An amazing and talented group of students made something worthwhile and in a manner that I think is unique to GSAPP. Below are images from the final intervention – a mobile sound and light performance space. As a quick overview, we spent the first session reading, drawing, and talking to community groups about who gets to build things in the city and why. What systemic issues result in this urban area being neglected? The second session we worked hands-on and in close collaboration with a number of organizers and community artists including the Uni-Project, Uptown Grand Central, as well as Harlem’s young musician Carlito Ratti. I thought it was very worthwhile for the students to not only work collaboratively amongst themselves, but also to fabricate something meaningful and interesting for actual people to use and experience.

An abbreviated syllabus below, full syllabus here: https://medium.com/@john.h.locke/hacking-the-urban-experience-2018-18f267862c10:

Session A Overview
“Attack current conditions in a manner that will change them.”
– Siegfried Kracauer

“It’s easy to say we need recyclable, sustainable technologies, old and new — pottery making, bricklaying, sewing, weaving, carpentry, plumbing, solar power, farming, IT devices, whatever. But here, in the midst of our orgy of being lords of creating, texting as we drive, it’s hard to put down the smartphone and stop looking for the next technofix. Changing our minds is going to be a big change. To use the world well, to be able to stop wasting it and our time in it, we need to relearn our being in it…”
-Ursula K. Le Guinn, Deep in Admiration (2017)

This semester we will collaborate with the UNI Project (www.theuniproject.org) — a non-profit that creates learning environments in public spaces across New York City — to design, build, deploy, test and defend a 1:1 scale prototype intervention intended to facilitate interactive participation in public life.

How we build, how things are made and for whom, reflects the social, economic, and political values of a community. We have the opportunity to help shape those values in our own neighborhoods. Here, on the street, New York’s key urban questions can be explored and tested. This is where in the words of Michael Sorkin, cities are “distribution engines”, separating bodies and power in to distinct tranches, which require a constant vigilance to break down these spatial inequalities in an endless struggle to maintain free, open space that is accessible to all. We’re now living through the broken failures of neoliberal urban planning, where public benefit has been surrendered in deference to a developer’s personal gain. However, with tactical precision, we will apply ourselves to subverting the systemic decisions that have led us to this point, in an attempt to provide an alternate path forward. We can prove that things, ideas, installations can exist in public space only for delight, outside of market forces.

We will begin with Henri Lefebvre’s assertion for a shared “right to the city”, an essential reading of the urban experience against the privileged inertia of entrenched power, in which a pluralistic collection of citizens must collectively create their city. The temporary activations and assemblages that we develop can lead the way toward an urban environment that provides for the many. In this way, our work should by its own definition be critical, it should merge the social, physical, and experiential, and acknowledge the political ramifications behind architecture and planning in 2018’s America.

This course seeks to assert the relevance of the design and fabrication skills at our disposal as potentialities for increased relevance. Through the re-appropriation and re-imagining of existing urban conditions, the student will harness their entrepreneurial spirit to design and fabricate a working prototype that embraces the messy reality of New York. The student will begin by identifying a quality of the urban condition that includes the latent capability for engagement and work toward fabricating an adaptive, responsive and environmentally viable solution. Specific emphasis will be placed on testing and exploring through hands on research the possibilities of detailing and fabricating using unorthodox materials. Formulating a strong guiding thesis idea will be essential to the project’s success, but the core challenge for the student will be converting a strong idea into physical reality, something to be observed, tested and documented.

Session A Goals
By attempting to capture a broader audience for architectural interventions, a number of questions present themselves and the student will be challenged to anticipate possible eventualities — how will it be used? How can we quickly imbue meaning in our work? How do we engage with different communities? How do we collaborate with outside groups? Fabrication will be considered less from a formal quality, and more from a use, durability, improvisation and public participation viewpoint.

Ultimately the student will come out of the course with a healthy respect for two core concepts: Firstly, an increased skill in the use and applicability of the fabrication skills we have at our disposal for solving design issues using unorthodox materials in unconventional settings; and two, that there is an opportunity for architects to regain lost relevance by inserting themselves through unsolicited proposals into the public consciousness as stewards of urban well-being.

Session B Overview
What can architecture accomplish? Is it merely the competent combination of a client’s given program, site, and budget? Are we merely the credentialed executors of assignments? Or worse yet, is society at a point in which it no longer expects anything from us? Do we now have the courage to leave the safety of the assignment and transform ourselves into entrepreneurs and producers? Our goal will be to reclaim the mantle of empowerment. We will form new alliances with groups outside of the architectural aficionado, and imbue our work with dignity and worth to appeal to the non-architect, the average citizen, the neighbor.

Building off the skills and experience gained in the first half of the class, this second session will look deeper into the possibilities of public fabrications to functionally alter everyday urban encounters. What do common materials mean to people? What impact can form have on the reading of a project?

The goal will be to create a proposal for a mobile installation that can accommodate future progress and participation — a malleable first draft that allows a feedback loop with the neighborhood to give back and evolve together. We will push the notion that learning occurs through making, doing, and interactivity; while giving primary focus to the designing of experiences in lieu of objects. How can you engage with a pluralistic public to have them become a partner in your work? How does that experience become fun, easy, and understandable?

Session B Goals
The temporary final intervention should give you an opportunity to upend the distinctions between public and private. You can temporarily disregard social hierarchies, and choreograph a temporary experience that provides for alternative social encounters and shared urban encounters. New York is a palimpsest of change on top of change, but your temporary work should guide the permanent into more democratic, open, and acerbic directions.

You will learn to collaborate with outside groups, in a project for real people, re-defining notions of authorship in architectural work. You will explore new models of practice, and leave the course with an understanding of how your own form, program, and material assemblages can change urban experiences.

Many thanks to Sam and Leslie Davol at the Uni-Project for all their help and advice, as well as Carey King with Uptown Grand Central for the amazing support.

Many thanks to Sam and Leslie Davol for the project photography!

What It Means for Consumers and Brands That New York Is Becoming a ‘Smart City’

Free Wi-Fi Kiosks Were to Aid New Yorkers. An Unsavory Side Has Spurred a Retreat.

LinkNYC kiosks not a hit with everyone

NYC nixes kiosk browsers after homeless commandeer their use

With little fanfare or prior warning, they began bolting the LinkNYC kiosks to the sidewalks in early 2016. Greeted with little more than a New York shrug, these were blatant pedestrian-scale digital billboards. An upgrade from the static posters on bus stops and phone booths. The trade-off for tolerating these new advertising intrusions was the promise of new “world-class” free wifi (of which an email address was initially required) and an internet-enabled, built-in tablet. Instantly, certainly apocryphal stories of rampant homeless porn-watching quickly spread, though a quick look through the offending media images showed that the concern seemed more to do with less desirable folks congregating and watching youtube videos or making voip calls instead of “moving along”. It should also be noted that these kiosks are not evenly distributed throughout the city, but rather more heavily located uptown – either through the result of human decision-making or a black box ROI algorithm is unclear. Seven months after the initial roll-out, access to internet for all passersby was either completely shut off or severely curtailed, though the digital signs remained.

Our course at Columbia, Hacking the Urban Experience, is invested in architectural street interventions at a neighborhood scale. As it appears that the design and implementation of these is driven by public-private advertising concerns (LinkNYC’s parent company is Alphabet’s Google), rather than architects or city planners, the first assignment of the course looked at ways to both acknowledge that these things now exist on NYC streets and to non-invasively study ways that they can be adapted. In the same manner that steetlight poles can act as support posts for help wanted or missing person signs, how can the Link NYC kiosks adapt and provide actual value to the street?

Below are samples of prototypes that were constructed in one week, with the expressed goal of adapting and testing how simple acts and gestures can impact our relation to these structures and public space around us. These kiosks inadvertently provide a number of opportunities – the bright screen can illuminate objects, the usb ports are charged and can power a desk fan, and the invisible wifi signals can define an actual physical space. These interventions became the foundation of a framework to discuss who is public space for, and who can stop and enjoy listening to a song by Slipknot on the sidewalk without a resulting pearl-clutching article by the Times.

BE THERE YALL!

Past course work:
http://hackingtheurbanexperience.tumblr.com/

It wasn’t only urban experiences that were hacked this semester! In parallel with other course assignments, students engaged in the hackage of “Stranger Experiences” – a short series of interactions that provided the student with a deeper understanding – through close observation, written reports and spontaneous encounters with strangers – in how real people use real space and produce the messy, overlapping urban realities that exists all around us. Designing and building within existing public spaces is a great responsibility, one architects have always responded to with varying levels of dismissive contempt and unsatisfactory urban schemes, but here the students were challenged to develop the capacity to learn from and adapt with the intangible qualities of history, texture and rhythm that make each block in New York City unique. Ultimately, the exercises were intended to allow the students to sympathetically embrace and deeply understand the qualities of particular urban situations that facilitate engagement with people as they pass through in the business of their daily lives – and meet some people in the process.

Images shown here are from Stranger Experience 02 – in which students, working in teams of two – posed as tourists and asked random strangers to draw them a map to a well-known neighborhood campus landmark. Here, Bernard Tschumi’s Lerner Hall built in 1999 was used, a student center known on campus for it’s glass atrium and series of kinetic zig-zagging ramps. The building also made for a fitting destination point, as Tschumi described the building as a “concept of architecture as a generator of events.” There was some debate about the relevance of this assignment, of which the jury may still be out, but there were a few interesting conclusions: the student’s got a sense of the ease of receiving personal, helpful interactions in public space, as well as pushing the boundaries of acceptable social conventions. For instance, no stranger hesitated to draw a map for a student, but calling or texting for follow up questions and directions seemed to be pushing it. The maps also provided a document to confirm or compare how people in and around the area visualize common space, in a Kevin Lynch-esque manner of nodes, paths and landmarks. As expected, the stairs around the central plaza, Low Library, and the Alma Mater statue were key landmarks that centered the maps. Lastly, since the directions were originally given as a set of verbal cues – only after that were the strangers further asked to draw a map (under the guise that the student was “more of a visual learner”) – it is interesting to see the fidelity of ideas as they translate from audible directions into a physically real map.

All other student work here: http://hackingtheurbanexperience.tumblr.com/

While my natural tendency can lead toward convolution, in the interest of concision here is my attempt to sum up the course objectives in one sentence: “to self-initiate and identify a problem statement relating to the urban environment, and then manifest a possible solution through a public, physical object, while confronting the myriad issues associated with that decision.” Problems addressed included the notion that strangers occupying proximate space are too disconnected – how can you encourage interaction? As well as the problem of physical space inducing a heightened sense of agitation during a stressful time (finals on a college campus) – how can a space be created that produces an alternately playful, soothing affect for passersby? So with that, here’s a sampling of self-initiated work from the third iteration of HTUE.

See previous work and extensive course descriptions here:
Hacking the Urban Environment II – Student Work
Hacking the Urban Environment I – Student Work

All images and work by students Amir Afifi, Hanxiao Yang, Marielle Simone Vargas, Wilbur Lee and Will Chen

Assignment 01 – PARASITES

Assignment 02 – LIGHT PROJECTION

Assignment 03 – FINAL

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.”

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

I didn’t really cut anything from the presentation included below. So, yeah, there’s a lot of slides. It’s (almost) the entire final presentation. I left it pretty much intact because not only 1) I can never edit my own work, but 2) the project is conceived more as a sci-fi narrative of Beijing and it will hopefully make more sense if read in complete order. And you can always just scroll way down to the end for some sweet images. This was for Ed Keller’s SpeedTerritoryCommunication studio, Spring 2009.

quick project description:
Architecture is a system of control predicated on limitations. This project is a study of the existing control systems in Beijing and a projection of how architecture and technology will merge to change not only prisons, but also the urban environment, the social stratification of society. Also addressed are what confinement and freedom will mean in relation to our relationship with how we build our world.

Detail from my final studio presentation of one symbiotic cell. See also a sankey diagram of the flows of energy through this system here.