Thanks to those that came out to Storefront for Art and Architecture on a chilly Friday in late January to celebrate the publication of Pamphlet Architecture #30: COUPLING and to hear provocative / entertaining manifestos as delivered by some of the brightest minds we know. This was part of the series called MANIFESTO and the theme was Infrastructural Opportunism, which came out of Pamphlet subtitle. Through collaboration with Storefront, we asked each participant to include 10 images and 10 (concise) manifesto points on the challenges and opportunities facing infrastructure in the 21st century. This led to a 100-point collective  manifesto. Our dream team list included:

MIMI ZEIGER on manifestos  // INTERBORO on exclusion  //  DIANA BALMORI on realignments  //  PLANETARY ONE on stripping down  //  LYDIA KALLIPOLITI on remedies  //  ANDREW BLUM on tubes  //  JOYCE HWANG on interventions  //  MAMMOTH on expanding fields  //  JANETTE KIM on highjacking  // and we put our money where our mouth is too … INFRANET LAB on contingency

[Joyce Hwang on interventions, with images of work by Sergio López-Piñeiro.]

[mammoth on expanding fields, gave a fictional account of an infrastructural meta-narrative.]

Mimi has already published her Infra-Opp manifesto, so we thought we would follow suit with ours. After all, what is an un-disseminated manifesto?

1. Know That There is a System of Systems

Arthur Jensen, played by Ned Beatty, in the 1976 film Network said: You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won’t have it, is that clear?! You think you have merely stopped a business deal — that is not the case! The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back. It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity, it is ecological balance! You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations! There are no peoples! There are no Russians. There are no Arabs! There are no third worlds! There is no West! There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multi-variate, multi-national dominion of dollars! petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars!, Reichmarks, rubles, rin, pounds and shekels! It is the international system of currency that determines the totality of life on this planet! That is the natural order of things today! That is the atomic, subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And you have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and you will atone!

2. Architects as Expert Generalists

Buckminster Fuller, labeled a dilettante and a dabbler in his age, was instead the forerunner of a new breed of designer / thinker that we like to call the expert generalist. Long live the new expert generalists!

3. Be Alert to What Has Just Happened; Be Entrepreneurial.

[photo by Shiho Fukada for The New York Times.]

After a multi-day traffic jam in Hetaocun, China, Andrew Jacobs of the New York Times wrote: Stranded drivers chain-smoked, stomped their feet against the chill and cursed the government for failing to come to their rescue. As the night wore on, fuel lines froze and cellphone batteries died. The residents of Hetaocun, however, saw the unmoving necklace of taillights from their mountain village and got entrepreneurial. They roused children from their beds, loaded boxes of instant noodles into baskets and began hawking their staples to a captive clientele. The 500 percent markup did not appear to dent sales.

4. There is Always Missing Information, Use it.

Donald Rumsfeld’s infamous 2002 speech yielded a term that now has its own Wikipedia entry: unknown unknowns. He said: [T]here are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.

5. Agile Maneuverability Rewrites Protocols

[from There Will be Blood!]

Daniel Plainview, played by Daniel Day-Lewis in the 2007 film There Will be Blood says: Drainage! Drainage, Eli, you boy. Drained dry. I’m so sorry. Here, if you have a milkshake, and I have a milkshake, and I have a straw. There it is, that’s a straw, you see? You watching?. And my straw reaches acroooooooss the room, and starts to drink your milkshake… I… drink… your… milkshake!

6. Software Can be Big and Physical, Like Hardware

The Medusa Bag was conceived in 1988 to meet the anticipated requirement for large scale water imports to California as well as to Israel, Jordan and Palestine. Others at the time were looking into tanker conversions and pipelines, but no practical economic embodiment of these ideas was found. The bags size and shape have been optimized and the first prototype bag will be built using industrial polyester fabric and special straps. A bag containing 0.5 gigaliters of water would be 465 meters long and 110 meters wide, while a 1.5 gigaliter bag would be 670 meters long and 160 meters wide.

7. Be Resourceful

Thilafushi Island in the Maldives has grown at the rate of a square metre a day, as more and more rubbish is dumped here. Mountains of rubbish – plastic, metal tins and rusty oil barrels – extend as far as the eye can see. Unlike the adjacent resort islands, the only visitors here are the Bangladeshi workers who wade through the sludge and brave the stench to burn the tonnes of refuse that arrive at the island every day. Spotting the potential to generate revenue from the mushrooming island, the government decided to lease part of it for industrial purposes. Additional terrain was created using white sand and now giant cement cones, oil drums and the skeletons of future boats can be seen dotted around. Metal compactors compress junk into blocks for sale to India. Each tonne sells for US$175. The island has grown to such proportions that it now has a café, a restaurant, two mosques, a barbershop, a clinic, a police station and rather unexpectedly, a makeshift zoo.

8. Measurements Can be Misleading, But Oh So Fruitful

[Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, published in 2000.]

Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves is a book about a book about a movie about a house. A series of surveying measurements initially reveal that the house is larger on the inside than on the outside. The discrepancy is less than an inch, but is a sign of things to come. One day a small, closet-sized room appears in the home, although the outside dimensions remain unchanged.

9. Scalar Indifference

A thermokarst lake, also called a thaw lake, refers to a body of freshwater, usually shallow, that is formed in a depression by meltwater from thawing permafrost. This landscape operates by scalar indifference as pools appear and disappear under freeze and thaw.

10. Live By Strategy, Play by Tactic

The Russian chessplayer Savielly Tartakower said: Tactics is knowing what to do when there is something to do, strategy is knowing what to do when there is nothing to do.

We are hosting a topic session at the 99th ACSA Annual Conference next March in Montreal. Our topic is titled Architecture’s Expanded Territories. If you are interested to submit a paper for the session (or any of the other great topics) read below for more. Here is how to submit. (Submissions are due September 15, 2010.)

Architecture’s Expanded Territories
Topic chairs: Lola Sheppard, University of Waterloo / Mason White, University of Toronto

In Rosalind Krauss’s 1979 essay “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” (PDF) Krauss observed that the practice of sculpture had been obscured and could only qualify itself in opposition to architecture and landscape. Krauss identifies three additional practices of sculpture that sculpture had previously been burdened with and names them “site-construction,” marked sites,” and “axiomatic structures.” Taking up a similar cause in 2004, Anthony Vidler offered emergent practices for “Architectures Expanded Field,” (DOC) by arguing that “underlying the new architectural experimentation is a serious attempt to reconstrue the foundations of the discipline, not so much in singular terms, but in broader concepts that acknowledge an expanded field, while seeking to overcome the problematic dualisms that have plagued architecture for over a century: form and function, historicism and abstraction, utopia and reality, structure and enclosure.”

Vidler’s potent proclamation and offer to architecture to evolve with its time has incubated for more than 6 years. Where are we now in this (still) expanding field? This session will table the messy and contentious territory between architecture, landscape, ecology, and urban design. A territory whose foundation was cultivated by Benton MacKaye, planned by Constantinos Doxiadis, designed by Cedric Price, with recent developments chronicled by Keller Easterling, among others. In short, the session will look at where the XXL and the S meet, or a new architecture within our expanding territories.

It could be argued that the potential of an expanded territory is increasingly being hijacked by an agenda of “good practice,” in the name of sustainability, often reducing architecture to the operational concerns of construction efficiency and building performance on a particular site. This session asks what form, format, and programs might exist in the new territory afforded by a deeper understanding of site? Or, what is sustainable design without the burden of sustainability?

What defines these expanding territories? Architecture’s recent privileging of operational costs over capital costs is a paradigm shift in scale, program, and function. No longer relegated to façade design only, we are seeing ever-expanding ambiguities of architecture’s envelope. This session seeks to find these large territorial lines, interrogate them, design them, and expose them. What potential lies in the tools encouraging a widening envelope of design influence – environmental data, maps, politics, economies – upon a give site? Sometimes it might not even look like architecture.

The session calls for speculative design research proposals or critical papers to think big. How does design operate at the scale of the region or the globe? Forgoing utopian ambitions to design the region or the globe, how can design participate in the temporal space of emerging natural and artificial systems – energies, ecologies, mobilities, and, possibly most importantly, economies? What is the role and operation of the big project in our age of urgent environmental issues and crippled economy? Where do you stand in the expanding territory?

[Pamphlet Architecture 30: Coupling. Here, the table of contents serves as a systems chart bundling actions to generate architectural byproducts.]

We are excited to announce that InfraNet Lab / Lateral Office has been selected to author the forthcoming issue of the Pamphlet Architecture series. It will be issue #30 and is expected for release in 2011. Our proposal is entitled Coupling: Strategies for Infrastructural Opportunism.

The 20th century was witness to both an infrastructure boom and bust. It is the 21st century that will need to project not only how to address crumbling and insufficient infrastructure, but also how to position new infrastructures that confront urgent issues of climate change, sustenance inequality, and our increasingly urbanized world. 21st century infrastructure should create a new public realm, enrich political policy, and embed productive processes. Coupling strategizes new formats for the physical infrastructure required in the wake of these shifting conditions.

[World map of high-speed rail, ice trade, and environment monitoring systems.]

[Icelink, Bering Strait, Russia / USA.]

Coupling argues, through a body of design/research proposals, that infrastructures behave as artificially maintained natural systems. Future models of infrastructure lie in embracing this condition in a more inclusive manner by bundling processes with spatial experiences. The intention is to counter the tendency to deploy infrastructure as a hard system, instead seeking the performance of soft, multivalent systems.

[Greenways: Framing and Farming Runways.]

Rather than a New Deal approach of massive engineering or iconic infrastructure, Coupling employs adaptable, responsive, small-scale interventions whose impacts are global in scale. Easily upgraded, this vision for infrastructure creates new sites for production, recreation, and civic life. The ambition is to supplement human and natural ecologies at risk rather than overhaul them. Shifting away from mono-functional infrastructure, the proposed visions meld existing landscapes with emergent infrastructures in order to catalyze new ecologies, economies, and, most significantly, a new social infrastructure.

[Flatspace: Nine Networks of Exurbanism.]

The six selected design/research proposals couple seemingly disconnected systems into a mutant assemblage of surfaces, containers, and conduits. In short, Coupling posits strategies for infrastructural opportunism.

It will be available from Princeton Architectural Press in 2011. More information will appear here as the project develops. The Pamphlet flickr stream is here.

Coupling team: Ghazal Jafari, Daniel Rabin, Matthew Spremulli, Fei-ling Tseng, Sandy Wong.

We are excited about the results from the recently hosted WPA 2.0 competition, and its enticing tagline: "Whoever Rules the Sewers Rules the City." The six selected projects look fantastic and we are honored to be among those included in the second phase developments.

Our project is titled Coupling Infrastructures: Water Economies/Ecologies and is centered on the twin dilemma of rising population and water shortages in the US southwest. In particular the project looks at terminal lakes in the region such as Salton Sea, Mono Lake, Pyramid Lake, and of course Owens Lake.

[Our submission: Water Economies / Ecologies]

We will be developing the project at the XXL scale as well as the S scale, both to understand and position the water infrastructure systems regionally as well their role as a new public realm. We are now working toward September 26 for a workshop in Los Angeles. November 16 will be the next date, which is a presentation by the six teams and symposium in Washington, DC including the jury and national policy-makers.

[WPA 2.0 competition infrastructure matrix.]