INSTIGATIONS

Curiosity has its own reason for existing.
Einstein

Always interested in new approaches to old problems, and varied ways to illustrate thought, I have embarked on a series of projects, mostly theoretical but often participatory. A childhood fascination with outer space and a later interest in Utopia v Dystopia developed into a Space Colony thesis project. Experiments with polyethelene prompted several iterations of inflatable constructions and confrontations. Xero magazine, an unedited open source publication predated the blogoshere. The Accademia Mezzanotte, an architectural social club spun off the first imaginary urban evolution project and pamphlet: Manhattan Eruptus. The Abecedary of Irregular Curves imagined a new descriptive geometry for the sensuous that predated computer generative modes (and in fact never progressed beyond letter ‘O’, overtaken by easy CAD modeling). The gradual warping of competition entries into urban design Manifestos built on the earlier precedent of alternative publication and provocation.

MANIFESTOS

You are not only responsible for what you say, but also for what you do not say.
Martin Luther

Manhattan Eruptus was created as an investigation into the concept of city and as a fantastic urban provocation. We are interested in issues of the dense built hyperactive modern city. The public claim on public spaces, on the natural resources, on the infrastructure, on the social interactions of the city, is losing to privatization and government balkanization. The expected protectors and advocates for the public realm are not there. Planning has become a shill for development. Zoning is a misguided social engineering tool. In NYC, an integral region is unnaturally trisected by distant purse strings in Trenton, Albany, and Hartford.

The O Zone Manifesto arose out of a specific interest in a limited competition for redeveloping Penn Yards. While we were not invited, we did have thoughts on what the competition did not address, and thus developed a new set of Rules of the Competition as a reminder. New Jerk City was then presented as one example of what those rules might yield.

The tragedy of the World Trade Center destruction and the travesty of redesign that followed rekindled the call for a new order. O Zone Manifest II restates the Rules and includes our World Trade Center Site and September 11th Memorial entry. Newark InFormation is an effort to prod a simple visitor center into a larger guide for public access and redevelopment of Newark. Each pamphlet produced includes an expansion beyond the stated program and site, to include what we feel are the essentials of new urban evolution.

Our call is a plea for the public realm; for more open public space (with density of use), for the protection of natural (and man-made) resources for public use, for the primacy of infrastructure over buildings, for varied and flexible small scale use (zoning) over monocultures and ‘centers’, for the recognition of history and anticipation of the future and not the expediencies of the present. 

COMPETITIONS

Any architecture competition will be an average upon an average by averages on behalf of the average. 
Frank Lloyd Wright

Competitions are predatory and abusive--a self-appointed power coercing free labor and intellectual theft with low lying fruit. They are antithetical to good design that emphasizes close communication and interaction with users, that requires access and questioning of professional reference, that is not presented as a fait accompli but as a complex dance of social, economic and artistic forces.

That said, we enter and fail a lot of competitions. Our aim is not to win competitions but to present a certain commentary, to widen the discussion.  We have entered competitions uninvited, we have submitted new rules to established competitions, we have started our own and created commentary pamphlets after the fact. Over time our focus has more become advocacy for public space and smart urban evolution. We always stress that larger connective public issues are essential to even the smallest competition worth entering.