YOURS AND MINE

Constructing Identity: arousing curiosity and generating imagination in occupied space.

This thesis will bring into awareness the space that is maintained between an individual and his fellows in hope to increase self identity, intensify experience and decrease alienation.

"In a word, to take a small step along the road of self knowledge to help introduce man to himself" Edward Hall

cul-de-sac: a dialogue on suburbia

Rumination
Much has been said and written in criticism of the North American suburb. It has been seen as the antithesis of design, a banal cartoon facsimile of some dreamed of sylvan ideal. To some, the suburb represents all that is wrong with modern life: rampant consumerism; the commodification of place; the homogenizing tendencies of global capitalism; a lack of community (and a lack of appreciation for community); the destruction of the environment (both in the invasion of the suburban accretions into the rural, and in the unsustainable nature of the suburb itself, what James Howard Kunstler has called the ‘greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world’); the ferocious pursuit of greed by developers, as well as the ostentatious and misdirected displays of wealth by the nouveau riche in the form of monster ‘McMansions’; the erosion of street life and the disappearance of the pedestrian (not to mention the corresponding degradation of the health and quality of life amongst suburban dwellers); and on and on…

There is, at least amongst designers and cosmopolitan urban dwellers, simply no question that the suburbs are inherently WRONG; that we need to in some way convince the inhabitants of the suburb that the quality of their lives are tremendously degraded by the very circumstances in which they choose to live. From the point of view of the architect or urban designer, the phenomenon of the suburbs can be seen within the larger context of the continuing evolution of the North American city as a kind of utopia out of control. The history of suburban development is a history of failure on the part of architects and designers to co-opt the collective imagination towards a more vital vision of the city.

Many of the criticisms that have been leveled at suburban sprawl focus on functional issues. The New Urbanist polemic, for example, focuses upon the idea that the inherent sense of placelessness arises from morphology. Vital community life does not exist in the suburb because there is no street life; there is no street life because suburban places are designed not around accommodating pedestrians, but around the needs of the automobile. Many of the strategies that have arisen out of the explorations of the New Urbanist polemic revolve around issues of injecting meaningfulness into the non-place of the suburban realm. There is a sense that by changing the morphology of the suburb so that it functions more like a vital urban place, it will acquire a greater sense of meaningfulness for its inhabitants. It has the power, in fact, to change the behavior of its inhabitants. But is this true? Many of the New Urbanist developments which have come to fruition have been criticized precisely for their inability to change peoples’ behaviour. Places like Celebration, Poundsbury, Seaside, or (closer to home) Markham, have proven to be successful as a marketing model for developers but ineffectual in terms of really changing the behaviour of their inhabitants. These are still ‘greenfield’ developments; they are by and large still homogeneous residential enclaves that rely heavily on the automobile; they have not successfully incorporated a diverse mixture of income levels; the quality of community in these places is questionable. I see in this polemic not a solution but re-branding of the same anti-urban cult of the individual that created this situation in the first place. The ideal of a house in the country of a traditional suburb has been replaced with a new ideal of the small town. Either way, the sentiment is in opposition to true urban life, and relies on a set of morphological and visual signifiers which remain skin deep. Does a simulacrum of the campo in Siena really acquire some value simply by virtue of its form? Perhaps this can be justified with the argument that New Urbanist communities are a step in the right direction, a kind of half-way house for the rehabilitation of the suburban dweller; but if that is the case, what is the next step?

Directions
It seems to me that what is really at issue when speaking about meaningfulness – about making meaningful places – is the question of how cities accrete history. It is [possibly] demonstrable that the suburb does not develop meaning in the same way that a truly urban place does - it is not built for evolution; it is a temporal place that exists as a snapshot of the ideal as it manifested itself at the time of its construction. However I do not believe that truly diverse and vital cities that exist in North America today have any monopoly on meaning. One of the themes I would like to explore in this thesis is the idea that ‘meaningfulness’ is divorced from vitality when we are speaking about places. I believe, and I would like to demonstrate, that on the one hand the cultural wasteland of the suburb is not as empty as it is often believed or assumed to be; and on the other that the vital landscape of the city is equally capable of becoming commodified, of having its meaningfulness co-opted... I would like to explore the basic assumptions about the suburbs in order to understand the undeniable success with which this mode of life has occupied and consumed the collective imagination, in order to seek avenues for entry into that collective imagination.

In order to approach this, I will begin by asking the following questions (and many more, no doubt!)…

Who are the people that inhabit the suburbs? What are the common links (beliefs, backgrounds, economic situations, tendencies, fears) that cause us to choose this way of life? Of what do our / their hopes and dreams consist?

What forms of community exist within the sprawling periphery? What are the networks, dialogues, identities, organizations and connections of these places and how are these influenced or generated by the mode of living defined by the morphology of the suburban city? To what do we look for self-identification when our situation in the world becomes so non-specific as to exist anywhere and nowhere at once?

Is there beauty here? Is there a future for us in this landscape?

Smart Things for an Ironic Future

This thesis is concerned with a complex and essential tension that I perceive in our relationship with technology, which I associate with the images of the cyborg and the hermit, the cyborg being the manifestation of the will-to-technology and the hermit being the manifestation of the impulse to reject technology.

The capacity to make and use technology is a crucial attribute of humanity. We are tool users. Furthermore, technology seems to develop following clear but largely unarticulated lines of desire. But yet we are simultaneously attracted to and repulsed by our technology. We are both hopeful that our technology will liberate us and fearful that it will contain us. We both love the power that it affords and anxious about the fragility of our waxen wings.

This drama is played out at the scale of the dwelling unit, posed here as a basic frame for our existential condition. There is a reciprocal quality to the dwelling unit: we give it form and it forms us, and thus the connection between it and us is strong. The dwelling unit frames our dwelling; we exist in it, with it, and through it; we see the world through it. We remember, imagine, and project the world from it.

In this sense, we have always been sort of architectural cyborgs, indeed, we have always had a close connection with all of our tools. But yet there is something totally repulsive about the very closeness of this connection. There is something unreal about it, something that makes us want to run into the woods and return to the land in a desperate bid for authenticity. Heidegger, Jung, and Al Purdy all give strong evidence of this tendency, and likewise in all three we see fascinating examples of architecture’s potential for engagement with our self-creation. Their houses were intense sites of dwelling and sense-making, both of the world and of the self.

Strong nationalistic tendencies in both Purdy and Heidegger must make us sceptical of their projects, however. And Jung’s stripped-down, stable model of the (fully individuated) self is outmoded. The true nature of nostalgia, sentiment for the land, and longing for unity, both in their very positive and understandable aspects and in their potential for violence and exclusion must be addressed.

This thesis then tentatively attempts to work with the changes in contemporary technology and the attendant changes in us. And a number of important changes are taking place: the extent that we are becoming embroiled in large, unfathomable networks is causing disindividuation and re-mystification such that technology assumes a mystical, almost semi-divine aura; the merger of physical reality with virtual reality (the emergence of mixed reality) together with transcendence of the purely visual interface are causing a more harmonious relationship to develop between mind & body; the split self, or ecological model of self is supported by technologies that structurally divide attention, opening the potential for ironic attitudes towards truth, and more pervasive acceptance of plurality and multiplicity.

Traditional boundaries are blurring between mind and body, self and other, humanity and nature, between classes, ethnicities, genders (Haraway). These boundaries are becoming negotiable zones. How can architecture navigate these boundary zones? How can we design meaningful architecture for our new hybrid condition? How can our architecture accommodate both inner peace and inner multiplicity, the possibility of rootedness without the solace of race, religion or nationhood?

The architecture of our dwelling unit represents a threshold between the ecosystem that we are, of beliefs, thoughts, desires, body, and machines, and the larger ecosystems, both of earth and world of which we are a part. It is a tool through which we confront our cosmos (Bachelard). The careful calibration of this tool is a matter of responsibility. We must also carefully calibrate architecture to the scale of our ‘technological flesh’ (Perez-Gomez), to craft a sensual engagement between us and larger-scaled systems as a potential antidote to the alienation exacerbated by digital technology. If our architecture implies a ‘way of living’, let that way of living be tolerant and liberal, and open to plurality.

This thesis follows from the identification of primal ‘value’ in the mundane elements of the house demonstrated in Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space and also Pallasmaa’s brief article “Identity, Intimacy, and Domicile”. It tracks the tendencies of the cyborg and of the hermit through these elements, focusing on: the chair, the bed, the water closet, the window, the stair, the dining table and the hearth. In treating these elements, the thesis presents historical accounts and poetical descriptions as well as gestures of design in the hopes of bringing about both a more intimate knowledge of these foci as well as speculating about a position in the tension between the cyborg and the hermit.

I just want to take pictures

“The silence of the photograph. One of its most precious qualities, unlike cinema and television, which always have to have silence imposed on them - though no-one ever succeeds in this. The silence of the image, which requires (or should require!) no commentary. But the silence, too, of the object, which it wrests from the deafening hurly-burly of the real world. Whatever the noise and the violence around them, photographs return objects to a state of stillness and silence. In the midst of urban hustle and bustle, they recreate the equivalent of the desert, a phenomenal isolation. They are the only way of passing through cities in silence, of moving through the world in silence.”

Jean Baudrillard
Photographies, 1999.

Urban Celebration

This Thesis looks at the transformative nature of Carnival in Trinidad on the city of Port-of-Spain. Carnival in Trinidad embodies a unique cultural confluence that is born from the conjoined European, African, Indian and modern West Indian narratives that shape the Caribbean consciousness. The transformation that occurs during Carnival is of a civic, personal and perhaps even spiritual nature. This thesis will explore in depth the urban artifices of Carnival, looking at the anatomy of the festival itself, that is, the history, characters, places and moving parts that comprise its celebration in the city. Through this exploration of masquerade and urbanism, I hope to create a realistic understanding of the syncretic nature of this festival and its emancipating role in West Indian society.

Carnival in Trinidad evolved as a vehicle of emancipation for the ex-slaves of the society. Its celebration is a centrifugal force within the society; drawing on the many parallel histories of the island and bursting onto the streets in the ecstatic celebration of a unified myth and reality. The problems of identity, spatial ownership and belonging that are inherent to the post colonial mind, on the days of Carnival are temporarily non-existent. This thesis therefore aims to create the beginning of an new urban understanding of Trinidad that is rooted in Caribbean history and Caribbean behaviour, rather than in borrowed attitudes and fractured codes.

Link to site: http://urbancelebration.blogspot.com/

Slow Food for Thought

A Food and Architecture Blog

Western society is experiencing an unprecedented food revolution. A heightened awareness of globalized food production, local sustainability and loss of arable land to urban centers has become the catalyst to transform the current way of thinking. Currently, more than 50% of the food consumed in the city of Toronto is imported from Florida, California and Mexico, and travels an average of 1300 km . At the neighbourhood level, the emergence of farmers markets and community shared agriculture programs, as well as the voices of local celebrity chefs intoning the importance of local food sources are creating greater awareness of what we eat and where our food comes from.

This thesis strives, for better or for worse, to reconnect the inhabitants of Toronto with the land.

The One Minute Theatre: Allan Wes Wilson

The following is an abstract of my intentions...What began as an ipod on the roof of St. Peter's has thusly evolved.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the correlative qualities between architecture and theatre. For millennia, drama has been used as a dominant vehicle for the investigation of those ethereal qualities which comprise daily life; operating as a framework for the deeper understanding of incredibly dynamic social, political and temporal relationships. To parallel an analogy by the English poet Ted Hughes; the classical dramas of the Greek poets have been conceived as quantitative elements which illustrate- which make accessible- the most intangible of human conceptions. However, episodes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century have evolved the dramatic arts into to something more critical. As such they may actually provide the richest interface for the registration and projection of colliding ideologies, capitalist motivations and cultural histories. What this thesis supposes is that drama has the capacity to express a more fundamental understanding of the affects of contemporary architectures. The proposition is made for an architectural device which may chronicle the dynamic tensions embedded in a neighbourhood in crisis.

ON LUXURY

ON LUXURY
The need to buy and the desire to buy has refined itself over and over again. The past has shown us that the politics of a plan or the spectacle of a ceiling always embedded a specific message. And as the goods created by a tastemaker embodies aspirations beyond the product’s original intrinsic value, so do these spaces for the life of each citizen.
People’s insatiable appetite for the absorption of these images is a measure of society’s investments. And on the scale of the city, it mythologizes people, histories, & geographies into inexhaustible brands. As a communal examination of current notions, by virtue of the pervasive extension of consumerism throughout our culture, deciphering the patterns can formulate an ultimate hypothetical and ironic "kit of parts luxury".

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[http://thesis-in-progress.blogspot.com]