Upcoming adventures
I’m sitting at the airport again, about to embark on a five or six stop trip over the next month. Oh my!
Speaking-wise, my first stop is the ACSA (Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture) annual conference in Montreal, one of my favorite cities in the world. I’m giving another paper on Cedric Price and the Oxford Corner House, archival research that I did at the Canadian Centre for Architecture where I spent the month of July.
In just one week, South by Southwest Interactive for my 14th time! Benjamin Bratton and I are doing a panel called “Urban Technology on the Dark Side:” 10 examples of urban technology on the scary, nefarious and strange side.
Also: two separate trips to San Francisco, one for a Cisco Urban Innovation Group event (between Montreal and SXSW), the other for the presentation of the Institute for the Future project I’ve worked on the last six months, and then LA for the major pass-or-fail crit for my thesis students in Art Center’s Graduate Media Design Program.
So: dizzyingly busy, a nice counterpoint to the quiet February I had in Princeton. I’m psyched.
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It’s been very productive month in Princeton, even if I am channeling John Nash in my organizing of little slips of paper in pursuit of the big arguments for my dissertation. I’m interested in what Katherine Hayles refers to as “how information lost its body” and how it gets rematerialized, not in bodies (which is her focus) but in architectural objects and spaces. Ultimately, I’m looking to explain how these broader theories and explanations might be bounced against Christopher Alexander’s design processes, Nicholas Negroponte’s Media Room, the Architecture Machine Group’s Spatial Data Management System projects, and Cedric Price’s building-sized information systems.
Is this where I’m headed? (From A Beautiful Mind. John Nash still lives in Princeton, so it’s not that far a stretch.)
In the course of last week’s reading frenzy, I’ve blown through books by Katherine Hayles, John Johnston, Friedrich Kittler, Donna Haraway, Niklas Luhmann, and Lev Manovich (and more that I can’t remember right now), as well as a bunch of shorter articles. It was an intense amount of material to not just read but parse enough to quote. I then cut up the quotes, recategorized them and put them into new piles. The piles all reside in envelopes, with titles like “embodiment/disembodiment” and “media/medium” and “processing and code” and “modes and operations.” This project isn’t dealing with my archival material or the historical material I have on cybernetics, artificial intelligence and the history of computing in architecture — that’s separate — but it should give me some perspective on the project. Finally, I’m not feeling blocked but rather driven to write, if only to not lose the train of thought I’m following that the hundreds of scraps of paper encapsulate. Unless I go crazy in the process. That’s also possible.
Also up this month: writing a lexicon entry on the computer in architecture for Joan Ockman’s book on the 300 years of architectural pedagogy and writing a piece for the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (JSAH) on Papers 2… and that’s in addition to the adventures on which I’m embarking, the subject of my next post.
neb 4.0! happy birthday, dear friend!
When I first heard about Neb, I believed he was the Snuffleupagus. My friends told me about him but he was never in town when I was in San Francisco. I believed him to be invisible. Given the many superpowers Neb holds, it would be a viable possibility. But then he materialized at eTech in San Diego in 2004, threw my arms around him and became a passenger in the nebmobile, virtually and when in the same place, zoomingly.
My vocabulary and my world have never quite been the same.
Happy zooming 40th, dear Neb. I’m sorry to miss the party this week but hope you’ll enjoy the NebGreetings from near and far.
love,
molly
My Tummelvision episode is up!
I got to tummel last week! I was the guest on Tummelvision, where I talked about architecture and interactivity and a bunch of other things with the lovely and wonderful Deb Schultz and Kevin Marks. It was great fun. If you’d like to listen, it’s right here. Thank you guys so much for having me.
Oh the places you’ll see
Lots of travel. Lots of projects. Lots of papers and writing. Lots of arguing with the structure of my dissertation. Lots of airplanes. Lots of mud and melting snow in Princeton, where I sit at my desk right now. It’s the quiet before the storm — I’ll post about what’s coming up in my next post!
Since I last posted, here are some places I’ve been.
Shanghai, China, October 2010
The Bund
Me in a cab under the blue-lit megastructure urban highways
Umeå, Sweden, December 2010 (brr!)
I was a guest at the HUMLab and spoke at the Media Places conference.
Munich (and also Düsseldorf, not pictured), Germany, December 2010
Glühwein with the lovely Magdalen Powers.
Venice, CA, off and on, October 2010–February 2011
Lifeguard houses on Christmas Day
There’s also been Minneapolis (twice to see family), New York (Microsoft Social Computing Symposium), Sacramento, San Francisco and Burbank (Institute for the Future).
I have a tendency to think I’m not getting enough done — probably because the dissertation writing is the hardest part– but I’ve been up to a bunch of things:
- I was invited to bat for the home team: I gave a paper called “To the first machine that can appreciate the gesture: Nicholas Negroponte and the Architecture Machine” at the Teaching Architecture Practicing Pedagogy conference at Princeton last weekend. Outstanding conference and great community of scholars and ideas on architecture practice and pedagogy. I also lectured on Negroponte as a guest speaker in a proseminar at Princeton in December.
- Working on a project I love at the Institute for the Future with two people I greatly admire, Anthony Townsend and Jake Dunagan. Lots of travel around California for fascinating conversations, workshops and interviews.
- Interviewing Nicholas Negroponte for publication in an upcoming book on the 150 year anniversary in the MIT School of Architecture. Was paid an embarrassingly high compliment from the man himself.
- Finishing a little project on communication systems for a future exhibition.
- Wrote a short piece in Rumor (Princeton School of Architecture publication) about the Shanghai workshop we conducted, Soft Energy Infrastructure
- Turned my fascination with and research on pneumatic tubes as an article for Cabinet
- Continue to advise master’s five students in the exciting Graduate Media Design Program at Art Center in Pasadena. It’s great to be a fly on the wall of their creative processes.
… and still trying to go running and do yoga here and there, to read self-help books and get decent sleep and cook good food. No wonder the blog ends up in last place!
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Beatriz Colomina, me, Janet Vertesi at the Princeton School of Architecture.
It’s been a wonderful month in Princeton and it’s about to heat up into a whole bunch of travel. I write this from Newark Airport, where I’m in the President’s Club on a friend’s membership, feeling sad to leave autumn on the East Coast and excited for Los Angeles and Shanghai.
On Thursday, Janet Vertesi and I presented to the Media+Modernity lecture series at Princeton. Media+Modernity spans several departments, including architecture, art history, history, German, English and comparative literature. (The program also offers a graduate-level certificate.) The lectures typically pair two people, often within Princeton but sometimes from outside. In this case, Janet meant an inclusion of sociology and history of science in our number.
It was great — good energy and a lively audience. Janet presented “Seeing Like a Rover” about her Mars Rover mission research, the ways that the researchers embody aspects of the Rover and the use of images. I presented my ongoing research about Cedric Price’s Oxford Corner House (1965–66) as well as the Birmingham & Midlands Institute Headquarters (1967–70). The two projects incorporate similar themes — BMI/HQ is a continuation of sorts from OCH — but neither have been written about or discussed with much frequency.
A panel titled “Responsive Architecture” for the ACSA (Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture) accepted my paper on the Oxford Corner House to their annual convention in Montreal (!!!) from March 3–6. You already know how much I love Montreal. I’m delighted to return and at that, to present the research I conducted at the Canadian Centre for Architecture.
Last night, we hosted a Hannah Arendt nightcap hour at my place in Princeton. It made sense: a few people are in a seminar devoted to her work; most of the rest of us have read her, she was the first woman to be a full professor at Princeton (a decade before women undergraduates could attend the university). Daniela and I made glühwein, Daria made bread, Anna-Maria made popcorn. Not sure who the next political scientist or philosopher will be who we fête, but I’m certain it will involve fondue and raclette.
Now, I’m waiting for a plane back to LA, where I’ll meet with my writing advisees and attend their Work in Progress presentations at Art Center and spend some time at home with my boyfriend. Next Tuesday, I go to Shanghai to help organize the Soft Energy Infrastructure workshop with Princeton’s Center for Architecture, Urbanism & Infrastructure. It’s my second trip to Shanghai–I was there in 2007 for a project–and my fourth to China since 1997. There’s so much more to say about it but rest assured, you’ll hear about it before I board a flight next week for points further west. I’m then back to LA just five days later at the beginning of November for crits at Art Center. Work continues on dissertation chapters, job applications, an article I’ll submit to Cabinet and um, I guess a bunch of other things. I’m excited for the travel but will miss my friends and my framework in Princeton and the gorgeous fall leaves.
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What comes next? It’s been a big question for me lately. I’m in the fourth year of five funded years of my PhD and in my sixth year of graduate school. Do I want to stay in academia? Do I want to do corporate R&D? Consulting? Thinktank? Start a company? My background is different than that of the other people in my architecture program (and with very few exceptions, with architecture in general), so it’s unlikely I’d pursue a traditional architectural history position. But this week, I found out that an academic position is open that speaks directly to my multifaceted background. I’m going to apply. There’s no downside to it. At the very least, it’s a good opportunity for me to try to put myself on the academic market and to go through the focusing process. And if I land it, it would be tremendously exciting.
I’ve refocused my dissertation proposal to hone in on the architecture and information/artificial intelligence aspect, moving away from characterizing it as generative computing. It makes me see that I’ll be able to incorporate a lot of the writing I’ve already done in various papers so far. I’m very lucky to have such a supportive committee. It makes me see this dissertation as a real thing that will not only come together, but that I will complete. A year ago, that seemed so far away. It even seemed far away when I was writing the original dissertation proposal. But now, it’s organizing itself. It’s coming together.
I’ve been reading media theory this week in order to try to situate the projects and practices I’m writing about. At bat: Jean Baudrillard, Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Friedrich Kittler. I still kick myself for not taking the media theory class two years ago — it would have come in handy — though I loved the All-Marx-All-The-Time class I took in its place.
We’re getting things set for the Princeton Center for Architecture, Urbanism and Infrastructure (CAUI) workshop in Shanghai — my flights are booked and I’ll be there the last week of the month. We’ve also begun to put in place the content strategy (including the social media strategy). I’m enjoying the collaboration. We span more than 50 years and every level of higher education from Mario Gandelsonas, the director, through PhD, master’s in architecture, and undergraduate students. Two of the M.Archs were in the writing group I ran two years ago: now we’re peers in this effort. I like how things flatten.
Finally, this week I’ll be speaking at the Media + Modernity lecture series at Princeton on Thursday (announced in my previous post). It’s exciting to have the opportunity to present my research to my colleagues across the school.
And then the travel picks up: New Haven, Boston, LA, Shanghai, all between now and October 27. The quiet in Princeton is a kind respite.
Very excited about this. I’m speaking in the Media + Modernity lecture series at Princeton on Thursday, October 14th along with my dear friend Janet Vertesi. I’ll be talking about Cedric Price and she’ll be talking about her dissertation research on images and the Mars Rover. If you’re interested, if you’re on campus or around Princeton, do come.
weeknote 18
I’ve been back in Princeton for just over a week and the heavy air of late hurricane season finally gave way to crisp autumn evenings. It’s my favorite season and it smells wonderful outside — a mix of Lake Carnegie and trees, a chorus of lazy crickets as the soundtrack.
Coming back gave me an opportunity to meet up with Christine Boyer (my advisor) and Ed Eigen (my first reader) about the research I did at the Cedric Price Archive and in Nicholas Negroponte’s personal archive. They’re not surprised to hear that I’ve discovered my original dissertation proposal contains about 5 dissertations, and they’re happy to hear the direction I’m going. Christine told me to retheorize, so I’ve been reading Paul Edwards’ The Closed World as a model of writing about imbricated information-technology-society hybrids. I will start writing an introduction of sorts this coming week, using it as a fulcrum to get into the architects I’m writing about. Having Janet Vertesi in town is quintuply amazing in this regard. She’s in Princeton’s Society of Fellows for a three-year fellowship and is just the right person for me to talk to about the history of technology aspects of my project. She’s also become a very close friend and on top of that, she and her boyfriend Craig live blocks away — a great mix of work and pleasure.
I also started digging into Richard Saul Wurman’s work in the 1970s. My last blog post mentioned some of what I’m curious about: the 1972 The Invisible City theme at the Aspen Design Conference and the 1976 AIA Convention, “The Architecture of Information.” It would be great to interview him as I did Nicholas Negroponte a few months ago and even better if he has archival material: the AIA has been of little help and I’ll need a trip to Chicago to get the rest of the material on the Invisible City conference.
Other things this week:
A lovely trip to New York with numerous meetings with friends. Richard Nash and I finally met face-to-face for breakneck-speed breakfast after numerous near misses. Alex Deschamps-Sonsino was in town with her good friend Karola and we wiled away a lazy afternoon in Brooklyn. Jennifer Brook and I saw the most excellent Sarah Sze show at the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, made a trip to Printed Matter and connected with Christian Svanes Kolding for a quick bit at the Standard. Alex Wright and I met up for the first time in a few years to catch up about the history of technology, babies, marriages, and relationships and meditation.
Mark Wigley came to the Radical Architecture Education seminar — the PhD colloquium — to talk about Buckminster Fuller, John McHale and the design department at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. It was great. Bucky was loved and hated: the students all had to be reprogrammed after his stays on campus. He has a history with Princeton, with 9 visits in the 50s and 60s (and one in 1929). They built tensegrity domes here on campus near the architecture lab. McHale is an interesting figure to me, especially with his work in futures studies.
Coming up this week: I’m extending my stay in Princeton and am looking forward to getting a lot of writing done. Jorge Pardo, who just won a MacArthur “genius grant” is speaking at the architecture school. On Saturday, Axel Kilian is organizing a robotics seminar and I’ll be a critic. There are birthday parties and good dinners and a lot of things to do.
You so wish you could attend these two conferences.
But you won’t be invited.
You’re more than 34 years too late.
There’s “The Invisible City,” the theme of the 1972 International Design Conference Aspen. It promised to
“address the implications of making the invisible city visible: of changing misuse into use and apathy into engagement. The conference will explore the programs, philosophies and materials that use the resource of our man-made environment for learning. The conference will address the architectural, planning, design, economic and political implications of these educational alternatives.”
Then, there’s the 1976 AIA (American Institute of Architects) Convention in Philadelphia. The conference brochure states, “We live in the invisible city. A place where public information is not public: a place that is not maintained because it is not creatively used.”
Both were chaired by Richard Saul Wurman, at that time an architect in Philadelphia who had grown increasingly interested in the mechanism and system of information and the process not only of designing information… but what now gets called “architecting” it.
More on the 1976 “Architecture of Information:”
“Wouldn’t a city — any city — be more useful and more fun if everybody knew what to do in it, and with it? As architects, we know it takes more than good-looking buildings to make a city habitable and usable. It takes information: information about what spaces do as well as how they look; information that helps people articulate their needs and respond to change.
“The resources of a city are its people, places and processes. It is our collective attitudes toward these resources that either encourage the destruction of the city through apathy and abandonment or reaffirm the necessity of the city to civilized progress and life itself by participation and use. Use as the place for learning; participation as the involvement of everybody in the role of teacher. People telling about what and why they’re doing what they’re doing where they’re doing it–the show and tell is the city itself.
Wouldn’t these be great conference sessions today?
Frank Gehry and Doreen Nelson offered “The School Room: Analogue of the City.” There’s a session called “Space Doctors: Understanding How People Use Public Spaces” led by Don Clifford Miles. Even understanding gets its own architecture: “The Architecture of Understanding” by Marley & Ronald Thomas.
Data visualization? Try this: “Visualization of complex ideas” led by Jonas Salk (yes, *that* Jonas Salk)! “How to spec an ‘interface,’ detail an ‘input’ and supervise a ‘programming process’” — in 1976. The father of computer graphics, William Fetter, offered a session on “Computer graphics and the urban perception,” while Ivan Chermayeff offered “Communication in architectural environments” and Michael and Susan Southworth explored “Communicating the city.”
It is, of course, the conference where Wurman popularized the term “architecture of information” in the keynote speech he gave.
Makes me want to reconvene or revisit some of these sessions. What if we asked people today to take these themes and give talks? Who would our Salk be? Could we invite some of these people to speak?
