​I really do not have any answers to these questions that I am about to pose, but I think they are starting to take center stage as thesis research is ongoing. The relevance of the “Italian Radicals” in my thesis has really come up as way of thinking and commenting on architecture and society in different ways. Archizoom, Archigram, UFO Studio, and more all went about it in different ways. Archizoom has specifically been relevant because though my early research I was trying to understand how to describe the generic nature of cities and articulate some understanding of why. No-Stop City creates a world that modernism’s goal is the elimination of architecture. They use the tools and ideas of modernism to then critique it.
The following are two excerpts from No-Stop City by Andrea Branzi.

​“The only place where The Factory Model and the Consumption Model are identified is the Supermarket. This is the real yardstick model of the future city and consequently of reality as a whole: homogeneous Utopian structure, private functionality, rational sublimation of Consumption. Maximum result for minimum effort”

“The city no longer represents the system, but becomes the system itself, programmed and isotropic, and within it the various functions are contained homogeneously, without contradictions.”

I think these two excerpts are pretty powerful and they open the door to a lot of discussion about cities now. Pier Vittorio Aureli hints at the first one many times in his writings about capitalism and architecture. In his writing, The Domino-Problem: Questioning the Architecture of Domestic Space he states the Le Corbusier’s domino house is the moment when industrialization overtook architecture (see other blog). I do think talking about the ideas of “maximum results for minimum effort” are being severely overlooked in the world today. That is a capitalist principle at its core, yet architecture design, architecture process, and every aspect of society has embraced it while seemingly attempting to question the impacts of capitalism within our society. I think by making these ties between Aureli and Archizoom it is clear that something within architecture discourse on its role within the city is no adding up. I think it is safe to ask questions like, how does that impact architecture’s role within the city today?

In the next excerpt I see two words, “homogeneous” and “contradiction”. Contradiction, to me, is one of the most important words in architecture. It seems like architecture and architects have no way to even articulate some way to address the contradictions within architecture and society. Those contradictions lead to major issues within the field because architecture claims one thing but does another. When it comes to homogeneous, I equate that to “generic”. Generic is not a new term, but I think it is an easy way to describe the majority of architecture within cities (whether that is good or bad is not the current question). Archizoom takes those ideas of a homogeneous city and proposes it on an endless scale. I think now (in a very general way because this is becoming longer than intended) I have established some terms and ways to describe processes, design, and the market within the city. So, what does this mean for the city now?

I am starting to wonder about a connection between the domestication of the work place and “hyper-programming” of the workplace within tech campuses and that ideology that goes along with startups with the city as a whole. The domestication of the work place is really meant to blur the lines between work and life. Life becomes work and work becomes life, convenience. That ideology is trickling into our urban space with Apple branding themselves as “town squares”. Public space becomes commerce space (private space) and commerce space becomes public space. When it comes to the ideology of Silicon Valley, they want to remove all contradiction and complexity with a yes or a no (0 or 1). An app is designed to solve a problem and its viability is contingent on it solving said problem. Apps view the world as complex, but believe that they can solve for it with convenience. Maximum result with minimum effort could be found in every product description from Silicon Valley. In that sense, architecture is attempting to interact directly with that world, but has realized its viability is only based on a response of yes or no. Does the building have 200 units, 1200 sf of leasable space, and a coffee shop? Is the generic nature of the city the outcome of architecture’s only option to cover for the shortcomings of architecture against a dynamic city full of contractions? To me right now it seems to be. I think there will be larger questions of place and identity asked within these topics but this seems to frame a new crisis. Archizoom targeted modern architecture for its critique and I think this critique targets the architecture of the last twenty years (maybe post Rem and OMA’s Small, Medium, Large, Extra Large). There is a claim of a set of ideals, values, and a future vision, but there has been no creation of a new way forward, just falling in line with “maximum result with minimum effort”. 

​- Alex Moore
​Branzi, Andrea. 2006. No Stop City- Archizoom. Orleans: HXY.
Vittorio Aureli, Pier. Winter 2014. "The Domino Problem: Questioning the Architecture of Domestic Space." Anyone 153-168.
 

This was a project to attempt rewrite Delirious New York in the spirit of the present time.

Introduction

MANIFESTO
The fatal weakness of manifestos is their inherent lack of evidence. It is time to look back on what has been done to the build environment. It is time to be retroactive. There is too much evidence, too much documentation, too much photography, too many attempts to grasp the city, for the result to be nothing. The city no longer has meaning. It no longer stands for something. The city is not a fantasy, but a backdrop. It disappears the moment you walk out your door. This makes the architect very uncomfortable, but what is worse no one knows the difference, even that same uncomfortable architect. He is left beating his head against the same wall, but all is well come payday, time to start over.
 
PERSCRIPTION
Cities are in search of a theory, but cannot find it. This delirium no longer feels good. Th ecstasy has worn off. All that is left is pain. Pain that must be killed. Isolation that must be accepted. The city has been lost.
 
BLOCKS
The structure of this manifesto is that of the grid. Order placed on the page to organize the individual block. If you understand blocks as individual pieces within a whole, you now see them differently. Their proximity and juxtaposition of them reinforce their separate meanings. The beauty of the block is that escape from nothing is right in front of you.
 
 
Prehistory: 1969

L AND O
In 1969, UCLA students transmit the text “l” and “o” from one computer to another. This moment changes the city forever. The invention of the internet has the greatest impact on the city. Not because of all the technological advancements that would follow. Not because it leads to the iPhone. It set the stage for humans to experience something without physically being there. Place no longer matters.
IDENTITY
Place is identity. The internet ushered in a new form of globalization. Ideas were shared quickly, repeated even faster, and before we knew it everything looked the same. Mass production no longer was the way to create products to buy, it created our environments where we live.
GLOBALIZATION
Rapid globalization changed the circumstances faster than ever. The issue is there is not an architecture that can compete with the dynamic nature of the of the globalized world we live in now. Architecture is lost.
 
 
Unconsciously Corb

MACHINE
Le Corbusier was resisted. The Radiant City never happened, or did it? The “living machine” knows no scale. The best part about a machine is it needs no consciousness to run. It has one job and it executes perfectly every time. The highway is a part of the machine. The reach of the highway is infinite. It knows no bound, and it does not have any because the single-family home goes forever.
 
MASS PRODUCTION OF SPACE
It is easy to point at the typical suburb and say that is the moment of mass production of space. While true in some sense, it now happens everywhere. Le Corbusier said the car is the ultimate machine of transportation and the highway has since lived up to his expectation. Speed fueled his desires. Where there was highway there needed to be nothing else. The speed of the car would alter perception and no one would notice. Where the car did not exist, his architecture did. Space now happens everywhere; unconsciously because the machine is now the market and our connectedness to the world. Le Corbusier had to travel from city to city to share his ideas. The entertainment district and stadium can now travel on Google and reproduce itself rapidly in our cities. Architects attempt to play the game, but it is just mass production. Le Corbusier hid his emptiness with the speed of the car, and now the phone keeps everyone’s head down when walking. Perception altered. Mission accomplished.
ROUTINE
We all strive to predict our day. We plan days, months, years in advance to make sure we know. Routine is comfort. Routine is security. Routine is no longer a desire, it is unconscious. If you do not have it what is the point. Do not just plan your next day make sure to plan your marriage (to buy a house), and your baby (to buy another house). Do not forget these steps. Finally, architecture can be redeployed in the world. A world that is predictable and understood. A world architects can protect their buildings from. The real suckers are the weathermen.
ISOLATION
Ahh the American Dream. Nothing else like it. 3,000 square feet, a four-stall garage, and a nice big green lawn (do not worry the lawn service takes care of it). Isolation is routine’s best friend. It follows it where ever it goes. Isolation needs stability. Wake up enclosed in your house. Walk into your garage and enclose yourself into your car (its cold outside so do not open the garage door until you are in the car). Drive to work. Drive your car into the parking under your office. You got lucky the elevator is right by your spot. Ride that up to your cubicle and do it all over again on your way home. The city loves isolation because all it has to do is work. Bring people in for work and send them out for bed. The ultimate machine.
 
CONTROL
The moment of control has come. The machine is working at its highest efficiency. It actually gets to pick and choose who it works better for and who it does not. The market, the politics, and the planner all have a place at the table again. Their weapon of choice, in their desire for control, the masterplan. The architects will just sit outside and twiddle their thumbs.
 
 
The Myth of Revitalization: Re-isolation

PRETEND
Urban revitalization is every city council member’s dream. No longer do they have to annex, it is now happening within their limits. It is an opportunity to add new value. Time for the masterplan and design standards. Would not want this to happen without our finger on the trigger. Mix-use sounds good. The brick is the ultimate tool of history. It reinforces the past just by the way it looks.
LINE
The gated community in the suburb has an entry point. It is its time to shine. A big sign and a name that evokes the sereneness of nature always works. They flaunt their intentions with the gate. The district, on the other hand, hides them. Their problem is they cannot resist the temptation of drawing their line of demarcation and they name themselves. NoDo, SoDo, or whatever the name. A new district was just made (probably where one once stood last week). At that moment, the gig is up. These districts are happening in the city and the notion of revitalization means that there was something that was not as nice as it could be. The moment that they showed their hand, they made clear that they only want the good parts. The brick storefronts (perfect for coffee shops) and the old factories (the lofts will be amazing) are all they are after. Revitalization does not want or care about the social and economic baggage of the surroundings. Everyone has missed the boat with gentrification. It is not that it happens where the less privileged live, it happens near them. Those districts have always had economic life and able to support themselves, but revitalization redraws the line of isolation (as if the highway that broke the neighborhood in the 50’s was not enough). The district revitalization is not meant to kick people out, it just ties the noose. The market will take care of the rest.
MILLENIALS
Ask the internet, millennials are all about minimalism and living for the experience. They are racing to the city. They are inhabiting these new hip districts. Tech jobs lead their charge. You can tweet for your job now. Things do not matter to these people. They are a generation unlike any before...wait, but are they? Think our grandparents that said that about our parents and they turned out just fine (like them with a car and oceans of square feet). Millennials, let’s talk when your 40. Your race back to isolation will be just in time. We only build for 20 years now and the next dose of revitalization will come around soon. Ahhh routine.
 

​Island in the Sun

INSTABILITY
Back to where we started, MANHATTAN, the ultimate instability. The resistance. The island and blocks that locked it in place and set the stage for the Culture of Congestion and Manhattanism that protects it from the emptiness of the American city today. It still stands as the Rosetta Stone, but in a world where the stone was forgotten. Social life still thrives, not because isolation and routine have not attempted to control it, but because of the culture of congestion. Land has only gotten more scare and population is always on the rise. Rem saw congestions potential, but knew its only chance of success was to become hyper-congested on levels unknown at the time. Manhattan has resisted and its battle cry is the honking horn. Take ridesharing for example (Uber or Lyft). In all cities, it only reinforces the highway. Now you can use someone else’s car to get from place to place. Its goal is anti-congestion. Less cars on the street. Manhattan, on the other hand, engulfs Uber. The efficiency does not exist because hyper-congestion exists. 
POSTMORTEM
Manhattan stands alone. The irony is the same people who created the invisible city, idolized Manhattan (the Rosetta stone) in school. The island, its geography, was the only resistance.
LIGHT
The block may hold the key. These singular moments among the whole. A few hundred feet separate the person from the next adventure. Le Corbusier needed a blank island for his tabula rasa. The real tabula rasa lies within the street. The beauty of this is there are many blocks within our cities that lie blank. Resist like Manhattan, there might still be time.
 
​-Alex Moore
Koolhaas, Rem. 1994. Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan. New York: The Monacelli Press.

As I have gone through my process I started basing many of my original notions off of reading by Rem Koolhaas. Over the summer that research has progressed and I am starting to put the pieces together with a few architects and urban theorists that begin to overlap on the same types of ideas that I am beginning to have with this project. These writers, Rem Koolhaas, Lars Lerup, Pier Vittorio Aureli, Albert Pope, and Michael Sorkin (to some extent) all are asking questions of the city that have gone unasked. I think their approach is very unique (it goes back to the process that I keep questioning) because they are writing about the city with an awareness of the issues that came from the moment when architecture and urban design broke away from each other.  This is important because it no long makes assumptions about architecture's place in the city. Generally they are all against this split, but others quickly assume architecture and the man made environment as the preeminent feature within the urban realm. For me, I am starting to believe that that is not the case either. While I do not know exactly why, I do believe that there is a reason that some of their most timeless writings on the city happened in the mid 90s and early 2000s.  My guess is that they were beginning to understand the real consequences of postwar development and the beginning globalization had done and what it was about to do to the contemporary city. Pier Vittorio Aureli does not only say that the city is invisible, but he also says we lack urban conceptions though which we can actively think about the city (which seems like more of a severe indictment on architecture itself). In a simple way I have thought of my studies as "understanding architecture's position within the political and economical realm", but that is assuming that architecture exists there at all. Albert Pope's Ladders may have significantly changed the trajectory for me. The idea of architecture and design being an engine for social, economic, political, and cultural change still exists, but right now it comes from a superficial approach because we do not have a way to actually conceptualize and understand the city. Rem's What Ever Happened to Urbanism and The Generic City ring truer than ever. It is time to attempt to revisit these ideas 20 years later. There is a paragraph in Whatever Happened to Urbanism that still inspires me to chase these ideas.

"If there is to be a "new urbanism" it will not be based on the twin fantasies of order and omnipotence; it will be the staging of uncertainty; it will no longer be concerned with the arrangement of more or less permanent objects but with the irrigation of territories with potential; it will not longer aim for stable configurations but for the creation of enabling field that accommodates processes that refuse to be crystallized into definite form; it will no longer be about meticulous definition, the imposition of limits, but about expanding notions, denying boundaries, not about separating and identifying entities, but about discovering unnameable hybrids." 

There is a lot there, but it is one of the most optimistic outlooks on what a city can be for people. The key to it became clear when reading Ladders, because it is not saying that better architecture is the key, actually it is more aligned with Albert Pope in asking architecture to take a secondary role in the environment. To me its no longer about asking questions about "how to better revitalize a neighborhood?" or "how to masterplan the perfect mix use development?" or even the environemntal sustainability issues of the time. Those are important, do not get me wrong, but for this project right now it is really asking about what the city has become and what it could be, the rest is just details. 

Albert Pope's main argument in Ladders is that postwar development of the city (centripetal and closed) has caused the contemporary city to disappear. He bases his argument off of the implosion of the grid structure that lead to closed and isolated development throughout the city and into the suburbs. This is a good place to start because the grid is foundational. Delirious New York is supposed to be organized and understood as a grid when reading it and the entire book can trace itself back to understanding architecture within the grid of Manhattan. As the grid disappears, the city does too. As the mass production of space within our environment  grows (freeways, malls, atrium, etc), urban activity is censured. Inhibiting cultural and social activity has created a city of nothing. Koolhaas's "culture of congestion" and the spontaneous nature of the city begin to align with these same ideas of closed off cities. 

I have begun to buy into the idea of the invisible city and control and censorship that the postwar city places on its people. I do not have the answer yet of where this goes, but I do think that it starts with the grid. It think it is time to attempt to conceptualize architecture as a more dynamic piece of our environment instead of slow and stagnant. It is time to throw away the preconceived notions of the separations of architecture and urbanism. It is time to question the process and do accept the outcome as the ultimate truth, but as piece to a larger puzzle of understanding. The canvas continues to become more and more blank when thinking about the city. 

Ladders- Albert Pope
Delerious New York- Rem Koolhaas
S, M, L, XL- Rem Koolhaas
The City as a Project- Pier Vittorio Aureli
After the City- Lars Lerup
All Over the Map- Michael Sorkin
Exquisite Corpse- Michael Sorkin
Learning from Las Vegas- Robert Venturi+Denise Scott Brown

Omaha will provide a great opportunity to experiment with these ideas, and I think the direction of the current thought continue to fit the city as a site perfectly. The main reason is the distinct difference between the pre and postwar city. Also, current downtown design discussions, the Conagra campus site, Crossroads Mall, the endless suburbs, and more will provide a wide range of opportunity for experimentation and speculation. 

     To lead this off I want to start with Rem Koolhaas’s Generic City, which is in his book Small, Medium, Large, Extra Large. Admittedly, this was not the first major Rem reading that I did in this process, but it felt like the one that really could be the main foundation for an idea. The main reason why is because it is exhaustively comprehensive when describing what he calls “the Generic City”, and another reason was that it felt like there were characteristics that described Omaha (which I will get to later).

     The Generic City is simply Rem understanding what the city is now. It has become a placeless and paranoid machine of repetitive production of form supported by sprawling infrastructure. The Generic City tries to create an identity, but the more that happens the more cities are universally similar. Identity and history are where the Generic City becomes the clearest. The city can become whatever it needs to be for whatever time it exists in. The market drives the production of space, but understand that only happens in the certain parts of the city. Historic preservation only happens on a superficial level, but once you experience the “revitalization”, identity and place dissolves quickly.
I am not really here to describe the reading verbatim, and even if that was the point of this blog it would not do any good because the reading itself is generic. It describes place, yet is based off of no place. To me, the generic city is the abandonment of the idea that architecture is urban design and a tool in strengthening social structures within society. I will repeat this often on this blog, but our cities are the manifestation of economic and political forces, and architecture is merely the tool they use to build their reality. Even back in the mid 90’s when Rem writes The Generic City it takes the tone of him forfeiting architecture’s place in society. Every city is looking to build entertainment districts that are anchored by bars and arenas, while surround by the ghosts of the industrial revolution waiting to be reincarnated as high end loft apartments. Do not get me wrong, I like going to these places too, but place, more than ever, is driven by economic output.  These places become beacons that continuously rise, decay, and rise again, only connected by infrastructure existing in blank space. We no longer understand the city because we zone the city, and within those zones only a small percentage can be slated for added detail. What happens to the rest of city? That’s easy, it becomes a product of mass production repeating itself for the sake of efficiency, just ask the suburbs. Urban planners (not urban designers) have sucked the life from the city with master plans, design standards, faux preservation, and more. The worst part is designers and architects accepted that as fact.

     Being a critic of this does feel a bit obvious and idealistic for someone who is just finishing up architecture school. That being said, I am not sure that this is the fate of the relationship between architecture and the city. When people talk about the future city the conversation revolves around sustainability and technology (smart cities). Those are inevitable truths with the future of advancement, but the conversation stops short of reimagining how to rethink our approach and process as designers of space for people. How can we better understand identity of place? How can we better design for human interaction, efficiency, and safety? I do not believe that policy and standardization is the future of design within our cities. Design is uniquely tooled to create a better future because it can be localized, empathetic, and flexible. The notion that architecture and design does not have a role in this conversation is exactly what has lead to the continued proliferation of the Generic City.

     The next step is to better understand what that role was, is, and what it could look like in the future…


-Alex Moore

       Thesis year in architecture school carries a lot of weight in my mind. It is the culmination of the five previous years of architecture education, and the spring board to what everyone hopes is a successful career. I think it is important to state here that one of the main reasons for Studio Ambiguous is so that these thesis ideas do not just make us ask hard questions for the next year, but that those ideas and questions can continue to permeate and impact our ideas about architecture and the city throughout our careers. I have started initial research and documentation, but the real fun will begin on the first day of fall semester in August. As I look at the proposal I wrote back in April to claim my intention to do thesis, I feel like I should document how I got to that point in April and what I am thinking now in the middle of June. I think it is important to be explicitly clear on what I am thing about now because things will change and evolve throughout this process and in order to make sense of the result, I must understand its inception.
             
        This is my chance to be proactive. I have a clear mind right now and the long nights of a school year are not weighing on me yet. Over the next few days I am going to write, in four parts, how I got to my proposal and some of the inspiration behind my initial ideas. In this series of four blogs, it will mainly focus on three different writings from Rem Koolhaas. Koolhaas was not the only thing that has influenced my thoughts about architecture and the city, but his writings really made sense to me as a place to start when building a foundation for this thesis. My plan is to continue to document the readings and research that I have done and will do on this blog, but understand that once I really started to dive deeper in to the writings of Koolhaas, a light bulb seemed to go off. I went from spinning my wheels trying to come up with basic thesis idea, to an initial level of clarity. He seemed to be viewing the city and trying to understand it in ways that I was beginning to, especially with his tongue-and-cheek approach at times. I think it is also important to know that these writings are 20 and 40 years old. I believe they have transcended time in some ways, but I also believe that throughout this process I can begin to reapply what they mean to the present and the future as that changes more rapidly by the minute.
 
        This idea of “city” is my blank canvas now. I will now freely take the liberty to interrupt the past, experience it in the present, and speculate on its future. “City” is a place of inspiration, interaction, and diversity, and in my opinion, the single greatest human invention. Currently, I am not really comfortable with the idea of architecture and the city, but this is my starting line, not just for this project but for a career of questions...call it a proactive manifesto. 

​-Alex Moore