To travel across the islands of Hawaii from Southeast to Northwest—Hawaii, Maui, Oahu, Kauai—is to travel backwards in geological time. The islands, born of molten lava, formed in a linear sequence as the Pacific Plate slowly shifted across a stationary hotspot in the Earth’s mantle. As the islands distanced themselves from this hotspot, a few inches per year, their fiery volcanic growth eventually halted (the hotspot currently resides under the island of Hawaii, which remains volcanically active and continues to grow in size). Over time, harsh winds and waves tugged at the islands loose ends, while the cooling of their rocky masses dragged the islands sluggishly back into the dark depths of the Pacific Ocean.

The life cycle of the Hawaiian Islands is clearly diagrammed on cartographic maps as the islands increase in size as they near the hotspot. It is also readily apparent visually from the silhouettes of the island’s mountain chains. The 400,000 year old island of Hawaii, which is soft and conical in mass, contrasts sharply with the 5 million year old island of Kauai with its jagged gravity defying cliffs and canyons.

The agedness of these islands coincides with their commercial specialization. As the youngest and therefore tallest island, Hawaii supports significant astronomical infrastructure, including technologically advanced NASA telescopes trawling deep space. The primordial visual aesthetic of Kauai has landed the island in dozens of Hollywood films, and garnered it the nickname of ‘Hollywood’s tropical back lot’. Memorably, Stephen Spielberg’s 1993 adaptation of Jurassic Park, relied on the time worn silhouettes of Kauai’s mountains to convincingly transport his audience into an ancient land… more

“Instead of being the threshold to the future, the first ten years of the twenty-first century turned out to be the ‘Re’ Decade.”

—Simon Reynolds, Retromania

While the above quotation refers to current trends in pop culture, it is equally apt at describing contemporary architectural practice and its theoretical discourse.

As architects, while attempting to define a formal vocabulary for this ‘threshold to the future’, the 21st century, with the aid of new tools and processes such as parametric coding that allow for mass customization (Grasshopper and the like), we have invariably recycled a formal vocabulary belonging to past decades—a vocabulary associated with optimism in scientific progress that relied on cues from mathematics, physics, microbiology, and other natural sciences.

Parametric architecture, while conceptually tied to ideas of evolution, optimization, adaption and systematic complexity, exhibits none of these traits after its built implementation and while the underlying 3D-models might be parametric, the buildings themselves are not. In its current state, parametric architecture is not at all parametric in its physical performance—‘parametric’ merely describes an aesthetic while the architecture itself remains inert and representational, if not metaphorical.

There are many past forms that could have been produced with today’s technologies, including built structures that pioneer the aesthetics of incremental and complex geometry–many of which are more than 50 years old.

E. Sean Bailey

Viviane Hülsmeier

Dr. Kimberly Shaw: ‘Well, that makes bomb number three. Don’t you love the smell of sulfur in the afternoon, Sydney?’

[bound and gagged Sydney only grunts and groans]

Dr. Kimberly Shaw: ‘What’s that? No? Well, I don’t think hell is going to smell a whole lot better, but since that’s where you’re going to spend the rest of eternity, you better start getting used to it.’

—’Postmortem Madness’, Melrose Place, Season 4

In 1992, Beverly Hills, 90210, the prototypical teen drama documenting the hardships of America’s wealthiest teenagers, attained the peak of its popularity, reaching an estimated 18.1 million viewers per episode. In an effort to capitalize on its immense following, its producers spun off Melrose Place, a 90210 for a slightly more seasoned crowd. The series, which followed the lives of thirty-somethings trying to reinvent themselves in a Los Angeles courtyard complex, received criticism and poor ratings in its first season, for being too timid. To remedy these perceived failings, the writers of Melrose Place concocted increasingly controversial story lines in an effort to increase viewership. Love trysts, betrayals and workplace firings, which were commonplace in the second season, were later replaced by catastrophic events such as car crashes, murders and even the walking dead. Not satisfied with individual agony, and to achieve a climax of collective suffering for their entire roster of fictional characters, the writers ultimately turned against ‘architecture’.

In the first episode of the fourth season, in a revenge plot not so dissimilar in psychology from those carried out by Al Qaeda in September of 2001 (or by the perpetrators of the Oklahoma City Bombing, which preceded the original air date of… more

Through the Federal Government’s Art-in-Architecture program, Richard Serra was commissioned in 1979 to produce a large-scale sculptural installation for the Federal Office Building in Manhattan. Formed from a single sheet of 2-inch thick Cor-Ten steel, Tilted Arc was 120 feet long and 12 feet high. Its 72 tons were balanced by gently arcing the material, which allowed it to stand independently. Positioned diagonally across the plaza, it bisected the space creating an imposing barrier, forcing users of the space to detour around the artwork.

Divisive in nature, from the moment of installation, there were requests for its removal. A successful letter-writing campaign brought on a public hearing in 1984. Government officials from the public hearing committee voted 4-1 to remove the sculpture and on the night of March 15, 1989, it was cut into three pieces and sold for scrap.

Subsequent versions of the plaza have adhered to a spirit of increasing complacency, via memorial. Since 1997, Martha Schwartz Partners’ intervention distilled the most superficial notions of Serra’s boundary, echoing it through long curving rows of green plastic seating, which curled around mounds of vegetation. A little over a decade later, the space is adequately leaky to be considered irrelevant. Enough so, as to mandate a new version by Michael Van Valkenburgh: an increasingly generic iteration in the series which mimics the greenness of Schwartz’s chair boundaries, replicated through large, organically-curving planters. The soon-to-be plaza promises to be meta-referential, imitating the original intent of Serra through shallow allusions.

In their broad appeal, the plazas have not nearly generated the levels of interest that Tilted Arc did. Rather than pursuing potentially controversial agendas, a series of increasingly conservative designers have diminished the site’s critical capacity by tracing past interventions to produce mediocre work that neither offends nor pleases.

E. Sean Bailey

Jean-François Goyette

It is only once animal life is snuffed out that bodies, bereft of movement, are expected to cool to the temperature of the surrounding air. While in life physiological processes and garments provide basic warmth, they do not suffice in the harshest of climates, where self imprisonment and blasting furnaces are some of the only means of comfortable persistence. The ills of cold climates are many. Infertile icy soils and short growing seasons force the importation of food from distant lands. Twenty-four hours of light or dark wreaks havoc on the experience of time, while the resulting lack and excess of ultraviolet light unhinges the body’s supply of vitamin D. More horrifically, prolonged exposure to the cold inflicts permanent damage to nerves and cells: blistering, the amputation of fingers and toes, and eventually, death.

Despite these sensible reasons to avoid the cold, there remain a few nations that ardently lay claim to vast arctic territories. Large swaths of Canada… more

‘Cold’ describes not only temperature but temperament. Distanced from the more ambiguous ‘cool’, it is a state that engages an extreme posture.

When architecture turns cold, it may become hermetic and defensive – at times exhibiting cruelty.

In cold weather, architectural skins often thicken and any openings are sealed, creating a limited environment, both controlled and isolated. When architecture takes on a cold disposition, as perhaps in the case of the Barcelona Pavilion with its chromed-steel cruciform columns, that reflectively tease, it allures, until the moment greasy fingerprints disrupt its surface—an indication of high-maintenance—serving to remind admirers to remain at a distance.

With its intense character, cold architecture—whatever its persuasion—remains difficult to access.

E. Sean Bailey

Erandi de Silva

In Giambattista Nolli’s 1748 plan of Rome, the outlines of buildings are hatched in order to highlight the planar density of the city. While these hatched boundaries represent spatial adjacencies, they are also a record of social proximity. While the erection of one building next to another necessarily results in a spatial conversation, it also results in the social contract that is being a neighbor. And just as there are good and bad spatial compositions, there are also good and bad neighbors.

By international standards, and as evidenced by its Nolli plan, the inner city Toronto neighborhood of Cabbagetown, where I grew up, is relatively sparse. Existing at an urban edge, next to a winding river valley and interspersed with parks, the houses while in close proximity often maintain spatial independence. This spatial estrangement is reconciled in part by a harsh winter climate, and the legal requirement for homeowners to remove snow and leaves from the sidewalks adjacent to their homes, which in ideal circumstances results in cooperation across boundaries.

This, sadly, is not always the norm. After any large snowfall, our family would don our heaviest winter gear, arm ourselves with shovels, and plow a path connecting the sidewalks in front of our house with those of our neighbors, expecting that the favor would some day be returned. Our neighbor, returning home one evening after a particularly brutal blizzard while we were still in the process of clearing her sidewalk, squeezed past us and paused at the top of her front stoop only long enough to mutter ‘I owe you an apple pie’, before slamming the door in our faces. Needless to say, we never received the apple pie, nor did she ever express any further words of gratitude, but to this day we continue to clear her walk, making sure to maintain at least our end of the social contract.

‘Here comes the story of a Hurricane…’

—Bob Dylan, ‘Hurricane’

I have had a lot of neighbors in my time.

The earliest one was a kind-hearted, sometimes drag queen, who would visit our place regularly (dressed as a ‘man’) bringing me gifts. My mother, a sheltered newcomer to the West, would peer into his apartment through the glass panes of the front door, amazed to see sequined dresses strewn across the floor.

Subsequently, we lived next to a very friendly, tall lady who scared me one Sunday when after a nice brunch together, she slipped away from the table, re-emerging in the garden dressed like the Easter Bunny. I was forced to to endure a terrifying ride in the backseat of my parents’ car, with said out-scaled rabbit, which delivered us to an egg hunt at my pre-school.

With another change of residence, came a lovely elderly couple who, most significantly, debunked a popular South Asian myth which dictates that people must eat rice for dinner. They also quashed the notion that married couples slept in the same bed, opting instead for two twin beds separated by a side table à la Lucy and Ricky Ricardo.

Following an international move, came a long string of suburban neighbors that I would classify as mostly unremarkable. A subsequent move to the city, proved to be more entertaining, living next door to a well-known concert pianist whom I recognized from his regular appearances on television. His home had a… more

E. Sean Bailey

Erandi de Silva

Architectural educators often rely on the precedent to make distinctions between good and bad architecture. Works by esteemed practitioners such as Herzog and de Meuron, or Sejima and Nishizawa are dissected and documented in an effort to determine what makes them successful as buildings and as works of art. While important lessons may be learned, the danger of such idolatry for the nascent designer is in its capacity to influence. Architecture schools, which should be places of free exploration and experimentation instead become factories for the production of architectural pastiches, or collages, inspired by a few great men. Once naive and unpredictable thinkers, admirable qualities in youth… more

Cy Twombly drew deep inspiration from classical mythology and allegory. Recalling an artist with similar antique interests, he said ‘I would’ve liked to have been Poussin, if I’d had a choice, in another time’.

Twombly produced gestural works which bore scrawls resembling names such as ‘Virgil’. Roland Barthes claimed that though Twombly produced images that resembled words, they were stripped of their meaning – mere traces.

His home, a palazzo on the Via di Monserrato in Rome, like his works, evocatively represents articles originating in the distant past, in a present context.

E. Sean Bailey

Erandi de Silva

For the first time in my short life, I am starting to feel old. Not because I have physically aged all that much—my skin still has a great deal of elasticity—but because I cannot figure out Grasshopper. No, not the natural variety of grasshopper that jumps around the yard, but the generative modelling software by the same name.

Unable to design via generative algorithms, I am forced to rely on antiquarian inventions such as the sketchpad and pen, along with my primitive Homo sapien brain (there is also the marginally more advanced Autocad and unadulterated Rhino). When confronted with those rare design problems that cannot be solved through any other means, there is always that last fallback, which is to take advantage of perceived aged-ness and demand the help of that younger more tech savvy generation, also known as “the intern”. This feat carried through in confidence, with the knowledge that someday they too will stumble upon their own Grasshopper and the cycle will begin anew.

James Cameron and other moneyed Hollywood producers are not the only non-architects generating imagined landscapes out of 21st century digital software. Many young artists and filmmakers are producing works which present new ways to understand architecture by recontextualizing spatial imagery, using the methods of related disciplines.

In the English artist Thomas Lock’s piece Breaking Points—a project which is influenced by Paulo Virilio’s Bunker Archaeology—grand melancholic photographs of weather-beaten war bunkers sited on the French coast have been programmed, using Open Framework, so that they are randomly selected from a bank of hundreds to create a moving image which continuously destructs and constructs itself. With a similar dynamism, the French artist Thomas Léon’s film Living in the Ice Age is created with Lightwave 3D and Blender. In this work, an abandoned building is placed in the middle of a frigid landscape and as the sun rises and sets… more

E. Sean Bailey

Josefine Wikström

In 1986, Tour of the Universe, a space flight simulator for the masses, opened at the CN Tower in Toronto. Making use of two Boeing 747 simulators, the ride rattled passengers in sync with a projection of a flight towards Jupiter, asteroid collisions and all. While the ride gained local notoriety as ‘the world’s first simulator-based attraction’, to this young visitor, even more significant than the simulated space travel was the space/time travel required to access these future technologies. Before experiencing the ride proper, passengers were led to an elevator transporting them not only forty years into the future, but to a space port located 1,816 feet beneath the ground, as deep as the CN Tower is tall. Void of windows, it was impossible to tell the real depth of the space station, and so the illusion of a subterranean inverted tower was maintained. (In reality, the ride was located in the tower’s basement level, a few mere feet below ground.)

In 2004, artist Euan Macdonald produced The Tower, a full scale replica of the top twenty-five feet of the CN Tower, the remainder of the structure having been buried after millions of years of geological sedimentation. While not a deliberate reaction to the Tour of the Universe, the two pieces are linked by their common subject matter, the CN Tower, but also by their use of the subterranean world to cloud our understanding of our present reality. The only means of disproving either of these mythologies with confidence is to dig.

The act of digging often works in tandem with sheltering, typically as a means of collecting resources or clearing space. In Hiroshi Teshigahara’s 1964 film, Woman in the Dunes, digging becomes essential for survival. For the sometimes amorous protagonists—a widow and an entymologist—who are trapped in a house at the bottom of a sandpit, clearing the sand to ensure that their dwelling is not buried by the encroaching dunes is critical. The character of the sand, remains unforgivingly and unapologetically itself, and the design of the house does little to withstand the nature of its context. As a result, the building and its inhabitants are isolated, threatened, controlled, abused and irritated by their environment.

Social problems exacerbate physical ones, with the local community trapping the couple in the pit. They are denied basic supplies and even water if they refuse to dig. The community depends on the survival of the widow’s house in order to preserve the structure of the neighborhood, if her house fails then those nearby will also inevitably fail. The community also relies on sales from the sand, which is sold illegally to the city (despite its high salinity). Thus, the stability of the village is contingent on the integrity of the house, which depends on clearing the sand, which is then sold to the city to build ultimately unstable buildings.

In this world, stability and instability are inter-dependent.

E. Sean Bailey

Erandi de Silva

There is no better word to describe the American South, than ‘sweet’. Southern hospitality, the wedding cake lace of Southern Belles in their debutant finery, the birthplace of the worlds most popular sugary beverage, Coca-Cola, a region lauded for its many confectioneries, and the only climate inside of American borders tropical enough to support the growth of cane sugar.

There is, however, a duality to so much sweetness, all too familiar to anyone who suffers from a sweet tooth (chocolate cake, ice cream and glazed donuts are some of my favorite things). I use the term ‘suffer’, because the sensual experience of these types of confectioneries is all too fleeting. They linger on taste buds only as long as it takes to masticate, which is never long enough, only to disappear into the taste bud-less void of the gut, the concentrated saccharine flavor gone to waste (literally) at the end of the digestive cycle. The sweetness of the confectionery is soon replaced with the shrill whirring of the dental drill and the bitterness of pulverized teeth; rinse. Nevermind the endless hours of physical labor required to burn the extra calories ingested for such a short moment of pleasure… more

The best known landmark in Cuba’s Valle de Los Ingenios (Valley of the Sugar Mills) is the Iznaga Tower, located on the estate of Manaca Iznaga. Built by rich colonizers exploiting a once booming sugar industry, the Tower was once the tallest building on all of the island, with its height designed to enable surveillance over the plantation below. Its tiers are equipped with bells which ring in various arrangements to indicate the schedule of a workday, to warn of slave uprisings, escaped slaves and even pirate invasions.

Currently, the building operates as a living museum, ensuring that the local history is not lost. The Tower and its associated factories have become symbols of the surrounding region, their images proliferated through various media aimed at tourists including pamphlets, postcards, keepsakes and even the welcome sign into the nearby city of Trinidad (an urban testament to the wealth of the sugar trade).

While architectural icons are often associated with a measure of celebrity and, in turn, are often objects of celebration, these buildings have historically dark underpinnings which situate their fame in a somewhat perverse territory.

E. Sean Bailey

Erandi de Silva

I was raised on Star Trek. Spending every summer isolated deep in the countryside, it was often the only show available on our rabbit ears. As a grouchy ten year old I generally resented the formulaic plots. Captain Kirk lands on seemingly abandoned planet. Captain Kirk angers natives. Captain Kirk escapes to the Starship Enterprise. Even more disappointing than the stale plot, however, were the terrible aesthetics. While future Earth certainly spared no money on the mechanics of the USS Enterprise, they definitely tightened the purse strings when it came to hiring the designers. With awkward proportions, cramped quarters, dismal lighting, cheap materials and ugly furniture, the enterprise looked more like a labyrinthine suburban rec room than a sophisticated trans-galactic spaceship. The mundane interior might have been redeemed by the most intriguing aspect of space travel, zero gravity, except that artificial gravity had already been mastered in Star Trek’s futuristic timeline.

Star Trek’s banal future visions would haunt me for the next twenty years of my life, with the series constantly refreshing its casts and spaceships (though they all sort of looked the same), while maintaining its living room feel. And while I ultimately abhorred Star Trek as entertainment for not straying far… more

As celebrities grow older, their images often fade, leaving them to lose the relevance they had at the peak of their youth. As the icons of architecture’s last Golden Age mature, what will be their fate? There are so many potential options, making it possible for them to explore one of several proven avenues.

Perhaps the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and company will go gracefully, taking care of themselves and embracing their role as aging beauties. At times it may be possible to revive their talent, giving them a new life, simply by recasting them into new roles and facilitating a comeback. On occasion, this may involve dabbling in superficial cosmetic adjustments or more serious physical augmentations which may include nipping and tucking their way to preservation and renewal. Sometimes these alterations take very well, while at other times, they prove to be controversial and have difficulty gaining acceptance. If the effort of upkeep becomes overwhelming, they may sadly just give up altogether becoming bloated, overgrown and generally unkempt.

Speculation aside, only time will reveal, what destiny awaits architecture’s iconic starlets. Perhaps future breakthroughs will end the phenomenon of aging altogether, creating new scenarios.

E. Sean Bailey

Erandi de Silva