M1 Excess Culture: an integrated framework of systems (Introduction)

The thesis seeks to investigate waste as a byproduct of consumerism and how it affects the cultural and economic growth of a society. In fact, if you dissect consumerism, one will find that it is a correlation of several systems that are interconnected, where one is dependant on the other—oil, environment, climate change, cultural impacts, obsolescence, morale, politics, materiality, the urban fabric, and city formations. Where the principles of thermodynamic equilibrium of these systems come to play in an integrated ecosystem that is constantly in flux and at the same time, in pursuit of balance in the natural order. It becomes important too look at this thesis in multiple parallels and as parallels that converge into a whole infrastructure of networked matrices. Keller Easterling considers the idea of what constitutes infrastructure and to think beyond the traditional infrastructure of transportation, communication, and utilities, into a network that includes collective standards of shared mechanisms in order to create our own understanding of space1. Though the topics proposed can be broken down into canonical sources, the importance of each subject is not weighted individually but as a collective, and imparts an approach on how architecture should design in the near future. To change our notion of waste and shift our values from something that is rejected into something that is accepted.

Waste is a scalar thing and also has no scale—it is everywhere, from a candy wrapper to building debris and large mountainous landfills. The term waste designates the elimination of a substance that no one claims or wants ownership of and is a devalued substance at the end of its life cycle, however, there is also no growth biologically and economically without the production and discarding of waste materials. Kevin Lynch, planner and philosopher, claim that it is a process that happens naturally and cannot be controlled, ergo we must accept it and find innovative solutions. He saw that we were all headed in a self-destructive direction that has implications for virtually every profession and that we should promote his philosophy on “positive wasting” and acknowledge this as valuable and necessary in the lives of people, things, and places2.

These solutions, whether through art, architecture, or by common practice, should seek to make waste a valued substance as it will be an abundant source for a future with scarce and depleting natural resources. We should also be mindful that waste as a byproduct has scalar implications on the environmental, social, and political impacts on society. As this topic is a growing problem, only recently have we been able to acknowledge this theme through art and architectural practice and education, by some notable urbanists, artists, and theorists—Kevin Lynch, Michell Joachim, Edward Burtynsky, Mira Engler, Alan Berger—are just some of many contributors to this growing discourse.

The fascination stems from waste being a diverse material that can take on many forms, as much of the waste we produce can be broken down into elements that are similar to the materiality that currently exists in the field of architecture. Since its origins, architecture has used the “waste” of agriculture as a primary material. These inedible parts—wood, hay, reed, bamboo—are often the primary ingredients that make up a building3. So why is it not possible to utilize synthetic man-made waste, given that modern architectural practices have been utilizing synthetic materials in construction since the industrial revolution? Futurist, Alvin Toffler spoke about the waves in historical milestones of civilization. Where the first wave is that of agriculture and the second, thousands of years later, the industrial revolution, and the third wave is the rise of a knowledge based economy in which we are currently in4. The thesis will overlap between the acceleration of the second and third wave intermittently as they are dependant upon each other. All of which stemmed from the industrial age of mass production, consumption, distribution, and mass society that was made possible through the production of cheap energies—coal, natural gas, and oil as the most significant. It is this wave that inspired the disposition of writers such as Orwell and Huxley on their political and dystopic writings.

It is only appropriate that this thesis explores the option of a narrative in parallel with architectural research. The purpose is to distribute a tone of voice that would carry on throughout the thesis to convey a sense of cynicism, black humour, and dystopia, while adopting the styles of Rem Koolhaas, George Orwell, James Howard Kuntsler, as well as my own. Narratives allow for play and a sense of urgency, a strategy that enables all types of people and generations to act empathetically. In Animal Farm, Orwell experimented with this method to tell his story that was written in the type of a fable and follows the traditional pattern of telling a moral tale with the personification of animals. The premise of the thesis’s narrative will follow loosely Orwell’s Nineteen-Eigthy Four from Room 101 where Winston’s worse fear is induced. It will then follow his journey as he experiences the thesis from his personal point of view.

The narrative would set up a scenario for the project that I would like to design. The setting is year 2050, oil has depleted to be almost nonexistent, to the extent that vehicular transportation and production has halted and as a result suburban culture dissipated as those who survived from disease and famine move towards the city in search for survival. Manhattan, a city that never slept was consumed by idleness as nothing came in or out of the city. Landfills become a natural part of the landscape, weaving itself into the different layers of the urban fabric. The sorting of rubble and rubbish become a natural thing as people salvage and ransack materials for survival. Consumed with boredom and the inherent habit of a “working” lifestyle from the past, naturally, a system of sorting, recycling, putting together of “stuff”, artworks, sculptures, and projects—begin to form a new union of jobs and a sense of community. Though intentions may vary, whether to create a sense of purpose, a goal, or to better society at a time of extremity. It is believed that the underlying purpose is to rescue themselves from futureshock, a term invented by Toffler to describe peoples’ reaction to the premature arrival of the future that often results in signs of deteriorated decision making capabilities or disorientation when change comes too quickly to absorb.

The plan is to consider the different types of waste that will be projected onto the city at a time when there will be little movement. A series of projects will investigate the reutilization of waste first as a building material, and second the implementation of waste that will define the city and its new built environment. Projects like a continuous flood barrier, housing, and waste spaces (oppose to green spaces), will closely follow themes of landscape urbanism to define a place’s use and to create adaptable “systems” instead of a rigid and systematic way of organizing space. Where we can begin to see an integrated framework of systems forming a ubiquitous landscape of an environment rich in forums, trading spaces, parks, and places of enlightenment.

Notes:
1. Keller Easterling. “Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways, and Houses in America.” Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999
2. Kevin Lynch. "Wasting Away". Sierra Club Books: San Francisco, 1990
3. Yona Friedman, “Du Déchet fait art,” L'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui Sept./Oct. 2007: 81
4. Ted Turner, “Executive Interview with Alvin Toffler,” AMEinfo, 22 Aug. 2004, 5 Dec. 2009

M1 Project Intervention

Imagine Manhattan in the year 2050 when oil production slows to be almost nonexistent, leaving this oil dependant city torn to hardship and ruin for generations thereafter. Nothing comes and nothing leaves Manhattan. The population is dwindling as disease and famine has swept the city, taking the weak, old, and the unborn with it. Those who remain are forced to use existing resources for survival. What was once Wall Street and 5th avenue boutiques are forced to become obsolete, they remain only recognizable as ruins after the citizens ransacked and demolished the buildings for materials—glass, copper wire, tubes, plastics, paper—anything they can use in order to survive.

The rising sea levels change the waterfront to be almost unrecognizable. Citizen led efforts are being made to alleviate stress on an already burdened civilization before it may be too late. The earth has proven itself to be less resilient than predicted, and it is furious, its fury lies in our ability to take advantage of its selflessness while stealing every piece of armour it has created over the course of its existence, but the earth has also proven to be merciless in its vengeance. As news and newspapers do not come frequently as they used to, it has become almost impossible to predict the weather and its patterns, rendering the city vulnerable and open to the violent attacks of climate change.

The sorting of rubble and rubbish almost becomes a natural thing, heaps of waste produced by the city has nowhere to go. The problem cannot be hidden any longer as waste is no longer being moved to disposal sites, it will become a visible crisis that needs resolution. It will create thousands of jobs and a union of positive community relationships at a time of urgency and extremity. Waste will define the city and its built environment with undulating layers forming a ubiquitous landscape.

In my project I will look at Manhattan Island and its conditions for potential flooding, while implementing a permanent flood barrier solution by reutilizing waste as the building material. I would like to concentrate on 4 architectural and topographical conditions the island presents: the Meatpacking District, Battery Park, the South Street Viaduct, and East Harlem—as potential locations to implement a continuous flood barrier.

The plan is to consider the type of waste that will be projected onto the city at a time when there will be little or no movement within cities. Since vehicles will no longer be seen as a primary mode of transport, it will be seen as a resourceful readily available form of “trash” that people can salvage parts from in order to create the structural system of the barrier. Presently in Manhattan, approximately 48% of the population own vehicles, MTA has approximately 5,900 buses that run intercity, 13,087 taxis, and around 40,000 for hire vehicles—this amounts to approximately 3,500,000 tires(12). Tires are among the largest and most problematic sources of waste as approximately one tire is discarded per person per year. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reports 290 million scrap tires were generated in 2003(13). With landfills minimizing their acceptance of whole tires and the health and environmental risks of stockpiling tires, we must make new uses for them. These tires can then be filled with concrete or stones to build the perimeter of the landfill and then interconnected by cementing between the tires or by petrifying the materials in place by protocell technology. The cars are then filled with carefully selected plastics and other non-toxic materials with long material life or materials that would not decompose under water, but instead be preserved under those conditions. The vehicle would then be put in a hydraulic crusher that encapsulates all its waste and then spits out a bale that can then be used as a building block for infill.

This would be done in layers, with each layer separated by demolition wastes and debris of crushed concrete, bricks, stones, and sands—as filler between gaps. At the top of the landfill above the water table, is another strata of waste, these are items that require remediation. The waste is then separated into different cells to be compacted and then covered with soil or thick plastics (ie. tarp)—whatever is available. Harvesting methane from the waste will be done in order to create renewable energy for the city, utilizing bioreactors to speed up the breakdown of garbage and produce more methane in the process. The leachates are drained and collected into a pond or constructed wetland for safe remediation of wastewater effluents. This is ideal because it is inexpensive to construct and operate, and also requires a low level of maintenance because of its synergistic relationship with the environment.

The land is then shaped to create the barriers, at the same time programmatic relief for its citizens. Parks, new living spaces, meeting places, trading markets, educational spaces—a forum built by its people from abandoned shipping containers, cars, pop bottles, plastics, carpets, and debris, woven together by whatever’s left of the city. What was seen as a dismissed unwanted inconvenience in our lives, waste, will prove to be a coveted resource in changing our built environment, urban fabric, and also in bringing together communities and support during future turmoil.


Notes:
12. “2005 Annual Report,” Metropolitan Transportation Authority, 1 May 2006, 10 Nov 2009,

13. “Management of Scrap Tires”, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. 3 Jan 2007, 29 Nov 2009,

Designing America's Waste Landscape--Mira Engler

Engler, Mira. “Designing America’s Waste Landscape”. London: John Hopkins University Press, 2004

The history of garbage in the past two centuries has been the history of urbanism: the rise of cities necessitated efficient collection of trash and excreta. Our modern-day equivalents are the aluminum can foragers, who open bags left out on trash night and search for redeemables. Their fortunes rose as those of the field scavengers fell. Prior to the 1970s, when cities and states first put a price on tossing them, cans were just trash among more trash, going to landfills. Forty years earlier, cans hadn’t yet been invented, and a few years before that, in the early 20th century, garbage itself was virtually nonexistent in big American cities.

Mira Engler’s Designing America’s Waste Landscapes covers the whole dirty history of excrement, offal, leavings, and scraps as they eventually evolved into sewage, compost, recyclables, and toxic sludge. Designing America’s Waste Landscapes is not a social history of how households and municipalities came to produce tons and tons of this stuff daily, instead, it brings together in one place many far-flung conversations about trash in disciplines as varied as art history, architecture, engineering, anthropology, and political science, with references to thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Walter Benjamin. She focuses on the idea of trash transparency—that we should look our waste straight in the gut, so to speak, and not shy away from the noxious smells, industrial apparatus, or toxic byproducts that are the results of being consumers.

Engler’s overarching concern is the application of this principle to the reclamation of polluted landscapes and the planning of future waste disposal sites and looks to the work of a group of artists and landscape architects who have argued that, instead of recoiling from the waste we produce, we should integrate it into our everyday landscape. Many of the artistic projects Engler discusses have provoked policy makers and local bureaucrats to come up with more interesting solutions for our waste landscapes. Some works, such as Mel Chin’s experiment-as-conceptual-art piece Revival Field, have even advanced scientific understanding of what’s possible in remediating and recovering wasted landscapes. As a landscape architect who has submitted her own projects for re-envisioned dumps and former industrial sites, Engler is heavily invested in the idea that artists can make a measurable difference and to produce work that embraces waste, rather than hides it from public knowledge. Her ideal of trash transparency emphasizes that nature and culture are interdependent and that remediated landscapes should incorporate a record of human effects.


For Brief By Carly Berwick see:
http://americancity.org/magazine/article/review-mira-engler-baltimore/

Mat Urbanism

Ospedale SS Giovanni e Paolo, Le Corbusier's Venice Hospital Project, plan of third floor (second scheme) 1964

http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/research/publications/case/book_venice_excerpt.htm

EXCERPT

From the Introduction, by Hashim Sarkis

Today mats are everywhere. We call them fields, grounds, carpets, matrices. Whether seen as counterpoint to the preoccupation with sculptural form or as what happens to architecture when it has to cover really large areas, no building type, it could be stated without exaggeration, captures the predicaments but also the imagination of contemporary architecture more fully. The mat answers the recurring calls for indeterminacy in size and shape, flexibility in use, and mixture in program. It expresses architecture's increasing encroachment on both city and landscape and as the open exchange between structure (building) and infrastructure (context) that this encroachment professes. In face of these challenges, and in every other design published in every other magazine, the mat claims to address a wide range of problems preoccupying contemporary architecture.

And yet mat building cannot be associated with a specific formal or stylistic tendency in contemporary architecture. In the words of the late English architect Alison Smithson, it is "still developing." Yet what she justified in the 1970s as a natural condition of the "first primitive state" of mats has become a defining feature. Mats are by definition still developing. Today we apply to this phenomenon attributes as diverse as Kazuyo Sejima's ethereality and Rafael Moneo's compactness. The mat is the image of the promised fluidity of the Foreign Office Architects' Yokohama Terminal. It also occupies the centerfold in Office of Metropolitan Architecture's books on the state of architecture today. To contain all these ideas in one building type would be to miss out on the broad range of real differences between these architects' positions vis-à-vis such fundamental issues as context, the relationship between form and program, and architectural language. The mat category, however, seems to be broad enough to allow for this wide range, even for contradiction. What further binds these contemporary architectures together is their conscious return to mat building as a historical possibility that was never fully explored.

The present fascination has no doubt been triggered by the changes in development culture, particularly by the ever-growing scale of institutions (such as hospitals and schools) and commercial facilities (such as airports and malls). Increasingly developers are also seeking architects to help give form to new programs that have yet to settle on a distinctive type: airport/park/shopping mall or housing/retail/institution. In response, perhaps evasively, architects are seeking ways in which a building could act as a flexible framework rather than a rigid container to these shapeless functions. Avoiding what Stan Allen here refers to as "overall geometric form," today's architects proceed to define buildings that could "give space to the active unfolding of urban life without abrogating the architect's responsibility to provide some form of order." They turn back toward the mat. Allen promptly cautions that contemporary architecture needs to enlarge the scope of mat to include urbanism and landscape. Renaming the phenomenon "mat urbanism," he outlines the mat agenda of today as opening to urbanism and its large scale and multispeed movement and to landscape and its surface and temporal qualities. Mat buildings today aim for a much more aggressive exchange between structure and infrastructure than what was intended in the 1960s. This exchange was assumed to be definitional of the mat, but it did not challenge the permanence and autonomy of infrastructure in the way that contemporary architects are trying to do.

http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:q6HXfBpuZfMJ:www.openspace.eca.ac.uk/conference/proceedings/PDF/Eren.pdf+mat+urbanism&hl=en&gl=ca&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESgy98_-I0--FXzXLzD7tqVapZYLFwJOc1Niu4Y_8zbADIyuvQOvc4pvlSXA0qjrWULcP-dhF2KZGRhDqd8H-ykHk8BCUuEBDFcT4859BqxifuLoaNJ4DYscryKDj8JEya-qALSy&sig=AHIEtbTXNd6Ntu4SrL_ciDN8oH8cMSjdiQ

Smithson (2001: 91) described the mat process and defined mat-building as follows: “Mat- building can be said to epitomize the anonymous collective; where the functions come to enrich the fabric and the individual gains new freedoms of action through a new shuffled order, based on interconnection, close knit patterns of association and possibilities for growth, diminution and change.”

The emerging mat-building approach was evoked also in Le Corbusier’s unbuilt Venice Hospital project in 1964. With Berlin Free University in Berlin (1963-74), Candilis-Josic-Woods and Manfred Schieldhelm attempted to show the environmental responsiveness of mat-building in a university context. The guiding ideas of these two buildings reappear in today’s structural and infrastructural organizations. The contemporary significance of mat-building is explained by Hashim Sarkis (2001: 13)

Mat-building’s shallow but dense section activated by ramps and double- height voids unlike the high-rise buildings, mat-building’s low-rise character takes the advantage of an equally accessible circulation network. Ramps in mat-building are integrated with design. The use of mat-building gives also the possibility of flexible design features so that the buildings and urban fabrics can be structured in an inclusive way which can provide different choices of access for its users. It can organize activities in one or two storeys’ height so that it minimizes vertical movements and provides flexible movement patterns, flexible circulation networks and choices of access. Moreover, a simple designed circulation between the ramps can eliminate the confusion within the structure and enable easy use of the spaces. Mat-building can offer the possibility of using the spaces with low physical effort and travelling comfortably with the help of the ramps.

A delicate interplay of repetition and variation:
Mat-buildings take also the advantage of repetitive systems, which can allow spatial structures to expand and change to respond to the changing needs of a variety of users. An environment designed with the variation and repetition characteristics of mat-building allows more users to participate in and experience that environment. For Susan Goltsman (2001: 19.2), “social diversity is very much linked to physical diversity”. If the repetitive design elements are usable and safe for everyone and can be designed also in variation, then it can be stated that with the inclusive design approach in mat-buildings, hazards and errors are minimized

Mat-building can define an organized field where diverse functions of urban life are unified and their internal relationships become more important than the overall structure.

[Landscape Urbanism is a theory of urbanism arguing that landscape, rather than architecture, is more capable of organizing the city and enhancing the urban experience. Landscape Urbanism has emerged as a theory in the last ten years and is far from being a coherent doctrine. Charles Waldheim, James Corner, and Mohsen Mostafavi are among the instructors, practitioners, and theorists who have been most responsible for articulating the terms of landscape urbanism. Interestingly, an early and influential landscape urbanism project, Paris's Parc de la Villette, has been influential for both its actual built environment, designed by architect Bernard Tschumi, as well as the runner-up's (unbuilt) design, by Rem Koolhaas. Still, most of the important projects related to this theory have yet to be built, so design competitions have been an influential stage for the development of the theory.]