Nothing really made much sense, but the ubiquity of groups spontaneously breaking out and dancing was awesome.

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Inspired by both razzle dazzle camouflage and my middle school trapper keeper, this barrier entry presents a strong graphic face to the street. While the concept of camouflage may certainly seem like a contradictory tact for a protective barrier whose sole purpose is to remain unhidden, by using bold, angular geometric forms to blur the barrier’s edges, this in fact increases its perceived range. The illusory effect of the forms induce nearby traffic to slow down, producing a safer, more bike and pedestrian friendly thruway.

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When I first saw this image of my block from the 40s, I knew it was something I wanted to share. Sure, part of it was a sense of pride, that our seemingly nondescript, uptown block once held a moment in time that was deemed important enough for someone to capture. And further, that that historical memory was saved, and became indicative of the history of the subway and the city. Properly fitting amongst a slideshow of once momentous occasions such as crowds cheering with Fiorello at the opening of the 34th St station and documentary photos of the surprisingly frequent automobile on train accidents. But it was also the content of the image.
The included caption was such:

1940: In a view north from 106th Street, only the supports of the old Ninth Avenue elevated line remained as the push to go underground continued.

As the subway ceded elevation in favor of the earth, the Amsterdam avenue elevated train disappeared. I can only imagine the revelation as light and some semblance of uninterrupted silence returned to the street. This image captured a frozen moment of transition, where the elevated train could be either in the act of disassemblage or erection, and with it the hope of revitalization. The newness and flux of urban change was just as relevant then as now, and should serve as a reminder that the present isn’t static and transitions are as true in the New York of 2011 as in 1941. However, that truism seems to have become forgotten in a city where there are now over 25,000 buildings and 100 neighborhoods classified as historic and under the jurisdiction of the NY Landmarks Commission, complete with all the associated zoning regulations and limitations on new building.

The QR code was translated into a laser cut ready file via F.A.T. lab’s QR_STENCILER utility. Using marking chalk, the stencil was painted on the street near to where the original photographer stood in 1941. All in all, this rudimentary, proto-augmented reality was created on the cheap in under four hours.

The removal of the overhead train tracks and the introduction of smart phones in the neighborhood are both changes to be resisted or encouraged. The means of accessibility to this installation are still beyond the means of many people in the area, and as ubiquitous as they may be among some, phones that can read a qr code are still not available to all. In that way, the moment in the original photo and this street marking can define a line through two points, the past and present, collapsed into one and defined by and within the smartphone. The direction and ultimate meaning of that vector is dependent on your own personal point of view. My initial inclination was to create a fantastical image to represent the street in 2081, but that would be devoid of meaning and furthered severed from people’s daily reality. By referring to a historic, shared reality, ultimately then, the means of this technological view of the past is as much of a harbinger of potential futures of the neighborhood as any fantasy image could ever hope to be.

With a budget under $300, the installation is realized as a spatial prototype for how a fleeting work can provoke an increased engagement between users and public space. Built with over 200 led lights and conceived to take maximum advantage of a temporarily repurposed historic building, the work becomes as ephemeral as a passing comet, creating a new constellation in the night sky, visible from the streets of Brooklyn for one night only.

Following from the dispiriting failures of 001, 002 proved to be more successful, and not only because of it’s pumpkin orange color, but because it wasn’t cleared of books within 6 hours and the empty shelves themselves weren’t removed after 10 days. I attribute this mostly to an adjustment of tactics and location. Every block has its own subtleties and micro-urban climates, one block is boarded up with for “rent signs” while the next is a thriving pocket of activities and street-level engagement. By moving to a location 8 blocks further south, 002 was placed nearer to a major thoroughfare – 96th street – and received a more steady stream of mixed pedestrian traffic leaving the express train stop on Broadway and by virtue of being closer to street level retail (a large CVS), educational (a school and church) as well as the residential apartments along 97th street. 001 just didn’t get enough foot traffic and frankly felt deserted. I thought being near a hostel and school would generate some interest, but the hostel is an imposing Victorian Gothic structure with a decidedly prison-like bent reflecting its previous use as a nursing home for “Respectable, Aged and Indigent Females” and unsurprisingly generates little sidewalk traffic and even less urge to stop and inspect some books in a phone booth.

In an attempt to encourage sharing and free distribution of the initial selection of books, I didn’t mark the books in any way. But in lieu of the entire initial selection of 001′s books being carted off within a few hours, I tested out being more explicit and treating the books more like a library. Almost like a Dewey decimal number taped to the spine of a library book, I added a visible logo to the bottom of each spine. I hoped this would prevent the books from easily winding up in the hands of sidewalk book resellers, but I fear that the marking implies an ownership that prevents a casual exchange of taking and leaving their own books. I observed a number of people reach out and pick up a book, flip through it, but then return it to the shelf. Some even doubled back for a second look and to engage in a closer inspection of the shelves, but they still refrained from actually taking a book. Perhaps feeling hesitant to, I don’t know, steal/vandalize (irony) something that’s out in public? I can see how there might be a stigma there, to not just keep walking straight along the sidewalk with your head down, but to stop and engage with the street. I intentionally wanted to avoid any directions, like a sign that would say something along the lines of “hey this is for sharing books, you can leave some here” and I still want to avoid anything that seems overtly prescriptive, but after seeing people hesitate when confronted with 002, perhaps there is a more subtle way to gently describe an intended use.

Even as they are rendered obsolete by the ubiquity of smartphones, I’m interested in pay phones because they are both anachronistic and quotidian. Relics, they’re dead technology perched on the edge of obsolescence, a skeuomorph hearkening back to a lost shared public space we might no longer have any use for. Something to be nostalgic for, in the way I can’t think about a phone booth without conjuring up images of an old, impatient woman banging on the door to one while I was inside using a calling card to ask for money. And of course they are nuisance, basically pedestrian level billboards that only blight certain neighborhoods (good luck finding a payphone in Tribeca, while there are eight separate phone kiosks on one block between 108th and 109th streets and Columbus Ave). But they can also be a place of opportunity, something to reprogram and somewhere to come together and share a good book with your neighbors.

All the books were donated by local residents and the plywood was milled by Kontraptionist.

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I’ve used genetic algorithms for form finding with a previous project, and that time I was using a tenuous connection between catia, modeFrontier and Robot. So I was excited to see grasshopper begin to natively implement an evolutionary solver with Galapagos. As an initial experiment I started with a classic, something simple – I wanted to find a tessellated form that would enclose the maximum volume using the smallest surface area. I’d like to think that this would produce something unexpected, but it’s pretty much the definition of a sphere. I set up the parametric model to wiggle all over the place with various triangulated densities and differing number sided polygons at each joining segment. My hypothesis was that the form would tend toward symmetry and evolve into the aforementioned spherical shape. I believed that the polygons would tend toward the most sides possible to more closely approximate a circle, later generations evolving away from a triangle toward an icosagon. (Just like on Flatland!)

A couple of observations: Galapagos pretty quickly found the overall shape – smaller radii at the extremes and bulging in the middle – the beginning of a sphere. However, while it tended toward bilateral symmetry, it kept a kink in the first segment that prevented the shape from being perfectly symmetrical. I think the solver got stuck in a local minimum as opposed to a global minimum. Perhaps with a higher mutation level or letting it run for a longer amount it could have jumped out of this. On further checks I found that it was correct, after 30 generations and over 2500 iterations, the surviving croissant-like shape of the optimal designs did have a better SF:V ratio than a perfectly symmetrical design. Perhaps it had something to do with the setup of the parametric model or the way the facets resolve themselves at the extremities?

But in general my hypothesis was proven correct. Which leads to the initial problem with Galapagos. There are a lot of opportunities with this type of experiment and people more clever than me will surely do them, but when you can only solve for one objective it becomes difficult to create truly complex solutions. For instance, with my surface area/volume problem there is only one true pareto solution. Eventually Galapagos will find it, or with enough time and a calculator I could calculate this myself. There is one single, optimal solution, it’s just hidden somewhere amongst a number of parametric sliders. Unless you start getting into multiple, competing objectives, then the pareto point becomes a curve and there are multiple valid solutions, each one involving certain trade offs and a criteria for selection. Say you wanted to find a form with the minimum srf area:volume ratio, but also that form had to have the fewest structural members, or provide the most shade on June 21st, or spatially provide the most potential revenue stream for a project stakeholder. That’s when it gets really interesting and opens the possibility for a design space that includes high performing, unexpected results. It’s a great start, and I can’t wait to see Galapagos evolve.

Download the grasshopper definition for version 0.8.0004 here: http://gracefulspoon.com/downloads/Grasshopper_GALAPAGOS_TEST.rar

Reappropriating anachronistic messaging infrastructure (which are really just props for pedestrian scaled billboards) into something potentially more useful. In this case a community book drop.

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In a remarkable piece from New York magazine regarding the liberal world’s MVP, Paul Krugman, the author described the genesis of Krugman’s 2006 book:

When he was writing The Conscience of a Liberal, Krugman found himself searching for a way to describe his own political Eden, his vision of America before the Fall. He knew the moment that he wanted to describe: the fifties and early sixties, when prosperity was not only broad but broadly shared. Wells, looking over a draft, thought his account was too numerical, too cold. She suggested that he describe his own childhood, in the middle-class suburb of Merrick, Long Island. And so Krugman began writing with an almost choking nostalgia, the sort of feeling that he usually despises: “The political and economic environment of my youth stands revealed as a paradise lost, an exceptional moment in our nation’s history …”

Krugman’s own vision of a lost utopia on Long Island, during that bright post-war bloom of middle class prosperity, which must have had seemed so full of limitless potential and opportunity but somehow lurched toward our current state of contraction, pulled apart and forgotten by the twin poles of unimaginable wealth disparity, was at the front of my mind when I had the awesome opportunity to manage this project from David Benjamin and the Living. This was House #7 of nine theoretical projects that comprised part of a one-day only open house installation on the future of suburbia, a what-if, hyper-fictional reality showing design’s potential to provoke and elucidate a hypothetical path forward hosted by Droog and DS&R.

Conceived with the ingenuity of hybrid housing/service industry residences seen in Tijuana and rendered with the graphic intensity of Chinatown, David’s concept called for a home that is both a store and factory for making and selling signs. The factory is an inhabitable sign in and of itself, and the facade of the house is taken over by examples of constructed signs. As more and more Levittown residences convert to self-sustaining home businesses the House of Signs positions itself as an integral piece of future suburban infrastructure. We went from concept sketch to exhibition in less than 10 days.

A mural designed for a competition as part of a public art/farm space in the Bronx. The design started simply enough, with a walk through the Bronx and seeing the message “being great is the best revenge” scrawled across an abandoned mattress. The sentiment seemed to aptly sum up the spirit of possibility and potential inherent in every one us that has ever been underestimated or ignored. This led to the method of application of the message – not with paint on brush, but rather by paint applied directly via the volunteer’s hand, slapped down with conviction on the concrete canvas. Each unique creator becomes part of the final composition, through an emphatic gesture that is sometimes messy, with colorful fingerprints and palmprints merging together and breaking out of the geometrical lines of the fonts. The mural and painting technique will unite all those that volunteer and create a lasting memory of community togetherness.

I finished as a finalist, congrats to Oscar Lopez for a great winning entry.

Spurred by a recent archinect post in light of the indefinite detention of Ai WeiWei, an artist who briefly collaborated with Herzog and deMeuron on the pictured Bird’s Nest in Beijing before very publicly denouncing the project (as well as the pretty much the whole Beijing Olympics show in general), it brought up Jacques Herzog’s defense of his design and accepting commissions in China, and how events have proven him to be either insufferably cynical or just hopelessly naive. I happen to lean more toward the former. His quote:

We see the stadium as a type of Trojan horse. We fulfilled the spatial program we were given, but interpreted it in such a way that it can be used in different ways along it perimeters. As a result, we made everyday meeting places possible in locations that are not easily monitored, places with all kinds of niches and smaller segments. In other words, no public parade grounds.

These images are from a 2009 trip to Beijing and show that his niche spaces can certainly have the potential to be used for alternative uses, but no matter how over-structured, complex or well-intentioned, that use will always come back around to one mediated by parasitic cctv cameras and a surplus of ever-watching, ubiquitous guards.

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For a jersey barrier competition submission, we started with an iconic New York quote from Agatha Christie as indicative of the city: “It is ridiculous to set a detective story in New York City. New York City is itself a detective story,” and played off the recurring themes of mystery and dual meanings inherent to the make-up of our city. New Yorkers strive to challenge themselves, whether by running through the park during the marathon or following their career dreams, and we wanted to elevate something that is typically a solitary challenging act pursued underground in the subway – solving sudoku puzzles – to the street level, making it a communal, shared act. The design then works simply on two levels, as both a reflection of the city, and at the smaller scale, of the acts that makes New Yorkers such apt problem solvers.

The design will be quick to apply. Using only a limited color palette and a repeating stencil system, we will be able to economically create a bold, colorful graphic statement that will encourage all those that walk, bike, and run by the barrier to think about and interact with their great city.

Spent the better part of the day playing around with the incredibly cool Kangaroo, the live 3D physics engine for Rhino, developed by Daniel Piker. Images are poor substitutes for showing just how fun this tool is to experiment with, so to get a better idea of the program’s potential see Daniel’s great vimeo page. The above images were part of a series of experiments in dropping a series of cubes through an obstacle course, and pulling points around on a 3D space frame. They were based on tutorials found at the always helpful and inspiring Kangaroo google group page.

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Corporal Casiano pointing out the Bridge of No Return and the site of the 1976 axe murder incident, in which two US Army Officers where killed by DPRK troops.

The Bridge of No Return with North Korea beyond. The Poplar Tree which led to the axe murder incident is off frame to the right.

The Joint Security Area(JSA) on the site of the former village of Panmunjom in the DMZ. The buildings straddle the demarcation line and this is where the 1953 Korean Armistice Agreement was signed by General Nam Il and Lt. General William K. Harrison. The North Korean building Panmungak is in the background. The short concrete threshold delineates the border.

We were warned not to make any sudden moves around the ROK Soldier, though photos with him were encouraged.

A Chinese tourist viewing North Korea from ROK Dora Observatory Station.

I confess to a certain fascination with the DMZ. Not only because this is the closest I can get to a tragically bizarre, nuclear-armed, anachronistic relic of the Cold War. But also because it so perfectly epitomizes the fuzzy boundaries between militaristic imperial might, happy smiley faced tourism (the last stop on the US base is a gift shop!), and an untouched nature preserve (except for all the minefields and whatnot). This is one of the most heavily militarized zones in the world and also one of the loneliest. The military motto at the DMZ is “in front of them all,” but there’s no longer anyone standing behind them. Forgotten between the great decisive wars of the United States, this is neither victory nor defeat, just an uneasy, quickly forgotten ceasefire. Something to be shunned not celebrated. Disregarded by popular US history, and willfully forgotten by a new generation of Koreans who are forbidden access. After awhile it was less awkward to just stop mentioning to Seoulites that we were going to the DMZ after they either dismissed the place as frivolous – “that’s just a tourist area for foreigners” – or they saw it as an embarrassing, painful reminder of just what the country has spent 60 years trying to get away from – “that’s not the real Korea.” This was more than just a 90 minute bus ride from Seoul, this was a world away from that glittering metropolis to the South. Trenches, bunkers and minefields still manned and maintained for fielding a conventional army in a world where that no longer exists, rendered obsolete by nuclear-tipped missiles and aircraft. Going through the motions because any alternative is too difficult to comprehend.

I grew up along another arbitrary border, and wanted to see if there were any lessons from the nomadic, aterritorial space that I’d experienced as a kid that could be applied to the DMZ. But that one is porous, barring physical access but allowing an open trade in culture and economic goods. Sure, the DMZ was fun and touristy, with campy videos and we all took photos with the ROK guards, and everyone rode around in a big bus, but it’s still a real thing. Clinton wasn’t lying when he called it “the scariest place on earth.” And that contradiction is what I can’t understand because it’s not my country, I don’t feel the danger, but it’s there. Two years of military service is mandatory for Korean males. One of our last nights, drinking late into the night, we were interrupted by loud singing of patriotic songs and practice military drilling. There were two young guys, one was starting his service the next day, the other was seeing him off. Scared, trying to be brave, drunk as hell they wandered off into the night. I imagined him up there at the JSA, clenched-fist, standing stoic behind mirrored glasses, one eye on the crowds with cameras, and the other on the men with guns across the line.

After perusing a recent discussion post on archinect aptly titled: architects getting f’d on Craigslist (or: truth, bitterness and self-pity together at last), I was reminded of my own unfortunate craigslist encounter. It pains me to say it, but true story, last year, my final grad semester, I was cruising craigslist looking for some freelance architecture work. Now, granted, jobs on craigslist are typically posted by the most bottom-feeding, scum-suckingest of elements that greedily prey on the desperate, naive or unemployed, (at the time I equaled all three) at a frequency that beggars belief. So I knew I was wading into an unregulated seller’s market, but we’ve all been in tough positions before and compromises are made and pride may or may not survive intact. I had managed to wade through the obvious red flags which typically fall into one of two categories: including the clearly insane (“This is your first impression and demonstrates your ability as a designer. Use care in selecting the paper, the font, and the organization of text on the page.”) or the unnecesarily pretentious (“hip and prestigious award-winning design firm now accepting interns…”). So it was not without a healthy dose of skepticism that I reached out to one seemingly innocuous post, “Long Island Resident Looking for Architecture Services.”

Unfortunately it didn’t take many email exchanges before it quickly became obvious that “Long Island Resident” – a dentist – held a depressingly all-too-common view on what the role of an architect should be during difficult economic times and where on the scale of respectability he held the design services sector of the construction process. Basically LIR had a plot of land and wanted someone to design him the house that would sit on it for free. Or rather that familiar old standby, work for free in exchange for “something to put in your portfolio.” This wasn’t one of those situations where you’re just trying help out a friend or family member with a garage, or doing some pro-bono volunteering for those in need, or just being an adjunct. No, not at all, this guy had the means and was looking to browbeat someone into submission. In all fairness LIR thought a full set of documents, about four months of work, shouldn’t be free, but rather could be had for the princely sum of $350. I had no idea where the $350 number came from, possibly it was the number that allowed an apparently well-off dentist to salve his own conscience at demanding such massive concessions from a poor, young architect all in the name of The Greatest Recession Since the Great Depression. But I don’t know. Look, obviously life isn’t fair. People aren’t infallible and when given the opportunity will take advantage of those that can’t or won’t defend themselves. Opportunism is a leach on any creative profession, especially architecture, where self-doubt and masochism run rampant.

As a firm believer in the you-get-what-you-pay-for principle, I took a few hours off from my finals, and sent off the above image to LIR. My counter-offer was that I would design and document a house for free, everything, on the one condition that he in no way interfers with my creative vision (see img above). I argued passionately and apparently in vain that the house I designed for him would be a sustainable marvel, 100% post-consumer recycled materials, it would utilize a unique geothermal process for harnessing energy from deep within the bowels of the earth that would create a custom steam-exhausting microclimate around his residence, and at the very least would be widely published. All for free. I thought he’d bite at it, but here I am some 21 months later, sitting and waiting. But in the meantime, the offer still stands and is extended to any other random, affluent craigslist poster out there looking for a house and doesn’t want the burden of having to pay a designer.

So in parting, keep your eyes open, and if you start to see a number of Massapequa Park Steamers dropping all over a residential neighborhood near you, you can be assured of two things: a) there are some very satisfied architects out there and b) their fee was $0.00.

Last year I had the great opportunity to briefly work with David Benjamin and Soo-in Yang of TheLiving by assisting on this project in Seoul’s Peace Park. Their ideas about new, collaborative avenues for architects to pursue using sensor technologies – amongst others – made their courses some of my favorite at Columbia, and it was an inspiration to see this pavilion come together. When I found myself in Seoul last week, this was on my list of sights and it was a true pleasure to experience the work in person.

Described on their project site, as such:
“Living Light is a permanent outdoor pavilion in the heart of Seoul with a dynamic skin that glows and blinks in response to both data about air quality and public interest in the environment. Citizens can enter the pavilion or view it from nearby streets and buildings, and they can text message the building and it will text them back.”

The New Flesh

The Destroyed Buddha of Bamyan

Some drone bombing interventions made for DEMILIT as part of their “minor (open-source) act of insurgent citizenship and imaginative transgressions” against the pilotless drones that we increasingly rely on to fight the the good fight (and sometimes not so good) in Afghanistan.
#demilit #bombthedrone

A quick competition entry Jackie and I put together for a mural to be painted on a jersey barrier somewhere in the city. The murals are painted by a dedicated group of volunteers over one beautiful NYC fall day, so instead of specifying a fixed design, we proposed a set of instructions that the volunteers could perform relating to the types of gestures that are associated with travel and roads, turning the act of painting the mural into a type of game. We designed new types of brushes that are attached to runner’s legs, bicycle wheels and extended from automobiles to create an abstract layering of movement vectors.

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One of the consequences of living in a city as massive and historically rich as New York is that it’s easy to feel a little overwhelmed at times. Which is why it’s so nice when once a year Open House New York lifts back the curtain and opens up the inner workings of the city to the curious. At heart New York is a friendly place, and OHNY does a good job expressing that in a frantically popular weekend (so popular that the tour of the in-progress 2nd Avenue subway tunnel filled up near instantaneously) . A thoroughly pleasing free weekend began with a trolley tour of the remaining structures from the 1964 Word’s Fair in Flushing, Queens. Where we found out about Robert Moses’ last folly and that there is such a thing as an urban park ranger, and they are in fact very nice.

The next stop was a tour of the digester eggs at the Newtown Creek Wastewater Plant in Brooklyn. The iconic cathedral to infrastructure that processes 310 million gallons of wastewater generated by approximately 1 million city residents. Converting solid waste into a sludge mix (a substance which after extensive churning leaves the digesters in what could commonly be compared to the consistency of a hearty marinara sauce – or so we were told), and is then loaded on to a steady stream of sludge boats that head to points north. The view from the silverly bulbous digester eggs (designed by Polshek Partnership) is one of the best in the city, eminently worth the mildly sulfurous price of admission.

The eggs are best described from a 2008 post by the Times:

What goes on inside the digesters is slightly more prosaic, but vital to processing millions of gallons of waste water every day. Sludge, which is removed from sewage, is broken down within the digesters into more stable materials: water, carbon dioxide, methane gas and digested sludge, which can be formed into dry cakes and then, after additional processing, used as fertilizer. The shape of the egg helps concentrate grit in the bottom of the tank and gas concentrations at the top. Each egg holds three million gallons of sludge. Four began operating May 23. The rest should be in service by the end of the year.

Our last trip was a historic walking tour of the lower Manhattan waterfront, which was surprising and mildly disappointing in that it was neither historic nor even all that interesting. Lessons learned for the next year.

From the top of the southern digester egg

Working on a series of comparative analysis of New York groups with Jackie.

I took this November 5th, 2008 in Borough Park, Brooklyn. Featured in the Designing Obama book.

The question becomes, what did we really expect? The explosive euphoria that greeted the election results less than two years ago has been replaced by the slow burn of disappointment, culminating in our current predicament, a time when the worst are now full of passionate intensity. Two years ago the prospect of Obama’s election, passage of healthcare reform, and the ostensible cessation of combat in Iraq would all seem to be legitimately good things for the country. So what gives? Why is there now the lingering sense of failure, the sneaking sensation that things are still broken in a way that can’t be ceremoniously repaired? Is it that wars that begin with a shock demand a suitably definitive conclusion? Or has the concept of what is good and bad become as malleable as the truth. Truth that is now divorced from reality, forever an unattainable subjective concept always just out of reach. When objectivity becomes nonexistent, unarmed truth is just another thing to debate. A culture’s values are constantly in flux, that’s nothing new, but what happens when a pluralistic society becomes so fractured it can no longer decide on just what its shared values really are anymore, good and bad are interchangeable while two competing truths can hold equal validity in common discourse. Interesting times ahead.

Arizona

Vermont

These have been living on my desktop for way too long.

A quick entry I put together for a mobile voter registration and information center competition which had a pretty cool set of limitations – it had to be under 1000 dollars, fit inside a 3′x3′x3′ box, and be assembled and ready to hit the streets by September. The immediacy and modest budget were compelling and a nice change of pace. An inflatable structure was used to get around the rigid packaging requirements to produce the maximum volume to surface area, that, and I really dig the giant inflatable union rat that has been popping up around lower Manhattan streets. Unfortunately and inexplicably, the deadline was pushed back to 2011 (which is not an election year) so I guess I’ll be waiting to see how I did.

concept
The gesture of the “i want you” poster was extruded and placed in a cylindrical shape for maximum exposure. Each arm becomes a customizable exhortation to vote and the end cap can be written and erased with a dry erase marker. The gesture is returned by the prospective voter who has to reach into the arms and place the completed form inside the unit.

assembly

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view google map

My final submission for the Kinne Research Fellowship at Columbia. Keep in mind this is the first part through the American Southwest and Northern Mexico from late last summer (!), the second session in Mexico City is still looming on the horizon.

Fast, Cheap and Out of Control is research through observation: structures, installations, natural landforms, urban growth and manipulated landscapes constructed in the blank slate of the Southwest Desert. A place where time stretches from Planck’s constant – used to record the chain reactions that produce an atomic detonation – to Robert Smithson brushing up against the infinite on the Great Salt Flats, all of which is tested and implemented under the powerful spell of the Western landscape – a strange entity mixed in with notions of nation and empire, bravery and myth, history and fiction.

The result of a six-week exploration in the form of a road trip lies before you in an ambling, somewhat desultory first-hand narration of a nomadic journey across the desert’s offensively vast spaces. Situated between the region’s fragmented vignettes of activity, I attempt to resolve the disparate nature of the desert’s strange, isolated events into a coherent narrative.

See the edited book above, or browse some of the original posts/chapters below:

Donald Judd and the myth of Marfa
Peace through deterrence in the underground titan missile silo
Improvisation at Arcosanti
The hyper fictional landscape of Tijuana
Ballard and the Spiral Jetty
The border wall that no one wanted
De Maria’s Lightning Field and Tourism
Water rights and development in the El Paso Colonias

“Take the whole family to Marfa, Texas, ‘the Jonestown of Minimalism.’ See Donald Judd’s bed! Eat food all the same color! Scare the locals! Win a date with John Chamberlain!”
Text from John Waters’ Visit Marfa poster from 2003.

Marfa was my last stop on the Kinne trip. A small town in the Big Bend region of West Texas, three hours south of the major east-west Texas Interstate, the region could be best described as isolated. You know you’re getting close to this 1.6-square-mile town when, if you’re driving from El Paso along US-90 (which you probably are since El Paso International is the region’s nearest airport), you see amongst the desert scrub, derelict oil derricks, lonesome cows, and sagging half-dead towns a squat, free-standing Prada store along the highway—an entirely unwelcome site along one of the greatest drives in the country, through a hauntingly empty lunar landscape sporadically interrupted by violently vertical low mountain steppes. While the window display of this Prada outpost is stocked with bejeweled leather handbags and four-inch peep toes, this isn’t any Italian couture outlet. Rather it is a 2005 art installation, a wink-wink one-line joke that is trying to say something about the current state of Marfa as a nexus of art and commerce. You see, art came to Marfa, and the Pradas weren’t far behind.

Ok, here’s the best story ever told about Marfa as written by the incredible Molly Ivins. It’s certainly apocryphal, but like all rumors and Texas tall tales, hints at a deeper truth. The booming oil-soaked West Texas towns were drying up in the severe recession of the early 1980s, a time in which poverty and unemployment were threatening the existence of a region that was built on the outdated, newly-modernized, and moved-away twin pillars of ranching and oiling. That is, except for Marfa. Thanks to a transplanted New Yorker, the minimalist sculptor Donald Judd*, Marfa had a back-up revenue stream— minimalist art, and lots of it—that was starting to lure a steady flow of nascent tourist dollars into the town. Word spread through the region that people from miles around, all over the country even, were starting to show up in Marfa with open wallets. And some of these new visitors were sticking around, fixing up old buildings, maybe even adding a coffee shop here and there. Before you knew it, Marfa wasn’t an old dying town, but a thriving one. As Ivins tells it, West Texans all over were intrigued by these new foreign visitors and wanted more of them, and a familiar sight started occurring at economic development town meetings in the region: “some old rancher is apt to stand up – big old rough hands curlin’ up the brim of his cowboy hat with embarrassment over having to speak in public, of course – and inquire earnestly, ‘How do we get them gay people to come?’”

*Among the many things the taciturn Judd disliked in his life, being referred to as a “minimalist” was a big one. He preferred to call himself an “empiricist.” He also rejected the term sculpture because of the implied sense of carving.

Now, some 25 years later, here is Marfa resident Christina Dreyfus quoted in the May 6th, 2007 Fort Worth Star Telegram: “With all of the new people coming, it seems to me that the place is going more and more for the tourists and retirees….The regular Joes on the street can’t afford it anymore.” For practical purposes, everyone knows what gentrification is. As usual, though, there’s more to it than the simple story of what is occurring in places like the Lower East Side and downtowns all over the country. Look at the case of adobe homes in Marfa. An original adobe structure is typically seen as difficult to maintain due to the poor state of wiring, lighting, and eroded material efficiency. Most residents are much happier in a balloon framed, wood-siding house, if not a simple pre-fab trailer, and see the decaying adobe as a blighted nuisance. But, of course, to an outsider, adobe is authenticity personified, a rarity, something to be prized. No one wants to tell their friends in San Francisco that they own a clapboard house in Marfa. In the West of the imagination, adobe is king, and homes that were appraised at $40,000 are selling for upwards of $300,000. Priced out are the 36 percent of county residents who live below the poverty line, which has led to low-wage workers commuting long distances to Marfa, a town whose population hovers around 2,000.

It’s inevitable that this juxtaposition of Marfa over time will lead to unavoidable and overly sentimental questions of the proper means by which to achieve civic renewal. The trope that what came before is certifiably better, that finding superiority in someone else’s traditions is morally more correct than embracing the new is certainly annoying in its own self-regard. But, before we go any further, let’s acknowledge that those questions regarding the value of art, gentrification, the economic and political implications of tourism, and race are bound up in an extremely complex and difficult mass, and get into a whole subjective field of issues that try to resolve what’s best for other people and what produces a vibrant and healthy environment. However, it’s impossible to fight the sentiment that the new Judd congregations are fundamentally out of synch with the idea of West Texas as a bastion of authenticity against the trendiness and fleeting fashionability of the art world. This can only be further reinforced by the steady stream of Hollywood celebrities that have been flocking to Marfa, chasing down the next Santa Fe, Taos, or Sundance, in a perverse distortion of Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier theory,” constantly finding and despoiling the last towns untouched by Wal-Marts and Applebee’s, while happily paying the astronomical prices that have driven the cost of everything from real estate to Blue Bell ice cream to staggering levels. This leads to one of the strongest reasons to denounce urban renewal, which is the range of civic activities destroyed by the removal of communal physical spaces caused by the homogenization of the town when all but the rich are pushed out. The neighborhood cafés, feed stores, and groceries that have been supplanted by coffee shops, art galleries, wine bars, and organic markets are a manifestation of the notion that locality begins with social life. Longtime cafés popular with locals have been forced to move off of the main street, segregated from the artist class. It had been eight years since I was last in Marfa, and the changes that have taken place in that time can only be called extensive, best personified by the Thunderbird Motel—what had once been a comfortably run-down (and eminently affordable) place to stay had morphed into a $150-a-night boutique hotel—which could most accurately be described as renovated in the South Austin style, which is off-putting in a generic Dwell kind of way.

A temporary, nomadic population of vacationing, summer residents, lifestyle tourists, and MFA interns, a group whose closest attempt at civic engagement came when they banded together to stop a planned big box development that was within eyesight of the Chinati Artist Foundation. An attractive, affordable residential and commercial development that one can’t help but assume the 36 percent of Marfa residents that live below the poverty would have preferred to a contemporary art mecca. Gentrification produces a shallow architecture that produces as poor neighborhoods as blight – suffering from a lack of citizenship and homogeneity between rich and poor, but in this case leads to an anti-development stance that keeps the town in a perpetual state of acceptable rusticity. It’s a tough equilibrium that has to be maintained to prevent the town from slipping into the anywhereness that causes the influx of monied residents to occupy an inherently anti-democratic stance as they exert undue influence on development in spite of the majority’s best interests. So many monied elites, in fact, that one local cattle rancher succinctly described the current state of Marfa as: “Filling up with triple A’s — artists, assholes and attorneys.”  This finally leads to the ostensible focus of this entry, the one man who altered Marfa to such a widespread extent, and was neither urban planner, architect, nor developer, but rather artist: Donald Judd.

John Waters’ satiric take on Marfa is funny for many reasons, most specifically the bubble lettered exhortation to “See Donald Judd’s Bed,” which you can in fact see. (I personally chose to forgo this portion of the tour, but by all accounts, Judd’s bed appears a comfortable nest among a scattering of decidedly non-minimal western kitsch furnishings.) It’s a perfect example of the subversion of minimalism’s aesthetic objectiveness and impartiality into a dedicated cult of personality and a triumph of the pseudo-spirituality found in zealots of minimalist objects. One can’t help but make the comparison that this is Elvis’s Graceland for the Whole Foods set. Not only is Waters referring to the man, but the designed object of the bed. In his later years, Judd turned to designing furniture with a simplicity that shared much with his art. The object of the bed becomes a shrine to minimalism’s end-point as merely good design, and the reason the quiz “Ikea or Donald Judd?” is now so difficult.

By all accounts Judd was an asshole, but he made an honest effort to assimilate into the secluded ranching community he found in Marfa when he moved from Manhattan in 1971. He always hired local workers and paid a good wage. But the gulf between outsider and local was too vast, and even Judd himself, the harbinger of the aesthetes, was unsatisfied with what he had wrought. In a continuing, and ultimately futile quest for the frontier, he left Marfa for a ranch further south near Terlingua where he spent the majority of his last years. He could never own enough land or buy enough property to attain whatever plateau of assimilation he strived for, and the Chinati Foundation was left to manage his vast holdings and artwork in Marfa. The Chinati Foundation is where I found myself on the morning of my 10 o’clock scheduled meeting time to rendezvous with a group of strangers and view Judd’s installations, as well as a number of other artists with whom he was friends and whose work he championed, including Dan Flavin and John Chamberlain.

Here’s the thing: it’s all about how you experience the art. I think this holds especially true with land art. Amidst reports of 20th century museum goers who have wept in front of paintings, art historian James Etkins set out to objectively classify a number of factors that would induce an optimal setting to produce “strong encounters with works of art.” Among them are seemingly obvious admonitions: go alone, don’t try to see everything, take your time, and minimize distractions; as well as more vague concepts: be faithful, pay full attention, and do your own thinking. The reason these bear mentioning is that the Chinati Foundation disregards all of them. Firstly, being part of a large group is a prerequisite for touring the grounds. There are probably some instances where moving through a museum as part of a group of strangers is a good thing, but here it is questionable—especially when the tour begins with a mother of three bored-looking kids asking the volunteer guides how many exhibits we have to see. The fact that this exchange takes place literally in the shadow of a Donald Judd pretty much sets the tone for the entire day: a harried herding through a number of repurposed buildings, and disapproving looks from the rest of the group for slowing them down in the Dan Flavin rooms.

Chinati is smart enough to start the tour with their best—Judd’s 100 untitled works in mill aluminum (1982-1986). The boxes have a certain refinement and elegance about them that is impossible to deny. Judd was a master of minimalism, a movement that is too easily and lazily derided for being ‘boring’ or ‘bland’ (think Carl Andre). No one could repudiate the careful time and skill that went into crafting the field of aluminum boxes into a successful example of less-is-more. But it is the boxes’ mere beauty that, to me, denied them true power. Notions of the sublime and picturesque were first codified in Edmund Burke’s 1756 essay in which he set out to differentiate that which is simply beautiful as opposed to that which is truly great or sublime. Beautiful objects are those that are “comparatively small,” “smooth and polished,” while the sublime object should be “vast in their dimensions…rugged and negligent,” “the great ought to be dark and gloomy…solid and even massive.” To put it another way, the Lightning Field is sublime, Judd’s boxes are just precious. DeMaria’s field of poles is physically and mentally disorienting, you can get lost within its vast scale, and the humming of St. Elmo’s glow at the tips hints at the latent electrical energy contained within the poles. In New Mexico, the polished steel of the lightning field is left exposed to the elements in the desert hardpan, giving the whole field a muscular vulnerability, while Judd’s boxes seem weak, entombed within the sterile, repurposed shell of a former army barrack.

The shell also works against the implied perception of the infinite field. However the qualities of a limitless industrial material like milled aluminum only enhances the notion that these boxes are a swarm of a whole that is beyond comprehension, like “sections cut from something infinitely larger,” as Judd stated in his Specific Objects in Complete Writings. It is standard to discuss the critic Michael Fried and his critique of minimalism’s perceived theatricality when talking about Judd—specifically his aluminum boxes. In Fried’s view, Judd’s use of such coldly industrial materials in a banal array denies the viewer the safety of a recognizable ‘art’ object and therefore requires the physical participation of the viewer to activate the work. Chinati would seem to be denying this interpretation by regulating that groups tour the boxes at approximately 10:45 every morning. The summer sun in west Texas is still relatively low at that hour, and, in rejecting the opportunity to experience the metal as it changes with the day’s light, Chinati ignores the theatricality of the objects, instead reinforcing the notion that the Judd boxes need neither viewer nor gallery. They need only the space of the military barrack—the golden light of dawn and the harsh high noon sun are inconsequential to the reading of the work. Again, a comparison to Lighting Field is in order. Where de Maria required the visitor to spend 24 hours with the work, Chinati asserts that 15 minutes in harsh, unchanging light is sufficient, and one is left to only wonder at the brilliance that could be seen in the golden glow of a Texas sunrise. Walking amongst the mute stainless boxes, I was reminded of the sunrise in New Mexico, and Marfa can only pale in comparison to that powerful experience.

Judd’s latent power comes to the fore in the 15 large-scale concrete works scattered across a field of tall prairie grass at the edge of the Chinati grounds. Here the viewer is free to move about at their leisure (the cubes are not part of the official Chinati tour), alone in the landscape. The cubes are varied, massive, and fighting a battle with the environment. The struggling chutes of weeds peeking from between the joints of the slabs produce the feeling of vulnerability and a more symbiotic relationship with the landscape. Alone on the isolated West Texas plains, with only the architectural scale cubes for companionship, you briefly forget that you’re in the middle of a small town full of people struggling to live their lives. And you suddenly have faith that art can be great. Judd said “Art has a purpose of its own,” and you can’t imagine it existing anywhere but here. And if a Wal-Mart threatened to appear across the highway in this last untouched paradise, it would be an abomination worth fighting against. But Judd also said that “society is basically not interested in art,” and he was wrong. The last 25 years in Marfa prove him wrong. Regardless of society’s interest, art is there driving the market. In the end, one is again reminded of another box, the box of the Marfa Prada along the highway. Because the Judd boxes aren’t really empty, they are selling another product for consumption. The product that is for sale within the concrete bunkers or the cool, steel boxes aligned in a row like a showroom, is no less real than that which is imprisoned within the ersatz Prada store up the road. Only what Judd is selling is less tangible, more elusive, but still real: a lifestyle imbued with authenticity, good taste, and affluence. I could feel the pull, the easy choice, but ultimately it was something I couldn’t afford.

And with that, I drove back east.

Jackie wrote a great project description for our competition entry for a fence around the world trade center construction site: What makes New York’s skyline so powerful is not the skyscrapers themselves, but the void between and around them, the vibrant hues of sky that hug their every angle. Skyscape focuses on that negative space in a site-specific work that combines photographs of the space above the construction site taken from surrounding boroughs over the course of a single day. The idea is that, not only will our skyline change dramatically with the addition of the Freedom Tower, but the shape of the sky itself, the space it encompasses, and therefore, the relationship between the buildings, the sky, and us will change. We still recognize the buildings’ forms, but they become the void—the sky is now the subject.

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photographs via Faces4Reform by Robert and Robbie Bailey of baileyphoto.com

From earlier this fall, this was our “it’s bullshit that we don’t have health insurance in a country where we spend 7,290 dollars per person per year on health care, more than two to three times as much as every other industrialized nation on the planet, and yet our country’s quality of care barely edges out Slovenia.” It’s a lot to convey in one look, but I think we nailed it. See more of the other uninsured at faces4reform.com.