Modernism and Internet State of Mind
Modernism was in large part defined by the relationship between craft and emerging technologies. This allowed the modernist movement to situate itself within history in a way that effected a wide range of disciplines. In a similar way Post-Internet is attempting to reach an “Internet State of Mind” in order to position its self within contemporary culture. Post-Internet can be a misleading term primarily due to the prefix post-. Thanks to the postmodern movement, the prefix post- has been associated with anti- however it originally means after, beyond, or derived from. Post-Internet describes an object created with consciousness of the networks within which it exists.
 
Post-Internet Era
The Post-Internet movement is something of an anomaly because its stance within the digital era is ambiguous. In the publication, “You are Here: Art After the Internet” explores both the effects and affects that the internet has had on recent artistic practices describing Post-Internet as an era. The era can be defined as the generation that experienced life pre- mainstream internet. In a sense Post-Internet is a once removed understanding of the current condition. Its situates itself outside of mainstream culture allowing for a critique of a society that is completely enveloped within the electromagnetic fog of information. However, the critique is presented through mainstream media not specifically tailored to virtual but to the brick and mortar of the museum. The true understanding of Post-Internet is the cognizance that the internet has its own system and power, which affect the way we evaluate physical existence.
 
Sub themes
As with ever art movement the classification of the art has been divided into sub-themes derived from the intent of the critique. Distortion explores the modern viewing of art through a digital existence. Language comments on the abbreviation and deterioration of the written language through digital media. The Posthuman Body speculates on the dystonia future of devices tethered to our existence creating new forms of existence. Radical Identification investigates the way that personal profiles can be repackaged and re-purposed within society creating a curated existence. Branding and Corporate Aesthetics focuses itself on the role of internet and marketing exploring the relationships between startups and international tech giants. Painting and Gesture begins to understand the evolution of painting within the digital world. Infrastructure explores post Internets relationship to digital art and net art and the issues with these movement that have created the rise of post Internet as a movement. These sub-themes are exactly that, they are not designed to constrain the art or exploration. The exploration can span multiple sub themes thus commenting on a range of issues that affect macro conditions.

AW

Sources:
Art Post-Internet 
http://ucca.org.cn/en/exhibition/art-post-internet/
The Perils of Post Internet Art
http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/magazine/the-perils-of-post-internet-art/
What is Post Internet Art?
http://www.widewalls.ch/post-internet-art/
What is Post Internet Art? Understanding the Revolutionary New Art Movement
http://www.artspace.com/magazine/interviews_features/trend_report/post_internet_art-52138

Society and our role in the game. Society is designed for us to fit. We grow up in an educational system that is constrained by the society of which we eventually enter. As we progress through life society guides us to where we will eventually fit. The fit, although not predetermined, is influenced by the societies  previous to ours. They are the societies of our parents, our guardian, our teachers, our coaches, and many more. Their societies all perfectly curated by the society before that. Thus, creating a perpetual system. A system challenged by the few but conformed to by the many. Society does not directly teach the ability to question for questioning society would result in the inability to fit. A character trait that does not conform to the 140 characters we are assigned. Society wants you to post your statues and share your interest with your friends because society has  methodically adapted itself to accept the norm, The norm, a term defined by society to be the standard. The baseline for existence in the current society. It is true society will accept the stragglers that are still clinging ton their flip phone or archaic technology however society names them. They are the stragglers. Deemed by society to be the slow adopters of trends far from the forefront but still society. 

It is important for individuals to challenge the society and its frame work, A teacher should not be subject to conforming to district standards if they feel the standard to be inadequate for the next generation of society. Just the same, the architectural student should not be conformed to solely the teachings of their professors. However, these large scale challenges of society are grand in undertaking and require an articulate understanding of the society in which it is commenting. On a micro scale it is important to challenge society in a way that reflects the ground up style of rebellion. We need to challenge the process in which we shop for our produce and meats of the way we interact with others through social media. The frame work of society needs to be challenged in order to understand our reason for existence in the world. If this does not happen society dictates full control and the adaptation of society becomes a phenomenon. An unreachable unobtainable self parasite that has no oversight mutating out of control by forces larger that the sum of its parts. 

​AW

​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.

Marcel Duchamp's readymades were shocking to the art world during their time of creation. They were a sort of off shoot from the Dada movement, but never had a manifesto for his work. This project was meant to modernize the meaning of the readymade in a manifesto. Duchamp never seemed to necessarily go out of his way to defend the art work, but it really came down to the principle behind it. The artist has the control to determine what is art and what is not. This was pivotal in the abstract art movement. ​The Readymades created an intense debate between the “establishment” and the more extreme members of the Dada movement. In the present, those questions of reality are very relevant. The manifesto works in short stages and questions all facets of, not only art, but society. That was also an underlying goal of Duchamp. In the end, it is up to artist, opinion giver, and whoever controls the message, truth is now in question always. As our world polarizes, it forces everyone to take a side and debate, and that’s all that was desired in the first place. 

-Alex Moore

The concept of revivalism in architecture is not a new one. It has returned time and time again as architects try to capture the purities and order of the past. Then reflecting these ideologies through modern detailing and materials. Living and working in Omaha I had the opportunity to visit multiple Midwest cities this summer I began to find a common theme or vernacular expressing itself within the urban fabric. Newly constructed buildings were designed to resemble old industrial buildings. Formal proportions were not met however the detailing of the projects reflected a turn of the century building that had been updated into trendy lofts and office space. 

The desire for these midwestern cities to be constructing buildings such as these pose a unique question. Why is there a desire to reflect industrial buildings within our cities? 

I believe the answer to this is rooted in history. American Modernism in accordance to urban planning and the future of our cities was filled with false promises. In Lebbeus Wood's Blog post "Haunted" he discusses the ghost of American modernism. 

Modernism promised us grandeur and cities of the future so much that the public, city officials, city planners, and architects bought in. We went as far as pushing "city regeneration" projects to level entire city blocks. In Omaha, the destruction of Jobbers Canyon was supposed to give way to a mix used downtown regeneration that included a marina, office space, and public connection to the river. Instead, the city received a Conagra office campus and a chlorinated pond contaminated to the point that fish are unable to survive. All located 100 ft from the Missouri river connected by a singular bridge. In Minneapolis, city officials leveled over 40% of the central business district in the name of "regeneration". Only to leave behind a vacant city with 40% more parking lots and abandoned lots in the urban core. 

The concept of Industrial Revival is a reaction of these failures. It is an unconscious decision that is driving the demand for these buildings. As a culture, we understand the gravity of what we have done to our cities. We understand the great loss and gap in history that was created by our futuristic ideals. However, there seems to be a desire to recreate the past and hold onto the beginning roots that originally created these cities. The hallucinogenic cloud created by the recreation of these brick buildings brings forth a false sense of security and reminiscent past of the good old days. Blinding us from the reality that our cities are growing exponentially with a constant influx of people, culture, technology, and money. 


Industrial Revival will no doubt continue and slowly fill in the gaps of our cities as we push for more walkable and livable cities and downtown cores. While I believe in creating these livable cities I question the motives and theory behind Industrial Revival as an architectural movement and aid on the side of caution. These projects should stand as a reminder or memorial to what was or could have been. They remind us of the lessons we learned from American Modernism and their lessons should be used to build and construct more meaningful cities. However, this movement should not define the future of our cities it should not act as a band-aid or reflection of the past. It is an unconscious response to the wrath of American Modernism. The ghosts that have been suppressed by the construction of these buildings will not be fully dissolved until we learn and focus on creating a definitive vision for Midwestern cities. 

AW
​

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.