Insurrectionary Memory

[Image: From a press pack released last month by Factory Fifteen].

This is just a quick note that I've updated an older post, embedding a short film called Robots of Brixton by Kibwe X-Kalibre Tavares of Factory Fifteen, whose work that post describes. Check it out if you get a chance.

A Long Line of Presentation

I ran into Rose near central park this past weekend.She shared some of the knowledge that she has acquired over the past 79 years. Rose told me, " There was always a long line of presentation. Not one item should outdo another. The pieces should compliment one another, to create one complete picture. This is how it used to be,there was an elegance before. We were working towards the face, everything was meant to flatter the face."

When I asked her why she wears gloves, she simply responded," To protect my hands."

Ruin Index

Welsh soldiers are currently documenting abandoned neighborhoods in the divided city of Nicosia, Cyprus, photographing a region that "stretches across the entire breadth of the island, covering 134 square miles." Their ultimate goal is "to catalog everything in the area of the city that is part of a buffer zone established by the UN to end the fighting." Quoting the soldier in charge:

"The people had to leave their homes and shops pretty quickly, leaving everything behind. There’s children’s clothing, boxes of unused shoes. Of course, all this stuff still belongs to the people who left it."
Some of the things lying in vacant blocks also include brand new cars made in 1974 that have been left in hollow shopping centres.
"There’s a Toyota Corolla 1974 which has 38 miles on the clock," said [Corporal Kelvin Roberts]. "When you open the doors you get hit with a fresh smell of untouched leather and the plastic wrapping remains on the inside of the doors. It’s a bit spooky."

Jace Clayton—aka DJ /rupture—wrote a great piece about the often surreal life of the international DJ, which kicks off with a visit to this very place:

I sat beside the pool talking to our host, trying to figure out why we were there. Down the coast, thirty miles away in the haze, a tall cluster of glass-and-steel buildings hugged the shore. “What’s that city?” I asked. It looked like Miami. “Varosha,” she said. Completely evacuated in the 1974 conflict. A ghost town on the dividing line between North and South Cyprus. The only people there were UN patrol units and kids from either side who entered the prohibited zone to live out a J.G. Ballard fantasy of decadent parties in abandoned seaside resorts.

Of course, this is also the same city where, in the recent book Divided Cities, we read about a subterranean network "where all the sewage from both sides of the city is treated." A casually post-political waste-management engineer jokes that "the city is divided above ground but unified below." It is a kind of infrastructural conjoined twin.

Will the Welsh soldiers also document the sewers?

(Thanks to John Maas for the tip).

Those of you in the UK on 19 July can take a "smell walk of Sheffield’s University Quarter followed by a presentation on the role of smell in urban design." You'll learn about "the unique qualities offered by smell to placemaking; contemporary experiences of odors in town and cities; [and] design issues and tools relating to smell." Read more at Urban Design Group. Meanwhile, for some background on comparative urban odorology, check out the work of Sissel Tolaas.

Interpretation-Based Spatiality

[Image: A collage of various buildings by Robert Scarano, from photos by Gabrielle Plucknette for the New York Times].

After reading today that a New York appeals court has upheld a ban on architect Robert Scarano, preventing him from practicing in the city, I found this fascinating anecdote published a few months ago about one of the tactics Scarano has used to get his developments cleared by the Department of Buildings. Quoting the New York Times at length:

It’s the summer of 2008. A young couple decides to buy an 800-square-foot apartment in a new condo building on the gentrifying outer edge of a fashionable Brooklyn neighborhood. The buyers go to close on the place, and as they’re signing away half a million dollars, the building’s developer, keeping a wary eye on the hovering lawyers, leans over and whispers something. There’s a second bathroom in the apartment, he says, one that does not appear on the floor plan—its doorway is concealed behind an inconspicuous layer of drywall. At first, the buyers think the developer is kidding. This is before the crash, near the peak of the market, and no one’s giving away a square inch. But the developer says no, he’s dead serious, just look. So a few days after they buy the place, the couple takes a sledgehammer to their wall.

Like something out of House of Leaves—or a kind of architectural Advent calendar, in which various walls are knocked down at specific times of the year to reveal whole new rooms and corridors behind them—the building contained more space than its own exterior had indicated.

Later, the article's author goes on to attend a party in another of Scarano's buildings: "'There’s a secret room,' [the party's host] told me, conspiratorially. Up on the mezzanine level, next to a pair of D.J.’s turntables, he knocked on a wall. It sounded hollow."

I have to admit that this totally blows my mind. Imagine another room within that room whose doorway is also sealed behind drywall—and then other rooms within that room, and further corridors and stairs and entrances. Tap, tap, tap—you navigate by sound, knocking deeper and deeper into an architectural world you only reveal by means of careful deconstruction. Amidst this labyrinth of drywalled rooms, you realize the true extent of your property, which extends so far beyond what you originally thought was your building that you end up, at one point, standing in another zip code.

[Image: The underground city of Derinkuyu].

In a way, I'm reminded of the massive underground city of Derinkuyu, which, as Alan Weisman explains in The World Without Us, was discovered entirely by accident:

No one knows how many underground cities lie beneath Cappadocia. Eight have been discovered, and many smaller villages, but there are doubtless more. The biggest, Derinkuyu, wasn't discovered until 1965, when a resident cleaning the back wall of his cave house broke through a wall and discovered behind it a room that he'd never seen, which led to still another, and another. Eventually, spelunking archeologists found a maze of connecting chambers that descended at least 18 stories and 280 feet beneath the surface, ample enough to hold 30,000 people—and much remains to be excavated. One tunnel, wide enough for three people walking abreast, connects to another underground town six miles away. Other passages suggest that at one time all of Cappadocia, above and below the ground, was linked by a hidden network. Many still use the tunnels of this ancient subway as cellar storerooms.

In any case, for Scarano it was not always about literally hiding extra rooms inside a building; it was often just a matter of using certain words—like basement—instead of others—like cellar—to hide his intentions. For instance, "Scarano tried to build a two-story addition to the roof of [an] old warehouse by transferring floor area from the building’s lowest level, which he planned to convert to parking, to the top of the roof. But the zoning code distinguished between a basement (which is partly above ground, defined as habitable, and therefore counted toward the floor-area ratio) and a cellar (which is underground and uninhabitable). Opponents accused Scarano of trying to finesse the difference, and eventually the Department of Buildings declared the space a cellar. New height limits have been established in the neighborhood, and the partly built addition is coming down."

Or this: Scarano "adapted the zoning rules that applied to warehouse conversions. Under certain circumstances, the code classified loft mezzanines as storage space, not floor area, and Scarano assured developers their new building plans could slip through this loophole."

It's hermeneutics—as if the spatial expansion of whole neighborhoods is really just a graph of certain words used in different contexts. As if vocabulary itself materializes, precipitating out as alternative spatial futures for the city. Indeed, the New York Times writes, "in Scarano’s view, the city’s code was a Talmudic document, open to endless avenues of interpretation. Through a variety of arcane strategies, he could literally pull additional real estate out of the air."

I've long been a fan of David Knight and Finn Williams, two London architects with an encyclopedic knowledge of that city's building permissions and zoning codes (I highly recommend their book SUB-PLAN: A Guide to Permitted Development, as well as Knight's recent guest post on Strange Harvest). The following image, taken from that book, is just one example of the type of interpretation-based spatiality so often abused by Scarano.

[Image: From SUB-PLAN: A Guide to Permitted Development by David Knight and Finn Williams].

Whether or not hiding entire rooms behind drywall is part of London's "permitted development" is something we'll have to ask Knight and Williams.

(Thanks to a tip from Nicola Twilley).

Summer Fashion Advice From the Countess of Glamour

The other day,I visited the Countess of Glamour at Off Broadway Boutique.I asked her for some summer fashion advice. She told me,"Think of strawberry daiquiris and mint juleps, of wonderful, happy,delicious colors, and always remember to carry a light scarf."

Gotham Sans

[Image: The Dark Knight Rises, courtesy of Warner Brothers].

Paul Owen of the Guardian today attempts a thorough critique of director Christopher Nolan's most recent films, by way of nothing more than the new poster for The Dark Knight Rises, due out in summer 2012.

The poster presents us with "an empty city totally devoid of people," Owen writes, which suggests to him a film that will be at once "claustrophobic, joyless, and derivative"—and he adds the third term as if in delayed realization that the first two, despite themselves, can often frame a compelling drama (many morality tales are precisely claustrophobic and joyless, which is where their effective power lies). But, in this way of thinking, the poster's highly architectural glimpse of a "city literally falling to pieces," as Owen describes it, is indication that the film itself will also shudder and fail under Nolan's unfounded narrative ambitions, as if depopulated streets accidentally reveal the director's inability to portray human complexity.

Is Owen right to deduce from a single piece of visual art the internal collapse of a film whose release is still more than one year away? And does this foreshortened view of a ruined metropolis—"an empty city totally devoid of people" with "rubble crumbling from the roofs"—rightly imply a story equally vacated of human interest?

Either way, it's nice to see a short piece of virtuoso art interpretation, inspired by an image of buildings.

(Earlier on BLDGBLOG: Dream-Sector Physics and Inception Space and Shining Path).