Stress Analysis

"I didn't design the layout of Brasilia. I just did its architecture.
And it's a place where the buildings count for a lot. The city is flat.
The horizon stretches away endlessly."
                                                                       - Oscar Niemeyer

Misc. notes on architecture

Re, the Modernist affinity for geometric simplicity, and the flat roof. Boxes with lids on them, more or less.

Granted, the flat-roofed structure has been around since time immemorial, being the direct descendent of the most rudimentary of architectural configurations, the post-and-lintel affair. Due to this lineage, one might describe it as "classic" in a sense. But perhaps only classic by default, by base necessity, since the prior mode of default mostly meant scouting out caves and the like. Post and lintel basically meaning walls and roof -- support and shelter. The rudiments.

The lintel element being -- by extension -- the flat roof. Which would become the basic structural feature thereafter, especially for buildings that served the most basic purposes -- be they domestic or institutional. Such things lack grandeur, speak in too humble of terms.

SO: The flat roof being a matter of default throughout the ages. Until the twentieth century, when High Modernism brought it back into style, made it a matter of preference. Modernism, with its guiding principle of purity and all that -- banishments of ornament and excess, form following function for the sake of improving (and aestheticizing) the built environment. That sense of purism extending to the reductivist basics of modular geometrical volumes -- permutations of the square and rectangle; the rectitude of -- as Le Corbusier would put it -- the right (i.e., 90-degree) angle.

All of that aside, there are inherent disadvantages to the flat roof, the sort that pose issues for the longevity of the building. One of course is the simple matter of water; which can collect in puddles along the plane of the roof, causing leaks which thereby incrementally shortening the integrity of the structure (not to mention adding to all sorts of laborious, expensive, and continual maintenance).

From an engineering point of view, the sloped roof has its upsides (no pun intended); mainly because it channels a lot of the gravitational taxation out towards the corners, where the corner beams could divert said forces right back down into the earth. But you lose that with a flat roof. Especially if its ceiling is low, and the structure sprawls. In which case it requires -- like the sort that covers any vast acreage (a factory, say) -- an optimum of load-bearing supports within. Basic physics, really. The more weight put upon a roof (be it the heavy accumulation of seasonal snows, a recreational deck or helipad, or the simple stacking of additional storeys), the more it needs to be reinforced from within, and extensively throughout. Stress-points have to be diffused – equally dispersed.

Such pragmatic considerations aside, there were plenty of other reasons to beat up on Modern architecture; and plenty of critics have lined up to do so in recent decades. Much of the criticism extending beyond considerations about form, focusing instead on issues of functionality. In this respect, it sometimes adopts the posture of a type of Adolf Loos-ish civic-virtues sanctimonious blowholing; which at times comes across as disingenuous, the anti-"purity" puritanism often hanging on the speaker as smartly as a second-hand suit.

At any rate, Le Corbusier is the favorite target for critics of Modern architecture; particularly his "Radiant City," which is overwhelmingly cited as the ultimate in bloodlessly "rational," dystopia-via-utopian urban planning. And yes, to look at the drawings and the model, one can't argue with that assessment. But it was never built or realized, if only because it was unbuildable and unrealizable, which is undoubtedly for the better. But there’s always Brasília, which was built and exists as an actualization of a similar plan. Like Corbu’s scheme, it's been described as inhumanly sprawling and impersonal, too aesthetically elitist and "absolute" in its grandeur. Similarly, it’s also been assailed for being too organized around the culture of roadways and the automobile; its expanses exceedingly unfriendly to pedestrian traffic and difficult to reach or navigate on foot. So while on one level – as a series of containers for administrative and bureaucratic activity – the city serves its function. But on another level, a much more logistical and symbolic level, one might argue it fails to fulfill its purpose.

Or so it’s said. Perhaps, dunno. I'm neither an architect nor an engineer, and I imagine this sort of thing is better left to those with the requisite expertise. What's more, I’ve never been to Brasília. But from appearances, the structure seems to be bearing up fairly well. Not only that, but it's still looking quite grand at the same time.

Some Lateral Thoughts, I (Playing Through)

Speaking of Cartographies of the Absolute in the prior post, I see that a while back they posted the above clip of reporter Charlie LeDuff golfing through Detroit. Which was a bit of a plate of shrimp, since I recently hear an interview with LeDuff where he was discussing his recently published Detroit: An American Autopsy. I found the interview heartening in some ways. Sure, one might disparage his sense of optimism in the face of Detroit's more-likely futures as being more a matter of denial than defiance. And his argument about "if you're boring, you're dead" might seem a bit wrongheaded if you're inclined to think of how factuality has become such a slippery and superfluous thing in the age of "new media." But whatever the case, I could connect with his earnestness and dogged commitment to his home turf.

As far as the matter of "ruin porn" and Detroit are concerned, I come across Steerforth at the blog The Age of Uncertainty saying a few words about "Abandonment," accompanied by some photos of derelict fisheries structures in Iceland...

"It is shocking how quickly buildings fall into decay. As the roofs of these structures rust, the late rains will seep into the walls, freeze and create fissures until, eventually, the inside is hard to distinguish from the outside.

Every ruin is a reminder that even the most solid-looking building is in a state of flux. We struggle to maintain the illusion of permanence, but the moment we abandon the fight, we find ourselves in Detroit."

Perhaps this has something to do -- albeit tangentially -- with my fascination with the topic of "ruin porn" as a recent cultural meme/trope/morbid fixation/whatever. Because I grew up in a place very much the opposite of Iceland. In the Deep South subtropic region of the SE United States. Where anything and everything constructed or devised by human hands was immediately pitched in a battle against the climate and the elements. Recently-laid roadways and sidewalks cracking, greenery sprouting through. Or sporting huge fissured bumps and ripples from the tree roots sprawling out underneath. The cloak of kudzu that -- during its non-dormant seasons -- rapidly grew to consume entire treelines, abandoned roadside shacks and homesteads, telephone poles, and the like. (If if was stationary, if was fair game.) Driving through parts of Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, and upwards into Indiana and Ohio, where the abandoned barns and silos sinking in on themselves -- sitting out in a field with a hundred yards of so from the highway -- were a common sight. Houses that had burned down, with only their foundation and chimney still standing, which sat that way for years afterward. There were constant reminders that entropy, decay, and calamity held all the cards -- were inescapable, inevitable.

Creative Destruction

( Or: Three Failures in Search of Resolution )


I.

It was conceived as a sort of ballet mécanique. Wheels set into motion by a complex network of pulleys; a robotic automatic painting device churning out random patterns of pigment; a flaming upright piano automated from without -- its keys being unharmonically hammered by an array of pistons; a go-cart racing madly in place; an inflating weather balloon; a bathtub filled with a smoking chemical concoction; a fire extinguisher discharging aimlessly; numerous bells and klaxons. Flames, smoke, intricate engineering amounting to nonce spasmodics, eventually collapsing in on itself. Perhaps the flames provided warmth on a cold New York evening, provoking a few of the huddled spectators to lean in closer that they should, risking endangerment. Did the museum have the foresight to take out a liability policy in advance, or have attendees sign a waiver on admittance? Not likely.

The ballet at hand being Jean Tinguely’s “Homage to New York” as it was presented to the public for its "performance" in the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art on a winter evening in early March, 1960. Assembled from a load of rubbish carted in from a garbage dump in neighboring Newark. Tinguely enlisted the help of Swedish-born engineer Billy Klüver during construction, with Robert Rauschenberg contributing a "money-throwing machine" to the works. Its operational lifespan lasted – by some accounts -- less than a half-hour before it began to fall apart, catch fire, and the New York Fire Department intervened on the side of the public behalf, with some of the audience boo-ing them for ruining the event by performing their civic-minded service.

Even though it was a machine designed to serve a function, a function that was effectively dysfunctional, it failed. Portions of the contraption that were supposed to do one thing or another did something else or nothing instead, and needed some interventional nudging on the part of the artist. It was devised to be a catastrophe -- involving equal parts contrivance and chaos -- and once it was set in motion, the catastrophic inevitably ensued. Clanking and grinding, smoke and flames. And in the end, debris. Wreckage and scattered parts to be picked apart and taken home by the witnesses, with the most desirable remnants being claimed by the Museum itself. From junk to salvage, twice over. Three weeks’ worth of parts and labor for something that would undo itself within a short span of a late evening.

Social Space (or, In Advance of a Tilted Arc)

Geography has little, or nothing, to do with it. Nor does fate, I suppose. Each
encroaches. Be it nature, or imposed,

erected. And that ring of dolmens and slabs may’ve served some purpose
out on Salisbury Plain. A function from which – depending on which
theory you choose – some bit of useful knowledge might be devised, divined,
deciphered. From Bronze to Gilded, the latter an age for the polis arising,
stacking up. Steel skeletons and curtain walls.

Architecture and engineering, building -- like the act of walking, itself --
being a triumph over gravity (which can be,

                                                  if you'll pardon the expression,

 a motherfucker), 

a diversion of forces and skirting of laws. Load-bearing verticals and the 

sheltering horizontals. The rudiments of post and lintel

construction. And there are equations for this, I'm sure. Things
ratioed,then proportionally modeled or molded. Space carved up
and framed. Orchestrations of emptiness, solidity framing air and
light at certain times of day. Equations of the sort I'm unable to parse,
penciled out and threaded on a knotty profusion of specialists' glyphs.
Equations of heights to breadths to masses
& whathaveyous.

{ Man being -- it was once said -- the measure of all things.
Albeit in this instance, a proportional unit, a bodily mean.
Easily rendered as a grapheme or dash by the draftsman.
Figure-ground relationship, reduced to relative scale. }

Whichever theory you chose, a charting device or sundial.
But here in the grid a sundial doesn’t work so well, pulls the short shift,
here where in most places the sun only invades the canyon for a couple of
scant and bracketed hours. High noon, the shadows are their shortest.
Barely there, directly beneath, and stood upon. Unshakingly underfoot as
I cross the plaza during lunch hour, taking my path across
and around

A curtain, a wall.

But there are other equations I learned long ago. And other streets
I knew where the orientation (aligned with the points on
a compass) allowed the shadows to fall and stretch out in
the late afternoon. Including the one that swallowed and
dwarved me a couple hours after school had let out,
its owner towering over, and asking,

“Hey, kid -- nice shoes. Where’d

you get those – offa wire?

Huhuhhuhuhh…"

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image: David Hammons, Shoetree, utilizing Richard Serra's public sculpture T.W.U.
[Trade Workers Union], Lower Manhattan, 1981. Photograph by Dawoud Bey.

The Half-life of Ephemera

Or: That which we have now, having never been (Slight return)


Something that used to happen to me fairly often, but hasn't in a long while...

Acquiring a book from either a library or a second-hand bookstore, books that had passed through other hands. A photograph found between the pages, or falling out from someplace therein. A photographs no doubt having been haplessly placed there as a bookmark many years or decades previously, before the reader had returned the volume to the library or sold it off to whomever.

One of these I can remember quite well. A black & white snapshot, with the blank white frame of a border. A man and a woman leaning against the side of a broad and bulky car. Behind them, beyond the car, a few homes marking the point where a short stretch of residential block gives way to an open vista, the road receding to the horizon over a terrain of rolling hills. The model of the vehicle and the man and woman's hair and clothes suggest that the photo was taken no later than 1952. The landscape and the sky have me thinking the location might be the outskirts of San Francisco or possibly Seattle -- some place like that, someplace coastal and right off the water, in California or the Pacific northwest, back when large portions of that region were still thinly and spottily populated, when many of the roads had only recently been laid down.

 Despite the fact that someone had them stand against the car -- to stop just here for a moment, so that someone could capture an image of the occasion -- they position themselves toward the camera quite loosely, but can't really be bothered to fully, formally face the camera. Their posture is relaxed and casual. The man grins, the woman appears to be on the verge of laughter. The way they are interacting suggests that they are something other than lovers or man and wife. Perhaps instead an old dear friend or sibling was visiting from elsewhere, making the rare trek across a large expanse of the country, for a few days of catching-up and spread over several days. With the photo having been taken in that last hour before the visiting party had to say goodbye, departing homeward.

At one point a had a small collection of these photos, amounting to only a few. Don't know at what point -- in which move or purging -- I lost them, but I had them for a while. I kept them as I had encountered them, as physical objects; as flotsam from other people's lives that had been unintentionally (one assumes) set into indeterminate circulation. The sort of photos you look at and deduce what you can from the information they contain. The sort of photos you look at and wonder: Who are -- or were -- these people? What did this moment mean to them? Where are they now?



* * * * *

Orbital Exile

There were those who deemed it an atrocity from the moment its plans were first unveiled -- a monstrous eyesore in the offing. Or some inverted, modern-day travesty of Tatlin's Tower. So I suppose this might (or might not) translate into schadenfreude for the detractors. This particular quote (pulled from an initial glowing profile in an industry publication, no less) grabs my attention...

"Mittal Steel has found the Chinese government to be an accommodating partner for foreign firms, especially when compared with the Mittal family's home country, India. 'With India being a democracy, setting up operations can be difficult,' Mittal says. 'I don't mean to denigrate democracy. But it takes time. You negotiate with all different levels of government. You negotiate with tribal people. It can take two or three years. It's a more difficult process than in the United States.'

'But I remember going to China. I flew into the airport, and there was literally red-carpet treatment. Then I’m in a car on a highway, and there is no one else on the road. So I ask, What’s going on here? And they say, The party secretary wanted to give you a nice welcome. This highway isn’t actually open yet. Then I get to the plant site, but I don’t see any land. I see houses, lots of houses – a village. And I say, Where’s the land? And the party secretary says, Right here. In 90 days, everyone will be gone."

Can't help but notice -- to my utter lack of surprise -- how Richard Serra turns up in this, cited as one of ArcelorMittal's former artworld clients. And relatedly, how the quote above echoes some issues raised in this piece circa 1990...

"Minimalism's partisans have all along insisted that it is wrongheaded to look for, let alone to interrogate, any found subject or author behind the art's patently object-like and desubjectivized facade. Thus Douglas Crimp insists, for instance, that 'Characterizations of Serra's work as macho, overbearing, oppressive, seek to return the artist to the studio, to reconstitute him as the work's sole creator, and thereby to deny the role of industrial processes in his sculpture.' We can be interested in Serra's use of industrial processes, however, and still hold him to account as the creator (not to say fabricator) of his work - work that plainly manifests certain personal ambitions and interests, its industrial facture notwithstanding. That Serra's artistic gestures have less in common with the sculptor's conventional rituals than with the rituals of the industrial magnate who merely lifts the telephone to command laborers to shape tons of steel according to his specifications, and the rituals of the foremen or construction bosses who oversee the processes of fabrication and installation, does not render those gestures altogether impersonal."

To be honest, I've always been a bit dubious about Anna Chave's essay "Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power." Something about the way it cherrypicked its information to bolster its thesis, its (at times) borderline scattershot scholarship, as well as the heated pitch of its own rhetoric...it all reminded me too much of an article in some sensationalizing tabloid, all of which made it a little too easy to dismiss a lopsided hatchet-job. Yet certain parts of it raise valid points, especially in regards to Serra's work and nagging questions about the nature of civic responsibility in the years following the Tilted Arc controversy. There was also an underlying thrust to Chave's thesis that dealt with the role such grand works play in relation to a larger political economy; and argument that it seems the Kapoor/ArcelorMittal flap illustrates a little too perfectly.

Although I imagine neither Kapoor or Serra ever think to to worry about or vet these sort of details. For the sake of staying focused on the project at hand, their chief concern probably doesn't exceed that of anyone who hires a contractor -- simply finding someone who can get the job done, who can make the vision a reality. But there are always inherent risks involved in that sort of process...




Forget it, Jake...it's Chinese drywall.

Lineage (The Way of All Flesh)

in the beginning, something about the word. but before that bit about the beginning
there was a lot of business about how mamoaha begat slipshad, and how slipshad
begat hamrach, and hamrach begat nimrod, & so on & so on. the stuff
that was in the gospels but never gospel proper, what only made it into the worst
of sermons and fell between the crevices of all the killings and the fuckings, the
cursings and redeemings, the departures and wanderings and arrivals. the last of
which seem to be -- once you think about it -- always and foreverly forthcoming
and a little too heavily reliant on a surplus of (ahem) trust.

before all that: the word supposedly spoken, and then (eventually) scratched down.
the word made flesh, or at least given worldly weight -- legs, if you will -- with its
shaping in the meat of the mouth. its meaning only by way of agreement, a signing
on some undrawn line. that agreement being only that which was mutually known.
the thing we each acknowledge, that lay there between us on the table.

but the only things that can really be known or trusted are those that arrive
well in advance of words. words too often arriving very late to the scene, like
the ambulance rolling up hours after the crucial moment, long after we'd sent word
to the sheriff, with someone having agreed to set out on foot carrying, how it had to
be done before the wires and the telephones made it out our way.

a narrative given shape, strung together and given beginning, middle, end.
tales passed from one to the next, the words there for the purpose of telling.
the sort of tale that sometimes -- some times -- reaches the point where language
breaks down, collapses, that goes a place that words can't go, where description falls
short and takes its leave, leaving just the prelingual utterance, sans syntagma.
because hurts of a certain kind have a quality of (if they must be spelt)
oooooooooaaaaoooooooo,
mmmnnnhhhhmmmmm.

* * *

and it's tiring, killingly so. it gives me a goddamn headache sometimes how some
cats think they can map all this stuff out -- with everything connected or correlated,
categorized and labeled, with everything falling properly into place, all named and
laid out tidily, fixed (supposedly) with certainty about their relatedness. but the
only thing one knows for certain is causality, and even that itself is all wound up in
randomness and happenstance, and beyond that everything else is just guesswork.
but the one thing one can be assured of is the hurts, and the varying qualities
and depths thereof.

now: the hand held aloft, its inside offered up for scrutiny, for decipherence. that fate
is something etched on the skin is another given, among the first things you learn. so too
with the ways in which everything is encoded. delineation, a schematic: the interrelation
of all things, each connected to another. this line tells of progeny, kinship. and over
here we have betrayal. here, the most dooming of jealousies. and here desire. here
abandonment. here fortune. and over here need. and here in need. and here ahhhhh,
and over there unnghhn...

with all of these leading to, pointing to nothing bigger than
THE DAY THAT YOU WILL DIE.

come sooner,
come late




_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

image: John Lee Hooker, 1951.

Photograph by Clemens Kalischer.

As Nature Allows

   

*

I.       Place name: from the ancient Persian, home of fires. The Zoratsrian plume,
          the eruptive arcs of conflagrant fountains, the flame having burned for centuries,
          if not millenia, if not from the beginning of time. For an eternity.

          An eternity having ended soon enough, with its source siphoned out. Drawn off
          'to light, to lubricate, and paint all the world.' The blaze dwindling, dissipated,
          the Brahmins abandoning the temple. The temple then renovated, and left to the
          tourists, for whom the flame had to be piped back in, artificially. A domestic import,
          a diverted diversion, viewable each day between the hours of 9 and 6.

II.       While on the horizon the ever thickening, man-made forest burns — brighter and
           monumentally, daily darkening the sky.

III.      The sky darkened. Dark: the color (as such) of that (more or less) which is
           (so to speak) not there. That not spoken of, left unquantified. Reification in reverse.
           The world now fully lit and lubed and painted. Permeated and suffused at every level.
           The subtext  ungirding all narratives, the presence that can only be inferred. Energy:
           an agent of acceleration and expansion. Nothing, essentially, being the biggest part of
           everything — how the totality operates, and also how it ends. The essence unknown and
           unknowable, unseen and unseeable. Its presence only inferred, the light from distant bodies
           bending as it passes through.


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images: From "Oil Wells at Baku, Close View,"commonly
attributed to Auguste and Louis Lumière, c. 1898  { # }