De-codeRing
in the desert
Everyday we dehydrate. Especially in the desert. It’s one of life’s autonomic functions. I’ve been dehydrating here, working on my thesis, and muddling about in the housing stock. I’ve updated this site a bit as the work increases and new meanings emerge. I’ve shifted some content around.
in the dark
The method here, of locating a pattern via GPS graphic and then ‘commuting’ to the location- is a drift, which allows us to re-territorialize through phenomenological experience and the mobility of human scaling. The Landscape’s shift to incorporate the graphic and pictorial is proven to be a temporal idea as it shifts to become an embodied moment of fear and panic. “Im pretty sure we are lost.” It is in fact that, linear segmentarity that feeds into a machine of overcoding, constituting geometrico homogeneous space, that has us feeling lost.
Last week my friend, Chuck, entered the quest with me. In the dark, her observation of the senses- smell and sound over sight – led her to believe we were in an agricultural use zone. We were in fact in both, a product to be consumed and a means of production – networks of exchange and flows of raw materials.
gleaners
If we except the geometry of the hegemony, the line between public and private is no longer the work of the human hand. Public life will remain a matter of formal obligation with diminishing territory, mutual commitments, and intimate associations. However, if we drift together, as end users and sometimes middle-men (pawns and bishops of architectural origin) then the road seemingly closed, walled- may open.
UNFOLD and OVRFLOW
waste landscape: dross, public health, sprawl
i dont buy nice things
Dear Alan Berger, I have begun work on drosscapes 2.0 for you, addendum to dross, the unfinished and abandoned (foreclosed) housing burb. Unfold, three main characteristics of the sprawl environment are; low land use mix, low connectivity and low density- not limited to housing. But, in a paper for my environmental public health course last year I explored housing waste specific to Phoenix and the Sonoran desert. What happens to waste in the desert climate?
tectonics
The act of sprawl maybe human, however the mechanism through which we have been producing and inhabiting sprawl is toxic. All this becomes exponentially destructive to environmental public health here in the desert climate both during use and post-use cycles. There is a new temporary. The empty house- either built and not sold, or recently both built and now foreclosed. A cycle which I have seen as rapid as four years. What makes the homes un-affordable besides ballooning mortgages? Simple. The monthly energy bill.
hot box
Climate control for the new housing type through non-regenerative energy use and poor solar orientation, sucking for air these enclaves are out their element. They are everywhere, massive scale.
‘In just the last 15 years, the US has developed 25% of all the land developed in the entire 225 years of the life of our republic.‘ – Frumkin
wash up
Shift scale for a moment to look material toxicity in these built housing environments. Impurities in the air impact our individual and collective health through the respiratory system. Explicit Toxicity is found in both live and dead suburban sites that are in a current state of decay and have exhausted their original commercial life use. As materials shift molecular structure, deteriorate, and experience allotropy, they enter our environmental health systems through air and water vectors. During construction, destruction, renovation, or as speculator derived phantom inventory; lead, pesticides, off gasses of formaldehyde from insulation, and ethers from cleaning products, particle board and carpet glues can be released into the environment. In the case of unfinished housing burbs or boarded up phantom inventory, the environment effected can be semi-live neighborhoods full of elderly, young, and adult inhabitants. Surrounded by (‘single family homes (in the US) built from 1970 to 2000 grew nearly 64%, while population only increased by 38%’- Frumkin) dematerialization exacerbated by foreclosure and economics built housing structures are themselves becoming toxic waste powder; contributing to end of the line health problems in the most vulnerable populations, children, seniors, and immobile poor.
unfold + ovrflow
2 x 6
property line
The truth about our cities was revealed; the ruination, the Deleuzean networks of new rhizomatic public life, adumbrated for us through the work of placehacking. Whilst unfolding the flows of urban infrastructure through explorations of ruin porn and cyborg draining- a bookmarked memory residing beyond the reach of my contemporary self was dislodged.
A personal place-making memory more than 10 years emotionally derelict. A nostalgic, magical reclassification of hidden space once passed by and ignored in a milieu of derelict warehouse storefronts. It became our everyday space in which we secretly built, danced, played music, slept, cooked, showered, socialized, and networked. The space brought with it embodied history, which we embraced, played with, at times almost worshiped. We created our own currency inextricably linked to the signifiers within the space. The entry was reversed, the program was abandoned, we felt we had discovered a freespace. Local participation grew, our group incorporated, privatized – leading to its demise.
rules of space
“The network of designed spaces, the city, is an intricate behavioral plan prescribing social interactions of every kind, prescribing therefor the thoughts and if possible, the feelings of individuals.” – Lebbeus Woods
Luckily for the world, entering and playing in segmented, privatized, abandoned space has become a culturally significant practice of geography. Propelling space and social play into a rebirth of virtual quasi public domain.
Suburb-andond exploration differs a bit from the work being done by bunkerologists and uers, but is no less important as a spatial bookmark- for me, as an architectural student burdened with the oppressively brooding question, is architecture dead?
user interface
Such a question cannot even be address without agreeing on a definition of architecture. Architectural narratives must exist and be created. Is there a complexity of underlying rules, patterns of uniform random automata?
The tales of unfinished construction of whole suburban neighborhoods. Half left carcass of space, defined by the outer wall skin, was stretched and remains. Organic striation inserted into the systems that had for a period of time clicked ahead clockworked, unstopped, those of us here watched the body of suburbia slow to a stop. The abandoned lots, half poured foundations, underground developed infrastructure. Naturally occurring system of open space, unclaimed and less segmented than plotted or planned. But these suburban neighborhoods lack environmental optimum orientation. Residents should be able to harness and program these spaces. Put it to good use, from within rip open the overly privatized and segmented existence, to find each other, outside, in their community. Play with the scale and question the materiality of the construction. Ask for architecture, and define it through their own participation in place making and social building. Inhabit the smoothness of the freespace surrounding their striated homes.
transformer
unfold + overflow
Occupy
” THE HEART PULSES WITHOUT CONSCIOUS AUTHORITY. ” – BUCKMINSTER FULLER
Occupy
Anyone know of a financially significant space in Phoenix worth occupying?
In the Unfinished Plat – the organic voids are random creatures, diversity derived.
These are places of speculation, overcoded moments.
In 2009, Professor Griffiths dispatched our studio into various incomplete suburban quagmires, around the greater phoenix area. As bright but difficult architectural students we couldn’t help but wonder – will future architects significantly address these housing systems of capitalist sprawl?
In his recent essay and book Griffiths describes his own troop through the American landscape and the erie cleanliness of the milieu.
Suburb-andoned spaces I have encountered are not yet in visual decay. Mostly are a bit untidy and undone. Frozen at that momnet that financing fell through and the work crews sent home. While exploring Pleasant Court, I discovered the wooden planks of the scaffolding frozen in place but time weathered and soft beneath my feet. I had driven for awhile the winding roadways, faux waterways, and searched out the incomplete-patch in the system. The roadways were empty and the homes seemingly left over. I decided to climb.
perch
UNFOLD + OVRFLOW
hello *blog*
"the territory itself is a place of passage" - deleuze
Last December I began tweeting (unfolding that in a future post), and following @bldgblog, received a tweet on placehacking.co.uk - a few days later the matter in my mind had thoroughly expanded out into the space around me, completely altered the context of world, my city, and my position in the continuum
After catching up on the academic essays that accompany the epic photography- my architecture studio culture had found a new line of flight in the musings of cultural geographers and the urban explorer(UE) – I experienced an internal paradigm shift that continues to map and influence my working method. An obvious added trajectory is the use of Photography. Unfold:
“By attending to the sensoriality and materiality of other people’s ways of being in the world, we cannot directly access their ‘collective’ memories, experiences or imaginations. However we can, by following their routes and attuning our bodies, rhythms, tastes, ways of seeing and more to theirs, begin to make places that are similar to theirs, and thus feel that we are similarly emplaced.”
- Sarah Pink 2008
1: A hybrid of documentary and anthropology, the Photography, serves UE as a virtual bookmarking system of experience and place. Although I was an outside viewer, the bookmarks adumbrated my own distant past embodied experience and structural emplacement within abandoned places – serving to remind me of some of the best experimental times had socially in the built environment. The UE access movement is also a subversive reminder that active engagement enhances spatial phenomenological experience, key for understanding the human role in placemaking events. UE participants soar above the ground plane, experiencing structural highs only rarely experienced by elite construction crews or in anime and UE are below the immense mathematically measurable weight of the ground plane, amidst fantastic structural concrete and brick infrastructure tunnels- stealth travelers of water supply and sewage lines. In this process the liminal quality of the ground plane transforms with supernatural flair, and the lives of explorers become reterritorialized in the city
2: Further, use of photography while blogging- as found in the placehacking.co.uk model, regenerates academic study that is both creative, intellectual, and sensual. Virtual networking not only exist as simulation of public space, but also introduces the public dissent and need for free space; in the mechanic, organic, and metacyborg. Open source online sharing of photos transforms, recodes, or reterritorializes previous sociospatial coding of buildings, bridges, and tunnels
overflow: market segmentation of space is a heavy theme, taking shape through a morphological lexicon- w deleuzean decoding of housing milieus. abandoned space, public and private, relays overt social, material, and embodied energy truths. In his book, The Fall of Public Man, Richard Sennett describes the historic public conditions in Europe and America as a rapidly expanding milieu of strangers, effected by forces of industrial capitalism and privatization (more to come in future posts)
3: “there is a growing responsibility to be rigorous w your dreams” - #virtualfutures
Earthouse has been a moniker I have used throughout my architectural education- beginning w the copyright of a collaborative image while working as a research assistant at university. Copyrighting intellectual property was suggested by my mentor there and has implications but does not have to be mutually exclusive of idea sharing. I infused earthouse w the global view of Bucky Fuller’s writings about spaceship earth, and my own inherent belief that housing is an equal right
In developing my strategy for earthouse.org, my goal, is for it to become-blog as vector – to cache and opennetivity the current final year in the master of architecture degree process – interspersed w the release of previous work from the past several years – with renewed reflection
The methodology here gives a big up thank you to those who inspire and never rest. And, thank you to the universe for allowing permutations of thought flows to arise
unfold + ovrflow
