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 Manifesto

In addition to the oil crisis, mass quantities of oil are required for the production of things—plastics, clothes, automobiles, and modern technologies such as, computers, cell phones, electronics, and devices. We have become a consumer nation, where these “necessities” define our identity and runs our lives. We become dependant on these items where most of these things become what we need instead of what we want. It fills our closets and our garages and gauge success based on what we own and its status it provides in our lives and our communities. These things cloud our vocation as inhabitants of the earth, where instead of embracing natural environments we cover it with masses of debris and waste. Though we thought these commodities would enhance our lifestyle and existence, the majority is still ignorant that consumerism destroys our balance with nature and actually accelerates ruin in peoples’ lives.

This is due to the fact that our waste and byproducts are hidden, transported, swept under the rug and away from the public eye. However the problem is not so much ours as it is a problem with the Government. The Government of the United States orchestrated consumerism after World War II to revitalize the economy after the war(8). The productive economy demands that consumerism should be a way of life, that we take the act of buying, using, throwing out—a ritual of life that seeks ego satisfaction in consumption where things could be discarded and replaced. The market design things, cars, buildings, products that will last for a finite amount of time, things are not built to last as they used to so that consumers would be forced to upgrade and replace. It is an endless cycle of disposing, buying, working off debt only to dispose and buy again. Business and capitalism has no pity for the environment, it is there to make profit, to take from us for their own benefit.

It is human egoism that drives our will to consume and the systems that encourages it, and we are quick to adopt this system. The market puts out loads of disposable products declaring that it will make our lives easier and more convenient. North America is only 5% of the world’s population, yet we produce 30% of the world’s waste(9). We must ask ourselves, “do we really need these things?” and “can we live with what we have?” Perhaps our culture today is filled with the notion that happiness can be bought, that you could put a price tag on anything as long as you have the cash or resource and can be amongst the privileged and fortunate. There needs to be an end to this mentality that has swept our nation, we have become conditioned to expect the impossible that we have made possible through oil. To think that produce from Asia, South America are just around the corner, tastes of India and Egyptian cottons at our local market, home theatre systems and furniture from one of many big box companies—it is easy to get what you want whenever you want. What happens when these items are no longer readily available? Is our nation prepared for that?

For everything we produce there is at least an equal amount produced in trash. Waste is a scalar thing and also has no scale—it is everywhere, from a candy wrapper to large mountainous landfills. The term waste designates the elimination of substance that no one claims or wants ownership of and is a devalued substance at the end of its life cycle. Biological substances and cells produce waste, we produce waste, machines and products produce waste—there is no growth biologically and economically without discarding the unwanted. We cannot control it, therefore we must accept it and find innovative solutions to make waste a valued substance, since it is the only abundant source of the future.

This topic is a growing problem, yet majority of us are in denial. It is not so much as it being a massive object we should take care of, we should think about waste and its huge environmental impacts on our societies today. Most large de-industrialized sites are located within proximity of local water sources; naturally, this is also where majority of the people congregate. Water scarcity is already a problem, as only 3% of the earth’s water is potable and that includes contaminated waters by industries, not to mention toxicity levels that seep into our water and soil we grow our food in. We can also expect increasing amounts of water related diseases in the near future.

We have the resources now to move trash and hide problems like these, but the future does not look bright as oil depletion, water scarcity, global warming, and resource scarcity correlate simultaneously into an unforgiving future. By putting waste material to good use allows dual purposes, it simultaneously reduces the burden on natural resources and second, reduces the quantity of waste to be eliminated. We must also curve the two associated fatalities that economic growth and increase in garbage are derivatives of each other and seek to reevaluate waste as a secondary resource. Life cycle analysis tools consider the overall composition of a material from inception to usage and the environmental impacts that go along with it, from “cradle to grave”. So in construction, the stages of extraction, preparation, processing, manufacturing, shipping, then construction, maintenance, repair, and lastly demolition; new policies are attempting to shift from discarding the material to creating a “grave to cradle” scenario, where reutilization and recycling becomes an important backbone for our future economy(10).

There are of course both pros and cons with reutilizing and recycling, first, that the energy initially invested in creating the product will be more profitable with reuse, however there may be environmental implications with some materials that are classified as toxic non reusable materials. We as architects must take responsibility primarily with the safe remediation of toxic material before implementing the rehabilitation and resurrection of inanimate materials and objects. There is an immense variety of material resources in existence beyond the traditional, everything points to the direction of maximizing the value of waste. The definition between reutilization and recycling is often mistaken—recycling maximizes the value of the constitutive material, and reutilization preserves the initial form. For my thesis, I would like to focus more heavily on the reutilization of discarded objects.

In favour of reduction, reutilization lowers costs by avoiding extraction of natural aggregates and other primary elements, as well as the costs of transporting and unloading natural aggregates and waste. It also allows history to procure in an object by lessening the transformable stages in the material’s life, opposite to recycling, and at the same time maximizing its value in terms of revenue and most importantly to the environment—as there are a lot of chemical processes involved with recycling. In some ways, retaining its original form allows us to view it as an artwork woven into the urban fabric, where ideally, these objects will eventually become the norm and standard of the built environment. The problem however, lies in the psychology that—waste as a matter is useful—and people do not want to accept this. I want to shift the mentality from things that our society devalue into something of value, where people will begin to reclaim ownership of the discarded.

The reutilization of garbage in art has been a reoccurring theme for many years, since 1913 when Marcel Duchamp created his first ready-made from a bicycle wheel and called it art. He wanted to instill the idea that garbage could be art and sought to blur the fine line between art and garbage. Though the fine line is not yet evident in the field of architecture, recent attempts by various architects has sought to redefine our profession as the be-all and end-all of the future—with the sustainability of our environment in mind. While the utilization of waste in art is becoming the norm, it is not so foreign in 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 building(11). So instead of utilizing organic waste, is it possible to adapt it with the use of synthetic or man-made waste?

Architects are amongst the privileged when it comes to the ability to visualize a project as a whole entity and to bring it into materialization much more efficiently than any other profession. It is from our creative free flowing ideas and knowledge of the built environment and its culture that allows us to see the emerging problems as an integrated framework of systems. We also have the knowledge for sustainable construction and the use of materials in efforts to conserve resources. It should be our objective to open up the markets for secondary resource exploitations, where we advocate the vast potential for innovations in waste and its construction benefits.

Notes:
8. Annie Leonard, “The Untold Story of Consumerism,” Kabbalah Today. Apr./May 2006, 29 Oct. 2009,

9. Annie Leonard, “The Untold Story of Consumerism,” Kabbalah Today. Apr./May 2006, 29 Oct. 2009,

10. Gérard Bertonlini, “Gestion des Déchets: My Poubelle is rich,” L'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui Sept./Oct. 2007: 53

11. Yona Friedman, “Du Déchet fait art,” L'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui Sept./Oct. 2007: 81

Robert Bean on Obsolescence and the Culture of Human Invention

http://www.robertbean.ca/
http://www.obsolescence.ca/bean.php


The research and creation associated with Obsolescence and the Culture of Human Invention is informed by the fact that material obsolescence in industrial culture is also the product of research methodologies. From as early as 1932, manufacturers from industrial economies have been actively researching and implementing the failure of design and technology into our lived experience. By scientifically quantifying and perfecting obsolescence in products, the continuous and accelerating consumption of manufactured products has been assured. The consequences of this development are considerable. Obsolescence, whether material or spiritual, becomes one of the most relevant developments of our time. The research associated with poetic and artistic creation may not share the methodologies of research formed by instrumental objectives. Culture, myth and metaphor are familiar to the process of creative and poetic research. How will artistic creation and research based in new technologies provide a renewed insight into the predicaments of obsolete things and experiences and how can this shape and influence the insight, future and wellbeing of our culture?

Obsolescence and the Culture of Human Invention will cover a three-year investigation into language, technology and artistic production in the context of digital media. The research documented and produced interdisciplinary artwork influenced by the culture and language of machines and obsolescence. The physical contact with the object was used as a procedure for remembering an obsolete technology that has influenced and predated his experience. The cultural complexity of the apparatus, its design, function, and mechanical precision were conveyed through this process of disassembly. The labour that fabricated and implemented the writing machine was also revealed. This project is an exploration of organic and inorganic memory through the borders and interface that continue to define the human experience with machines.

We are specifically interested in the creative and critical potential that technology and cultural obsolescence necessitates. Rather than presuming that obsolescence is inherently defined by loss and nostalgia, we will actively engage methods of creation that generate and inspire production concurrent with the processes of obsolescence. How can the excess of technological obsolescence inspire creative activities and circumstances?

There is an apparent contradiction in naming obsolescence as the subject of an extensive research project into creativity. Research methodology is traditionally associated with progress, development, and the brand new. Consequently, researching the imaginative and productive potentiality of outmoded culture and technology advances an inverse relationship that may appear obsolete to the conventional language of research. This is a critical paradox of our time as well as a principle question to investigate during the research / creation project. How are we as artists and producers affected by the experiences of obsolescence at this moment in time? How does this situation influence our perception, intuition, sensorial experience and our creative activities? The project profiled the ingenuity and resourcefulness that the artists brought to the contingencies of material and cultural obsolescence in an era of unprecedented technological advancement.