In his book You Are Not A Gadget one of Jaron Lanier’s criticisms of current digital culture, specifically the thing we call Web 2.0, is the paradox that a tool that is marketed as something to enable human creativity and individuality has actually done the opposite. The set of checklists and ‘Likes’ that form our online personalities demean the intricacies of the human mind. As we enthusiastically embrace these limitations so we limit ourselves. We willingly surrender to the perceived wisdom of the cloud based crowd at the expense of individual human insight. The question is as much a moral one as it is a practical technological one. Figuring out what we should do is as important as what we can do. To publish something takes a degree of arrogance that only an individual should have. An arrogant group quickly becomes oppressive. In the first chapter Lanier has a few simple suggestions of things to think about before publishing online. My three favourites are:

- Don’t post anonymously unless you really are in danger.
- Post a video once in a while that took a hundred times more times to create than it takes to view.
- Write a blog post that took weeks of reflection before you heard the inner voice that needed to come out.

In other words: think before you speak.

This is even more pertinent when posting online where very quickly, context is stripped away by selective copying, pasting, reblogging, retweeting… more

During OMA’s ‘Partners Talk’ at London’s Barbican Centre, Rem Koolhaas proclaimed that AMO’s newest publication Project Japan was architecture, much like the spaces that OMA has designed. This comment is not surprising, coming from a man who has been reformatting architectural content since the beginning of his career, building on a framework laid out by many architects before him.

Judging by his ‘believe it or not’ delivery, Koolhaas appeared to assume that his comments would be interpreted as controversial. Speaking to a roomful of what can safely be assumed to be predominantly architects, why should such a comment be shocking?

Alongside buildings, models, drawings and images, words—printed and otherwise—are important tools for architectural communication. As they all transmit content, weighing the importance of one format over the other is difficult, if not impossible.

Any resistance to the suggestion that architectural practice can happen across formats may stem from an identity crisis on the part of a profession who are unable to see themselves for who they are. Conventionally framed as purveyors of buildings, there is an entire realm of architecture that does not occupy itself directly with the production of habitable structures. While the general public can be forgiven for not having an awareness of this, architects—who have perhaps been confused by the requirements set by professional licensing institutions—cannot.

Sohrab Golsorkhi

Erandi de Silva

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. 24 hours of light and dark wreaks havoc on the experience of time, while the resulting lack and excess of ultra violet light unhinges the body’s supply of vitamin D. More horrifically, prolonged exposure to the cold inflicts permanent damage to nerves and cells; blisters, 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 extreme character, cold architecture ventures beyond the range of comfort.

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. When I was born, my family lived next door to 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 one must eat rice for dinner. They also quashed the notion that married people 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. Upon moving to the city, for a time, I lived next door to a well-known concert pianist whom I recognized from his regular appearances on television. His home had a sophisticated modernist-inspired interior that could not contain his music, which was forever spilling out onto the street.

The most famous, however, and not to mention the most uniquely stylish, of all my neighbors was Rubin “Hurricane” Carter. His clothes, his car, the objects in his world, were all so well chosen. His house, a beautiful old dwelling… more

E. Sean Bailey

Erandi de Silva

2011 has been a year of global unrest; Civil war in Libya, revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, riots in the UK and protests on Wall Street. While the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt played out in the major civic squares of Sana’a and Cairo, in America and the UK there has been no logical point of focus for protests, as the source of outrage has been difficult to pin down (while the fatal shooting of Mark Duggan initiated the London riots, the madness that ensued reflected a more systemic social malaise). This lack of appropriate symbolic geographies has left protesters in these cities to wander. Rioters in London descended on local high streets, cannibalistically looting their own communities. In New York, “Occupy Wall Street” protesters have spun a web around the city, tracing the infrastructure of streets and subways to symbolically disparate points, including corporate skyscrapers in Jersey City, the civic plaza of City Hall, the federal courthouses of Foley Square, the consumer hub that is Union Square and the academic front lawn of Washington Square Park. They have even attempted to cross the Brooklyn Bridge into the ideologically neutral outer boroughs.

The one place the protestors cannot seem to be found is Wall Street (Zuccotti Park is located a couple of blocks to the North). On a recent lunchtime visit, the street was abandoned except for rows of temporary metal barriers lining each side and a handful of police officers… more

Wall Street, as part of the urban grid, has divisive origins. Its name, derived from the Dutch “Waalstraat”, is believed to be a reference to an earthen wall bounding the northern edge of the original New Amsterdam settlement. It is presumed to have been erected in order to limit access to the English colonizers and Native Americans. Nowadays, the site has expanded beyond being simply a street into an embodiment of the idea of American finance, extending into numerous realms, including that of lifestyle.

In Oliver Stone’s 1987 film Wall Street, the materialistic influence of this site manifests itself in an apartment on the Upper East Side as the impressionable stock broker Buddy Fox (played by a young Charlie Sheen) steps closer towards emulating the gaudy postmodern style of his mentor Gordan Gekko (Michael Douglas). Guided by his aspirational designer girlfriend (Daryl Hannah) faux marble walls, trompe l’oeil scenery, fake brickwork and an excessive use of gold and silver leaf line his million dollar apartment. As a misguided indicator of “success” that separates Fox from his blue collar roots, his ostentatious private dwelling is a critical accoutrement, necessary for establishing his identity as an up-and-comer in the business. While Wall Street once sought to keep out invaders, its influence has begun to infiltrate the spaces around it, like the urban grid which seemingly expands in every direction, for better or for worse, Wall Street’s reach is limitless.

E. Sean Bailey

Erandi de Silva

The Piccadilly Community Center does not represent an instance of documentation. Its uncanny juxtaposition of both impoverishment and overabundance is both anachronistic and revealing of the center’s studied construction. The inverse of the canon of social documentary photography, those images that record and sometimes romanticize the poverty, the community center creates a dense and specific world, rather than record one already existing. It is a kind of social realism built, not captured.

And though it takes as its subject interaction between people, and studies those spaces that facilitate and house these interactions, neither does the Piccadilly Community Center, as constructed in Hauser and Wirth’s Piccadilly gallery space, represent an instance of relational aesthetics. Rather than represent a continuation of that phenomenon defined by Bourriaud as “a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space,” the center perpetuates, instead, a more traditional dream of mimesis and its power.

When Pygmalion created Galatea in the likeness of a woman, he hoped the divine gift of a human soul might enliven her sculpted flesh. The Piccadilly Community Center, an artificially constructed vision of a local community center built in a gallery space in posh central London, is, in its mimetic foundation, an expression of renewed faith in recreating reality and the power of these recreations. The Piccadilly project suggests that by building something that looks like a community center, the spirit of such a place, of community, might somehow descend into its shell, rendering it less a mockery of the lower classes than a functioning supplement to their social lives.

As a type of reproduced space, the artist Christoph Büchel’s interpretation of a community center in Piccadilly has a dialectical agenda which is self-consciously positioned between reality and artifice. For this exhibition, Hauser and Wirth’s upscale gallery fittings are removed and replaced with scavenged furnishings and accessories that simulate a detailed but thrifty recreation facility, indicating a place that has been there for some time and is permanent rather than temporary.

This project relies on misrepresentation to define itself. While the space’s identity may originate in “Art”, it shies away from this label. An obvious gesture indicating an attempted divorce from the discipline’s conventions is the omission of Büchel’s name from any promotional material, implying that the community space has come into being as any other: a product of anonymous authors, possibly bureaucrats.

The uncanniness of the space results from its proclivity for mimicry but also from its programmatic tension: art fans intently gaze at carefully placed Post-it notes and disheveled file folders, as if they were trying to understand a Dutch still-life, while elderly locals bake Algerian bread. Some users of the space are there to observe, while those under surveillance may not know that they are being watched. Thus, there is a gradient of awareness amongst users as to what is really taking place in the space.

Büchel has essentially constructed a stage for ordinary people to go about their daily activities and upon which an audience can wander. Here the roles of audience and actor are fluid and can be exchanged at any given moment. This juxtaposition of program produces… more

Rachel Engler

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 paintings evocatively reproduces a world past, in a present context.

E. Sean Bailey

Erandi de Silva

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, 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 dis-proving either of these… more

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, it 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. Here 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.

Just as the sugary confection eventually dissolves into the pain of cavities and exercise, so do the comforts of the American South… more

Numerous cities throughout history have been built on the wealth accumulated from the extraction of natural resources. Similarly, the city of Trinidad in Cuba was built by rich colonizers exploiting a once booming sugar industry. As a UNESCO World Heritage Site, Trinidad’s colonial settlement and the nearby Valle de Los Ingenios (Valley of the Sugar Mills) stand as a testimony to the development of Cuba’s sugar industry.

The best known landmark in this region is the Iznaga Tower, located on the estate of Manaca Iznaga. Once the tallest building in all of Cuba, it served as a watchtower 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 on locals or visitors. 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 Trinidad itself. 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 very 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