets, Grist ,December 21, 2010, http://www.grist.org/article/2010-12-21-Taming-the-mean-streets-o -new-york-a-talk-with-nyc-dot.

24 For example, twenty years a ter the construction o BARTin northern Cali ornia, the expected development aroundstations has not occurred. See Robert Cervero, RailTransit and Joint Development: Land Market Impacts inWashington, D.C. and Atlanta, Journal of the American Planning Association 60, no. 1 (1993): 83-90.

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other countries with high speed rail, we areexploring scenario planning that identi eslocal potential capable o tipping the scaleso urban design toward particular solutions.

In the examples shown here FIGS. 1, 2, and 3 , theAnaheim station area is imagined accordingto three unique catalysts: the need or parking,the expansion o the citys sports acilities,and a new transit connection between therail station and Disneyland. The design ostaged interventions oreshadows subsequentcomponents, taking into consideration economic, programmatic, and policy drivers. Eachscenario leverages a res publica rom twosources: the initial public investment in in ra-

structure, and the subsequent growth it sparks.

The potential o a systemic interventionlike high speed rail will only be realized iarchitects and urban designers work in moreopportunistic and strategic ways. This holds

whenever in rastructure is the starting pointo public architecture. The zones o stormwater, power, and circulation have resisteddesign attention, but as experiments takeplace in cities across the country, it growseasier to understand how this orm o respublica can take shape. A ter all, there was aMain Street between the courthouse and theprison in Lockhart. Now that the in rastructuralinterstices have captured our concentrated

ocus, we need to demonstrate that we can

make something o them.

***Dana Cu is Pro essor o Architecture, Urban Design andUrban Planning at UCLA where she is also director o cityLAB,an urban design and research think tank. Her work ocuseson a ordable housing, modernism, suburban studies, thepolitics o place, and the spatial implications o new computertechnologies. Cu s research on postwar urbanism was

published in a book titled The Provisional City (MIT Press,2000), and she recently edited Fast Forward Urbanism withRoger Sherman (Princeton Architectural Press, 2011). Since

ounding cityLAB in 2006, she has concentrated her e ortsaround issues o the emerging metropolis.

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THRESHOLDS 40SOCIO

EditorJonathan Crisman

Designer

Donnie Luu

Assistant EditorsAna Mara LenJennifer ChuongAntonio FurgiueleIrina Chernyakova

Advisory BoardMark Jarzombek, ChairStanford AndersonDennis AdamsMartin BressaniJean-Louis CohenCharles CorreaArindam DuttaDiane GhirardoEllen Dunham-JonesRobert HaywoodHassan-Uddin KhanRodolphe el-KhouryLeo MarxMary McLeod

Ikem OkoyeVikram PrakashKazys VarnelisCherie WendelkenGwendolyn WrightJ. Meejin Yoon

PatronsJames AckermanImran AhmedMark and Elaine Beck

Tom BeischerYung Ho ChangRobert F. DrumGail FenskeLiminal Projects, Inc.Rod Freebairn-SmithNancy StieberRobert A. GonzalesJorge Otero-PailosAnnie PedretVikram PrakashJoseph M. SiryRichard Skendzel

Special ThanksTo my family,Mark Jarzombek, Sarah Hirschman,Adam Johnson,Donnie Luu,Nader Tehrani,Adle Santos,Rebecca Chamberlain,Jack Valleli,Anne Deveau,Kate Brearley,Deborah Puleo,Michael Ames,and all of the authors, theeditorial team, the advisoryboard, and the patrons.This issue would not havebeen possible without you.

Opposite: Intergalactic Sculpture , 1994.Copyright Ezra Orion.


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5 SOCIO-INDEMNITY AND OTHER MOTIVES JONATHAN CRISMAN

11 CONJURING UTOPIAS GHOST REINHOLD MARTIN

21 LE CORBUSIER, THE BRISE-SOLEIL, AND THE SOCIO-CLIMATIC PROJECT DANIEL A. BARBER

33 MOVE ALONG!THERE IS NOTHING TO SEE

RANIA GHOSN

39 FLOWS SOCIO-SPATIAL FORMATION NANA LAST47 COLLECTIVE EQUIPMENTS OF POWER

SIMONE BROTT55 COLLECTIVE FORM

DANA CUFF67 TUKTOYAKTUK

PAMELA RITCHOT75 BOUNDARY LINE INFRASTRUCTURE

RONALD RAEL83 DISSOLVING THE GREY PERIPHERY

NEERAJ BHATIA AND ALEXANDER DHOOGHE

91 PARK AS PHILANTHROPY YOSHIHARU TSUKAMOTO

99 MUSSELS IN CONCRETE ESEN GKE ZDAMAR

105 PARTICIPATION AND/OR CRITICALITY? KENNY CUPERS AND

MARKUS MIESSEN113 THESLUIPWEG AND THE

HISTORY OF DEATH MARK JARZOMBEK

121 EXTRA ROOM GUNNAR GREEN AND

BERNHARD HOPFENGRTNER

127 SCULPTURE FIELD DAN HANDEL

135 ON RADIATION BURN STEVE KURTZ

163 CAIRODI SOPRA IN GI CHRISTIAN A. HEDRICK

175 HUSH STEVEN BECKLY AND

JONATHAN D. KATZ189 NORCS IN NEW YORK

INTERBORO PARTNERS209 UNCOMMON GROUND

ZISSIS KOTIONIS217 EDENS, ISLANDS, ROOMS

AMRITA MAHINDROO225 THE PRINCE

JUSTIN FOWLER 233 BEYOND DOING GOOD

HANNAH ROSE MENDOZA 237 AID, CAPITAL, AND THE

HUMANITARIAN TRAP JOSEPH M. WATSON

245 THE END OF CIVILIZATION DANIEL DAOU

255 TOWARD A LAKE ONTARIO CITY DEPARTMENT OF

UNUSUAL CERTAINTIES263 SOCIOPATHS

JIMENEZ LAI

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