Mapping Lucy

Postscript

2006-11-01T13:54:00.000-08:00

I happened to read this passage this morning and I thought about yesterday's post.

"Perhaps cities are deteriorating along with the procedures that organised them. But we must be careful here. The ministers of knowledge have always assumed that the whole universe was threatened by the very changes that affected their ideologies and their positions. They transmute the misfortune of their theories into theories of misfortune. When they transform their bewilderment into 'catastrophes', when they seek to enclose people in the 'panic' of their discourses, are they once more necessarily right?"

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life

Eco-perspectives from South America and other outlooks that differ from popular liberal opinion in North America

2006-10-31T17:07:00.000-08:00

I wasn’t sure what to say. A conversation with Mauricio and Pio about nauseating ‘eco pop-stars’ (Peter Gabriel and Chris Martin were pipped at the post by Thom Yorke who said recently that he would consider refusing to tour 'on environmental grounds') changed tack when they laughed that they weren’t worried about global warming. I probed further. It was quite simple, they weren’t. And they were somewhat scornful of those that are. ‘Are you?’ I stuttered insecurely….was it possible not to be?!

When ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ is playing in cinemas across the globe, when a report has just been released in the UK warning of the £3.68 trillion ‘cost’ of ‘ignoring’ climate change, when chief scientific advisers are calling it a bigger threat than terrorism, when we’re being told the ‘debate is over’…….after reading ‘The Revenge of Gaia’ earlier this year, as a subscriber to Resurgence magazine, with worldchanging.com as my homepage…..what options are there but to be concerned?

How to think now about my new Argentine mentors, who had just broken the boundaries of all Euro-American political correctness?

I thought about this in my last week in Buenos Aires and I had to think about my position as much as theirs. Slowly but surely I can feel the firm ground under my feet becoming slightly more marshmallow-like. ‘Global Warming’ may be a worldwide phenomenon with consequences for everyone, but it still looks different depending on where you’re imagining it from.

For example, in the USA, the discussion about ‘global warming’ among ‘those that believe’ is dominated by a kind of moral indignation. The context is a country dominated by oil interests, the world’s largest polluter with a bad track record of associated action. ‘Thinking’ North Americans are self-conscious about their problematic foreign policy, uncomfortable about their car-dependent cities, guilty about their affluence in an asymmetrical world and haunted by Exxon media campaigns aimed at discrediting climate science. To ‘not’ be concerned with global warming is almost unthinkable unless you are a right-wing, head-in-the-sand, Bush-lover (and even his traditional base, the evangelical Christians, are calling for radical changes in environmental policy).

But Mauricio and Pio are not of this latter cut. They are political agitators, self-described ‘humanists’, motivated less by money than by a greedy interest in a sprawling range of topics and are some of the most well-read people I’ve ever worked with. So their criticisms are rather interesting. Mauricio draws parallels between the media-driven fear of ‘global warming’ and the Cold War – a cultivated terror of the ‘abstract unknown’ and the convenience this opens up for self-serving political agendas and Orwellian government tendencies. He despises ‘radical chic’, a description which rather too closely fits a particular brand of Berkeley environmentalism. But most of all what I have come to better realise is that to be Argentine (at least the ones I met!) is to have a robust scepticism of moral certainty, authority, bureaucracy and consensus, a scepticism which has been fuelled by political contexts of military dictatorships and recent economic collapse.

While they might not deny the science of climate change, they argue against what they see as a political monopoly on the discussion of it - you are either ‘pro' global warming or you are in denial (a la George Bush ‘you are with us or you are against us’). I agree that it is quite common to hear it presented in morally simplistic terms ('we, the converted'). m7 resist this ‘fake agreement before the debate has started’, a kind of ‘we know what we need to accomplish, all we have to work out how to get there’ attitude....though they concede that what is interesting is that it’s global - that it can be talked about everywhere ‘is the start of something new.’ Mauricio added “the English spent most of the last century setting up the infrastructure that created it, and now they are horrified, and trying to do something about it.” He stuck his thumb into the air and smiled: “Global Warming….Cool Britannia!” It's true, global warming definitely offers feel-good rebranding opportunities for politicians....and is a conveniently abstract cause for those in search of personal salavation without too many strings attached [The drawing below is courtesy of the Corbalan sketchbook (that means Mauricio)...]

Interestingly, Ala Plastica, the environmental artists who I visited a number of times outside Buenos Aires did not entirely contradict those sentiments. Their opinion was that ‘climate change’ policies might receive public support in rich countries that are trying to address their emissions, but was less tenable as a political topic in poorer countries struggling with unstable economic situations and hungry mouths. Even if you frame them as interconnected problems it is simply a scale and abstraction of thinking that is viewed as a luxury. At the least, my Argentine encounter complicates the common perception (in my experience) that there are those that must be converted....and then the choir.

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[But in case you still want to know just how guilty you should be feeling in hard, quantifiable information, you can rate yourself with this carbon-dioxide calculator. I'll let you know once I've calculated my sins.]

‘Biffabacon’ and other distinctly Bri’ish phenomenon that have wound their way to 950 Moreno Apt 4B.

2006-10-12T08:32:00.000-07:00

Something bizarre. The more time I spend in Buenos Aires the more I learn about English pop culture….while my familiarity with Argentine history and politics remains motley. I only found out the name of the President last week and I know the name of one local musician (…..from the thirties). While this is not something to boast about, the reason is nonetheless intriguing - that Mauricio of m7red is an encyclopaedic expert on all things British. The content of an average conversation ranges from Princess Diana to Brick Lane to James Stirling’s sexual orientation to chavs to the Sex Pistols, the Smiths and Bloc Party. He knows that The Queen drinks Glenfiddich Whiskey and that Richard Branson went across the Channel on some kind of hydro-automobile. And his email address is an homage to ‘Biffabacon’ - the victimised teenager from Newcastle of Viz magazine. It lends a new dimension certainly to the on-going debate of whether Buenos Aires is a ‘European’ city.

When we are not discussing the intricacies of my homeland I am developing ad-hoc techniques in information overload management. A ‘flashflooding’ blog that we set up as a way to share information has morphed into a kind of open-ended ‘cyber-collaging’ experiment. Anything that is loosely connected to the phenomena of floods, complex organisations, games, co-operatives, protocols or logistics, is theoretically candidate for inclusion. What the blog is for is not very well-articulated - it has connections to the development of m7’s next iteration of the Flood! game, as well as material for a future book – but this ambiguity is turning out to be quite productive. The content and format is emerging without a described ‘plan’ and the exercise is guided by intuition as much as anything. Given a potentially endless stream of information, what material to process and how much of it? How to edit, transpose, copy/paste? What two or three themes, personalities or phenomena to wind together? How many links to follow, which fat reports to bother reading, which parts of dense books to dip into? When it goes too far in one direction (too many American academics profiled) it changes tack in another direction (translation of Spanish material about Argentine factory co-operatives currently). At risk of sounding completely abstract I feel like I am working out the river we might be on by developing a sense of where the banks are first!

An integral member of the experiment is Skype, the friendly internet software that sends links, observations and jokes between our neighbouring workspaces so that we don’t need to move - very 21st Century. I even introduced Robie to Mauricio on-line at a ‘Skype party’, complete with ‘emoticon’ pizza and cocktails! They talked about where they are from and what the weather is like, just like it might have been in ‘real life’!

I oscillate between peculiar on-line worlds like secondlife.com and the incredible m7 library, which is bursting with philosophy, art, urban theory, political history, gay architecture zines and primary school textbooks on the military. Some of the most entertaining encounters have been with the seventies architecture magazines which are also a useful ‘eyeopener’ for me in terms of my research project. 'Invisible London’, for example, an issue of AD from 1972, is full of material from the original ‘participation’ debate.

There are a multitude of gems including a particularly acerbic writer by the name of Jeff Nuttall who picks apart the community theatre groups that ‘keep interrupting children’s games’ and the ‘let’s-for-gods-sake-give-decent-people-a-decent-environment’ brigade for their ‘lack of eroticism’. There are also wonderful book reviews by Martin Pawley (still hovering around the UK architectural journalism scene today). Favouring a book by Robert Goodman entitled ‘After the Planners’ he quotes at length his attack on the ‘incestuous private language’ of architects which “encourages debate over the aesthetic appropriateness of a particular architectural project rather than questions about the political consequences”. Read this book, he advises, because "most tragically it makes crystal clear the dimensions of the hideous Punch and Judy show that architectural practice has become in the hands of the technological state”. Meanwhile a lengthy article on ‘Invisible London’ attempts to ‘make visible the invisible structure of the city’ in light of the fact that ‘the definitive attempt to treat the city as a physical thing is now quite discredited’. It includes beautiful thumbnail maps of airport noise levels, possible bikeways, directions of waste disposal, the subterranean city, green space distribution and graphic interpretations by Archigram.

Notes from papers delivered at a Design Participation Conference in Manchester include one on “Value theory and User Participation” which examines means of determining value in biological evolution, philosophy, economic theory, marketing research and psychology in order to help in the "direct specification of value which is the most coherent means of user participation in design”. And last but certainly not least a writer by the name of Victor Papanek poses this rather ambitious question at the end of his article on the industrial design profession: “What is an ideal human social system?” The answer apparently requires “an in-depth study of such diverse social organisations as American Plains Indians, the Mundugumor of the Lower Sepik River Basin, the Priest-cultures of the Inca, child-care in Periclean Greece, modern-day Sweden, the Catholic Church, the Loyalist Regime of Spain..(and many more)”!!

Most importantly, back in San Telmo I am re-housed! In a beautiful apartment, with beautiful artist housemates, Laura and Ignacio. A little blue bedroom in the rafters with a balcony overlooking the red kitchen…coloured glass, tall windows in the studio with shutters and a balcony overlooking the city, a cosy red sitting room, books and plants everywhere and a subtle smell of oil paint. And two crazy cats, Margot and Felipe. Ah, the joy of having a kitchen and somewhere ‘to come home to’!

Rivers as 'quiet dialogues' and other environmental perspectives of Ala Plastica

2006-09-22T10:06:00.000-07:00

I took the bus to La Plata on Wednesday, a city an hour south of Buenos Aires, for the second time. There I met Alejandro Meitin, a member of Ala Plastica, a group of artists who I have been ‘imagining’ now for over a year. As usual, it was my friend Hana who introduced me to them. How romantic their work sounds from afar - environmental artists working with local residents to ameliorate the polluted water systems caused by heavy industry….breaking with traditions of object-production and working instead on the scale of ecological systems ….opening up new possibilities for art in a social context.

Alejandro met me at the bus station. He is ordinary-looking, very friendly, almost uncle-like. I spent the morning with him at the Musee de la Plata (where I saw the dinosaurs I missed last week!) and the afternoon driving around, after lunch with his wife Silvina at their cosy house. As Alejandro took me to see the places where they worked I began to realise that I would not be seeing anything in particular, in the sense of a clearly demarcated project. Their work is about the production of connections, dialogues and platforms of shared work in relation to environmental issues (not only with other artists, but with other social and political subcultures), rather than projects in the object-sense that I am conditioned to understand them. Grant Kester, an art critic who writes about their work said this about them and their work in La Plata:

“Ala Plastica developed a set of interconnected projects based on a principle of social assemblage, in opposition to a number of massive engineering schemes that have damaged the ecological and social infrastructure of the region… they mobilized new modes of collective action and creativity in order to challenge the political and economic interests behind large-scale development in the region…. each of them were produced in conjunction and negotiation with activist groups, NGOs, neighborhood associations, and artists guilds in a form of what Wallace Heim has aptly termed “slow activism”… these collaborative and collective projects differ considerably from conventional, object-based art practice. The viewer’s engagement is actualized by immersion and participation in a process, rather than through visual contemplation…”

It was startling to drive around this much poorer area (in comparison with the Buenos Aires that I know), with its big petrochemical factories and open sludge-like rivers. We stopped in an old downtown once populated by workers from a meat factory that exported beef to England. It was the area in which the Peron revolution started. As we drove Alejandro talked about making small negotiations, exercises and workshops over the years to produce 'new points of view', how they weren’t only interested in articulating protest as artists but also in producing transformations.

Their projects in the past few years have taken them all over the ‘bio-region’ as well as abroad. In the north of Argentina they have been involved in the recovery of a salt trail, which was once an important line of exchange for local trade and communication. Led by the founder of a salt cooperative, eleven elders from different places walked the route over eight days. The motivation was to build networks of resistance to the exploitative practices of multinational mining companies and in the intellectual property battles with pharmaceutical companies over the production of traditional medicines. In Paraguay Ala Plastica are working with a network of NGOs, philosophers and anthropologists to produce alternative plans to the intentions of government development in a region where an indigenous tribe have lived up until now without assimilation. Plans for protected areas are being drawn up based on ‘mental maps’ of places and trails of significance for the tribe´s histories and identities. These ‘organic’ plans, which differ starkly from the government imposition of a grid, explore the possibility of the co-existence of two ways of imagining the world, rather than one being swallowed by the more dominant model. I also recognised a project of theirs that Javier of Bordergames had told me about when I was in Berlin, where they worked with fisherman to create a small river bypass on which to rebuild their trade after they were displaced by the workings of a large dam.

When Alejandro talks about their work, many of his verbs begin with the prefix re-. They draw on indigenous knowledge for clues on forging new, complex connections with fragile environments - recovering values, reconnecting people, remaking histories and so on. They wrote about one of their projects: "..we generated a practically indescribable warp of intercommunication with innumerable actions that developed and increased through reciprocity: dealing with social and environmental problems; exploring both non-institutional and intercultural models while working with the community and on the social sphere; interacting, exchanging experiences and knowledge with producers of culture and crops, of art and craftwork, of ideas and objects..."

Interestingly Alejandro was first a lawyer. After university he went to work for the National Parks in Patagonia for three years before being sent overseas for four years to make contact and share experiences with other National Park services in Europe. During this time he worked with various river and pollution issues and when he returned to Argentina in 1991, he set up Ala Plastica with his wife. ‘Rivers are quiet dialogues’ he told me, in reference to their capacity to connect many different people through memories and experience.

Again I drunk up the words they use to describe their work - ‘rhizome’ to describe the multiple levels of connection they strive for, ‘place vocation’, platforms of labor and action based on the specificity of a place (in many ways I was reminded of the founding ideals of the Rural Studio), ‘bio-region’ to describe the connections between their work in different places through large-scale ecosystems, cities as ‘egosystems’. It’s funny in the scope of their limited English what sophisticated words they do know - ‘performative’, ‘dialogical’, ‘organic processes’, ‘complexity’, all from communicating about their work on international art circuits!

Their modesty made an impression on me. There was a sense of commitment and understated radicalism but there was nothing sexy about what they showed me, nothing ‘pop’, as Mauricio might say. Their documentation is very low-tech, with no branding strategy: folders with photos on coloured pages and small pieces of text cut from printed pages, films edited with basic software tools. For me, an architecture student accustomed to viewing glossy portfolios, it wasn’t even necessarily easy to really grasp what it was they did. I realised that to get a sense of the connections they are making demands experience of them over time and participation in their work.

When I was dropped off at the bus station at 5 o clock I noticed how exhausted I was from the effort of speaking in Span-glish all day about these subjects! Next week I will take them up on their offer to return and stay the night, and to discuss the possibility of doing some work together while I´m here.

‘Un-walling the High Modernist Living Room’ and other architectural strategies of m7red

2006-09-17T18:34:00.000-07:00

m7red, also identifiable as Mauricio Corbalan and Pio Torroja, work, live and play in a motel-like space on the top floor of an apartment block in the Montserrat district. The aesthetic reminds of me of both Raumlabor and Beacon Street - colourful, multi-functional furniture installations, odd assortments of lights rigged up in an ad-hoc fashion, boxes of nails stored on bookshelves in the bathroom along with political philosophy and porn. Studios, bedrooms, kitchen and bathroom all spill onto an open walkway which boasts an Atelier van Lieshout-esque shower capsule with views over the city and a bathtub filled with thick, dark green water. If you swill it around with the small crabbing net you can actually find some functioning goldfish.

I have an ‘office’ all to myself, a room with high ceilings lined with copies of Architectural Design from the sixties and seventies, an inheritance from a friend’s father. Pio found me one from 1968. The title is ‘Architecture and Democracy’, and it is filled with articles on subjects like squatter settlements, prefab housing and the shifting role of architects. I have spent three afternoons there thus far, browsing the literature they keep pulling off shelves and slowly translating the ‘rules’ of Flood. This is the game that they have been developing over the past few years and which I will work on while I’m here.

Most of their work revolves around creating dialogue structures about urban issues, as a kind of architecture in itself. They potentially differ from other groups this year in that the conversations these generate are viewed as an end in themselves, rather than in service of a specific material outcome. In their own words…. "we work on the implementation of urban political scenarios where everyone can become a decision making agent in the city” and “with the development of architecture which includes social relations and the architecture of groups and networks." They like swarm systems, pop culture and barter practices, as well as how the term ‘architecture’ has been lifted to describe strategic techniques in so many other disciplines. They are also blog addicts. They currently have four in fact: m7explorer, decorama, chat-theater and a photoblog with the same title as this blog post (“unwalling” is apparently an Israeli military term that refers to entering a property by blowing a hole in the wall in order to avoid booby traps around doors and windows)…..and we might develop yet another for Flood!

There are plenty of people around tinkering with similar subjects, but the interest for me is in how their position has been shaped by the political framework of Argentina. “Let’s organise ourselves, the State has left”....grafitti that could be found even in the middle class suburbs after the economic crash of 2001. For them the ‘crisis’, as it is commonly referred to here, was an important catalyst for their work. Collaborative networks exist out of a certain kind of necessity perhaps, rather than because of a trendy fetishisation of all things ‘collective’. For example, an artist-centred barter system they were involved in, Proyecto Venus, actually became an officially recognised informal currency during a six month state of emergency. While Mauricio contrasts the Argentine ‘weak’ State with the powerful sense of the State in Europe (they have done some work in ‘bureaucratic’ Holland as well as with Raumlabor, whose projects are often funded by cultural government organisations), it might not be so far from the post-Katrina atmosphere of neighbourhood organising in New Orleans, which followed widespread disillusionment with the US government response at all levels.

This context is the springboard for their Flood! game, “a de-nationalising of the flood control system”. Their goal is not necessarily to propose an outright alternative to the disaster response system for floods in Buenos Aires. Rather they use the circumstances of a flood, which so dramatically and rapidly changes the nature and relationships of the city, in the context of a game, to generate conversations amongst a wide range of people about new urban possibilities. The key is that you play another character than yourself, encouraging players to think about the city from a different perspective. The game has been through a few iterations, depending on where it has been played – so far, Argentina and Madrid and next, Costa Rica in December. It originally started off as a straightforward website inviting ideas on how the city should cope in times of flooding, the suggestions from which (serious, humorous and fantastical) became the basis of its development into a game.

Like all the people I’ve visited this year, it is always interesting to hear what kind of vocabulary they use. Mauricio explained how they think in terms of creating ‘public time’ rather than (or as a form of) ‘public space’….and of investigating ‘urbanity’ rather than ‘urbanism’. Their references range from books edited by Newt Gringich on conservative strategy-planning, to anarchist handbooks and collaborations with Dungeons and Dragons gaming experts!

So far I have no idea how they fund themselves. I haven´t yet asked.

Meanwhile……..unable to spend any more time reading books in restaurants I ended up in a double theatre/cinema bill this evening – a theatre performance entitled ‘La Cuna Vacia’ (the Empty Cot), which dealt with the military era of the seventies and the ‘disappeared’. Dramatic lighting, haunting music and beautiful visual effects were only upset by my recently purchased four-peso alarm clock, which started to beep loudly and cheaply in the middle of a sensitive moment. Afterwards I went straight into the cinema next door to see Matchpoint, which had been recommended by Pio. Because I am out of the loop as usual on most things cultural and current I only realised then that it was the recent Woody Allen film and that it’s all set in London. Very strange to watch such familiar scenery, social interactions and lifestyles in Buenos Aires. If you haven’t seen it, go tomorrow, it’s excellent.

Meanwhile downstairs at 4 in the morning the cheesy disco beats at the ViaVia hostel are still thumping. It’s time to ramp up the search for my own apartment.

Mi español está mejorando.

Barranca Myths and other murky means for “understanding” Buenos Aires

2006-09-12T10:16:00.000-07:00

What happens if you put in a room (or renovated water tower) together for ten days….aging Italian professors, a smooth Swedish starchitect, Japanese researchers with language insecurities, shy Mexican landscape architects, a thoughtful social activist from Hong Kong and a Berkeley faculty member more interested in tango than planning tools (among others)? The first ILAUD workshop in ‘nicely neurotic’ Buenos Aires (after thirty years in Italy), resurrected after the death of its founder, Giancarlo de Carlo, and on an expansion experiment beyond North America and Europe, in terms of both participants and subject. Lubricated with bottomless espressos and carne empanadas, the cocktail produces a lot of conversation, some half-hearted drawings and an academic fistfight for good measure at the end.

It wasn’t always inspiring but I can say that I have a different perspective on this city, renowned more for its music (tango) and literature (Borges) than its architecture, to any I would have just wandering the streets as I did in my first couple of days here.

The ILAUD philosophy is rooted in understanding and expressing the ‘biography’ of cities as a means for informing their future developments. They like to talk about identity, cultural memory and lost meanings. They moan about developers, skyscrapers and global sameness. Our energies coalesced around the hazy phenomenon of the ‘barranca’, the old river bank along which the city first developed. It is the edge at which the Pampas (the eternal stretch of flat land between Buenos Aires and the Andes) once met the Rio del Plata, and which has now been more or less masked by the continued development of the city into the reclaimed floodplain of the river. The barranca remains however the only sloped piece of land in an otherwise flat city and many parks and historic civic buildings are located along its edge.

So does the ‘barranca’ have a role in the contemporary life of Buenos Aires?

Given that the term means nothing to the average porteno (citizen of Buenos Aires), you could forgive us, the students, for wondering how relevant this question was. But by the end of the workshop I believed that its strength was in fact its ambiguity. That it could be interpreted as a physical or conceptual phenomenon gave rise to a number of different approaches to the ill-defined question. That it is a ‘black hole in the memory of the city’ meant we could explore it as ‘outsiders’, and for a short amount of time, without treading on toes or reiterating the obvious.

My working group boasted Japanese, Argentinian, Mexican, English and Italian participants and a crucial translation gadget that was whipped out every now and then to provide the Japanese equivalent of ‘conceptual’ or ‘phenomenon’. Communication was slow, painful, sometimes hilarious and occasionally productive. For us the ‘barranca’ became a way to rethink the relationship of the city to its water. It is a small example of a larger absence of the river from the daily life of the city. The industrial port, domestic airport and now skyscrapers stunt visual access to the river in terms of views and actual access in terms of waterfront recreation, bathing and small-scale fishing. You are hard pushed to find a seafood offering on the meat-ecstatic menus of the city’s restaurants and tributaries of the Rio running through the city were buried in concrete pipes after flooding in the 1930s (exacerbating rather than solving the problem it seems). Ironically the city only comes into direct contact with the water once or twice a year during the annual floods.

We proposed a public program for beginning to “imagine the water back into the city” in three overlapping ways – through memory (the marking of and storytelling about hidden rivers in the city), through tactility (outdoor pools at the edge of the Rio, recalling the recreational activities that once happened there) and through gaze (the preservation of certain views of the river from the barranca as future development continues). We suggested that these events be coordinated by the national library, a giant sixties hulk on the barranca, to make visible on the streets its repository of the city’s stories and histories.

In a broader context it was mildly interesting to witness the ideological tensions between faculty of different generations and cultures. Jill Stonor, our Berkeley professor, was a breath of fresh air, breezing in with Borges and others tucked under her arm, and the only one to pick up a paintbrush during the week! She took to task the conception of nature in the city as ‘green space’ pointing out that the barranca is better understood as a geological wedge of sand. Wallace Chang who owns and runs this gallery inspired me with his gentle and evocative urges to mull over ‘collective personalities’, ‘reconstructed stories’ and ‘urban acupuncture’, rather than pursue a plan-driven, classical ‘site analysis’. Meanwhile the Italians fought fiercely and internally over their various all-compassing masterplans which solved all the problems of the city in one neat package. I imagined I was getting a glimpse into the culture that Stalker (see June) were reacting against when they set up their practice in Rome.

Fortunately the water theme dovetails neatly with both the work of m7red (who engage with the flooding problems in the city) and Ala Plastica (who deal with river pollution). So I am interested to see how my reflections change over the course of my stay here.

And to recover from the strain of playing at serious academia?

…..the highlight of the workshop was a party in our apartment that Jill had rented on Plaza Dorrego, complete with mezzanine and barrel vaulted brick ceiling and 15 ft high windows. We hired a jazz band from our favourite bar down the street, Del Tiempo, and free flowing red wine helped loosen up relations considerably.

………..and then this weekend a trip to the country……to an ‘estancia’ (Argentine farm), courtesy of family friends of Toben’s, the other Berkeley participant. It was just as I had read about certain chapters of Imagining Argentina. A handsome pink house in the middle of endless flat, with grazing horses, warm winter sun, green parrot-like birds circling overhead and a full moon that illuminated the landscape for miles. I rode a horse for the first time in six years and revelled in the sense of well-being that it released. We knelt in the middle of a field and allowed the horses to gently sniff along our arms, shoulders, necks and hair. The poetry of the moment was only momentarily interrupted by a giant horse sneeze which sprayed me with black equine snot.

Yesterday we took a rickety train to La Plata, a suburb of Buenos Aires an hour away to see the only Corbusier house in the Western Hemisphere and the first that I have visited. We enjoyed a tour by a local architecture student and admired the spatial tricks of the house, generally feigning half ironic/half genuine awe. The famed dinosaur museum where we should have been able to see the six story gigantosaurus from Patagonia was closed. So the train ride to La Plata may well happen again after the short pedalo ride around a pond of plastic bottles failed to satisfy as an alternative.

Toben is on a plane back to the States as I write this so my Spanish crutch has been knocked out from under me. I call in at m7red later this afternoon. A new adventure begins.

The girl who walks on machetes and other unexpected adventures on the Sunset Limited

2006-08-28T20:39:00.000-07:00

Sarah Ann neatly categorised the people who travel on trains in the US. Those who are too fat, those who are too old, those who are too hard up (....to fly) and school choir groups. I thought she was spot on until I took the train from New Orleans to Austin for a second time last week and met some people who defied all pigeon-holing attempts. In the glass-ceilinged observation car I chatted to John from Virginia, a tattoed 24 year old whose Dad had changed plans to fly him from Arizona to rail after the news of terrorist arrests in the UK. We compared our sketchbooks, his featuring considerably more skulls and tits than mine. The cheeseburger in the dining car tasted all the better for the waiter, who told romantic stories of how the railroads once served the finest beef in America. Also eating dinner was a displaced Katrina resident moving to California with her two kids and a lady named Holsom, a disgruntled political activist who launched into Tony Blair´s shortcomings when I told her I was from England. Downstairs in the cafe car, a Denzel Washington lookalike kept us amused with his comedic impressions and seen-it-all-before anecdotes gathered over thirty years of Amtrak service. Holsom offered me a ride from San Antonio to Austin with her friends, saving me a gruesome five hour wait in the early hours of the morning. Not only did one of her friends turn out to be a circus performer who walks up staircases of machetes, she also works for a friend of Robie and Jay´s in Austin. Small World.....Enthusiasm for American Trains Undiluted!

It seems incredible that it takes less time to get to Buenos Aires by plane from Austin than it does to New Orleans by train but I can confirm that´s the case. I´m writing this from Argentina, where my marginal Spanish has at least managed to get me from airport to hostel and an empanada and cerveza into my growling stomach. My activities here over the next two months range from an ILAUD workshop (two week international student affair on the nebulous theme of ´Nature and the City´), followed by work with m7red, architects who ´build forums that bring together both experts and non-experts to discuss pressing political and urban topics´ and Ala Plastica, artists who ´develop projects linking art and socio-environmental causes´.

In the meantime, in preparation for working with m7red on one of their projects called Flood!, I have been hastily reading Disaster: Hurricane Katrina and the Failure of Homeland Security. It makes such compulsive reading that my first day in Argentina was spent glued to a book about New Orleans. I just finished it so that I can begin cultural adjustment tomorrow. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in penetrating the complex web of politics and personalities behind the government response to Katrina.

And a final plug for Ronald and his steady climb towards presidential candidacy - read about him in the New Yorker this week..... if you missed him on the Weather Channel over the weekend...

‘The People are the Planners’ and more wishful thinking in post-Katrina New Orleans.

2006-08-16T17:01:00.000-07:00

First there was the Bring New Orleans Back plan that Nagin overturned upon his re-election (after grandiose ideas were rejected by Congress, after FEMA money failed to materialise, after protests from local groups). Next there was the Lambert-Danzey planning process, orchestrated by the City Council, which basically circumnavigated the mayor's office. Now the Unified New Orleans Plan, funded by the Rockefeller Center, is thrusting that process out the way so that an ‘official’ Grand Plan can be finalised by the end of the year. Each neighbourhood will be assigned (sorry, vote for…) a planning team, and organisers are promising to synthesise the process with the grassroots, self-organised planning that most districts have already initiated.

Two important meetings of the Unified New Orleans Plan took place while I was in the city. There are lots of disgruntled, eloquent blogs that have already documented the democratic charade that invited all residents of the city to vote from a preselected pool of planning teams, after a series of 12 minute presentations, in a room designed to hold 300 (plans to get the Superdome fell through apparently). Link to People Get Ready, Becky Houtman and Darwin BondGraham for their relative ironic/earnest/sour takes on it, as well as this genius diagram by Toulouse Street.

I can’t imagine any citywide planning process that could possibly run smoothly under the given circumstances but nonetheless Tuesday 1st August was definitely a reason to feel pessimistic about official efforts to co-ordinate the city’s future. With twelve precious minutes in which to sell themselves most teams did a dismal job. Carol and I were rolling our eyes back in our heads by number eight (there were eighteen in total) and we have some ability to read drawings and understand planning language. Screen after screen of tedious bullet points about relevant expertise or predetermined processes. Irritating slogans with bad graphic effects. Illegible diagrams of teams organised into hierachical boxes. Vague drawings from other projects with lots of nice, green trees. Slides of half empty meeting rooms with whiteboards and neatly dressed ‘facilitators’ wielding sharpie pens as demonstrations of inclusive methods - just what the ‘charette weary’ residents of the city want to see I’m sure. Powerpoint - surely the most disastrous thing that ever happened for civic engagement?

If teams were local they laboured on it, if they weren’t they went to pains to parade the member of the team who had been born there. There were lots of emotional dedications to the ‘unique spirit’ of New Orleans. Frederic "The Man who Listened" Schwartz had clearly been rehearsing for days, turning bright red as he lyricised “if you’re from updown, downtown, backwater, bywater, lower ninth, upper ninth…we are here for YOU”. Large, bouncer-type men were introduced as ‘implementation strategists’, ‘this is the man who knows how to get the money’.

And the most refreshing speaker by far? Andres Duany of the Congress for New Urbanism, the devil of style over substance, server of thinly veiled real estate interests, magician of pastiche and nostalgia. He spoke simply and directly to the audience with no Powerpoint, immediately creating a more sincere and intimate connection with the audience. He touched on everything people care about – getting things done quickly, holding FEMA accountable. He waved around documents of work he had already done in Mississippi adopted by the Governor. He invited people to go to the River Ranch development a couple of hours away to see their previous work (I looked it up later – a 300 acre "re-creation of historic residential New Orleans", complete with areas named the 'French Quarter' and 'Garden District' and homes starting at $265 000). His smooth delivery was interrupted only when a member of the audience started to yell accusations of hypocrisy, the details of which were drowned out by a rabble of ‘shut ups’ and ‘shhhhshs’. I am not a fan of New Urbanism, but had I been an ordinary resident deciding on those presentations alone I probably would have voted for him.

Ronald Lewis was my only substantial connection in New Orleans to a resident whose home had been destroyed by Katrina. He is unequivocal in his distrust and disillusionment with the city planning process. “No more dots” he kept saying, referring to the little stickers that he has put on endless maps at endless meetings to indicate where a school or firestation might go. At a UNOP meeting, he caused a stir by telling the facilitator that he could do her job, “I can get up there and ask you what you want and write it down on a list”. Ronald is understandably suffering ‘charette fatigue’. He refused to vote for a planner at the Tuesday meeting because he refused to make an uninformed vote. And he doesn’t believe it would have made a blind bit of difference anyway.

In this broader context it’s interesting to consider the politics of the House of Dance and Feathers, whose opening was on Saturday. Ronald should be moving back into his home of twenty nine years as I write this, just before the one year anniversary of Katrina. The goal of renovating his house and building his museum anew (made possible with a grant from the Englehart Foundation and channelled through the Tulane School of Architecture) (see post below) was to generate grassroots energy and action in the neighbourhood, and in doing so to attract the attention of the media and the city at large.

The event on Saturday night was packed with Ronald’s extended family, local residents like Mr Gettridge (the 83 year old ‘master plasterer’ who is currently renovating his house on the neighbouring block by himself), Tulane students and faculty, the New Orleans media, the editor of the Times Picayune selling his latest book, Breach of Faith. Guests ate barbeque and drunk Budweisers, and the mood was celebratory and optimistic. In Ronald’s speech he said “if this was just about Ronald Lewis it wouldn’t be interesting…but it’s not…it’s bigger than that…it’s about people working for people”. Because Ronald is a trusted and long-term community activist these words were actually meaningful.

The House of Dance and Feathers is a symbol of hope, a catalyst for action and a means to nurture one of New Orleans most unique cultures, the Mardi Gras Indians. But could it have ever materialised within the context of the city-led planning process? I doubt it. It couldn’t have happened because it is built on private land and making extra funds available for one resident’s personal vision would be unfair in a process endeavouring to be equitable and democratic. The paradox is that because of the respect and trust Ronald commands in the Lower Ninth Ward, the ‘private development’ is likely to have wider, positive effects beyond the bounds of 1317 Tupelo Street. It is public in that it is ‘open to the public’, but in code terms it is a private garden shed. In organisational terms Ronald describes it as a ‘dictatorship’. He makes the decisions, he owns the building. And for this reason it will probably prove far more sustainable than a new neighbourhood community center with an elected committee at its helm. Here, in this situation, planning and participation theory falter….there is no accurate way to abstractly describe the sense that this particularly undemocratic renewal strategy makes.

No-one disputes that New Orleans is a unique city. But who gets to represent the essence of New Orleans and decide how to preserve it? Andres Duany builds a development that mimics the French Quarter and acts as though the soul of New Orleans is found exclusively in its architectural details and thus restored through them. Ronald can now be found daily at his museum, telling the stories of the Mardi Gras Indians and working on costumes for the first post-Katrina parade of the Big Nine Social and Pleasure Club in December. He will tell you that New Orleans is about its people... probably about how the competition between tribes at the Mardi Gras parades gives him enough stories to last all year until the next one. The new structure is a roof under which to nurture their values, struggles, stories and strength. I don’t think that Ronald’s project is the all-encompassing answer to the planning process. At the same time I do believe it represents a type of project that will squeeze through the cracks and take place in spite of, rather than because of, the official planning process, and in doing so help generate the much-needed vitality, optimism and mental strength that is needed to get the city back on its feet.

On Sunday I danced in the lot next to St Augustine Church, the oldest African American church in the city and opposite the Backstreet Cultural Museum. The bi-weekly celebrations are an energetic assemblage of old and young, black and white, drum circles and brass bands, Chief Fi Yi Yi and other Mardi Gras Indians. I thought of those slides of empty meetings, whiteboards and sharpies, and decided the official planners could do with spending half an hour at St Augustine and the House of Dance and Feathers if they need some new ideas about what really motivates the citizens of New Orleans to ‘participate’.

The House of Dance and Feathers and other anomalies in the Ninth Ward

2006-08-08T07:05:00.000-07:00

If you’re near Tupelo Street, drop by. You’ll be one of a steady stream of visitors graciously welcomed by the indefatiguable Ronald Lewis of the Lower Ninth Ward.

For the past ten days I’ve been laying tile and hardwood flooring, building decks and losing my bodyweight in sweat at Ronald’s building site. Ronald is a Mardi Gras Indian of the Choctaw Hunter tribe, founder of the Big Nine Social and Pleasure Club, a costume maker, a committed community activist and director of the House of Dance and Feathers, a small, grassroots museum he created in his carport several years ago. There he collected costumes, photos and newspaper cuttings from years of second line parades, as an educational resource for the neighbourhood as well as visitors from further afield. A fragment of the collection was saved from Katrina but the rest of it and his house sat under 14 feet of polluted water for two weeks after the storm ravaged the city last year.

Project Locus, a young, non-profit architectural organisation, applied with Ronald (and under the umbrella of the Tulane City Center) for a grant to reconstruct his house and museum, with the hope that getting him back in his neighbourhood would act as a catalyst for others to return and rebuild also. For now, the site is a lonely hive of activity in an otherwise ghost town of a street. In this sense the elegant little museum structure is inspiring but also poignant – what kind of future will unfold around it and will it come close to Ronald’s optimistic vision for Tupelo Street and the rest of the Lower Ninth Ward? Around his house, which has been completely gutted and renovated, two big patches of sunflowers have been planted by Common Ground Relief. The sunflowers are supposed to suck excess arsenic and lead out of the soil and should apparently have been disposed of just before they bloom. But no-one seems to be motivated to remove the blaze of yellow optimism just yet.

So if you want to get your hands dirty for a day or two the advantages are numerous – free lunch from the Catholic Church operating out of a wrecked Subway, or a big plate of ribs if you’d prefer from the Rib Shack on St Claude, on-tap access to Ronald’s bottomless cauldron of New Orleans stories and his unique perspective on the post-Katrina process….as well as the occasional Cajun sausage off his grill if you hit the right day.

If you don’t get a chance to drop in you can listen to him on NPR's Morning Edition soon (Steve Inskeep is on site tomorrow!) or see the project at the ‘Viennale’ come September!

Fried Alligator on a stick and other Southern Favourites

2006-08-03T19:52:00.000-07:00

….for example, the ‘ball fry’. That might be just a Texan thing though, I’m still not sure if that counts as Southern. I narrowly missed out on an annual chow-down of bull testicle to celebrate I’m not quite sure what, but it’s good to realise that as much time as I spend in Austin I’m only just scratching the surface of the unique culture that is Texas. As perhaps could be expected, they are apparently slightly chewy with a juicy centre.

But that’s beside the point because I’m back in New Orleans now. And I didn’t eat fried alligator on a stick either but it was available at the Natchitoches Folklife Festival where I spent the weekend, courtesy of Sam Douglas, filmmaker extraordinaire. Natchitoches is the oldest town in Louisiana, not to be confused with Nacogdoches, Texas, the oldest town in Texas and founded by Natchitoches' brother. Nor should you try to search for it on the internet spelt ‘Nakatesh’.

A Fortnight in London Town

2006-07-18T11:54:00.000-07:00

..….family….friends….unusually good weather…new shoes….see Robie’s blog, General Rinse, for more details of our cultural adventures. For the first time ever I explored the whole Barbican Centre complex (which feels more Future City than the Future City exhibit we went to there).

Robie, Jennifer Bonner, a fellow Rural Studio alumni, and I gave a talk as part of Architecture for Humanity’s lecture series and the London Architecture Biennale….about our projects in Alabama. Somehow the organisers managed to assemble an audience of sixty soccer-indifferents (due to a clash with the England vs Sweden match). We thought it would be a breeze but it turns out the art of negotiating three speakers, three perspectives and three projects is not as straightforward as we first assumed. Presenting our projects made me reflect again on the two lives of the Rural Studio, its actual local effects and then its part in architectural discourse, which is always a selective representation tuned to satisfy the particular appetite of an audience.

In the second week I looked up Public Works, an art/architecture practice whom Hana, the source of most of my contacts this year, has always spoken highly of. The partners are one artist and three architects and their practice name reflects their interest in public space: how it is constructed physically, but also in the social structures that both define and sustain it, issues to do with maintenance, surveillance, exchange and connections to broader local networks. I was struck by two aspects of their practice in particular. Firstly how working as an artist and architecture organisation means they bring not only a wider range of perspectives and working methods to a project, they also have access to more funding opportunities. Most of their projects are supported by public art grants, though they make no distinction between their individual roles within the practice.

I got much out of spending a few days with them, but in particular learning about their ‘on-site’ working strategies. Their engagement with the site of a project is a continuous process of exchange with users rather than a single, abstract interpretation of it. In projects such as the Mobile Porch or Granville Cube they set up a structure on site so that conversations with, and suggestions from, local residents can unfold naturally over time, rather than in the more forced setting of a formal ‘consultation’ meeting. ‘Participation’ is thus not so much about who gets a say in what the form of a building should be but rather about the earlier negotiation of the content of a brief.

See details of their quirky Park Products project here, where they worked with gallery attendants, gardeners, park users and product design students to make a series of products available in exchange for helping with the park maintenance (eg. the ‘chompost bar’, a bar of compressed compost for people to take home who helped pick up leaves). I worked on a small project looking at how you could create an event space in front of a typical Victorian terraced house on a residential street in East London. The project is for a couple who are starting up a creative consultancy in their own home and who want to explore the possibilities of the ‘live/work’ concept.

Pilgrimage to Corviale Illustrated

2006-07-17T11:26:00.000-07:00

Pilgrimage to Corviale

2006-07-05T15:07:00.001-07:00

(From three weeks ago, undisciplined blogger that I am) Five days to unexpectedly fill in Rome…….so I decided to undertake my own exploratory walk. For a while I wondered whether to do a section of the Campagna Romana itinerary, but settled instead on a trip to Corviale, a kilometre long housing block built on the edge of the city in the sixties.

In the past couple of years Stalker have been involved in a multidisciplinary exploration of the use and appropriation of the public spaces in the building, as part of a research network called Osservatorio Nomade. Their work included the setting up of a ‘Corviale Network’ – a local television station involving residents which aimed to challenge media stereotypes about the building. The television station has been described as a public space in itself - “a positive instrument of exchange and information within and outside Corviale…. a flexible instrument that can be modulated according to the different needs of its shareholders”. The project has been covered extensively in the press, perhaps less for the clarity of the outcome than the photogenic allure of the research subject itself. I was able to find it on a large map of Rome immediately - a curious long skinny line right at the edge, bearing no resemblance to any other marks on the page at all.

My walking companion was an American, a graduate student in music who appeared to have found Rome a more inspiring place to compose than Miami. Our plan confused a number of our fellow hostellers who were swapping their intentions for the day over breakfast - “today I’m going to do the Colosseum, yesterday I did the Trevi Fountain…”. And I hoped that it might act as a mild resistance to the mindset of one girl who informed me that “you can do Venice in four hours….all there is to see really is San Marco”.

We began our walk at the site of one of Stalker’s other projects, an old slaughterhouse inhabited by Roma Gypsy and Kurdish communities. From there we walked through old, densely-populated housing districts with washing hanging from windows and the usual tangle of television aerials, across the river and past the Travestere railway station. A lonely little pedestrian bridge took us over the rail tracks into gradually more suburban areas not without their intrigues, including a miniature Eiffel Tower. After a couple of hours the countryside began to actively penetrate the city with sudden swathes of wildflowers and handsome country villas perched on the edge of hillsides, peering down at the intruding suburbs. As we walked we compared disciplines of music and architecture and I recognised the same grandiose ambitions of a fellow thesis student – his baby a 25 minute digital piece that apparently chronicles the entire development of Western music!

Finally we rounded a corner and saw Corviale running endlessly across the brow of a distant hill. For some reason I felt like a bizarre kind of ill-defined pilgrim. We walked the length of it and it really was like an encounter with a mindset from another era. I noticed the fourth floor, the fate of which has been well documented in the magazines. Originally intended for community facilities which were never delivered, it is now filled in with concrete blocks and irregular window systems as people built in their own illegal apartments. I wondered if we would seem suspicious, but somehow a linear building of 6000 inhabitants lacks the intimacy for people to claim the space around it as theirs to distinguish between legitimate visitors and unwelcome intruders.

And beyond the building you look onto rolling hills and horses grazing in the field in front of it, a truly abrupt marking of the edge of the city. Not a petrol station or small housing development in sight!

The following night I went to the book opening of “Immaginare Corviale” at the Olivetti Foundation, the sponsors of the project. Sociologists and cultural commentators talking eloquently (I presume since it was all in Italian!) from a rooftop next to the Piazza Navona. The concrete edifice seemed a world away from the splendid views over the ancient heart of the capital and the dozens of impeccably dressed Italians attending the event; perhaps an inevitable contradiction of any social project funded with grants from elite cultural institutions.

The walk that never was

2006-06-10T11:36:00.000-07:00

Or…the story of how Lucy turned up breathlessly in Rome to participate in a five day ‘research-walk’…..a month early. Errrrr.

Because an email from Stalker finally arrived…. including details of a project happening that week (so I thought), Campagna Romana, a five day walk with teams of students led by scientists, artists, poets and architects from eight different locations outside Rome (autonomous towns until they were recently engulfed by the spreading city) into the centre. It marks the ten year anniversary of the first Stalker 'act', a walk around the edges of Rome, which became famous (at least in my current version of the world!) for implying that the imagination of new possibilities for the periphery also demanded different ways of mapping and perceiving them. The walk defied the traditional analytical techniques of planning and architecture in favour of a sensory, experiential approach.

An opportunity I decided I couldn’t miss!

…and because the last weekend in Berlin and the journey home had not yet been fixed ….because the fickle impulsive in me began to stir and the flights were reasonable.…because I still had a lingering curiosity about Stalker which I was loathe to abandon….. because for some reason, no matter how many times I looked at the website I still failed to read July instead of June…..because somehow the corresponding emails with Stalker were ambiguous enough to gloss over my confusion….because I waited until I got to Rome to actually call someone about it…..

…whereupon I enthusiastically confirmed with Lorenzo that I wanted to participate and asked what I needed to do. The first thing he said was ‘be here by July 10th’. I was so MORTIFIED that I didn’t say anything, just a few hmmms and oks……before hanging up the phone as quickly as possible to regain my composure.

It took a full afternoon to swallow my pride and call him back to admit that I was in the wretched city and a month early for his wretched walk. MORTIFIED especially because our correspondence has been so confused to date already. Lesson learnt: pick up the telephone once in a while…

Of course this was a much bigger catastrophe for me than him and I was duly invited to the office anyway. I turned up somewhat humbly….in an area that looks a quite different to the Rome where I had been consoling myself with gallons of gelati and espressos earlier in the day.

I coincided with end-of-week drinks with Lorenzo, several interns and an American called Peter…..followed by dinner at a very German family establishment complete with hundreds of screaming kids where delicious bruschetta, steak and wine was had for seven euros….and finally a walk home through the area of Campo Boario where Stalker did a project over several years with communities of Kurds and Roma gypsies. It was dark but we sat under a full moon in a garden they created in the middle of a vast expanse of courtyard which I noticed on a map today is the only unlabelled building in the area.

So the question still remaining of course is what should I do here for five days now there’s no walk to participate in?! I hope my time will consist of bothering Stalker anyway, trying to drink up what information and stories about past and present projects I can, and perhaps doing a walk of my own...on my own! Since I have been here twice before and since their ‘field of inquiry’ is the peripheries of the city it seems appropriate that I should be there while I’m here, instead of guzzling more gelati and getting in the way of other people’s photos around the Trevi Fountain…..which is also quite tempting.

FYI: the walk is open to anyone who wants to participate, a month from now! Participants choose their own method of representation and there will be an exhibition of all the compiled documentation afterwards. Go! You should! Tell me what it’s like afterwards!

Who ever said the Germans don’t have a sense of humour?

2006-06-02T17:43:00.000-07:00

It is June and I am still in Berlin….contrary to original plans…unsurprisingly. I will be here another two weeks. Various forces conspired so that this emerged as a logical decision. Mainly that Stalker, the Italians, continued to be elusive and that I want to be in London for the last two weeks of June. So Rome has been delayed or cancelled, it’s not quite clear yet. But I’m still leaving Berlin before the World Cup starts…..fortunately or unfortunately I’m not sure….

Meanwhile agreeable things have come out of deciding to stay for a while longer - like skinny dipping in lakes in the gorgeous countryside of the Oderburger region….and the opportunity to help with the documentation stage of the Dolmusch project. Most recently Matthias, one of the core Raumlabor members told me how he is a celebrity with the Turkish kids in his apartment block - the ones who caused mischief around the Dolmsuch ‘Reiseburo’. One of the intentions of the project was to explore ‘multicultural hybrids’ of urban systems (the name ‘Dolmusch’ is derived from the private, informal taxi system in Istanbul). Matthias thinks that this gesture was appreciated by the surrounding immigrant community who are disillusioned by the unidirectional ‘integration’ policy in Germany. In other words ‘integration’ normally means the problem of how to assimilate immigrants into German culture, rather than the possibility of a two-way exchange. This is what the Dolmusch project tried to explore instead…..

It might be interesting to put the project into some context with other Raumlabor projects from the last couple of years: I think the most striking are:

- A giant scaffolding mountain (‘Der Berg’) inside the Palast der Republik, the controversial Communist Parliament building which is in the process of being torn down in order to be replaced by the 17th Century Prussian Palace that stood on the site previously (if the required 80 million euros (?) is ever raised!). The mountain, which climbed from the street through the centre of the building and out through the top, featured a guesthouse where you could spend the night and three different tours up to the top of it. It's amazing to hear about the crazy bureaucratic and technical challenges had to be negotiated in order to realise this project!

- The Hotel Neustadt project, which involved transforming an empty housing block in the East German city of Halle into a hotel for the summer, complete with rooms designed and built from scrap materials (for a grand total of 3 Euros each!) by kids from the city and a series of interactive projects orchestrated by artists from all over the world - skateboard parks, film festivals, espresso bars, massage parlours, mini golf courses..... The festival-like project allowed the area to be completely re-imagined by both residents and visitors. There is now a fabulous, graphically-seductive book that documents the project…

- The ‘KuchenMonument’ – a giant, ephemeral plastic bubble that has been travelling around different cities as a temporary space for events ranging from Christian youth groups to artist discussions to political dinners.

The temporary arts project that takes advantage of the massive amounts of empty space either awaiting reconstruction or in a legal paralysis has assumed central importance in the cultural development of Berlin. The notion of architectural permanence is completely undermined here….and instead the Raumlabor projects explode the potential of the temporary project as a medium for cultural activism and political statements, through which new systems and patterns of inhabitation in the city are imagined. I am so inspired by the almost-absurdity and spirit of their projects! And in the meantime the material that is deconstructed and saved at the end of each project is gradually accumulating in a small village near Poland that we visited this week….in order that it might take on yet another life at some indeterminate point in the future.

......I have also had more time to be an obedient tourist recently. Sure that I was basically numb to the ‘starchitect’ sightseeing after being oblivious to the street of Eisenman/Koolhaas contributions, offended by Potsdamer Platz and only mildly interested in Libeskind’s Jewish Museum, I was secretly relieved to find myself blown away by the Neue Nationalegallerie by Mies van der Rohe. It is stark and serene, and the day that I visited it with John Hart (an Austinite landscape architect also visiting Berlin) it was closed, the deserted concrete landscape around it broken only by the occasional lone skateboarder or cyclist. Inside they were in the process of building an undulating wooden landscape for a Berlin/Tokyo exhibition opening next month...hmmmm...sexy contrast to the rigid form of the building.

John Hart and I enacted the first shadow drawing, a project I have been idly plotting for a while. We traced the shadow of a sculpture in blue chalk in the courtyard and recorded the time next to it and I was thrilled by a video I made of it disappearing and reappearing as the sun went in and out of the clouds….We were amazed to realise that the shadow had moved entirely out of the boundaries of chalk just five minutes later. Ok, so you can’t see it very well in these photos….or in fact in ‘real life’…..the method definitely needs some tuning…

Meanwhile I’m getting nostalgic about the thought of leaving my neighbourhood. This evening in Gorlitzer Park I marvelled again at the wildness of this place… a truly integrative piece of land, full of punks, Turkish women, young families….where an auditorium sits in ruins because the Portuguse stone was unsuited to the German climate and an old railway station covered in grafitti waits for the trains that never arrived there – a place of bent dreams which somehow cracks open space for new ones to brew….

Dolmusch X-press unfolded.....

2006-05-23T00:39:00.000-07:00

.....as a fragmented and energetic series of events experienced at different times in different ways by many different people. I’m still not quite sure exactly what it was that took place…..which could be the point.

Apart from helping at the Bordergames workshop……..I dressed as a travel agent and gave out information in flawless English at the Reiseburo // went on an ‘unofficial’ teenager tour of Kreuzberg, which ended with a rap battle in parking garage // consumed many sausages and beer at the scaffolds of Exyzt, which projected video from a camera on a helium balloon above it // danced at an endless round of parties which migrated nightly between the different ‘hotspots’ on scraps of public land along the Dolmusch route.

I’m uncertain how you might measure the success of the project: by the number of people who experienced it? whether they had a good time? whether they learnt something new about their city? by the range of people that came together to make it happen? the fact that it pissed off the taxi monopoly in Kreuzberg? that the Green party now wants to run a Dolmusch system to the new train station in the centre of the city?

RE: Bordergames. A number of promising contacts were made with people connected to youth clubs and educational initiatives in the city so that BorderGames Berlin is generally considered to be a work-in-progress. Still, there should be something to download off the Internet in a couple of weeks here. More importantly I am a celebrity in Berlin (see below for more details). I’m not sure what the article says as my German is still pretty weak, nor can I remember what I was so surprised by on the computer screen.

The Dolmusch process opened up some interesting questions for me as well as introducing me to some catchy jargon like ‘urban software’ and ‘performance architects’. Paradoxically after a year of obsessing over design processes which more effectively engage social and political ‘immaterial’ issues I found myself slightly disappointed by the material content of the project. But particularly now it’s over and life is ‘back to normal’ I’m appreciating what an invigorating network of exchange I was part of for two weeks.

Meanwhile I have transferred to working for a few days on another raumlabor project, involving shockhorror, CAD work and office hours at the office in Almstadtstrasse. This experience feels a lot more familiar. The project is a quirky installation for a cultural congress in Frankfurt - a series of almost-cube, moveable, adaptable structures for hosting films, talks, club nights, kids activities - fun but definitely ‘off-topic’.

I’ve also enjoyed two family visits that inched me out into areas of Berlin not yet explored. Activities divided neatly between museums (Mum) and shopping (Hattie).

Also of Note // DesignMai (so-hip-it-hurts design exhibit……limited content further obscured by……a hazy fog of uptempofusionbeats and fruity beer) // Belle and Sebastian concert! Yey! filled me with an overwhelming sense of well-being // ‘Fantastic Norway’: exhibit about some Norwegian architects who took a red caravan around small towns in Norway, from which they served waffles and coffee and engaged people in dialogues about the future of their towns. The exhibit was definitely presenting their working method (anthropology meets architecture) rather than any output……so it will be interesting to see what develops in the near future.

I also got the chance to look around and hear the history of K-77, a commune which was first squatted in the 1990’s through a theatrical intervention (this confusion between squatting and art allowed them to buy the time they needed to negotiate with the local authorities). The government eventually paid for 80% of the renovation work………the wonderful days of the welfare state! Fifteen years later the house is a cosy warren of earthern walls and endless doorways. In both the communes I’ve seen here the most inspiring aspects have been the communal spaces – big generous kitchens with giant dinner tables, yoga studios with sprung wooden floors, collective libraries carved out of lofts, roof terraces and alternative performance and film spaces at street level.

I also discovered that the street with the slightly eccentric buildings I biked past most days in Kreuzberg form a veritable starchitect gallery of Koolhaas, Eisenman, Hedjuk,Abrahim, Rossi and Sauerbruch Hutton. Hmmmm, what a well-trained eye I have. Not to mention I found out I live round the corner from an Alvaro Siza housing block, complete with some telltale curves, an odd column and a kindergarten covered in grafitti….telltale of course once all the details were pointed out to me.

And in Terms of What’s Next: Stalker, the group in Rome I’m meant to be joining next week are not responding to my most recent emails! Anyone know how else to contact them? And otherwise PLAN B. Options include staying in Berlin where there is plenty more fertile ground to mine. Please leave suggestions in the comments section. In the meantime I wanted to try and cross paths with a couple of other architecture collectives here. One is Pankof Bank. I sent the usual email out into the ether to find out that one of its members is a fellow Cambridge alumni, Sam Causer!

BorderGames arrives in Berlin…….

2006-05-08T03:37:00.000-07:00

…..and it was my task to lay out the ‘red carpet’ and make all the necessary arrangements before they (“the Spanish People”) arrived. This entailed making a flyer…..making a workshop space…..and then this week running around Kreuzberg gathering cables, batteries and other technological confetti that usually malfunctioned to ensure the thwarting of a smooth start.

What is BorderGames? Make-Your-Own Computer Game software developed by Jorde, Javier and David (aka Fiambrera Obrera), three part-time activist-artists of varying levels of humour and intensity, connected by their anti-capitalist sentiments and an interest in community practices with a resolutely anti-do-gooder attitude. BorderGames turns users into producers, presenting the opportunity to construct a computer game using your own neighbourhood, friends and enemies. Representations of daily life experiences are navigated through a series of dialogues with multiple choice answers and a specific goal in mind. In the case of the Madrid game it was developed with a group of Moroccan teenagers who were in the country illegally. Thus the central theme of the game is to acquire papers that allowed you to work in Spain. To do so you have to negotiate the challenges of the police, potential employers and youth educators along the way.

The software is essentially a tool of political representation for those whose voices are rarely heard on public platforms. The character who introduces the game comments that the user will find real stories very different to the narratives of politicians distributed through media channels. I realised some of my own biases when I played the game - how come the youth educator in fact turned out to be bad guy, who despite good intentions perhaps ended up increasing the chances of my deportation? Likewise I was confused by the fact that all of the multiple choice options for interactions with the police ended up in a brick falling on my head and the game being over. Nor in fact was there any certain way at all to get papers - all conversational routes end with the falling brick even after you have finally managed to acquire a temporary set of papers. I realised of course that the game follows not the logic of the average computer game formula but the real experiences of the teenagers.

The Kreuzberg workshop is taking place in a ground-floor storefront under a large housing block in Kottbusser Tor. Our design challenge was to make a ‘teenager-friendly’ space for the workshop that didn’t resemble an internet café or a new media office (think of an ensemble of chairs, tables and computers in an otherwise bare room) for under $100, with access also to MDF, wood, paint, a lime green carpet and a series of shipping pallet ‘seats’ of varying shapes and sizes. We (Martin, another Raumlabor intern and me) constructed what you can see in the photos below – signage using the graphics of the flyer including oversized letters, a good deal of yellow and black caution tape (borders…..) and a basic asymmetrical wood ‘auditorium’ structure.

This week’s activities have centred around familiarising the kids with the concept of the game and walking around the neighbourhood with them to collect interviews and photographs of places and people of significance in their lives. The next stage is to assemble dialogues of typical interactions between them and the characters they decide to include in the game.

I have been impressed by Fiambrera Obrera’s practicing of what they preach. They are insistent that the development of the game should happen on the terms of the kids rather than them imposing a structure. In other words the process and methods shift with each new location and group of participants. Previously they have worked with a fixed group of illegal immigrants between the ages of 16 and 18. Here in Kreuzberg they have found a situation where because of the location of the space opposite a playground almost all of the participants are under 12 and with varying and unpredictable levels of commitment to the work. They are mostly of Turkish origin, legal residents and with consciences consumed more with soccer (boys) and animal stories (girls) than politics. Thus the methods have morphed to accommodate this flux and working includes as much football playing as it does time in front of the computer. After the first week it seems that the ‘Kotti’ game is more likely to be a patchwork ensemble of stories centred on the housing block that crosses Adalbertstrasse (where our workshop is taking place)/the problem of a lost football and the encountering of various figures in order to recoup it (uncle in a kebab shop, punk, policeman etc)/the assembling of a ‘dreamteam’ football league made up of characters from the neighbourhood.

Meanwhile interesting gender differences manifest themselves in the opportunities to draw – girls invariably make escapist worlds of flowers, clouds and princesses while the boys territorially ‘tag’ their names and neighbourhood gang (the number ‘36’, the old postcode for the area). I have been very impressed by the self-confidence of kids interviewing and photographing friends and strangers to be characters in their game and the beautiful video footage shot by some of the older girls. At the end of one week we have some dialogues, a range of stories and histories with accompanying photographs, a 3D computer model of Kottbusser Tor thus far Madrid characters in it and some video interviews.

And then after every workshop we find a spot to consume beer and Turkish meat and reflect, and the Spanish entertain us with stories of their other projects which include rethinking various aspects of pornography and shoplifting, all littered with references to ‘relational aesthetics’ and ‘performative theory’. Insightful indeed!

Dolmusch Xpress...

2006-05-02T12:13:00.000-07:00

I definitely hoped that working for people this year would give my project some useful structure. I’m not sure I anticipated this would mean working flat out every day from the moment I put my bags down but this is what I’ve been doing here. In fact I’ve arrived at an exciting high-energy time, today being the launch of the DOLMUSCH X-PRESS project, a two week performance/installation/infrastructure project. It is a collaboration between Raumlabor, the group I’m working for, Peanutz Architekten (a group that I conveniently meant to look up during my time here) and the Hau Theater, a series of three theatres in Kreuzberg. And unbelievably it also includes installations by Exyzt, the French group that were in my initial Branner proposal (I only found this when I arrived!) as well as a Spanish artist group ‘Fiambrera Obrera’ (meaning sausage/corpse lunchbox or something, sausage and corpse being the same word in Spanish apparently….) whose part of the project I have been contributing to for the last two weeks. And the whole project is coming together via a sprawling network of Berlin artists, theatre people, students, carpenters and eccentrics who all seemed to have worked with each other in one capacity or another before.

The project coincides with a theatre festival and is an intriguing and humourous blend of performance, architecture, art and transport whose disciplinary boundaries are hard to delineate. ‘Dolmusch’ is a Turkish word describing the private taxis in Istanbul and elsewhere that cram ten or twelve passengers into one minibus along fixed routes. The project plays off a concept of encouraging people to travel through the city in different ways for the next two weeks and in doing so to perhaps shift or heighten perceptions of the city in which they live as well as provoke a critical perspective on the current transport options (my interpretation....?!). So the ‘performance’ is three new public transport routes through Kreuzberg that intersect at five or six locations throughout the neighbourhood. One is a private taxi service, boasting ten or more private drivers with their own cars including a goa trance DJ, a magician, a radio talkshow host and the mayor of Kreuzberg. They follow a fixed path, in one direction along the route of a highway that was planned in the sixties (but successfully opposed) and then back wiggling ‘around the houses’. Then two horse-pulled carriages will carry people along what was their main thoroughfare over a century ago and a water taxi will transport passengers along the canal which is currently monopolised by the ‘tourist boat mafia’.

At each intersection some kind of installation is taking place, complimenting or exaggerating aspects of the transport routes. Across these you can find the ‘Dead End Country Club’, where you can mix your own country music, ‘Hippology’ seminars on the anatomy and psychology of horses, puppet videos about the history of experimental housing along one of the routes, a Reiseburo (travel agency) with actor-receptionists, tours of the neighbourhood by teenagers which include ‘tagging’ your own wall, a mini kiosk-cinema, a model of Kreuzberg composed of old furniture collected off the streets and a ‘Kochstudio’ at the HauEins theatre - a spoof celebrity cooking show in the theatre with teams which include rappers from Kreuzberg – and last but not least the project I’ve been working on – the opportunity for teenagers to make their own videogame in Kottbusser Tor (one area of the Kreuzberg) featuring their own friends, enemies and places of particular significance.

Because I’ve been working on this one part of it I have almost no idea what’s going on in the other parts apart from crossing paths with people painting signs and looking stressed (and the group meetings conducted exclusively in German!). It’s hard to tell whether the project will have any coherence, located as it is in different parts of Kreuzberg and composed of a really quite loose range of activities, or whether the experience of it will be at all as powerful as the concept is when it is presented as a whole on paper. In the meantime it is pretty intriguing to get to grips with the extraordinary range of people that are connected to the project, from traditional horse breeders commuting in from farms seventy kilometres outside the city to the baggy-trousered Kreuzberg rappers to the uber-intellectual Spanish artists who have been alternately drinking espressos and siesta-ing since they arrived yesterday. Ragna, a planning student who has worked with Raumlabor several times, describes their projects as ‘snowballs’, constantly emerging structures which grow and change as different people get involved and each add their own unique set of stories, connections and perspectives.

In Berlin the streets are strangely airy......

2006-05-02T11:37:00.001-07:00

.....and it seems like every other conversation includes the reference “…..and then the wall came down”. In fact I should only speak for Kreuzberg, the area of the city in which I’m living and working, because I have barely left it since I arrived two weeks ago. Apparently this is normal behaviour for a ‘Kreuzberger’, although to fit into the broadest demographic category I would be Turkish and own a kebab shop. The donor kebab, which I never embraced through my undergraduate years, has now assumed central importance in my daily consumption, along with a disproportionate amount of bread-things from German bakeries. So my biggest problem here so far is stomach pains…..that and not being able to speak the language. In fact general communication breakdowns on all fronts – internet cafes line every street here, full of fluorescent lights and booths full of teenagers looking at porn, but barely a wireless internet café anywhere where you can take your own laptop. Meanwhile the apartment I’m staying in boasts a relic from a previous age – dial-up, to which I seem unable to connect.

When I biked to ‘work’ today (this is possibly the best biking city I’ve been in, the pavements are so wide that you happily share them with pedestrians and every other street is cobbled, so cars drive slowly making that pleasant European sound of tyres bumping over uneven surfaces) the streets were eerily empty save for a couple of large ‘Vive la Revolution’ banners swinging over the streets. Police cars were beginning to line up in preparation for the May 1st festivities (or riots…depending on whose description you listen to). I was working most of the day but when I rode back after the ‘premiere party’ of the project I’m involved with (bratwurst in a bun and beers you had to pay for), the same streets were packed with the sounds of reggae and hip hop, a mixture of mohican-ed punks, hipsters and Turkish teenagers cruising up and down the streets. Every now and then a group of green shielded-helmeted Polizei would charge down the street in what was apparently more of a ritualised dance than any kind of genuine confrontation. That hadn’t stopped the authorities organising close to fifty police vans lining the streets all the way home to Gorlitzer Park, which was pumping out techno music in the pitch dark from the old railway station in the middle of it.

My apartment is on Wrangelstrasse, which boasts a range of Kreuzberg delights: kebab shops, bakeries, tele-internet cafes, dirty-couch bars and working mens clubs full of old Turkish men. It is hard to see into these for all the cigarette smoke but then that seems to be the case for most of Berlin where everyone smokes like a chimney. A strange contrast to living in the uber-health conscious Berkeley. I am also around the corner from what is surely the most popular ice cream shop in the city: there are still people queuing there at 2am in the freezing cold. The apartment has wooden floors and high ceiling and big windows onto the street. It also has two roommates - a tuba and French horn player - and two crazy cats. I saved Charlie’s life a couple of nights ago after he squeezed his head into a bag of catfood, got stuck and proceeded to crash around the house in a suffocating panic with the bag over his head.

In a funny way Berlin has begun to renew my faith and energy for city living after three years post-Alabama of fantasising about the freedom and possibilities of a rural existence. This city is teeming with cheap places to live and outlets for creative energy. As Markus of Raumlabor put it – “here it’s possible to renovate an apartment that the government will pay for, rent an office for nothing and put a sign on the door calling yourself an experimental artist”. Most people I have met so far seem to be doing more or less that. I heard an British musician on the radio (Noel Gallagher possibly??) the other day who had just moved to Berlin. He described the city as ‘psychologically spacious’, which is precisely the feeling that I get being here.

This is the New Orleans post

2006-04-23T13:48:00.000-07:00

...in a current tradition of delayed updates....from my trip there, let's see....over a month ago. It’s been so long in coming because I got bogged down in how I should present my peep into an overwhelmingly complex situation. In the end I decided to write an A-Z, for lack of any better external structure that would limit my inevitable rambling. And then later I took out the descriptions that were too boring….

....here is a mishmash of what I came into contact with during the two weeks I spent there in March.

B ring New Orleans Back – the mayors co-ordination effort…….see the initial reports here.

C onferences. Everyone is holding them. I spent a lot of my time with the organisers (Dan Etheridge and Alan Lewis) of this one - Reinhabiting NOLA - a collaboration between the Xavier Center for Bioenvironmental Research, the Tulane School of Architecture and the Neighbourhood Story Project. The conference last November brought together 150 academics, professionals, scientists, artists, community leaders and environmentalists for two days in New Orleans and included a number of displaced residents who were flown in for the weekend.

D evelopment. While I was there the 'rebuilding' media focus was on a plan labelled ‘neighbourhood viability’. To receive reconstruction funds a neighbourhood must prove its ‘viability’ through a critical percentage of returning residents and its adjacency to two other qualifying neighbourhoods. Many potential rebuilding efforts were on hold until the release of FEMA base flood elevation maps this month.

E arth Science Perspective on Katrina. A lecture I went to on my first evening and my introduction really to the environmental complexities of the situation. Louisiana has 40% of the US coastal wetlands, which protect against storm surges and are estimated at an economic value of $5 million per square kilometre. Monitoring of the coastal wetland loss in the 1980s measured an acre being lost every 30 minutes and identified it as the most severe environmental problem in the country. Caused in large part by the interference of natural systems by the levees, the wetland loss problem was exacerbated by the oil and gas industries in the last century as they dredged commercial shipping canals that in turn created open passages for storm surges. I felt very indignant about the fact there were only nine people at the lecture until I realised that dozens of talks and discussions are taking place every day across the city....

F EMA. Of course is the easy scapegoat. I don’t really know enough to comment on the numerous and fierce accusations of incompetency, cronyism and no-bid contracts but one anecdote from Ronald Lewis, a resident of the Ninth Ward, really struck me. He was part of a self-organised rebuilding effort when Hurricane Betsy devastated the Ninth Ward in 1965 and there was no FEMA to step in. Ronald was assigned to a community sheetrock team that redid twenty to thirty houses in the neighbourhood. His opinion: FEMA has disabled people’s ability and will to self-organise while failing to provide any more effective alternative.

G round. “This city is built on chocolate mousse”

I -10. When the massive I-10 was built in the sixties it bisected many lower-income neighbourhoods with no consultation process at all. In the Sixth Ward the giant concrete columns of the freeway have been painted with live oaks and mythical imagery, a neighbourhood’s way of reclaiming their lost space. The offer to help ‘Rebuild’ is thus treated suspiciously in many communities – I-10 was just such a project.

J ournalists. Contrary to popular reporting New Orleans is not a city below sea level. More than half of it is at or above sea level, making it similar to hundreds of coastal cities across the world. Nor was the flooding restricted to low income neighbourhoods, it in fact cut across racial and class boundaries, devastating, as well as the Ninth Ward, the middle to high income neighbourhoods of Lakeview that were built on land reclaimed from swamps and the lake around the fifties.

L evees. The levees actually collapsed in three places, each efficiently wiping out a different area of the city. It turns out that at no point were they ever holding any more water than they had been designed to. So their failure was one of construction more than anything else. All around the Ninth Ward there were signs asking for witnesses of the levee break. Rumours abound that they were dynamited. Dan told me that there was actually a precedent for this. In the early 1900s men would guard the levees on their side of the river during storms in case a neighbour on the opposite side tried any tricks. Even if there was no actual dynamiting in 2005, in Dan’s opinion there was a metaphorical ‘dynamiting’ over the years as commercial shipping interests were systematically privileged (and heavily subsidised) over the interests of residents of the Ninth Ward and beyond.

M ississippi River Gulf Outlet (Mr Go). It was the widening of this canal from 500 ft to 2500 ft in the sixties that encouraged the storm surge that devastated the Ninth Ward. Calls now are for the canal, which was an economic drain anyway (only two to five ships use it each week) to be closed immediately. Ideas have included using all the waste from the storm to dam it, which though not environmentally sound may be better than it all going to landfill. Right now all the wood waste is being turned into wood chip mulch by Halliburton to be sold nationwide. Not sure if it will specify its potentially toxic origins.

N eighbourhood Story Project. An inspiring documentary project that is collaborating with the Tulane School of Architecture. It empowers high school students to record the stories of people, traditions and histories in their neighbourhoods and in doing so to challenge the negative stereotypes of those areas often perpetuated by the media. The by-line of the program is ‘our stories told by us’. I was at a seminar led by Rachael, an anthropologist and one of the founders, and Ashley, a student who wrote one of the six books that were published just before Katrina. Ashley is a resident of the Lafitte housing project which has been closed by the authorities since the storm. The most striking things she said during the seminar: “I didn’t know I lived in the ghetto…..…..till I heard it on the TV”. Hear her on New Orleans Indymedia Radio here.

O pposition. A group from an area called Broadmoor published an article in the Gambit about their self-organisation into an activist group after coming across a diagram in which their neighbourhood had been replaced by a large green circle. The story recorded their anxiety to find out what that meant and their anger at the lack of consultation with them. Various phonecalls unveiled the fact that it was part of a hastily drawn up plan by a Philadelphia group in a very short amount of time and that it was not in any way a fixed plan. The green circle apparently indicated ‘where a park could be’ if residents agreed. An interesting illustration of the politics of representation and the problem of interpretation. It also seems to have been a catalyst for an impressive amount of neighbourhood organisation.

P arades. The wonderful tradition on which New Orleans has built its cultural energy. During ‘second line’ parades the audience and performers form one dancing, singing crowd that winds through the streets for hours, stopping to honour places of community significance, churches, stores, people’s homes, and honouring the recently deceased. Rival ‘Social and Pleasure Clubs’ exist purely to organise annual parades, which are funded, with a considerable amount of sacrifice, by members of their community. Rachael described it as the cultivating of ‘cultural resiliency’. I imagined this in the context of bureaucratic interpretations of ‘urban renewal’ processes. There was a big debate this year about whether Mardi Gras should be cancelled and the money put aside for rebuilding, but this missed the point that parades have been an embedded part of the social and cultural renewal of the city fabric throughout its history.

R onald Lewis. A long time resident of the Ninth Ward - architecture students from Kansas State are working to rebuild his Museum of Dance and Feathers, which was once housed in his carport. Ronald is a Mardi Gras Indian costume maker, an artist who spends all year making intricate beadwork costumes for parades. His museum contained all his costumes, as well as newspaper clipping and photos dating back decades, objects which are impossible to value for an insurance company. He saved perhaps 10% of his collection - beautiful beadwork patches and photo albums full of people in costume with wonderful Indian names. For Rural Studio folks, Ronald blends Amos’s patriarchal nature, AJ’s artistry and Music Man’s all-consuming spirit. He is hoping that as he rebuilds, others in the neighbourhood will gain the confidence to as well. He hosted a crabboil one night which functioned both as a crit with the students and a party for neighbours who have returned. What better review than to have drawings pinned up on the side of a house on site, with a torch illuminating them in the fading light, beers in hand and Cajun sausage on the grill? Here him on NPR here.

S ixth Ward. The area in which Tulane has chosen to locate its pilot Urban Build studio (see ‘U’). It is one of the traditionally working class neighbourhoods that form a belt through the centre of the city. The Sixth Ward is within seven blocks of the French Quarter, an example of the surprising spatial integration across New Orleans. It is basically at sea level, and because of its proximity to wealthier areas it is likely to be awarded ‘neighbourhood viability’. It is a neighbourhood of extremes; dilapidated and cramped, full of ragged structures, vacant lots and isolated families occupying only one or two porches on every block, but imbued nonetheless with the vibrancy, vitality and intense charm of historic New Orleans that knocks you sideways.

T ulane. The university is in a particularly interesting position to co-ordinate a powerful network of action both locally and nationwide, at a grassroots level and at a political level. Reed Kroloff and Ila Berman, the Dean and Associate Dean respectively, are on the Mayor’s Urban Design Committee. Meanwhile every one of the ten design studios at Tulane has been charged with tackling an aspect of post-Katrina New Orleans this semester. In addition they have started a nationwide design/build consortium, the Tulane City Center, to co-ordinate the energy and resources of all the schools who are interested in working in New Orleans. In conjunction with Architectural Record, they held a prototype housing competition, the entries for which I helped unpack and display for the jury session (which I didn’t get to be present for!). And see here proposals they also commissioned from a series of Dutch and American firms for a ‘radical’ rethink of the city at various scales. This is all going to result in a series of different exhibitions across the city at the end of this semester.

Oh, and Reed Kroloff is also engaged in an all out war with the New Urbanists, ‘the ‘Mcdonalds’ of architecture, according to Ila Berman, who are literally knocking on the door of New Orleans after sweeping along the Mississippi Coast with highly organised charettes and attractive hand-drawn watercolours. His article in Metropolis in March claiming 'to be black' caused quite a stir. Read it here and some of the responses to it here and here.

T rees. One way to tell which areas flooded is to look at the trees. Magnolias don’t fare well in salt water and are dying all over the city. In contrast live oaks are fairly resilient. They are some of the most magnificent structures in the city, their roots heaving up huge chunks of the pavement everywhere you walk. It is striking to drive along the Gulf Coast where barely a single house, casino or commercial strip remains but where all the ancient live oaks still stand, the secret lessons of survival embedded in their roots far under the soil.

U rban Build. This is the studio that emerged from the ‘Reinhabiting NOLA’ conference. A double pilot studio is up and running, hoping to expand to six studios running concurrently if all goes according to plan. One studio is working on an affordable prototype for a house in conjunction with a community centre and affordable housing group in the Sixth Ward. The other is trying to tie that project into a larger scale vision for the neighbourhood as a whole, in my opinion a much harder project to take on as a ‘real’ project. At the scale of the single house the relationships are manageable and the boundaries clear, and the studio a well-adapted setting for carrying out intense collaborative student work. These relationships and boundaries become infinitely more complex at the neighbourhood scale, particularly in this situation. As a result students at the mid review seemed to have stayed within the safe boundaries of what can be physically measured - massing, street layouts, ‘green space’ (the apparent cure for all ills) - and represented through diagrams, while marginalising the social complexities of the area and failing to acknowledge the value systems which allowed them to casually demolish an entire housing project with the click of a mouse. Despite a claim to community consultation I searched in vain for one anecdote of an interaction with a resident which informed someone’s strategy.

V olunteers. The only people virtually to be seen in the ghost towns of the Ninth Ward and similar areas were clusters of students gutting houses on what had been termed the ‘alternative spring break’ project.

W aste. Toxic mostly. After the storm there was six feet of polluted sediment in some areas. The sediment has been cleared but the environmental hazards remain uncertain. The EPA is delaying making any sort of definitive statement about it, claiming more studies are needed. Barrels of DDT from a factory that once made Agent Orange during the Vietnam War were found in people’s living rooms. A consortium of architects and community groups have started the Katrina Furniture Project, a recycling and craft program which will train young unskilled workers in furniture making using the waste wood from the storm. And you can normally tell how many people are back in a neighbourhood by how many piles of debris there are outside people’s homes.

X. An aggressive, fluorescent branding marks each house in New Orleans, indicating when and by whom they were inspected after the flood. The number at the top marks the date, to the side which authority checked it, and at the bottom how many dead bodies were found. I’m glad to say that I only ever saw zeros.

Z ero feet above sea level. An extraordinary datum now exists across the whole city, the brown watermark scar on buildings which allows you to read how far the ground is below sea level at any given point. As you drive from Lakeview near Lake Pontchatrain back into the city it gradually decreases from eight feet and over, down to two or three until finally it disappears when you reach Uptown and the Garden District.

Austin Antics

2006-04-22T14:22:00.000-07:00

A weekend collaboration between Robie and me just before I left for New York. The mesh columns were already in place courtesy of Jay's sculpture class homework a few months previous. We added slightly wobbly shade structure composed of two sheets of cattle mesh (?) from the NYE Austin First Night installation, bamboo leaves trimmed from the garden, cardboard tubes from the garage, a bag of zip ties and some 2X4 stubs. It feels good underneath it in scorching Texas sun. Also carefully placed a storm-safe distance from the house.

New York baby....

2006-04-22T14:08:00.000-07:00

(from April 14)... I squeezed in this visit on my way home to London, elongating a stopover from Austin into a three day sensory overload of skyscrapers, graffiti, fire escapes, people-watching, bookshops, strong coffee and screeching subway trains. The city sidewalks sent some kind of vital energy fizzing up through my body and everything seemed vivid and surreal and thrilling. Staying in Fred’s loft space, which boasts elevated plywood nests, a giant warehouse window and proximity to the Hudson River, rounded things out nicely.

Some last minute research into people and places I could pester for insight revealed that the planets are indeed aligned. Things like….one organisation I wanted to visit, the Hester Street Collaborative, turned out to be co-run by a Rural Studio alumni I’ve met before - Alex Gilliam. He in turn recommended I contact Damon Rich of the Center for Urban Pedagogy, who Gretchen had already put me in touch with. I met both of them, visiting Alex and his band of charismatic high school interns at their office in Chinatown, which is tucked in between storefronts selling jellyfish and chopped eels….and Damon at his office in an old canning factory in Brooklyn, who inspired me with his anecdotes about getting an experimental non-profit off the ground. The two of them co-teach a weekly architecture class to high school students through the Cooper Hewitt education program. It happens ‘on-site’ at the Fulton St Mall, the main shopping area of Brooklyn, which, like most of New York, is engaged in a heated debate about the future of the area. I took part in the class on Wednesday afternoon, which involves the students sketching, interviewing, recording, improvising and the girls at least turning down repeated advances from crusing teenage males.

At the Pratt Center I had a stimulating two hour conversation with Tara Siegel, a Rose Fellow, who introduced me to some of the fascinating political complexities of working in the field of affordable housing in New York and gave me a good overview of their work which stretches across architecture, planning, policy, advocacy, fundraising and tenant organising.

Maybe best of all I met Jennifer Monson of iLAND, another friend of Gretchen’s, an experimental dancer who is interested in the collaborative potential of dance and science to explore kinetic understandings of nature. Her performances on vacant lots and across cities are informed by natural cycles and migration patterns that aim to dissolve mental dichotomies between nature and the built environment. One of the best facts I learnt from her was that certain rare plant species, which disappeared from wilderness areas in Maine and Vermont due to acid rain, have been emerging in vacant lots in Harlem where broken concrete slabs are producing unusually alkaline soils.

And apart from that…….I noticed that in New York, unlike anywhere else I’ve spent time in America, you enter the bathroom directly off the restaurant. You open a door next to your table and there it is…and always unisex because there’s only room for one. Space-saving strategies manifest themselves at all scales.

Read on for details on a symposium I rushed to off the plane on my first day (more aligned planets).....

Where: New York City, West 61st Street, just across the road from Central Park, near the giant Time Warner complex at Columbus Circle that was just a slick rendering on a billboard the last time I was here (four years ago).

What: ‘Should the Future be Designed? Alternative Approaches to Activism, Politics and Professional Practice in the Design Disciplines’

Who: All the people that the dazzling Ananya Roy at Berkeley weaves together in her lectures on cities and all the messy processes and politics that construct them, including David Harvey (‘Spaces of Hope’, ‘The Condition of Postmodernity’), Marshall Berman (‘All that is Solid Melts into Air’) and Michael Sorkin (‘Variations on a Theme Park’) (I haven’t really read any of these incidentally….)

Why: Because they clearly stole my research proposal so I had to check whether there was any litigation potential and that their ideas weren’t any better than mine.

When: Monday night, after transferring on standby to an earlier plane from Austin, lugging two suitcases on the subway to Fred’s apartment in Brooklyn, then dashing back onto the train into Manhattan and missing half of the event.

Of Special Note: Marshall Berman turns out to be a small, goblin-like, wildly-bearded radical who’s still trying to pretend it’s the sixties. His fluorescent tie-dye t-shirt was quite a contrast to the otherwise academic attire of his colleagues (wool sweaters over shirt and tie etc) and the perfect way to earn instant respect from his fresh-faced audience. I also learnt the word ‘urbicide’ from him, which means ‘murder of the city’.

What Else: David Harvey argued for a more sophisticated understanding in the design process of the larger social and political forces in which any project is embedded and “a better grasp of what the problems are in trying to design the future”. He also dismissed the Internet as a democratising tool when two thirds of the world don’t have access to electricity. Christine Boyer criticised the architectural avant-garde’s “inability to act” while “standing amongst the debris” of urban catastrophes and preferring to “dabble in the development of intensely radiating objects rather than the ensemble of the city at a much more complex level”. She cited Katrina, asking why seven months later there has been a total absence of large-scale projective schemes for rebuilding from the architectural profession with the singular exception of Andres Duany and the Congress for New Urbanism (interestingly the New Urbanists’ response to criticism from the ‘avant-garde’ is exactly that - they don’t have any better ideas themselves). Meanwhile, ironically it might be the military who is at the forefront of developing operational tools for understanding the city: “we’ve seen the future of warfare and it’s urban”. Unnerving, definitely.

Space for Action: Develop witty and unpretentious opening line in order to be able to approach Marshall Berman (or similar) during prosciutto-guzzling aftermath. As opposed to the current formula of staring wistfully from a distance like a weedy wallflower. I bought a book by David Harvey but even this lame excuse for interaction was doomed - he had already left so I couldn’t get him to sign it.

Houston, infamous city of freeways......

2006-04-22T13:56:00.000-07:00

(from April 01).......oil money, zoning freedom….and also it turns out gorgeous live oak boulevards and famous art institutions …. An hour stopover on my way to Austin from Berkeley turned into a two day stay when I decided to miss my flight, rent a car and meet Robie instead, who was on a trip with his boss to visit petrochemical plants outside the city. This also made possible a visit to Project Row Houses and the famed Menil Collection by Renzo Piano, which are in turn symbolic really of the incredible wealth and poverty that exist in the city. They are both centrally located, but divided by the I-10 freeway. On one side you enjoy the handsome live oaks, museums, chic antique stores and the Rice university campus. Across the other side I drove slightly self-consciously around a neighbourhood of dilapidated houses, vacant lots filled with wild flowers and boarded up bars and storefronts.

Project Row Houses was ‘open’, meaning that I could wander in and out of the eight renovated shotgun houses, each of which housed a fairly unremarkable installation tackling themes of race, poverty and social justice. The shotgun houses are complimented by a two story brick building at one end of the street, which houses a gallery, administration, a free bread counter and shelves of art magazines. The walls are filled with ‘before’ and ‘after’ photographs of the renovation process which was instigated by a group of young African-American artists with a vision to integrate the arts with grassroots community revitalisation. Another row of shotgun houses behind the galleries have been renovated for single mothers to live in rent-free while they pursue an education and I recognised four bigger houses behind those designed and built by Rice students as affordable housing prototypes for the area. Also on the 'campus' were the headquarters of the Row House CDC and the skeleton of a building which I found out later will become the on-site workshop and headquarters of the Rice Building Workshop.

Meanwhile over the other side of the freeway I enjoyed an unexpected William Christenberry exhibition at the Menil, including a photograph of downtown Greensboro in the thirties and a startling Dan Flavin installation in an auxiliary building. And then I had the pleasure of driving 45 minutes ‘out of’ the city, through miles of strip malls, to the Holiday Inn in Bayview, home to the most oil processing plants per square mile in the world…..or something reassuring like that.

The last vehicle in the world....

2006-04-04T22:39:00.000-07:00

.....that I imagined Shannon Flattery might be driving was a gold Mercedes. But the fact that she was made her all the more interesting, I like it when people don’t fit patterns of expectation. And besides it was a kind of retro 1970s model. So we drove around Richmond, homicide capital of the Bay Area, and she gave me a short history of her work and the project that she has been developing in the last couple of months.

I had contacted Shannon after receiving an email via a Berkeley list about her project in Boston, Touchable Stories, which engages neighbourhoods which suffer from high crime rates, poor employment prospects, gentrification pressure or all three. Similar to the premise of the Neighbourhood Story Project in New Orleans the idea is to empower residents to tell their own stories about where they live and in the process to challenge negative stereotypes. I wanted to meet Shannon because I am increasingly interested in what architects can learn from the qualitative methods used by artists working in the field of urban revitalisation. As a professional, your analytical tools inevitably condition how you come to understand a place and in turn how you choose to intervene. Architects tend towards information that can be represented in a diagram - physical attributes, quantifiable data, classifiable typologies (residential, commercial, open space, infrastructure etc). What can we learn from anthropological methods that seek to understand and define a place and its needs through narratives and stories?

The final outcomes of Shannon’s projects are interactive installations in a local ‘non-art’ space (a church hall, a disused municipal office….), a series of rooms by different artists, each exploring a particular theme which in some way defines the neighbourhood (for example languages, industries, landmarks, dreams, housing, spirituality, violence). The exhibit is open to the public for a year and often becomes a temporary social hub in the neighbourhood. During this time the organisers (a collaborative of artists and local residents) arrange special tours for ‘targeted’ groups. These are the people they believe need to hear the stories in particular - city officials, police, local businessmen, future investors, school teachers and so on.

The installation only begins to materialise after eighteen months of intense local interactions. This process takes a number of different forms, from interviews with up to a hundred individuals from a range of backgrounds, to community dinners (“to get people at the table whose voices should have been heard long ago”) and weekly volunteering for local organisations (“making ourselves useful too”). My favourite anecdote was about the tours of the city which Shannon has been given by cops of four different ethnic origins, African American, White, Hispanic and Asian, and the different perspectives they each have on the city. It was one of those who had introduced her to the best view of Richmond, which turns out to be from the parking lot of the golf course on the hill and which is also where we sat in the gold Mercedes while she explained how Richmond developed.

Since the realisation of each project depends on the participation of a network of local artists Shannon organised a dinner to which she invited a hundred artists who live in the area. She described how pleasantly surprised she was when sixty came and each one expressed a desire to help in any way they could. It was an interesting reminder that an ‘outsider’ can be a positive catalyst for local action.

I was also fascinated by how she had interpreted the relationship between Berkeley and Richmond, “two totally different worlds”. A wealth of research has been produced about Richmond in the past, “though you wouldn’t know it to look at the city”. Since much of it is stored at Berkeley, one of her goals is to provoke a discussion about how all that intellectual and financial energy can be channelled towards the city in more productive ways. So another of her dinners involved getting together as many academics as she could in Berkeley who had studied various aspects of Richmond in recent decades.

As we drove through the Iron Triangle, the ‘no-go’ area in the centre of the city so-called because it is framed by three railway tracks, Shannon was emphatic about the one thing she has continually learnt from her experiences - “that no-one has ever really taken the time to listen to the people who live here”. She is certainly honest about her bias against well-paid officials, consultants and….architects! Interestingly, her past installations have often been a catalyst for an influx of neighbourhood investment though this is not an explicit or even implicit goal. In this sense it will be interesting to follow her progress in Richmond which has suffered from disinvestment ever since the shipyards which effectively brought it into being closed after the Second World War (though a planning and design group in Berkeley has just been paid $1.5 million to draw up a new masterplan for the city…..) She drove us (Jay and me) out to an old Model T Ford Factory, the first on the West Coast (?), a giant edifice of a warehouse, which sits empty on the edge of the bay, beautiful and bleak, right next to the displaced city hall which apparently moved out into an isolated strip development while refurbishments were taking place and seems not to have raised the money to move back into town.

I had only a snapshot glimpse into Shannon’s project but her mode of working corresponds with what has caught my imagination about the people that I’m going to work with in Europe (more about that in another post), some of the speakers at Structures for Inclusion and the Rural Studio – the notion of the on-site presence, where interaction through everyday activities in everyday spaces dissolves the formal boundaries and professional divides of official ‘meetings’ allowing more subtle, complex understandings of a place to emerge. This unfortunately is the ‘time’ which is not easily categorised in the balance sheet of budget-tight consultation processes. I’ll look forward to seeing her developments when I return to Berkeley next Spring!

Structures for Inclusion...

2006-03-27T09:34:00.000-08:00

...in San Francisco, California. A conference walking a delicate line between sharing genuinely useful information with a well-intentioned, generally young crowd, hungry for inspiration on how to make viable careers in community-oriented work (includes me of course!)…..and an over-zealous back-slapping ritual in what can feel like a rather claustrophobic field. Lest I sound like a cynic let me be clear that the content was almost unanimously interesting and pretty varied. I am new to the conference thing so I suppose that on-stage gushing about colleagues is all part of it. In reality the overactive air conditioner was far more perplexing.

Highlights were definitely:

- Dan Piterra of the Detroit Collaborative Design Center, who was energetic and humorous and bombarded the audience with stunning statistics on Detroit, witty and beautiful installation projects which appropriated abandoned housing stock in the city (houses bound in clingwrap/planted with alfalfa bundles/wrapped in latex and then ‘peeled’ plus more) and sexy renderings accompanied by suitably gritty electronic beats.

- Antoine Bryant of Project Row Houses in Houston who was easily the tallest person at the conference told stories about fusing art with the restoration of historic shotgun homes, developing affordable housing and campaigning for policy change and ended his presentation with a spoken word call to action. All of our row developed an instant crush on him.

- The Library Initiative through the Robin Hood Foundation Project, which partners with New York based architects to design libraries for under-funded public schools in New York City. Lots of blobby oversized cushions, playful light details and bold graphics interspersed with clips of earnest kids talking about the importance of books (this unsurprisingly turned out to be the promotion video designed to charm potential donors into pledging hundreds of thousands of dollars).

Other people who took up more than half a page of notes in my sketchbook included Larry Scarpa of Pugh and Scarpa, whose practice has both a profit-led and non-profit arm. The latter, Livable Places, develops well-designed affordable housing and works to change planning policy in Los Angeles. He was only one example of the popular ‘happily-ever-after’ presentation tactic which involved an affectionate story about a colourful character framing the beginning and end of the talk. In his case an eccentric Florida folk artist (some connection about art and the everyday) seemed to have risen to national fame as soon as he started buying her paintings.

Also enjoyed insights into Design Corps, Charlottesville Community Design Centre, Public Architecture, Studio URBIS, Shelter for Life, the Tulane City Center (who I had just spent time with in New Orleans) and the City of Santa Cruz housing program.

Repeated themes included forging partnerships with community groups, establishing trust through on-site presence, calls to affect policy, the nuts and bolts of nonprofit administration, debates about the Architect’s Code of Ethics and how to incorporate community-based work into private practice (as opposed to through schools of architecture or nonprofit groups - definitely a key question for me this year). There was less truly interdisciplinary work (apart from some work with artists), for example with environmentalists, scientists or anthropologists (with the exception of insights into ‘Reinhabiting NOLA’ conference organised by the Tulane City Center) or ideas about design as a collective community process beyond just a consultation stage (another interest for me this year), with the exception of the Houston and Detroit projects.

Biggest irony: a ‘Structures for Inclusion’ conference which presents only the designers’ viewpoint on projects and sponsorship by ‘Design Within Reach’, a company which sells furniture upward of the $2000 mark. Most over-used word: ‘community’. Grossest phrase: ‘these people’. Most generic verb: ‘helping’ or perhaps ‘reaching out’. I was interested that ‘CDC’ in the context of my favourite Detroit program stands for Collaborative Design Center, rather than the more common Community Design Center and guessed that was a particularly intentional move. Having struggled with semantics a lot while developing my project I was disappointed that no-one really tackled those intricacies – the fact that ‘community’ can give a semblance of homogeneity to a group of people within which there might in fact be large disparities and conflicting value systems. And that the term is also unspecific on issues of representation – when we claim that the ‘community was involved’ exactly whose voices were heard and who were the (probably large majority of) people that weren’t part of the process?

Gretchen and I also agreed that the leftover vodka from the after-party on Saturday night should definitely have been served as bloody Marys the next morning. But all in all I found it an inspiring and thought-provoking two days. The end of the conference was naturally followed by an afternoon at the races, which in Berkeley turns out to be very different from the champagney aristocratey British version and more like an expanded version of the betting shops on the high streets – loud men, greasy burgers and cigarette smoke. The horse which we had special insider knowledge on, as well as at least a hundred dollars in bets between six of us, came last in its race by well over a length.

If you have a spare eighteen hours

2006-03-17T10:29:00.000-08:00

......take the train. You can depart from the centre of the city, the check-in takes two minutes and you’ll have a maximum of three fellow passengers. The first catch of my journey was that the train from Austin to San Antonio was running fifteen hours late (fifteen….) so I was bundled onto a stinky replacement coach instead.

In San Antonio there was a two hour stretch before the train left for New Orleans. Amazingly they were paying for taxis to take people to Denny’s for something to eat. I declined out of laziness mainly, though they do serve up a good pancake there, and munched on my slightly melted trail mix instead. The leisurely pace of proceedings and small number of passengers significantly increase chances of interaction. I debated with a lady sharing my church pew in the waiting room about whether the floor was shaking. I didn’t think it was.

Amtrak trains are double-decked, just like buses in London. There is something really exciting about going upstairs to your seat. There you will find that your feet don’t even reach the seat in front of you, that yours extends back to a horizontal position and that you are guaranteed two seats to stretch across because the whole train only has about eight passengers on it.

The train to New Orleans left on time, but for the first hour shunted back and forward in the station. For a whole hour, back and forth, back and forth. No clear reason why. This was 1 AM. I woke up from a reasonable sleep at sunrise…. 6am….in Houston! Still in Texas! A pink sky dramatically pierced by networks of freeways riding over the traintracks. It is quite amazing to me the untapped potential of train travel in this country, particularly coming from a European perspective. Strange to imagine how this country was once crisscrossed by a dense network of railroads now recorded by forlorn dents in the landscape in every small town you pass through. Odd to think that I could have once travelled from Newbern (my ‘hometown’ in Alabama) to Greensboro (my project site at the Rural Studio) by train. Honestly I think it is a tragedy that this country is not at the forefront of pioneering train travel. That said, the poetic sadness of the beautiful old brick warehouses and rusty silos and abandoned rail cars along the disused railroads is one of my favourite, surreal landscapes in America.

As a devoted fan of the Southern landscape travelling this route could not have been more thrilling. I sat glued to the window, alternating between sketchbook and videocamera. Still camera turns out to be completely inadequate for recording the experience. The train along the Gulf Coast gives you insights into the vast expanses of landscape between cities that you are denied by car travel (landscape equals fast food and gas stations for miles on end) or plane (landscape equals clouds or interesting abstract patterns of landforms). Because the train travels so slowly you have ample time to soak up the patterns of inhabitation: oil fields outside Beaumont, swamps and cypress trees in the Bayou, pine logging and cattle grazing, sparse settlements of trailers, enormous piles of scrap metal and fields of rusting cars, huge abstract forms of magnificent silos, giant sci-fi-ish powerplants, historic downtowns and church spires peeping over roofs in the distance, fields of yellow texas wild flowers, sudden openings onto wide brown murky rivers and the awkward beauty of industrial bridges that carry the trains across them, a dramatic fire outside Lake Charles filling the clear blue sky with menacing, billowing curls of black smoke.

I considered dropping all my Branner plans and dedicating the year to making an enormous linear drawing of the passage from Los Angles to Jacksonville Florida, which are the extents of the Sunset Limited (?) route I was travelling and collecting stories of lives along the railroad as I go. I can’t imagine a more thrilling way to spend my time than sitting in the sun drawing a magnificent silo while the amazing 50 car freight trains trundle onto their destination behind me. Trains turn me into a hopeless romantic. If anyone thinks I should do this instead please email me.

As we eventually pulled into New Orleans, snaking our way back and forth across the river past parking lots of FEMA trailers and neighbourhoods blanketed with blue tarps, conversations in our carraige turned to Katrina. One woman, perhaps a returning native kept saying ‘those levees man, they’re tripping me out, I thought they was big dam like things, but they just little five foot bumps they think they can keep the water out with”. She had some opinions on the government too. “If they gave people some materials and some food to eat for two weeks, their houses would be back up in no time, but they ain’t doing nothing”. Another man related a story of how his cousin knew he was alive only once he saw him on TV helping his grandmother into a helicopter harness from the roof of their flooded home. I also made friends with a guy who is commuting in from San Antonio every week to repair roofs. He gave me his card lest I meet anyone who might require his services.

I thought this was surely the best possible way to arrive in New Orleans for someone who has come to investigate the rebuilding process.

Driving over the state line into Alabama...

2006-03-08T14:51:00.000-08:00

[dating back to Feb 13th] [Chapter One of Four from Alabama trip]

.....is the closest I feel to going home on this side of the Atlantic, the once alien strip malls and trailer parks of the interstate landscape now seeming completely normal. But the Alabama which fires my imagination is found on the back roads, the charming if dilapidated Main Streets of once thriving small towns, the beautiful barns falling into disrepair, the abandoned family gas stations advertising at a dollar a gallon. I still believe the genius of The Rural Studio is in how it reverses the direction of the talented student, if just for a few months, and reinvents the rural landscape as a place of opportunity. In a way the most remarkable spatial organisation it has produced is not in the quirky forms of its portfolio of houses but rather in the colonisation of downtown Greensboro by young, energetic spirits who, without the usual roster of urban activities to fill their time, start occupying places and landscapes in new and creative ways. With a critical mass of like-minded people there and a steady stream of interesting people constantly coming through, living in Hale County became a giant adventure for me, fuelled by the exhilaration of opportunity and responsibility, the freedom of open space, of time spent outside, of a low cost of living, of a slower pace of life.

In the meantime, because of or in spite of the Rural Studio (who knows?), almost all of the Main Street stores in Greensboro are doing business, a dramatic contrast to any other comparable town we drove through on the way. There are now five or six renovated loft spaces, as opposed to two in progress when I was there. Once storage for the goods and grains sold in the stores below, they are now transformed into amazing living spaces with 18ft ceilings, ornate pressed tin ceilings, wainscoting and fireplaces, huge sliding doors, and clawfoot bath tubs rescued from old barns. Emily and Daniel, whose apartment we stayed in for the week, are living in theirs rent-free after a heroic renovation effort that is basically on-going.

Before arriving in Greensboro we had driven from Texas (deciding foolishly to take the scenic route, which meant we were still in the state seven hours after we left Austin) to Starkville, where we stayed for a couple of days with Jay, who is working at the Small Town Center, part of Mississippi State School of Architecture. Starkville is an intriguing place, with all the usual features of a small college town in the South - a charming downtown complimented by a sprawl of strip malls – but also with this curious little ‘new urbanist’ district where Jay lives - where you can find every type of classical building style packed densely into six blocks, from mini greek temples inhabited by frat boys, to brick terraced houses facing onto cobbled streets reminiscent of northern British towns, to three storey townhouses, almost unheard of outside the big cities. A gourmet food store, a wine bar and a cheesy margherita joint all within walking distance of Jay’s 150 sq ft studio which the three of us plus two dogs squeezed into. It’s been built up incrementally over forty years by one guy, now the mayor of Starkville, and though it might feel a little like a film set and be dominated by college students, all things considered I’d live there before a brick ranch house suburb any day.

The Small Town Centre has an admirable but difficult mission: advising small towns suffering the effects of policies outside their control – loss of their agricultural base predominantly - on new economic visions for their town. While I was there they were getting ready for a mayors of Mississippi conference. Meanwhile it seems like their post-Katrina work on the Gulf Coast is being somewhat overshadowed by the slick presentations of Andres Duany and his band of New Urbanist evangelicals.

The video camera got its first important outing save for its bumping around out of the car window across Texas, which resulted in at least an hour of completely useless footage. A two hour interview with Jay about his time at the Rural Studio (four years!) and his take on the participatory process (my research subject) was the perfect wake up call after three weeks with my nose in books and my consequent idea of what it meant. Writers on the subject will tell you that the participatory process is one that is not framed exclusively on the terms of, and by the tools of, the designer. Rather, to avoid a singular interpretation (that of the designers) of a situation that may be driven by different sets of values to the users, supple methods are required that interpret needs and desires which may not have been articulated before, particularly not in conventional architectural language. Though they might be translated eventually into an architectural proposal by the designer, the input may not begin life in these terms.

What I realised I hadn’t understood, until listening to Jay talk about his projects, is that a participatory design process which does not begin with discussions over plans and sections, details or materials, may never arrive at those aesthetic or technical discussions either. The designer may still make those decisions alone, but shift the process and language which informs those decisions. For example…Jay and his teammates were building a new backstop for the Newbern baseball team. They were attending the games but their attempts to engage the crowds and players in design conversations were unsuccessful. They organised a town meeting in their studio, where they dutifully pinned up drawings, eager to receive feedback about their ideas. But only three people showed up and they had little to say about what they were shown.

Did this mean that the team didn’t care about getting a new backstop? Not necessarily, but the way of talking about it was completely and utterly alien to the players, who had never encountered an architectural drawing before or thought about their backstop in terms of materials and details. In the end one Sunday Jay was invited to pick up a bat. From then on he played every week with the team for the rest of the season, while his teammates continued to make friends in the crowds. Over this time they came to notice certain things about the way the existing layout was ordered – all the bleachers were shaded in the afternoon with the bench of the away team being the only one that wasn’t, all the vendors had their same spot for selling catfish or beer each week. These observations led them to drop all their plans for new architecturally interesting seating plans and quirky vendor booths. When the end of the season came they took down the old fence with the help of some of the team and simply built a new and beautiful sculptural backstop of steel columns and chainlink fencing - decisions about which had been made entirely by them, but based on their months of attending and playing at the games.

When the baseball season started back up Jay said, to my surprise, that no-one particularly commented on it. Baseball continued as it always had done, the same food being cooked, the same teenagers strutting, kids playing and young guys competing for the flashiest rims on their tyres. When we tell stories of the Rural Studio people like to hear best the tales of transformed lives, perhaps the baseball team who went from losing every game to the top of their league courtesy of their new field. But in fact, perhaps fortunately, it is much more subtle than that. Was it a participatory design process? Maybe not in the way that I read in my books it should be. But in the fact that Jay played on the team for four years, becoming in the process a trusted and integral part of that community and able to make decisions in that context, I think more so than any kind of survey process could ever be. The backstop continues to impress visiting architects and new students with its detailing and gracious form and for everyone else, it probably does a better job than the last one of keeping stray balls in the field.

Likewise, in building a house for Music Man - a prophetic, eccentric, charismatic bachelor who communicates in a completely different way to anyone I’ve ever met - a conversation about walls and doors and materials is simply never going to unfold in a way that helps you make straightforward design decisions. Instead, as second year instructor, Jay encouraged students to spend time on site, clearing the vegetation, going to church with Music Man, building first a small room he was able to move into from his dilapidated trailer. That same room also allowed them to build mock-ups of the details for the house and to speculate about how Music Man might inhabit his future home. There were endless debates in the studio that I can remember about what kind of attitude should be adopted in relation to Music Man’s passion for hoarding, particularly plastic bottles and bags and redundant electronic equipment. The space in which he lived in his original trailer was actually carved out of a dense mass of these agglomerated objects. Should students try to reform his unhygienic penchant for ‘junk’? In the end a decision was made to build a house with a really tall pitched roof, which would retain a feeling of spaciousness even if he filled the house up again after a few years. Sure enough, three years later exactly this has happened and the generous roof pitch performs just as the designers hoped it would. No-one really knows if Music Man ever uses his shower and toilet which he never had before this house. And as close to him as we are in a funny way, I don’t feel like I’ll ever really understand what moves him to label and retain every bag and bottle he comes into contact with, to record every movement and visitor on a piece of paper and attach it to a clothes line that is strung across the middle of the room, to store his giant speaker and guitar in his bathroom. But that really is part of the magic of knowing him, the poetry of coming into contact with a reality so far from your own and finding friendship nonetheless.

Putting together this proposal...

2006-03-05T11:33:00.000-08:00

....has been one of the best and most frustrating things I’ve done in my life. It’s gone through so many iterations and had input by so many different people, the wretched thing has probably been rewritten now about twenty times. After years of tacking words onto the end of my visual projects at the last minute, I’ve realised that this process is in fact not dissimilar to a studio design project, a constant reworking and tweaking that you’re never quite satisfied with. The difference this year is that I have to impose my own deadlines…. much harder!…..

The research has shifted from being broadly interested in the process of activist architects who work in unconventional ways in vaguely ‘other’ locations, to a more focused (I think!) exploration of the modes of communication and exchange the same architects use to inform their participatory design processes.

‘Participation’ is this strange word that bumps around a lot in the field of architecture I’m interested in, referring basically to the empowering of clients and users to play an active role in the design process. It is meant to tap into the contextual knowledge that the architect doesn’t have access to, that which is embedded in the everyday experiences of the client/user. This kind of process is a given in private residential projects where the client and user are one and the same and, since they’ve sought out the architect, likely to be active in the expression of what they want or need. But it is a much trickier process when comes to projects where the client and user are different, large scale development projects or community projects where there are multiple stakeholders. ‘Participation’, where possible, is assumed to be a good thing. But the premise of my proposal is….“Given the multitude of ways in which the input of users can be engaged, the participatory process is really a creative project in itself”……(in other words it is possible for it to be badly designed too)…. “It requires the design of organisational frameworks and communication tools and the negotiation of knowledge and power imbalances, conflicting value systems, multiple agendas and social and cultural divides…..”

In architecture we are trained to use a particular language, a particular set of tools, to talk about our ideas in a particular way and to define our role in a particular way. But the ways in which we communicate and collaborate with other disciplines and non-architects is a subject that receives much less attention. To me, how you set up that collaborative process, particularly with people who aren’t trained in design, is really interesting and not straightforward either. How useful are plans to someone that’s not used to reading them? All the people I am interested in take on this subject in an innovative and creative way, stepping outside the usual frameworks and tools, challenging modes of practice and expanding the ways in which we imagine working as an architect.

My interest definitely stems from my time in Alabama where so many factors caused me to question my preconceptions about the design and production of architecture: how ideas were talked about, the range of people you interacted with on a daily basis apart from your peers and professors, the studio being an old barn right in the centre of town, communicating design ideas with a client from a very different socio-economic background, how the energy of students was harnessed collectively to achieve results that never would have been possible alone, newsworthy architecture suddenly being produced in the deepest recesses of the rural South…

Right now, having got the research to a stage I’m sort of satisfied with, later than I would have liked perhaps, I am in the middle of negotiations about where I’m going, so more details coming soon! Meanwhile reports from the trip back to the Rural Studio next up…..

Like most things I do...

2006-03-03T17:31:00.000-08:00

……..this blog is a little late in arriving. Luckily the number of friends inquiring politely as to its whereabouts reached a critical mass and last night I sat down to dabble with HTML code for the first time. What this basically means is that I’ve been too much of a design snob all these months (it’s been approximately a year since my friend Hana’s blog inspired me to consider one) to use an off-the-shelf template, finding myself appaulled at the corporate style headings and gaudy patterned backgrounds. Despite all pretensions not to be, it turns out I am that dreadfully predictable architect: I like my web pages white.

So here it is. What’s it for? I seemed to have acquired a bad habit dating back to 2003 for moving to places where my friends and family aren’t. As soon as I settle I seem to pack my bags and move on. As a result I’m in possession of a spidery network of friends I’m hopeless at keeping in contact with. Now I’m at it again, this time embarking on a year of travel thanks to a generous grant from the University of California, Berkeley, where I have been doing a Masters for the last eighteen months. This should mean that there will be something interest on here from time to time, better at least than anything I had to report last year (stayed in the studio again until midnight, ate chicken curry from Julie’s Healthy Cafe, limited myself to two cups of coffee from Strada). There will be architecture stuff for those of you interested in my research and hopefully not too much of it for those of you that aren’t. Either way this blog is for the dear readers of it, so let me know how it is for you.

Meanwhile this debut posting is burdened with the challenge of summarising the last six weeks, which was made up of many hours in front of the computer and books in Texas during January (which, in the cowboy state, feels like perfect English summer), followed by a road trip across the South to favourite old haunts in Alabama in February. Original plans to go to Caracas in January were postponed in favour of sorting out first where I was going the rest of the year, who I was visiting and what exactly I was going to be researching (another post coming shortly). Old friends and new projects in Alabama served as a testing ground for a recently acquired video camera (!), interviews and experiments in how to record information as I’m ‘on the road’, as well as providing plenty of fodder for thought (another post coming shortly) as I get my project started. I’m back in Austin now, planning a two-week trip to New Orleans before flying out to Berkeley for the Structures for Inclusion conference and to poke my nose into the thesis studios in Wurster Hall, where the all-nighters are no doubt already in full swing. After that I will finally be leaving the country, heading for the great and glorious lands of Europe while the bank balance is still reasonably balanced.

This blogging thing is sort of fun.