When it becomes job search time for an architect, in order to get an overview of firms and potential internships, the search starts where most searches these days start, Google. That search may lead to some other websites that specialize in job or internship postings, but something interesting continues to happen when using the keyword ‘architect’. Intermixed with a few listings that meet the generally expected criteria are companies like IBM, Google, and others specializing within the technology sector. Facebook lists ‘Optical Systems Architect’ and ‘Solutions Architect’ on their careers page, Google has an opening for a ‘Cloud Architect’, and Apple is searching for an ‘Imaging and Vision Architect’ along with 600 listed jobs that appear with the keyword ‘architect’. Although the amount of tech jobs, the search for that elusive job goes on, unknowingly witnessing a phenomenon that seems to raise profound questions about architecture and the architect in today’s world and in the future.

​Whose systems are dependent on who? Does space in the city have value if it does not have Wi-Fi or other means to activate social media services, regardless of built architecture?  Which architects really influence and shape our environments? 

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. 

LINK

I tagged this article from Arch Daily in the entry about Omaha and its Highways, but I do think it warrants a post. In this interview he ponders a few topics that seem to be very relevant to the purpose behind this blog and the moment in time that we are in as architects/ designers. He talks about his process and ideas, but really this is insight into an approach to architecture that I think is missing in most. Defining architecture is very important to start the conversation. To me, architecture is more of a process and less of a physical thing. It is a way to think about problems and manifest solutions in the physical world (ex. buildings). Architecture can quickly become "plug and play" and that not only impacts the quality of work, but it also hollows out the "why". Christian talked about questioning architecture in this interview..

"I thought the city of the future would be designed by sociologists and computers. Houses would be assembled in factories, people would buy what they like, and sociologists would assemble them. Why would you need architects then? It would all become like a living process, just as Archigram and the Metabolists envisioned. That’s why I was losing interest in architecture. I didn’t want to become an engineer to assemble these plug-in cities."

And these questions lead him to futher questions about the "why"...

 "I was still searching and constantly asking this question – what is architecture for? And I thought that an architect who is not asking this question is not an interesting architect. You have to understand why you do what you do and how useful it is. What is it that makes you passionate artistically or sociologically? Once you understand this, you have a chance to be understood by others"

I think it is very important to continually question architecture's place in society, definitely when technology evolves as fast as it does. I refuse to believe that being an architect is just doing a service for a client and moving on. That may seem like the classic idealistic statement from a naive masters student, but if we can start to really rethink the process of designing a space within towns and cities architecture can start to impact again. Currently it feels like there is a desire in practice to just check boxes and move onto the next project. Architects generally are talking one talk (progressive, spontaneous, and innovative) but walking another (standardized, safe, and repetitive). This is not everyone, obviously, but there seems to be an accepted process which might be out of the architect's control that has taken over. I think this blog and research will continue to ask that why and how to use architecture and design differently within the future context of the city. 

"And I never stopped perceiving space as an artistic medium. I understood that no one else but an architect could solve the problems of the contemporary city."

Lastly Christian talks about the power of architecture within the contemporary city. I want to be clear, its not an ego that makes me believe this, it is our education and skill set. Somewhere during the past couple decades urban design and architecture split and for some reason struggle to be talked about in the same realm now. A building can be constrained by a site, but no project's potential impact on the city and its people should ever feel constraint. 

Alex Moore

​Belogolovsky, Vladimir. 2017. Christian de Portzamparc: “No One But an Architect Can Solve the Problems of the Contemporary City”. July 7. Accessed July 8, 2017. http://www.archdaily.com/875329/christian-de-portzamparc-no-one-but-an-architect-can-solve-the-problems-of-the-contemporary-city.
 

​I came across this recent video from Vox about the highway system and its history within our cities. It quickly reminded me of a project that I did last fall about recognizing some of these patterns of inequality within Omaha, Nebraska. For that project I overlaid a 1937 redline map of Omaha with today’s demographic information to show that 80 years later those lines that were drawn still have a real effect on mobility and demographics in the city.  This gets more interesting when you then overlay the highways that were built in the 50s, 60s, and 70s in Omaha, and you get a clear picture of how isolated some of these areas of Omaha became. This is highlighting a specific issue, but it is also a broader call to continue to reevaluate how issues are processed and solved within cities.

Before I go further, I want to recognize that the history of redlining has racial and political roots that are major issues. Redlining was used to deem neighborhoods poor and blighted and it was used by banks to refuse loans and home ownership opportunities. This allowed for racial and economic minorities to be taken advantage of and isolated.  It is clear by this map that those patterns of isolation are still prevalent and have an impact on social and economic issues within cities. While you cannot discuss these issues without understanding the history behind it, I really want this to be about exploring the future of how we reconnect cities. It is very easy to overwhelm a discussion like this one with negative history and social issues that it has created. I think current planning discourse struggles to disconnect from these aspects of the conversation and look forward to solution based conversations. This is where I believe that architecture’s empathy and process is better prepared to handle the new and future urban issues. 

​Something that has become clear to me throughout my studies is that Omaha is not this humble Midwest city, rather it has been shaped by the same social, economic, racial, and historical issues of all major US cities. The interstates and highways are one of the more visible within the city. Its westward sprawl would not have been possible without the dominance of Interstate 80, which runs right down the center of the city on an east west axis. Like most cities, Omaha is very spatially categorized into North, South, and West, and all of those carry strong stereotypes and connotations (mostly negative and misunderstood within the public). These lines are reflected as clear within the major highways that cut up the city. While working on my project in the fall I drove around south Omaha neighborhoods with Ed Leahy, Director of Omaha EITC Coalition, and it is impossible not to feel the disconnect that Highway 75 creates within the area. The description of “food desert” and lack of transportation continually came up. Access is a key for mobility for these areas and these highways cut off access and turn community into isolation. South 24th Street is lively and vibrant district within Omaha, but its tightly constrained by Highway 75 on the west which makes it a community asset for very few compared to what it could be. Neighborhoods like South Side Terrace and Indian Hills have no walking or biking access to those amenities, and the through roads that do connect are 4+ lane roads that make it even hard to maneuver if you do not have a car.

Many cities are grappling with hows to reconnect these neighborhoods that were divided by highways. Los Angles with Park 101 (http://www.park101.org/) and Dallas with Klyde Warren Park (https://www.klydewarrenpark.org/) are just a couple of examples. These are massive infrastructural undertakings by these cities. I think it is important to explore all scales of reconnection. A policy change is not going to solve the physical boundaries of this issue. There is at times a grey area where design can intervene in cities, but being creative on how to reconnect neighborhoods is one of the clearest examples of where design can create a better city. Design can be forward thinking and not reactionary. It does not have to be constrained by the negative aspects of the past. The issue is clear and it does not have to continue that way. To rethink our cities will first take a rethinking of the process with which we problem solve within them. Whether Omaha or New York, it is time to allow design more freedom to attempt to improve the situation within our cities. 

-Alex M

Christian de Portzamparc: “No One But an Architect Can Solve the Problems of the Contemporary City”


​I want to thank and cite a few people for the map and the resources. 
​
-Palma Joy Strand- Creighton Law School
  Director, Creighton's 2040 Initiative
  Co-Founder and Research Director, Civity
​
- Edward W Leahy
  Director, Omaha EITC Coalition

Dot Map
http://demographics.coopercenter.org/racial-dot-map/
University of Virginia- Demographics Research Group

     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

These "knows" are things that have been tested and mass produced through catchy phrases such as "Place Making" "10 by 10" "Mixed Use" "Live, Work, Play". There is a place in the profession for this type of work and it is respectable and can be important to communities if implemented properly. I want to make this clear that I am not trying to demean any of this work, dissuasions of these "knows" successes and failures are for another day and another post. However this studio will be focusing on and exploring the fringe condition at the intersection of the entities. 

This will be accomplished through the creation of narratives that begin to set the frame work for speculative design. Although most the work will be based in Omaha certain formalities and constraints can and will begin to dissolve as we explore the fringe condition of entities. The hope is that by doing this we are able to free our selves from everyday constraints and produce provoking concepts that make the viewer question societies norms and deeper more meaningful conversations. 

​AW