COOPER UNION -Organizational
Simulation of Fluid Territories -
Professor
Pablo Lorenzo Eiroa
Students groups:
Elan Fessler and Mack Cooper William
(selection of work)
Introduction:
"Progress and catastrophe are
the opposite faces of the same coin" Hanna
Arendt (1968)
“The
State subordinates the hydraulic force to canals, pipes, damns that do not allow
turbulence, which obligates movement to go from one point to another, for the
space to be striated and measured, for the fluid to depend on the solid, and the
flux to proceed passing by parallel laminar series. Instead, the hydraulic model
of the nomad science and the war machine consist of expanding by turbulence over
a smooth space, in producing a movement that occupies the space and that affects
simultaneously all the points, instead of being occupied by itself as a local
movement that goes from one point to another. ”
Gilles
Deleuze and Feliz Guattari “A Thousand Plateaus”
ORGANIZATION AND STRUCTURE
Space and Structure have
always been related to architecture’s subject matter. In order for an idea to be
of any relevance to deep structure, it has to be able to relate to the structure
of that space. Public space and infrastructure play a similar role in that
relationship. Architectural ideas concerning public space should relate to its
structure. In this sense, infrastructure remains an area untouched by our
profession, with few alternatives largely unexplored, where it is only developed
by state driven organizations like the Army Corps of Engineers. Since a large
amount of energy and economic resources are related to infrastructure renewal
and enlargement, the architect, in a side role, should engage a more active
participation in order to take these opportunities for large-scale interventions
to transform so that they can achieve a more sensible role to the urban space.
The problems of infrastructure excess and infrastructure redundancy are produced
as everyday common interventions and present continuous opportunities for
architecture interventions to affect the city at large.
There is a known shift in
worldwide port cities over the turn of the 20th century that involves
the recycling of the port’s infrastructure in order to incorporate the ports
into the fabric of the city. The shift produced by maritime global exchange,
presents a background for a less developed problem. The shift in the
incorporation of these structures, which were originally designed for different
scales, purposes, and then domesticated by cities, mark a special social shift
in the perception of urban space structures. On the other hand, those same
cities are challenged by a parallel problem, in relation to the same areas of
exchange between city and water. Today, water control systems are the focus of
attention of many states, since not only the rising levels of underground water
affect cities in floods with water coming from underneath, but also from borders
facing open waters or rivers, with problems of containing the increasing
pressure of water. As studied at Princeton University, the effects produced by
global warming present the case that in 100 years, the tide will raise 2 feet
globally, an equivalent of .60m (for instance, the shore of New Jersey and its
beaches will be receding by 240 feet (80m).
INFRASTRUCTURE EXCESS AND
ARCHITECTURE AS EXCESS
Infrastructure today has no
time, it is always new and replaced for the new, instead of growing and adapting
organically with the city. A more open-ended comprehensive thinking of the
public space in relation to infrastructure is necessary. A strategy with these
bases could adapt to new uses proposing an alternative behavior. Public space
and its structure must incorporate accumulation of time, effects, functions, and
layering of problems, which continuously transform within time. Infrastructure
interventions progressively have become simple engineering, linear solutions,
while opportunities for integration in a more comprehensive urban design
panorama are being simplified by shallow economic thinking. Its excess, its
qualities, and side effects as well as its urban potential are eliminated as
non-critical interventions become aggressive, eliminating any possibility of
those landscapes to acquire identity or quality by simple substitution.
Homogenization, standardization, simplification and insensibility are the only
means to measure itself with anything else other than its immediate simplified
purpose of its construction. Many times we can notice that infrastructure is
replaced by building parallel infrastructures, with increasing simplification.
The excess and replacement become unproductive redundancy because of the new
rigid design, which derives only by multiplication of the same problems it tries
to solve. A demand for accumulation by time instead of replacement is necessary.
Integration rather than elimination and a comprehensive inclusion can only use
time as a tool to accumulate complexity rather than beginning new in each case.
It might be a possibility to
de-motivate infrastructure linear functions in order to develop simultaneous
public urban landscapes. Infrastructure needs to become formally unstable to be
able to relate to the complexity of the interventions at the scale it usually
sustains. Proposing a more integrated, more sensible and more complex for the
dual. De-motivating its function to becoming more open in its being.
Infrastructure has been commonly centralized, but today infrastructure has been
extending largely the city landscape. This expansion of the urban space that
consumes any territory has not been able to accommodate to the new, but rather
the opposite to homogenize the landscape. That is the extreme case once it
encounters the fluid territory of the edges of the water, as we can analyze its
indifferent behavior connecting the Keys around the Gulf and Florida Coast.
Infrastructure excess is generally present in redundant interventions and
already an open opportunity to develop architecture opportunities. Architecture
could operate using these structures generating interesting public space. At the
same time, if infrastructure excess usually disturbs environment by producing
side effects that affect the dynamic stability of natural processes, then those
anomalies and disturbances can be manipulated to generate landscape
opportunities. Generating an artificial ecology, Infrastructure excess may
produce Architecture as excess. By these means infrastructure excess could
propagate architecture opportunities as residue.
Since Hurricane Katrina,
current solutions for controlling New Orleans’ possible future floods will
include the building of extra large infrastructure interventions with a degree
of structural excess. Architects in this context can use, boost, and redirect
this excess towards developing landscape architecture operations out of
infrastructure deviations, side effects or latent opportunities in resistance by
using infrastructure together with the existing environmental forces. A more
creative and dynamically efficient determination of the structure of public
space will allow for these large infrastructure interventions to operate at a
more adequate and sensible scale. In this way, allowing spatial architecture
strategies and public space to be conceived, which otherwise, without
compromising the structure (infrastructure) of that public space will tend to be
restricted to work as urban decoration.
MEMORY OF THE SITE
The Mississippi River, as
well as the entire system of deltas and wetlands, is in a continuous state of
shift and movement. This continuous shift of the territory has been altered by
the aggressive and insensitive application of levees and other structures, which
affect the natural evolution of this shift. The changing the curves of river,
its movements, sedimentations, processes and the entire ecosystem produces
negative visible effects over time, which contributed in part to the Katrina
disaster. It seems that the effect of the environment was not considered once
these structures were developed. Clearly these structures could be more
open-ended in function so that a more comprehensive and sensible spectrum of
possibilities can be integrated in this dynamic ecosystem. The ratio of change
of the Delta system is about 7500 years each time a new delta is created because
of sediments. The delta has diverted its primary channel already by six times.
Concerning the sedimentation process, which has been largely affected by the
levees, the Mississippi carries 500,000 yds /day of sedimentation which once
deposited at the delta, increases consistently at the area of the wetlands.
Another fact is that the infrastructure has not been used in relation to
recovering the latent history of the area to use of the sedimentation process as
a way to generate dry land. Generally this is a common practice that was
developed with the crop fields in the area and in the opposite lowlands side of
the Mississippi River, generally where the highlands area lies. Within the
amount of water that the river carries, 70% is water and 50% is sediment. At
the same time, the Atchafala River carries through 30% water and 50% sediment,
collaborating to a rich and diverse ecology once it encounters the Mexico Gulf.
The Mississippi River Delta includes a history of evolution in which movement
and the continuous reinvention and appearance of deltas is a part of these rich
systems of territories. Currently, there is a high ratio of vanishing wetlands,
of about 1 acre per 35 minutes, and these wetlands have always served as
barriers for storms. The infrastructure of the levees to contain the river made
a shift from working as flood plain to be more like a river constructed as a
conduit, or as an artificial canal.
REPRESENTATION vs
SIMULATION:
“Today abstraction is no longer
that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer
that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation
by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no
longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that
precedes the territory – precession of simulacra—that engenders the territory, …
It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the
deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours. The desert of the real
itself”.Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation.
By
applying certain digital frames to animated sequences of the analog research, a
new digital material becomes visible and operative. Framing, layering and
filtering with digital tools becomes a mode to select information. Forced
distortion and manipulation should be discerned between excessive information. A
creative vision of “what to look for,” and “how to look,” became two faces of
the same problem related to interpretation and reading. In this sense, a more
active and important role to representation started activating the problem of
presentation as opposed to representation.
One of the ideas worked
through this specific medium was to present rather than represent actions,
problems, solutions and speculations. Animation was then understood not only as
a representation in time, but as a way to think and understand the constitution
and construction of form within time. A strategy, which uses time to build up
form, would be able to include more evidence or data as well as dynamic input
that would progressively become incorporated as new problems and shifts to
solve.
