January 2012
1 post
The Continental Breakup →
The Planet Money team takes on the Euro crisis in this week’s This American Life. In typical fashion, they introduce a complicated economic concept through a series of stories.
The markets are up so far this year, but trading volume is low, suggesting that this is unlikely to last. On March 20, as Felix Salmon explains at Reuters, Greece will have a to repay or refinance a €14.4 billion...
October 2011
1 post
September 2011
1 post
"All of life has been utterly, profoundly changed... →
“Why? Why, sky? Why do you look like shit? You look just the same as ever, just blue sky and white clouds. Why can’t you change the way Facebook changes?”
August 2011
3 posts
Hurricane Morning
Looks like we’ll be ok. Local weather stations suggest that we got some 4 inches of rain. At 4 we were woken up by some vicious winds and moved to a lower room that seemed safer. We did lose the top of a tree but it landed on the woodpile. Nevertheless, there are still hours to go.
The Storm Starts
The storm is starting even though it is still a very long way off. I know this is only a taste of what we’re going to get later in the night and tomorrow morning.
Another concern we have is the amount of water we’re going to get. We are on a hillside and we have concerns about how saturated the soil is on that hillside. That said, I think this is a safe place to live, likely the...
March 2011
1 post
On Warfare Today
Italian pilot David Cenciotti, blogger, is writing about the military operations in Libya on his site. Not only can readers gain technical insight into the operations there, Cenciotti points to a new relationship between aviation enthusiasts and military forces.
Enthusiasts form an international network that constantly monitors military communications worldwide, thus potentially undoing the...
January 2011
1 post
December 2010
1 post
Out of Denisova
If there’s a place where information technology is providing massive advances, it’s in paleoanthropology. Genetic analysis is redefining our notion of recent human origins. As a spectator, I’ve been following this material with great interest. If you have any curiosity about where we came from as a species and haven’t read about the recent discoveries involving the...
November 2010
3 posts
From Dublin to Beijing?
Former chief economist at the IMF, Simon Johnson looks at the Irish crisis and assesses it in terms of global geopolitics and the rise of China. Read his article here.
Peter Christopherson
Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson, one of the most influential musicians and designers of the last thirty years died last night. His work was enormously important to developing my thought.
Read the obituary at the Guardian.
Silence
With the end of conventional ideas of isolation, alienation, and boredom that the ubiquitous networking of the world created in the last decade is silence and quiet gone for good?
Or will the chaos and noise of this era one day seem as easily navigable as the hustle and tumult of the early metropolis?
October 2010
2 posts
Suburban Poverty Grows →
And so it begins. In this article at the Next American City, we hear about the rise in suburban poverty and the government’s lack of response. Let’s be clear about this. Suburbs (not all suburbs, some suburbs, particularly exurbs and old, inner ring suburbs with working-class homes) are the new ghettos, where immigrants go. Now that city centers are either Detroit (beyond repair) or...
New City Reader Launch
Some photos from the first two days of the New City Reader.
More at my Flickr site.
August 2010
5 posts
Darkness
One of my favorite artists, Katie Paterson. Absolutely splendid work.
History of Darkness is a slide archive; a life-long project, it will eventually contain hundreds upon thousands of images of darkness from different times/places in the history of the Universe, spanning billions of years. Each image handwritten with its distance from earth in light years, and arranged from one to infinity.
The Stucco Box
Via the LA Forum. John Chase on the stucco box (aka the dingbat), one of the many great works he did. Simultaneously the definitive word on the topic and hilarious.
John Chase
Sad news. According to Curbed LA, John Chase passed away this morning.
John was one of the smartest and most innovative thinkers I met in Los Angeles during my decade there. I met him soon after I got to SCI-Arc and he had a huge impact on the way I thought and could reduce me to tears of laughter in a few minutes when he described some hilarious architectural perversity.
His book Exterior...
Is a Crash Coming?
At the Wall Street Journal Brett Arends gives ten reasons to avoid complacency and be on your guard going into the fall.
The Vital Center
In 1949, historian Arthur Schlesinger published the Vital Center in which he outlined his theory that American politics swung between near-Left and near-Right to assure a moderate progression of reasoned politics over time. When then pendulum moved too far Left, it moved to the Right until it swung back again. Today it seems, we have a new vital center, but instead of near-Left and near-Right we...
July 2010
10 posts
Advice for Robert Dudley
Over at the Netlab, I posted a project by Caren Faye, a student in the fall 2009 “Evil” studio, for rebranding BP. Maybe it’ll prove useful for Robert Dudley, the incoming BP CEO.
On Ecology
Ecologists are catching up to one of the Infrastructural City’s key lessons. Hybrid ecosystems are dominant today and we need to study them to understand the biosphere. Alas, ecologists are generally studying pristine wildernesses instead. Sort of like urbanists who look at New York and Boston and pronounce everything alright with the city? More at Nature.
Via Rob Holmes.
What if College Tenure Dies?
Today’s New York Times has a story entitled “What if College Tenure Dies?” What if? Tenure is long gone. Why cover this story now?
Networked Publics Publish
Please note that we have extended the deadline for the submission of final work to the Networked Publics: Publish project as follows:
Final submissions are due on the 30h of July.
We encourage you to post your piece earlier as doing so will prevent you from being caught in the maelstrom of posts that we expect on the 30th (we had over 30 submissions to the first round).
Once posted, all of...
Can China Fight the US Economically?
Economist Michael Pettis thinks it can’t.
The Bubble in China?
Two conflicting viewpoints about whether there is a real estate bubble in China: an interview with Stephen Roach, Morgan Stanley’s Asia Chairman and a post by Charles Hugh Smith, blogger. To me the data that Smith has marshaled sound a lot more plausible than Roach’s Malthusian endorsement of the Chinese property market. After all, even if there are huge amounts of Chinese, that...
First as Tragedy, Then as Farce
What if we take Manfredo Tafuri’s main thesis
Architecture as the ideology of the Plan is swept away by the reality of the Plan the moment the plan came down from the Utopian level and became an operant mechanism.
and turn it on its head to explain our current predicament?
Architecture as the ideology of the non-Plan is swept away by the reality of the non-Plan the moment the non-plan...
Consider the Source
US firms are at or near the forefront in technological advances, especially in computers and in medical, aerospace, and military equipment; their advantage has narrowed since the end of World War II. The onrush of technology largely explains the gradual development of a “two-tier labor market” in which those at the bottom lack the education and the professional/technical skills of...
David Harvey on the Crisis
Here is a video of David Harvey explaining the economic crisis with added animation.
I particularly loved his description of all of the reasons that defenders of capitalism are using to explain why the crisis happened and how much more coherent his explanation (which I largely agree with) is.
Linky
On Cities, Suburbs, and Strategies
There isn’t a whole lot to disagree with in Joel Kotkin’s latest, “The Myth of the Back-to-the-City Migration” at the Wall Street Journal. His recommendations are on target as well:
The condo bust should provide a cautionary tale for developers, planners and the urban political class, particularly those political “progressives” who favor using regulatory and...
June 2010
3 posts
Global Cities and Telecoms
In the Global City, Saskia Sassen writes:
The fact that telecommunications and information technologies are essential to both processes has added yet another force for agglomeration. Finance and specialized services are major users of such technologies and need access to the most advanced facilities. These technologies, which make possible long distance management and servicing and instantaneous...
Photo-Illustrations
I’ve never seen this before: expressly staged “photo illustrations” for an article that aren’t meant to convey a crime scene but rather to set the mood.
See NY Magazine’s latest on Madoff.
The Freegan Establishment
It’s rare to see the Times breaking an interesting story. Today they did. Go read Jake Halpern’s The Freegan Establishment, an account of a modern-day commune in Buffalo that lives off the waste generated by society.
May 2010
5 posts
Three Years of Netlab in Lithuania
I will be speaking about three years of Netlab work at the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius, Lithuania. More here.
Contemporary Art Centre Vokieciu 2, LT - 01130, Vilnius tel: +3705 2121954, fax: +3705 2623954 email: info@cac.lt // www.cac.lt
On the iPad Interface
Just a brief note—the kind of brief note that I should post more of—but if you haven’t tried Google Maps on the iPad, you should. I think there are a lot of problems with the iPad, particularly with regard to its “walled garden” approach to software, but the direct connection between your body and the interface is unprecedented. In the case of Google Maps, go into the photo view...
Fast Trash Exhibit Closing Today
I am long overdue posting this, but if you are in the city today, go to the Fast Trash exhibit organized by Juliette Spertus with Project Projects. It’s a fascinating look at the system of pneumatic garbage collection that is in place on Roosevelt Island. The exhibit is located at Gallery RIVAA, 527 Main Street on Roosevelt Island and is open until 5 (that means only a little more than 5...
The One Church of Apple
Slate carries Jacob Weisberg’s article “Apple’s Way,” the best explanation that I have yet read of the problem with Apple, why it will be a disaster for the media industry, and why it has the best aesthetics of any technology company.
Habermas on the EU
The Financial Times carries an interview with Jürgen Habermas in which the philosopher discusses the problems that the European Union is facing. Read it here.
April 2010
3 posts
Read the Infrastructural City Online
If you haven’t read the Infrastructural City, now is your chance.
Stephen Becker and Rob Holmes at Mammoth have put together an online reading group around the book. You can find the schedule here.
Networked Publics w/ Stephen Graham
I will be moderating “Discussions on Networked Publics,” a panel on urban politics and warfare tonight April 13 at 6.30pm. This is the third in a series of panels examining how technology and social changes are transforming the public realm, held by the Network Architecture Lab at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation’s [GSAPP’s]...
Roundtable on Publications 8 April @ Parsons
I will be speaking at Parsons tonight, 8 April, Thursday, 6-8pm
at The Glass Corner, Room 206 School of Constructed Environments Parsons 25 East 13th Street
The occasion is the launch of Candide. Journal for Architectural Knowledge, a peer-reviewed German-English language periodical edited by the Department of Architecture Theory, Faculty of Architecture at RWTH Aachen University, Germany.
For...
March 2010
10 posts
1 tag
Force By Forcewest
dbsw:
Force by Forcewest
(via @ratpack)
Ohh...: It isn’t just the social media friendships... →
It isn’t just the social media friendships that are thin. So are the “real” ones… but that has been the case for a long time now (actually, the latter was on the trash heap decades before social networking came about). I think over the last two decades the relationship in physical space gets pumped up artificially by shared, meaningless experiences laden with alcohol-infused emotional content,...
On Architects's Web Sites
Over at the Fast Company blogs, Alissa Walker talks about how bad most architects’s Web sites are. She’s absolutely right! What are they thinking? Props to anyone who, like Neil M. Denari Associates, eschews the Flash monster for Indexhibit. She also mentions Architizer, which I belong too although its focus on built projects makes it a bit hard to shoehorn my work into.
In...
Future of Urbanism Conference
I am speaking today at the University of Michigan’s Future of Urbanism Conference in a panel on Urban and Regional Ecologies with Alan Berger, Chris Reed, and Ed Soja. Watch for a YouTube video coming up soon.
Sean Cubitt on Invisibility
I just discovered the blog of media studies scholar Sean Cubitt. There’s a some overlap with my own thoughts on network culture, which is always nice to see.
I thought this post worth quoting in its entirety.
Further notes on the history of invisibility
The characteristic cultural formation of the capitalist epoch was realism, and its characteristic visual form geometry, specifically...
Fantastic Journal: Disturbance At The Hejduk House →
I was doing well with my writing today until this piece by my friend Charles Holland derailed it. The destruction of Hejduk’s Kreuzberg house is really terrible news!!! More at Architecture in Berlin. There’s so little of Hejduk’s built work that this is a special crime.
Famous Last Words
Although I suspect that the editor of the Real Estate section of the paper must be fuming about this, the New York Times finally owns up to the fact that “It’s a great time to buy a home” is a lie that even doe-eyed realtors know is false. Read it here. Now why couldn’t they have said something like this in 2005?
Fake Shop Fronts
What will those clever people think of next?
Via Kevin Slavin:
>North Tyneside high street ‘revived’ by fake shop front
“Fake businesses are to be used to lessen the impact of the recession on high streets in North Tyneside.
With 140 empty shops in the borough, council bosses think they have come up with a unique way of ensuring shopping areas remain as vibrant as possible.
The first...
NJ Tax Credits for Sprawl
New Jersey legislators have cooked up a truly horrible idea: encouraging sprawl through tax credits.
From the Record (via the NJ Real Estate Report):
Bill would create N.J. homebuyer tax credit
In an effort to boost the state’s housing market, New Jersey legislators have introduced a bill that would give home buyers an income tax credit of up to $15,000, spread over three years.
“The...
The Dreaded 404 Error…
(via livejamie)