hey everybody welcome to the next
edition of our school's lecture series
the Robert B Church memorial lecture
series this is our third lecture of the
spring term and our seventh of the year
by my count in a series that I think
just keeps delivering one high end
offering after another I want to say
thanks to everybody for coming tonight
this is at work or co-sponsoring with
tasks for the event tonight and the I
think the lectures have been super well
attended and I'm very glad and happy
with the with the energy about it both
from students and faculty so I just want
to say thanks thanks to everybody for
that okay
joining us tonight is Nikolas DiMaggio
Nikolas is an associate professor of
architecture and urban design at the
University of California Berkeley he's a
fellow of the American Academy in Rome I
am and at the MacDowell Colony has
received additional design awards and
fellowships etc from Parsons the
International Union of architects
pamphlet architecture and the Van Alen
Institute he's a winner of the Eugene M
award from the American astronautical
Society I like that one especially and
shortlisted for the art book prize his
work has been exhibited at the to 2010
Biennale of the Americas the 2012 Venice
Biennale of architecture and San
Francisco's SFMOMA Nicholas is a
producer I think of many varied types of
work he's a writer a maker a drawer a
diagramer a historian and in my opinion
a prolific researcher but if we tried to
describe him most accurately in a way
that captured all those various modes I
think most of all we can admire Nicholas
as a design theorist he's someone who
values the making of things as much as
the writing and saying of them in order
to produce new ways of knowing things
that perhaps we've always looked at but
never truly seen such as the case for me
in his book space suit fashioning Apollo
published in 2011 from MIT press which I
admiring Lee described as a category
killer in it
Nicholas describes the crafting of the
Apollo era spacesuit but in a way that
captures not only the material
and logistics of making it but in all
its other extensive reasons for being
things like couture fashion movements
cyborgs cybernetic logics image culture
of the 1960s etc Nicholas is second and
most recently released book is local
code sorry 3,659 proposals
about data design and the nature of
cities from Princeton Architectural
Press in 2016 here again
Nicholas weaves together so many
disparate histories and ways of seeing
objects architectures and landscapes and
cities here the object of the object of
study is not an object per se but it's
the city and cityness itself it's part
I think techno material culture part
design history reread part speculative
projection about the future of cities
and their digital citizenship Nicholas's
theses in both books as well as his
larger body of work and research emanate
out of what I would describe as a
gathering and collecting an assemblage
of narratives case studies histories
archival discoveries and disciplinary
probes in preparing this introduction
tonight I was I was trying to come up
with a joke about jb jackson jane
jacobson Reyner Banham walking into a
bar but I soon realized that it wouldn't
make any sense until after Nicholas's
lecture partly because it just wouldn't
have made a very good joke but secondly
and and and mostly because it's
impossible to properly reproduce the
effects I think of Nicholas's work in
this limited space he's a brilliant
writer and his particular style produces
connections that none of the rest of us
knew anything about in a type of what we
might call emergent theory that spills
out as you're reading or listening to it
so I think we'll just leave it to him so
without further ado please join me in
welcoming Nicholas
thanks very much it was a really
wonderfully flattering introduction and
I will try and do it justice
I well this first slide is up I position
what I'm going to talk to you about this
evening relative to two different kinds
of politics I first kind of politics is
the most important politics these days
which is the politics of our nation as a
whole
we are in a unprecedented moment in
American political history and the the
one of the many one of the the
proclamations from our current president
that has not yet been met as part of the
rollout of a set of very tendentious
policies in the last month is a promised
1.2 to one point nine trillion dollar
infrastructural investment plan and so I
think I will talk to you very much
tonight around the question of what what
infrastructure actually means in cities
and landscapes this is of course a
really important and interesting thing
to be thinking about here specifically
not just anywhere in the world but in in
Tennessee the home of historic set of
national investments in infrastructure
throughout the 20th century and home of
the kinds of things that this
infrastructure plan that we are a that
we are promised from the current
administration will contain big things
bridges roads tunnels identifiable
things things with big shapes and
boundaries on the horizon I'm going to
talk to you tonight about a different
kind of infrastructure a kind of
infrastructure that maybe even or more
necessary
to the growth and resilience of our
communities but I'll let that go for the
moment and explain it with starting with
the next slide the other kind of
politics I would I would ask you to
think a little bit about are the
politics of a place like this one of a
school of architecture of what it means
to be an architect in the 21st century
and in particular about the the larger
separation through specialization that
has guided our discipline throughout the
20th and 21st century when Alberti said
how the nature of the modern
architectural profession in his book de
ray and a Victoria he I think it was the
second book I don't know the reference
for sure but he he said that to be an
architect was to specialize in three
things was to do three things to to make
buildings to make n structures and
landscapes to craft improvements
technical improvements around the making
of buildings and landscapes and lastly
to to engage and understand the history
of the making and building of landscapes
for him that was the three-legged stool
of what it meant to be an architect
along with a much larger trend toward
specialization in the modern world
people these days tend to do one or the
other they tend to either focus on
making things or focus on the technical
matters of making things or focus on the
history of things and I guess the the
way in which I will present my work to
you is my own assertion possibly against
the tide of history that it is ever more
important to do all these things
together and to bring them together in
our profession so that's the the what I
will attempt to model in miniature for
you in the context of this lecture is is
a very deeply held belief of mine about
what is really important in our
profession and what the the greatest
potential of our profession is
this lecture starts with some tiny
little things eleven small microscopic
parcels of New York City real estate
assembled by the architectural trained
artist
Gordon matta-clark between 1971 and 1973
through attending land auctions and
paging through reams of sort of
telephone book style property rosters to
look find these abandoned spaces in New
York City today using a modern
geographic information system it's
possible to find many thousands of sites
like this in New York City and in fact
in almost any American city we care to
look at this is 1500 sites in San
Francisco sites in Boston New Orleans
Miami the presence of empty and
abandoned spaces is if nothing else a
kind of constant a scenic quinone of the
American urban landscape starting in
2009 with students at at Berkeley I
started to look at these spaces in
particular a database of 1,500 so-called
unaccepted streets unaccepted because
the city's Department of Public Works
would would agree with you that these
were zoned as streets but they would
contest the fact that they were actually
used as rights-of-way and thus they
didn't maintain them and database is
maybe 2 grand a word in fact this was a
single Excel spreadsheet that I wrangled
out of a an administrative assistant in
the Kohl Center of the Department of
Public Works and the Excel spreadsheet
was only kept so that when people called
to complain that there was like a
burning couch in one of these streets
that they could say oh no that's an
unaccepted Street we don't we don't
maintain it but because of my interest
in Matta-Clark because of my interest
in the the the kind of metabolism of of
emptiness and vacancy in cities I I got
a hold of this and and my students and I
did it did the some of the first surveys
and actual maps of these sites in in in
San Francisco
so not only are these sights interesting
for their existence but they turn out to
be particularly interesting when you
look at other kinds of urban information
they tend to track very closely for
example the sort of respiratory
respiratory hazards and ailments
carcinogens in the city they track
reported crime which is always different
from actual crime but a good indicator
and they in fact score very highly on a
whole range of social needs indicators
used by planners something else is true
of these sites they tend to track very
closely environmental issues in the city
from the urban heat island to
particularly true in San Francisco
during flooding like this year's like
this year's stormwater impediments they
they track the concentration of heavy
particulates in the air and thus
perversely these abandoned spaces are
some of the potentially most valuable
for not only ecological and
infrastructural work but also towards a
kind of economic and potentially a kind
of economic and social resilience as
well my fundamental argument to tonight
is about how we think about
infrastructure mostly we think about
infrastructure in the United States in
terms of big things that do predictable
have predictable effects on landscapes
but if you really think about the
challenges we face from climate the
unexpected effects of climate change on
buildings and landscapes increased
drought increases flood increased
likelihood of extreme weather events
the real problem is what the Rockefeller
Foundation has termed resilience which
is kind of a stupid word because
resilience just means the tendency of a
spring to go back to where it was before
whereas in fact what we need is a kind
of adaptability and ability to continue
to transform and change when you think
about resilience the problem would be
with the enormous kinds of
infrastructural investments that you
have even here in your landscape is that
even a thousand foot dam is useless
against a flood that's a thousand feet
and one inches tall right that large
interest
products ten infrastructural investments
tend to be by their very nature brittle
and and poorly adapted to extreme
circumstances the work that I'm
presenting here is a proposal about
another way of thinking about
infrastructure because one of the
reasons why we've historically done big
measurable things is is because our
computation our ability to understand
the landscape has been limited to what
those big things can do but in this day
and age week when we can map and
understand the city as a complex network
of influences and watersheds and
small-scale environmental impacts we can
predict and therefore invest in a
different kind of change in urban
landscapes a change that might take say
an investment like the recent multi
billion dollar investment in higher
diameter sewer pipes in San Francisco
and instead take even a fraction of
those funds or half of those funds as is
shown here and make a series of targeted
micro investments in all these vacant
sites which would accomplish at lower
cost at about half the cost exactly the
same goal of shaving off the top of of
the flood when it hits the San Francisco
sewer system and do so not incidentally
not by putting money underground but by
putting money on the surface of the
city's most at-risk and underserved
neighborhoods communities of color and
those not not usually getting the kinds
of investments that we're talking about
a stormwater retention
a localized storm water retention
infrastructure in each one of these
sites that we're outlined here would at
half the cost of underground sewer
improvements net you a local investment
of about $600 a square foot in each of
these which is a lot of Park and a lot
of landscape still at less of the cost
mostly because infrastructure is really
really expensive okay
so since starting this project in San
Francisco in 2009 my students and my
studio have done consulting work and
collaborations in several other cities
in Los Angeles and in New York City LA
collaborating with a community nonprofit
called the amigos de los ríos and in New
York City with an urban ecology lab at
the new school and very much the same
kind of overlap of vacant land
environmental social need and
environmental impact has been the case
in each of these places in this has
resulted in exhibit installations
speculative projects and now in New York
City we're collaborating both with an
urban ecology lab at the new school led
by Time McPherson and a non-profit
engaged in job training and greening of
vacant lots in at-risk neighborhoods
called
Green City force the Green City force is
the winner of Awards both from the Obama
White House and from the Clinton Global
Initiative it's also been very much a
software product now what this project
actually is is really a set of software
tools to connect GIS raise your hands if
you don't know what GIS is everyone's
either knows what GIS is or if it's
being bashful
so joyous and parametric design tools to
each other now we don't often think of
it this way but software just like a
building is as much a cultural artifact
as a technical solution and software
just like buildings contain within
itself certain assumptions about how the
world is and the nature in particular of
mapping and landscape scale software and
architectural a scaled parametric
software is such that until we started
this work there was actually no way to
get these pieces of software to
systematically talk to each other so
this is also very much an open-source
software project sponsored by autodesk
but the graham foundation by range of
other other funders what the software
does is
at least hinted at by this diagram which
is basically provides a way to now of
course we can always connect GIS to CAD
by importing geometry and layers one at
a time but that's not actually the the
what is amazing about geospatial
information what's amazing about
geospatial information is all the many
different kinds of things one can know
about a place not just its shape so what
the soil type is what the what the
building stock is made of what they're
all all sorts of information that are
now available to us is never before and
so what the software we wrote we wrote
does is allow you to maintain a very
extensive database of geospatial
information to query all of that from a
parametric design environment and
produce in the case of these projects
thousands of individual individually
customized design proposals that are
that are talking to the database about
all kinds of things about each
individual location where a design
activity is taking place but not not
representing a kind of import or export
of data as we're used to thinking of it
but rather representing a constantly
upgraded updated kind of repository of
this obvious information that is
affected by the designs the where we can
simulate not just what is going on in
terms of drainage and and the
thermodynamics of these sites before we
put the designs into them but also
afterwards as well and have that kind of
iterate through a complex design process
not necessarily big data big data has a
very specific definition which is even
larger than the data that we're talking
about here but certainly allowing our
design tools to engage medium-sized data
at the scale of cities and landscapes
has been very much the goal of this work
I will explain what it amounts to what
and ends up within the context of what
may seem like a very anachronistic thing
to do or the project that is this
digital um but it is in the nature of
the digital to be to be very ephemeral
and it is a nature of an argument to
want to stick around and so to the
extent that this work is an argument as
well as just a piece of software it was
very important to produce a tangible
artifact from it which is this book
which I was very lucky to be able to
work on the design of with a Dutch
graphic design studio catalog tree what
kind of leading information design
practice in Europe the collaboration was
funded by the by the Graham Foundation
and the collaboration resulted in this
book and in the exhibits that is in your
school so I thought I would talk a
little bit about it whatever else you
can say about the book it is very very
yellow and the its yellowness if nothing
else is symptomatic of an attempt to
think through also the techniques and
technologies of bookmaking of the the
overlaying of multiple inks cyan magenta
yellow and black we substituted a highly
fluorescent yellow for the conventional
yellow which meant that we couldn't
depict kind of normal-looking
photographs in it but we could start to
pull apart the actual production process
of the book and assign to different
plates and colors and layers different
kinds of information so the book takes
you through the argument that I just
took you through in terms of the the
environmental impact of looking at
vacant lots in here in San Francisco and
then it has many many individual
drawings for design proposals a version
of the exhibit that you have here was
shown at the Lisbon architecture trial
this fall and I'm using those slides
since the you guys were wonderful enough
to finish the exhibit today but I didn't
have images of it before today but the
the exhibit shows you the the book in
the exhibitor arranged in the same in
the same way again with the kind of
explanation on the Left all the maps and
then each of these each of these
individual drawings is has a kind of
code to it not just the local code of
the software but a kind of encoding of
how environmental data shaped a specific
provision
of urban environmental infrastructure on
each side its dimension its scale its
position that's all the code is
controlling and that's all we really
designed we didn't go ahead and design
you know swing sets and and park benches
and illumination on each of all each of
these sites and that was also for a very
specific social and political reason
which is that one couldn't actually
imagine getting to that level of detail
in a project like this without an
engagement and collaboration with the
communities actually impacted by it so
that's why the the designs are somewhat
encoded is because we wanted to be very
particular about what we could code for
using environmental simulation and what
we could not code for because it would
need to be governed by a kind of social
collaboration so that results in the
layout of the big book in the exhibit
the moving from left to right you go
from east to west in San Francisco and
then the size of each individual drawing
is controlled by the environmental
impact or contribution of each
individual design again in the center of
the exhibit are these perspectives which
are an attempt very much to to show some
design but not so much as as would start
to be kind of getting into the
architects desire to to be overly
controlling so each drawing provides a
kind of code that can be decoded with a
key and here a kind of sample side also
shows shows you how much the
relationship between the individual
contribution of that particular site and
the actual scale of infrastructure of
the city as a whole after we did this
work in San Francisco we were approached
by the Amigos de los Ríos in a
non-profit based in Pasadena and asked
by them to collaborate in a study of a
particular kind of site in LA which they
had always thought would be could and
should be our particular utility in LA's
ecology and environment in particular
they were interested in sites like this
one sites underneath billboards
billboards kind of grow like mushrooms
along the highways and large avenues of
Los Angeles and these billboards have
plots of land underneath him that are
leased by companies like CBS Outdoor and
Clear Channel and the the lots
underneath the billboards are often
either fenced off or just used as
surface parking lots and so in this case
a map didn't exist of these in a
database didn't exist in these so we had
to create it using the Amazon Mechanical
Turk and a lot of volunteer labor we
created a database of 768 sites vacant
lots along billboards along highways and
avenues in LA and then we
cross-reference that with we ground
truth that with a with a database of 150
sites that this nonprofit had found just
by walking around and we thought we were
pretty good and then we made a serious
proposals for a certain kind of
infrastructure that could go in to allow
these sites to continue to function in a
way that they would serve the interest
of the companies but also with a
relatively minimal investment could make
a big impact on the actual ecology of of
LA and as in San Francisco a lot of what
we're drawing here is water flooding and
stormwater a huge problem in California
we tend to get cycles of drought and and
flood that are only accelerating in in
the current climate and so the the storm
water system is never really built to a
capacity that can actually handle the
amount of water you get at a flood but
then the soil dries out over the course
of several years and things get really
out of whack and so again this is a
proposal for not to replace the sewer
system but to kind of level it out and
balance it with minimal investment in
these vacant sites the next project we
did was actually the result of an
invitation from the curators of the 2012
US Pavilion at the Venice architecture
Biennale the curators were the Institute
of urban design in New York the the
Biennale was curated
Kathy Leino the the Institute was
founded by Michael Sorkin they were
interested in very much in our work on
on vacant sites and their potential for
social and ecological utility and they
invited us to myself and and my
collaborators to do a workshop in the
American pavilion during the Biennale
all about vacant lots in American cities
and I said that's great
but it doesn't make sense to me to fly
you know five thousand miles from
California to Venice and get a bunch of
students there to talk about
sites in America that they can't visit
or engage with or have no idea about and
I also had the experience of directing
in 2004-2005
University of Virginia's program in
architecture and landscape architecture
in Venice so I knew something about the
city and something about the place and
in particular I knew that there was a
huge problem with abandoned territory in
Venice not in the center of the city
which is overrun with you know eight
million tourists occupying a city of
60,000 there's very little up for grabs
in that space but if you expand your
idea of Venice even slightly you find
all of these abandoned islands in the
venetian lagoon that were a historic
part of the landscape of the city but
now are completely abandoned so we led a
kind of amazing workshop with Italian
and American architecture students who
were able to get themselves there to to
Venice the workshop was offered for free
and supported by my college and
we we looked in particular at sixty
islands in the lagoon that had
historically being part of the this is a
engraving from 1528 that shows you how
the city itself conceived of itself as
these parts as part of the city and in
fact not only that but these these
islands always had a kind of an amazing
role in the city which is where you put
either the crazy people or the sick
people or the artists right the so they
they served as a kind of extended almost
a kind of extended unconscious of the
city where some of the most interesting
things happened that weren't quite ready
to come into the center but that were
for better or for worse going to have an
influence on it and so the the workshop
actually and you know the the Venice is
a has a huge huge issues with the
ecology of its Lagoon and huge issues
with the with the economy of its Lagoon
the ecology the the the introduction of
a big chemical port chemical
manufacturing industry into the Venetian
Lagoon in after the Second World War
contributed to a huge loss in ground
water polluting of the lagoon and then
the dredging of deep channels for both
cruise ships and and freighters has
meant that the Venetian Lagoon has gone
from a kind of spongy complex Marsh to a
sort of flat bottom the bathtub of just
saltwater and the deepest where the
deepest point in the Adriatic is
actually inside the Venetian Lagoon and
as the result of scouring from enormous
cruise ships and so we we proposed at
the same time on the on the economic
side Venice has gone from a multivalent
economy to a monoculture of tourism as I
said eight to 15 million visitors a year
depending on your definition most of
which these days are coming in cruise
ships so they leave no economic trace in
the city you know they go out with pack
lunches from that from the cruise ship
and don't even spend any money and the
city's population is declining such that
at the current trends if you if you
extend the statistics doesn't work this
way but if you extend the the lying of
the depopulation of locals from Venice
by 2040 Venice will have no people and
only tourists right now it's at about
60,000 it was at 250,000 after the
Second World War and it's declining
sharply so we proposed that that for
these vacant islands that a kind of
combination of ecology and an economy be
the result of direct investment by the
city in both a kind of construct series
of constructed wetlands that would help
Ally alleviate some of the worst of the
tidal scouring in the Venetian Lagoon
and give it back it's kind of spongy
help give the lagoon back it's it's very
important role in alleviating flooding
and then also take one of the best and
only creative parts of the current
venetian economy which are these
temporary exhibitions of the Biennale
but that happened episodically every
other year and don't and make them a
12-month series of residences in these
islands that would actually produce a
more viable creative economy this is a
Venice is also a really really good
example of how spending a lot of money
on big infrastructure it gets you
nothing because in the in the
Premiership of silvio berlusconi a
popular businessman who rose to the
italian prime ministership promising
change arranged enormous investment in
infrastructure in the venetian lagoon
some almost over two hundred million
euros of spending on an enormous system
called the modulus betterment ala
electromechanical or mosaic which is
supposed to be these enormous floating
flood gates which are on the the bottom
of the lagoon and supposed to alleviate
the worst of venetian flooding but
they're already predicted to be lower
than the peak flood ten years from now
and the and when they go up if they stay
up they will completely kill the actual
native ecology of the lagoon which
relies on a twice daily complete tidal
exchange of the water of the whole again
so there's that okay then in New York
City we were I was asked to collaborate
with the urban ecology lab at the new
school led by an ecologist named Timon
McPherson he and his lab have mapped
over 30,000 vacant lots in New York City
and have done an intensive ecological
study at 1,500 of them and so in this
case we were able to to not pretend to
be environmental scientists ourselves
but actually collaborate with real live
environmental science that scientists
on visualizing what these recommended
ecological investments would look like
on all of these on these 1,500 closely
studied sites in New York City and again
you can see some of the uses that to
which we put the four plates of offset
printing in trying to render these
designs with a combination of
abstraction and definition which we
thought was appropriate to the work okay
so there's that so that's both a kind of
proposal about practice it's the design
of some shapes not final shapes for
things but some draft shapes for a bunch
of things and it's a kind of thought
about how we can better use the power of
software not just to design the same way
as we always have better but to actually
open up new ways of design and new ways
of thinking about space if if the world
is evermore described by information are
there better and more and more useful
ways to mediate the relationship between
information and the making of
architecture and cities so that's the
the kind of first part of the talk the
the second part of the talk is really my
attempt to undo and critique and
undermine everything I've just told you
through the lens of a certain kind of
architectural history that is also very
closely related I would argue to
everything I've been talking about for
the first half of the lecture and this
the hinge here is really returning to
this character Gordon Matta-Clark and to
his history and thinking about what it
might mean in the context of this work
I've just shown you do does everyone
here know who Gordon Matta-Clark
is is he still the staple of
architectural education that he has been
so where's your hand no no so Gordon
 I will tell you who he is
in the course of this lecture but I'm
just interested in knowing whether
you've heard of him before the project
this project that Gordon Matta-Clark did
mapping 11 vacant lots in in New York
City it was called Fake Estates Reality
properties but it one
many interesting things about it it
wasn't a it's been widely published and
presented the actual artifacts that he
collected about these lots in New York
are enormously valuable they sell for
hundreds of thousands of dollars and it
represented by the David's Werner
gallery in New York so a very
interesting sense of like value of
drawings but Gordon Matta-Clark never
intended this to be an exhibited artwork
it was actually only reconstructed
Gordon Matta-Clark tragically died of
pancreatic cancer at the age of 37 in
1978 and this the contents this one is
now this very famous artwork called fake
estates 11 sets of photographs and and
titles two vacant lots in New York City
was really just the context contents of
a box that he kept because he didn't
know what to do with them and a curator
convinced his wife to to his widow to
put them into an hour frame them into an
artwork in 1992 already 10 or 15 years
after he had died so already it's a kind
of strange thing because it wasn't a
thing that was meant by its author to be
a thing it's not even a thing it's just
a collection of information about eleven
vacant lots in New York that Gordon
Matta-Clark bought but then went back to
the city after his death and you know
who was what what was you know pieces of
paper like this one a tax receipt and
and and all the rest and yet it has in
the life of curatorship in the life of
if you google fake estates a million
things will come up there's whole books
about about the work elaborate critical
and theoretical discourses so it might
behoove us to spend a little bit of time
saying well I mean I let's not judge by
scale but if you know this these eleven
sites have had just any eleven
vacant lots have had an enormous
cultural and architectural history in
terms of their influence on the
profession and on the way people have
thought about territory and so in my
lecture about three thousand six hundred
fifty nine vacant lots it's probably
these are way more important these
eleven than my three thousand six
hundred fifty nine but it might be
interesting to digging
what they were and what they might what
a project like mine might mean in terms
of a project like this it's also very
important so raise your hand if you've
have heard of Gordon Matta-Clark I and
raise your hand if you haven't it's
totally ok ok
so Gordon Matta-Clark when I was in
architecture school you know ol like 15
years ago
Gordon Matta-Clark was still very much
someone on the lips of architecture
students and you'll see why when I show
you a little bit of his history and what
he did he cast himself very much as an
anti architect he literally called
himself at that I will later on in a few
minutes I'll talk about a specific
episode when he shot out all the windows
to Peter Eisenman's Institute for
architecture and urban studies with with
a rifle you know this was like not
making it up this like totally happened
and there was a really deep conflict at
the time between what he's thought of
himself is standing for and what the the
architectural establishment thought
himself was standing for which is part
of why he so always been such an
attractive figure to architectural
students because no one is more
victimized by the architectural
establishment than the architecture
student and so the notion of someone you
know literally taking up arms in that
situation is really interesting ok but
one of the one of the things that but if
just with that with that kind of little
vision of what Gordon Matta-Clark 
might represent as a figure in
architectural history it's also very
important to understand that again a bit
like the fakest States itself the
history is sort of way more interesting
if you look at it because just like
these 11 you know maps of vacant lots
weren't actually ever designed by
Matta-Clark to be looked at on their own
neither was Gordon Matta-Clark who was
 always cast as a as a kind of
anti figure to the architectural
establishment he wasn't separate
entirely separate from the architectural
establishment either and in fact he was
pretty close in his own history to the
center of what we might regard as
architectural history for one thing his
father
Roberta Matta was a Chilean immigrant
from Chile to Paris where he was an
intern and then employee in the studio
of Le Corbusier and he drafted all of
these drawings for the Villa radius
Gordon Matta-Clark father and so and
Gordon Matta-Clark was no medical
Roberto Matta-Clark's father then
ended up leaving Corbusier studio in a
kind of a bit of a controversial way
because he suddenly decided that the
corbusier's you work was only useful to
a non-existent person who lived in
perfect harmony with society in his work
and he couldn't stand that and so he
went and fell in with the surrealist
instead designed crazy structures like a
house there whose walls consisted
entirely of moistened sheets and then
went to become a painter and a sculptor
and was very and here is young Gordon
Matta-Clark photographed with a
sculpture from Giacometti surrealist
stage and Giacometti and and mater and
Duchamp were all part of the same circle
and Duchamp was in fact Matta- Clark's the
The Godfather of both Gordon Matta-Clark
and his twin brother Sebastian Matta
here's a photo of Roberto Matta and the
young Gordon matta-clark on Long Island
Sound Matta Clark's father it was also
is this lecture being recorded
it is I'll say it anyway he was a bit of
an asshole he left he was a philanderer
and he left Gordon Matta-Clark and his
twin brother with their American mother
in New York went back to Paris and
Gordon Matta-Clark relationship with him
had all the kind of complexities that
you would result the results from a
father abandoning a young family and his
children and so he would get together
during the summers etc but like like a
lot of children with an absent father he
always looked up to his father as well
as despising him and so when Matta-Clark
decided he wanted to be an artist
it art his his father told him that the
only training you know all advices
autobiographical and Matta-Clark father said
well the only training to really become
an artist is architecture and so Gordon
Matta-Clark knowing he he wanted to be
an artist went and enrolled in the
undergraduate architecture program at
Cornell in 1962 his first great first
year grades were pretty unremarkable his
grades were kind of were incredibly
spotty after that day they go from a D+
instructure's so you'll be okay a bit
b-minus in in studio there's a specific
course let's see where's the course the
history of architecture 401 here
that's an interesting class he got to B-
there they were a number of grades um
but that class was taught by a very
specific person and and represented a
very specific landmark in the history of
Cornell represented the moment when an
architectural historian named Colin Rowe
went along with a bunch of his former
colleagues from the University of Texas
at Austin to Cornell and a couple of
other schools on the East Coast
and these are the so called Texas
Rangers and they were called the Texas
Rangers I will not I will not actually
sing this but they were called the Texas
Texas Rangers they didn't call
themselves that they were that was a
nickname given to them by the students
which you know like a lot of things that
students say about teachers was
fundamentally true even if not always
flattering and the nickname came from
this adapted song set to the tunes tune
of a Western song named streets of
Laredo and it goes like this oh I am a
ranger and I come from Texas oh I am a
ranger and I am teaching you we are lead
John and Werner and we are all Rangers
just get you the good book and you'll be
one too and the good book was this book
the earth complex which was the kind of
Bible of a certain kind of of this new
formalist approach
to architectural education which believe
me you are still experiencing and being
taught today this is the the kind of
lingua franca of modern American
architectural education and it was based
in large part on the work of these
figures people like John Hajduk Colin
Rowe Slutsky Lee
John was Hajduk Lee which is Lee I
forgetting all the names now anyway
people who went on to become the
prominent deans etc of American
architectural education varnish Seligman
and I'm beginning Lee's last name anyway
the the basis of this approach to
architectural education was in large
part a single essay published by Colin Rho
in the architectural review in which he
focused on a kind of formal comparison
the essay was called the mathematics of
the ideal Villa and it equated and
flattened together the villa
malcontented by Palladio and the villa
stein de Monse by Corbusier and talked
about their kind of shared shared
properties shared formal properties and
then made out of this a proposal for
architectural education which was both
deeply historical and trans historical
asa historical and mostly focused on
form and formal exercises and their
provision in response to if you're lucky
site conditions but if not just their
architectures response to itself to it
so this was an attempt to craft what was
called and is still called by people
like Pierre Vittorio really an
autonomous mode of architectural
creation and it was also an attempt to
provide for architecture what's a
painting had in something like Abstract
Expressionism which is a mode of making
that referred not to the outside world
but just to the history and mode within
that creative discipline itself the
cynic winona of all of this was of
course the nine square grid problem
which is still being taught in many
schools to this day that class which
Matta-Clark got a b-minus in was a class
by Colin Rowe purely on baroque facades
one slide of baroque facades after
another
for the entire semester we can easily
imagine that it was precisely such an
overlay of facade studies that produce
the following exchange in a 1974
interview with Gordon Matta-Clark in
Avalanche magazine which is a downtown
art scene magazine and the interview
asks you studied architecture at Cornell
didn't you and medical arc responds yeah
that was my first trap but the things we
studied always involved such surface
formalism that I never had a sense of
the ambiguity of a structure the
ambiguity of a place and that's the
quality I'm interested in generating in
everything I do rose
formally precise response to time Masson
surface was fundamental to the Texas
curriculum it also was fundamental to
the later group of which he became an
honorary member and and critical
figurehead which was the group who Peter
Eisenman Michael Graves Charles Goethe
me John Hajduk and Richard Meier the New
York five or as they became came to be
known the whites which was not a
description of race although it might
have well have been but rather the
complexion of both they're sort of cord
inflected buildings and of the cover of
the 1972 catalog five architects which
brought them to prominence in the
catalogs introduction the curator Arthur
Drexler of the of the moment show of
which it was a record renders explicit
the retreat from politics that
accompanied the group's formal concerns
even as distinct from the original
funding for the Peter Eisenman's
Institute for architecture and urban
studies which had actually been largely
social in nature and focused on housing
architecture Drex Arkin declared is the
least likely instrument with which to
accomplish the revolution and then row Colin
Rowe begins his second longer
introduction by excusing the a political
nature of the work through an optimistic
but somewhat elliptical argument that in
America the revolution had already
occurred in 1776 okay and then Rowe
also says establishes another essential
contrast in the same introduction
between
between this work and not an
architectural style per se but rather to
the collision of what Rowe himself in
quotes the computer and the people and
this was a whole other thing that was
happening in the 1960s which we also see
traces very much of today which is the
collision between the aerospace industry
the Apollo era aerospace industry and
the huge problems of or what were
perceived especially to be the huge
problems of mid-century American cities
they resulted in the development of some
of the first mapping and CAD programs to
map and chart urban renewal in
illustrations like this one a kind of
completely reductive model of all of the
problems of modern Pittsburgh by the Air
Force the Air Force's Rand consultancy
they resulted in in the assertion by
Hubert Humphrey in 1968 that the same
techniques that are going to put a man
on the moon
are going to be the techniques that
we're going to clean up our cities this
is the DNA of a lot of the use of
computing in architecture and in fact
Matta-Clark had a semester in New York
City studying urban policy with the
Lindsay administration for which these
rand consultants were were later on
working so as a result Matta-Clark was
flanked by two very distinct abstract
frameworks claiming ownership over
architecture in the city on the one hand
the kind of formal machinations of the
Texas' curriculum and on the other hand
these highly technical kind of
numerically based responses to how the
city could be enumerated and solved with
computing he wasn't really comfortable
with either one although he did work for
a year after graduation for the
Binghamton Redevelopment Authority doing
mapping and computing work and that was
the only job he actually held in his
life but staying for that extra year
working for the Binghamton Redevelopment
Authority provided this super extra
bonus which was to his role as an
assistant in hanger-on to a
groundbreaking exhibit called Earth art
Mountain in 1968
at Cornell which was the kind of
originating story of much of what we
later know is the land art movement
Matta-Clark served in as an assistant to
the artist Dennis Oppenheim cutting a
long dogleg trench into Lake Cayuga with
a chainsaw and perhaps even more
influential loaned Robert Smithson
his truck Robert Smithson was the kind
of central figure of of much of the land
art movement and became a kind of mentor
along with Oppenheim to Matta-Clark as
he moved down to New York City and
started his own art career matter
Clark's final as I've foreshadowed
Matta-Clark's final attitude towards
his architectural education not to
mention the Cornell crowds movement
parallel and alongside his own downstate
trajectory into New York City's
avant-garde was never so violently and
publicly Illustrated as when he shot out
the windows of the Institute for
architecture and urban studies was an
air rifle he once borrowed my gun to do
a piece at the Institute for
architecture and urban studies remembers
Oppenheim I was extremely excited about
that
according I'm gonna read for a second
because I want to get the facts straight
because this is this is an event which
you can imagine is of which notes are told and almost all
of them are actually somehow inaccurate
but best as I've been figure out able to
figure out this is what actually
happened according to Andrew McNair who
is the curator of the exhibit in
question which was called ideas model
matter Clark's contribution was supposed
to be something quite different the
partial cutting and demolition of the
windowless sheetrock cube of a
conference room that was in the center
of the Institute for architecture and
urban studies space also included in the
exhibition where graves Gwathmey Hajduk
admire as well as more up-and-coming
designers like Todd Williams Rodolfo
Machado and Jorge silletti but in the
pre-dawn hours of the long night of the
gallery installation Matta-Clark arrived
with a very different contribution from
the imagined cutting he entered the
gallery bearing sheaves of photographs
of shards shrouded defenestrated housing
projects mounted on map borne and and
the aforementioned gun after asking
permission to break a few already
cracked planes in in the loft loft
studio Matta-Clark shattered everyone
and if the critical and historical
position was implied the emotion was not
these were the guys I studied with at 
Cornell he reportedly explained these
are my teachers I hate what they stand
for
the windows were just as quickly
replaced by an appalled Eisenman though
the catalog to the exhibit emerging only
four years later allowed only that the
installation made the gallery too chilly
okay keep writing me I'm very interested
in your anti architect architecture
Matta wrote a matter the father wrote to
Matta-Clark the son in an archived and
undated letter the cross language pun
meaning how to be an architect and
against architects at once work with
abandoned spaces Matta-Clark was to
write in 1974 began with my concern for
the life of the city of which a major
side effect is the metabolization of an
old buildings in new york as in many
urban centers the availability of empty
and neglected structures is a prime
textual reminder of the ongoing fallacy
of renewal through modernization
interestingly enough what we now think
of what of what Matta-Clark
was referring to is metabolization of
buildings we would now call by another
name which is gentrification because in
fact Matta Clarke's employment in
downtown matter Clark supported himself
when he arrived in New York City he was
the only person he was a very bad
architecture student but he still no
hell of a lot more about plumbing and
construction than any of his colleagues
in the downtown art scene so he was the
major one of the major kind of
contractors for hire in constructing the
kind of archetypical space of
gentrification which is the Soho loft
and he opened with a couple of his
artist friends what was described at the
time is the first restaurant in Soho it
was actually the first restaurant for
white people in Soho because the
restaurant it took over and replaced was
a was a as you can see from the sign a
Hispanic restaurant for the for the
laid-off workers in the former
industrial site light lofts in in the
city and so a rather so Matta-Clark at
the same time developed in a very
important
around literally drawing from his
experience of renovating these lofts the
artistic and architectural practice he
was most known for which is a series of
of cuts and modifications to buildings
as an artwork and these are in a way
that I would say aren't isn't usually
acknowledged really coming directly out
of his experience of renovation there
are a kind of hardening of the edge of
renovation to do something else the
first one of his sort of architectural
installations was the rerouting of a
small piece of section of drywall in
Greene Street Gallery to expose one of
the sewer pipes that was inside the wall
just this short 1 foot span of sewer
pipe and then a series of photographs of
where that sewer pipe went you know
above above that cut and where it went
below the cut so literally if you'll
excuse my language again taking the shit
out of the walls and and revealing it
and then understanding where it goes so
really understanding the building itself
as a kind of metabolic object this led
to a series of much of larger and larger
activities on the bodies of buildings
which were amazed by his cutting of an
entire house in an NGO in New Jersey
right outside of New York City in half
from top-to-bottom excising of an inch
of material from the center of this
building with the same materials he'd
been working on with the loss with
sawzall chisels all the rest and then a
kind of slow and then a cutting of the
foundation to allow one half of the
house to be slowly tipped back from that
inch long cut and create this elongated
slice crucially this was also a project
that was all about urban redevelopment
even though again it's not often
reported as such this house was only
available because it had been slated for
urban renewal by
the government of Newark and was owned
had been speculatively purchased by
Horace Solomon an art dealer in the
knowledge that it was likely to be
bought at a higher price by the
government for urban renewal so this is
the final house this kind of cemented
matter Clark's reputation and also is a
weird kind of speculation on value as
well these corners which he removed and
now in the collection of the San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art and
they're insured for about three million
dollars so this was the group the group
of people around these kinds of actions
called themselves the an architecture
group Gordon Matta-Clark was one of the
only kind of architectural e-train
people in the group it also included
people like Gloria Anderson dancers
painters etc our thinking about an
architecture Matta-Clark explained in
1974 was more elusive than doing police
pieces that would demonstrate an
alternate attitude to buildings or
rather the attitudes that determine
usable space we were thinking more about
metaphoric voids gaps leftover spaces
places that were not developed even the
name of the group the an architecture
group was not to be fixed it changed
with every mention from Anarchy torture
to an Arctic lecture to an art collector
and in this in 1973 we see the first
mention in this era graham which is
something that used to exist to mail
things cheaply from abroad it sort of
folded up into its own envelope we see
the first mention of fake estates
property slivers with some projected
ideas for them death unfortunately
brings a kind of unasked-for
certainty and the current view of fake
estates more often than not declares and
finished much like the buildings that
vexed and transfix the artists but the
actual life of what they were and his
practice at the time is much more
interesting one thing that is clear is
by 1977 matta-clark had done five or six
enormous cutting spheres circles slivers
out of buildings paid for by museum
like the NCAA in Chicago he wanted he
was really by the time just period just
before his death thoroughly sick of
cutting into buildings and exhausted by
it he was interested in networks
literally and figuratively and he was
sketching drawings like this one that
are that are kind of networks and
fragments of pieces connected to each
other one of the one other threat
another threat emerges as well which is
of particular of Matta-Clark's never
consummated re-entry into the landscape
of the digital he had worked in this
kind of urban computing Center in
Binghamton but he had never been able to
use computing in his own work when Matt
a Clarke spent two weeks in September of
1975 cutting a work called conical
intersect into two masonry townhouses
set for demolition alongside the rising
pompano Museum in Paris he asked his
friend Gerald Eggman to join him
from New York and share the labor
recalling their plaster shrouded
discussions on the site HomeAgain
credits conical intersects inspiration
to an influential media piece by the
artist Anton McCall first shown two
years prior line describing a cone shown
here in the Tate's collection which
consisted of a dark room where a white
circle slowly appears on a black
background projected on the film now
when this was originally shown in
galleries the today if you go to the
Tape and they have this up they'll have
a smoke machine in the gallery and what
the smoke machine does is it transforms
the illuminated line into a cone when it
when it goes through the when it goes
through the gallery but it's actually
important to understand historically
that the smoke machine wasn't included
in the original installation because any
gallery would naturally be full of smoke
from people smoking Matta-Clark was
really entropy came really interested in
a word that we actually hear used a lot
today in the context of new technology
which is virtual the word virtual means
literally something that big exists only
in its power to affect you and he was
interested in
precisely moving beyond this heavy
laborious cutting of geometric shapes
into the making of virtual shapes with
computing as he explained for example to
Bill Mitchell who is later Dean at MIT
and director of its Media Lab he writes
as I explained over the phone I'm an
artist who has been working sculpturally
with buildings slated for demolition by
cutting them to alter their internal
space since there are immense economical
and physical barriers to overcome in
producing a full scale work I've wanted
to catalogue a set of more idealized
spatial variations by using computer
graphic techniques computer graphic
techniques of ahead of course being one
of the also the major products of 1960s
aerospace culture more often than not
used in the context of a particular kind
of proposal this is a reworking of the
Apollo lunar landing simulator by UCLA
architecture faculty member Peter
cabinet sir - - instead of cruising
around the lunar surface to cruise
around a kind of modernist proposal for
downtown LA in 1966 in the same
interview in which in 1986 interview
which in which he identifies Matta-Clark
exhaustion with the physical labor of
building cuts his friend Leslie beam
also reflects on Matta Clark's quote
desire to help people for example on the
Lower East Side to work with them Levine
concludes pessimistically that he was
never able to surrender to that space or
I did yet history actually argues
otherwise right before his death Matta
Clark got an enormous grant from the
Guggenheim Foundation to very precisely
found a resource center and
environmental youth program for vacant
lots in the Lower East Side and he uses
to describe this the word network it was
at the time part of the vernacular of
City Planning as well of course as Matta
Clark's own sculptural interest but the
term also formed in a central part of a
thread of urban history and urbanism to
which Matta-Clark cannot but have been
exposed which is the work of Jane Jacobs
whose book death and life of great
American cities came out in
in medical arcs first year at Cornell he
and Jane Jacobs actually lived two
blocks from each other throughout Jane
Jacobs childhood and her successful
leadership of the the end of the lower
Manhattan Expressway resulted in a
enormous parade through Medical arcs
neighborhood and the burning of cars in
Washington Square Park which couldn't
have possibly escaped a young child with
anarchic tendencies so so this whatever
its origin no Matta Clark's vision like
Jacobs was of the city is a living body
for example in his of the words like
metabolization but also in the present
in this proposal in which he talks about
quote an emphasis on environmental
awareness that is attention not only to
the internal needs of a building but
also its inherent connections to
surrounding areas the educational
project proposed the quote unquote
environmental structural design program
is further explained as follows in order
to demonstrate new approaches to solving
the housing crisis substantially
deteriorated structures weakened by
either fire or age would be used with
attention paid to providing a more
flexible floor space the proposed
alternative is 200 introduced concrete
construction the proposed introduction
of concrete frame structures into the
fabric of abandoned buildings is then
recorded at length and justified in a
this is a very unusual thing to propose
doing to wooden buildings but Matta
Clark justifies it initially due to
cost concerns and fireproofing but also
fundamentally he says quote finally from
the design aspect it would allow cadets
in the program to experiment with more
advanced structural problems yielding
greater spatial freedom which is
basically one of the last points of
Matta Clarke's five points of
architecture the ability of concrete
structures to and the free plan to give
maximum expressions to Architecture and
they were very much part of the
manifesto of projects like the villa
steiner Monsey the villa savoye and
the rest the concrete texts that were in
their own way the bible of the
texas-born cornell bread formalism that
maduk lark so violently professed to
despise which is a bit of a surprise
of course this project never have found
its way to realization several months
after his last cutting was complete with
explorations in computer graphics and
urban education just begun Matta-Clark
wrote to the curator Florent Beck's
quote I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad
news but since I last wrote the doctors
opened me up and looked inside with
horror that advanced cancer of the
pancreas and liver he ensued
chemotherapy in favor of natural
medicine summer brought his marriage and
the death came on August 26 in an IKE
hospital surrounded by friends I'm
almost done there was much in Matta
Clark's life that both appropriated and
destabilized the very ideas of
inheritance legacy and the rituals of
documentation surrounding those events
the geographical terrain in fake estate
still exists return to the city for
non-payment of taxes after Matta-Clark's
death where they remain even in this
survey of New York City vacant land
Matta- Clark's own interest in data and
documentation means that his work really
thrives in the archive it's endlessly
fussed over by historians because so
much of it was endlessly documented by
him in the course of making its work the
steady constant citation however has not
even escaped appropriation by the very
architects of whose work it was a
substantially a critique in 1996 the the
noted theorists and historians
evylyn hua and Rosalind Krauss published
this essay a user's guide to entropy in
the noted art-historical magazine
October which had initially which had
begun itself as a publication of the
Institute for architecture and urban
studies but if October had started as
part of Eisenman's intellectual stable
this work was very much this particular
essay was very much written in
opposition to it the essay chiefly
concerned the work in its central
section chiefly concerned the work of
Matta-Clark and and about its work this
work from several scales from this
experiments in molding and layering and
burning physical objects to the building
cuts and concluding with an extended
consideration of fake estates the eval
Anwar who wrote this section of the
essay emphasizes throughout the what he
called the sovereign contempt in Matta
Clark's attitude towards architects at
the same time as this essay was written
this question was especially on academic
because in the 1980s the personal
computer combined with new kinds of
computer modeling software of the sort
of of which Matta-Clark was no doubt
dreaming aloud a sudden and unexpectedly
facile modeling of objects through
deletion and staged subtraction what are
known mathematically is boolean
operations and the tendency of the
software towards an appearance of the
partial and the subject er the
subtractive and the deleted led to its
quick adoption by formalist architects
which all explains at least partially
why as early as 5 years after his death
Matta Clark's career had become a kind
of a method a so-called method for the
very formalist architects of which he
set himself against so Peter Eisenman
would made some of the first use of this
software form Z was developed nobody
uses form Z anymore but at the time it
was a completely new and completely
revolutionary and it was developed at
Ohio State where in its early stages
Eisenmann had access to it during the
design of this building the Wexner
Center and then this whole project was
kind of codified through another exhibit
at MoMA deconstructivist architecture
for which Mark wiggly was the young
research assistant and in his and
curator handpicked by Eisenman and Matta
Clarke's Englewood house is one of only
six illustrations in the catalog essay
so there's this immediate kind of
appropriation of of Matta-Clark and
Eisenmann himself soon enough was to
explicitly write about Matta-Clark
and gave us a precedent for his own work
Matta Clark cutting of a building in
half and so denying its function and and
Eisenman of course emphasized the
mathematical notion of the half versus
the actual dismemberment of the
structure and so in this essay this
essay is literally an attempt to take
this on and to to to take these guys to
task for a kind of at the most
generously we could say a kind of sloppy
usage of someone's work who would not
have agreed with its usage with such
usage if he were alive
why adopts Matta- Clark's own voice for
this purpose in writes quote what I do
you could never achieve since that
presupposes accepting ephemerality
architecture has only one destiny and
that is sooner or later to go down the
chute okay but if the adoption of Matta
Clark's formal aesthetics of
transformation into the heart of 1980s
formalists culture into this aesthetic
there's a particularly kind of crazy
aesthetic of the deconstructionist
moment which is very precisely buildings
that are self-consciously permanent but
built to look as if they're in the
middle of something right so a kind of
aestheticization of the notion of
process partially built partially
deconstructed coming apart of the seams
but at the same time finished they don't
go on changing or moving whereas this
changing or moving was very much what
Matta-Clark was interested in but then
we also have this crazy example in the
course of his this program he wanted on
the Lower East Side of making a project
with young you know disadvantaged youth
in New York City in which they do all
these crazy metabolic moves on buildings
but all using the Le Corbusier free plan
and concrete you know Domino frame
construction which is also kind of crazy
but in trying to sort this out and this
is the the last example of the lecture
it might be useful to look at another
example in 1974 following the Englewood
House matta-clark undertook another
house transformation
bingo he explains in an artist statement
is the finalized title for a work that
in progress was called being gone by
ninths the piece involved the use of a
typical American small town home in fact
one slated for urban renewal in
in upstate New York he writes that was
to be demolished for urban renewal
during the project a major part of the
exterior was to be sectioned into nine
equal parts each of these facade
segments was cut free lowered intact and
created for transport leaving the center
part of the nine part grid undisturbed
which is of course you know the nine
square grid the fundamental was of
course the fundamental unit a Matta-
Clark's own first undergraduate studio
but here kind of switched round and
thoroughly changed instead of an
enduring utopian Cartesian plane it is
the adaptive and opportunistic edges of
the houses unmaking and remaking as well
the grade remains is an instrument but
its purpose is fundamentally reversed
Cullen Rose later years involved both
the softening of dogma and an opening to
the particular possibilities of form in
the urban context in the late 60s and
70s Rowe returned to a renewed interest
in the less dogmatic approach to the
city as a figure ground that was the
subject of a as early as 1966 this kind
of work was a subject of thesis were
students of his and ultimately it
resulted in 1979's book collage city in
this book Roe and his co-author Fred
coder lament in the context in this
context architectures failure in the
1920s to embrace the conceptual and
formal properties of collage
illustrating the point with several
works of Picasso but a more apt counter
example might be not the polite Picasso
in this context but the more violent and
radical roots of Dada collage this one
of the first very first collages of
newsprint ever made by the artist Hannah
Hawke was called cut with the kitchen
knife daughter through the last vimar
BeerBelly cultural epoch in Germany this
would maybe figure importantly in such a
story not only for its political content
but for how its action the cut with the
kitchen knife is set against the
alcoholic rotund and masculine power
structure of the day the kitchen knife
of course is a tool ready to hand first
as the instrument of an oppressive
hierarchy in this case the the 19th
century
German woman relegated to service but
then precisely the instrument also of
rebellion and remaking in creation at
the time at the same time it's what you
have in the drawer and it's what you use
and it's how you make your way out of
the situation it is in the light maybe
this story that we might regard Matta
Clark's proposals uncanny introduction
of Le Corbusier's five points into the
interior fabric of Lower East Side
buildings here with the same logic as
the demolition chisel became a creative
implement in Matta Clark's building
cuts the very same instrument of the
mid-century Cities unmaking the tower in
the park visions that were of a piece
with Le Corbusier's 5 points are unmoored
from their origins and rearranged into
the reverse like an oysters irritation
they're metabolized coated and
incorporated into the urban fabric the
resulting pearl providing structure and
value from today's distance we cannot
really imagine the shapes that would
have emerged from Matta Clark's Lower
East Side studio exercises they the
excisions the remakings the
repurposings the reinventions whether
they would have been real or virtual
concrete or conceptual or all of these
at once but we can imagine their
precision and precise framing of
something distinctly and
quintessentially urbane representing not
the inevitable failure of architecture
to cheat death but the city's enduring
ability to frame and reframe life for it
is truly the destiny of all of us and of
all of our architecture to go down the
chute but it is in the nature of the
city in its shifting networks and
network metabolisms to enduringly
survive thank you very much
so I've already overstayed my welcome so
I really don't mind if you don't have
any questions or want to skedaddle but
if there's anyone questions I would also
be happy to I know that really probably
didn't make an enormous amount of sense
even to even to me but any no question
is too dumb I'm I want nothing more than
to talk about this stuff so yeah yeah
yeah
absolutely yeah so you know yeah yeah
yeah you know it's funny because it's so
an architecture lecture when I was a
graduate student in in the late 1990s
and early 2000s it was the moment of a
certain kind of you know digital
formalism and blob of texture but it was
still a moment where you would have
someone like Greg Lane would come to
Princeton to lecture but he would still
be using slides photographed from a
computer screen right so it was very a
really strange moment of mediation and
there would still be a notion that came
very much out of the Eisenmann school
that one justified one's actions with
fundamentally with theory when
constructed a theoretical framework in
which one's architecture could not be
critiqued without like an advanced
knowledge of that theoretical framework
that's the classic like Eisenmann
move and so all that stuff appeared so
in unlikely in Greg's lectures it you
know the the which were typical of the
time you got like 10 minutes on Delors
and the fold and then you got a whole
bunch of buildings but you couldn't
really critique them as buildings
without referring to the specific pieces
of Delors in the fold and and you know
as architecture I don't know that's so
like it's sort of you know kind of cut
off any cauterized any potential
criticism which is the like that whereas
the nowadays of course we have with the
perfusion of PowerPoint slides we don't
actually get a lot of theory in lectures
anymore we just get like oftentimes
there's this performance
the lecture I don't know if you've seen
this but there's this performance that
the lecturer does like right before the
lecture where there's this window with
like five thousand PowerPoint slides and
they're all just being shuffled around
live in front of you and then you just
get like a bunch of stuff and you're not
giving any tools to - you know it's it's
not maybe not as bad as like giving a
kind of hermetic theoretical language
which you don't understand is a way to
could take the work but neither is it
giving you any way to think about it
it's just showing you a bunch of stuff
and so very much what I tried to do here
like you know as when you get the chance
to do something that you saw as a
student you always want to do it like
the way you wish it had been done this
is one of the great you know one of the
one of the great joys of getting older
right and so to me it's like well I've
had a lot of experience showing this
work the work predates a lot of the
theoretical and critical components of
it but I think it's really important to
critique your own work and to understand
all the ways in which your own work is
terrible right you know because that
which is not the same thing as thinking
it's terrible right because that's the
creative voice that you need to silence
but the critical voice you need to
listen to and and and it needs to be a
caution and so when I started to do this
work and presented it and you know it
you know for the it's interesting and
exciting and digital and all the things
you're interested in these days but I
also was really interested in this
history and said well would it be
possible to investigate this history a
little bit and use it as a way to both
frame and critique the work and then in
the order is very important because to
me at least it's very important for me
to present the work to you and then give
you as many tools as I can as you can to
critique it and talk about it with me
and understand why it might not you know
and then this kind of spooky overlap
between matta-clark sand history his
interest in computers and mapping is
interested in vacant space was all
completely unknown to me when I did the
original work I just like fake estates
which I thought had been an art work
that he did and so the kind of
excavation of all this history was both
a little spooky it was a little weird to
sit there in the CCA archives and be
like oh wait he was really interested in
vague I'm actually doing stuff in vacant
spaces and he was really interested in
competing but they were too expensive
and he couldn't actually get access to
them and and so that was a really
interesting history to uncover but I
think it also begs the question is like
well you know by talking about this
history I say
this is something maybe along the lines
of what medical might have done but I'm
sure he would have done it much better
right so or you know in other ways in
more complex ways and it's very much a
piece of work that it's in its infancy
and so I'm most interested in the
conversation about it and in giving the
people I talk to the tools the best
conversation possible which was in my
mind at least my goal yeah yeah you can
remember back that far yeah yeah yeah
yeah
gosh I mean that's a really that's the
question that I asked with the lecture
I'm not sure that I have you know
certainly I don't have the answer maybe
an answer I think that the you know one
of the things if you study the 1960s and
what happened with architects you know
for a large period in the middle of the
last century even if they didn't exactly
know how cities worked or what made them
take they certainly pretended like they
did and they were very happy to you know
design the biggest things possible you
know what architect wouldn't we like to
design you know the biggest thing
possible and the most kind of top-down
large-scale work and that you know in
the context of urban renewal that was a
cataclysmic failure that's what Jane
Jacobs you know change people don't
understand that Jane Jacobs was an
architecture critic for 15 years before
she wrote death and life of great
American cities Lewis Mumford was
successful in casting her as like an
active istic housewife you know he but
she was actually like a you know an
editor at architectural record and she
was assigned the project of critiquing
housing projects as architecture and
urban renewal projects as architecture
but she was like oh there's something
that these things aren't getting what is
it and then she expanded out and
developed this whole thesis about the
metabolic nature of the city in the way
in which these large these large
projects cut off all the dense networks
that actually made the city resilient
and work and so I think we are
my biggest fear is that you know we are
a nation that needs to invest in
infrastructure our infrastructure is
aging all our old infrastructure needs
reinvestment but my fear is that in in
you know even if we're capable of
mustering what is actually in the Trump
plan probably mostly can be private
money that somehow you know I'm not sure
how it's gonna work but even the most up
to neck optimistic scenario if we spend
a lot of money
we will spend it not on the right kind
of infrastructure we won't spend it
renewing existing infrastructure which
is what we really need or but we'll
spend it on the things which politicians
like which are big new things that they
can stand in front of for a photo
opportunity and say I built this I made
this you know the relationship between
power
building big things as you know as old
as the pyramids right so that's what
tends to tends to happen where as we are
going into a moment caused by the
incontrovertible scientific fact of
anthropogenic climate change where the
real challenges to our cities and
landscapes will be highly unpredictable
climate change is the pouring of more
energy into the global weather system
which doesn't makes it slightly warmer
but that's not really the point it makes
it all so suddenly colder because
there's you know and something hotter
and suddenly and much more dynamic and
unexpected and what helps you know so
that's going to be a challenge we saw
already in New Orleans what a challenge
these catastrophic weather events are to
the resilience ease of cities and
communities and so I think that when we
really think the real challenge of our
own age is how to sustain and and
bolster all of those invisible networks
that make the city happen and so this is
a small way of thinking about one
particular opportunity which is vacant
lots and the kind of what they represent
in the city urban landscape what they
represent in terms of the neglect of
certain communities what they represent
in terms of certain communities having
within them the territory that is most
useful for the resilience of the city as
a whole which I which is if you get
nothing else from this lecture that's an
important that's the important thing and
so but there are many many other ways to
think through through those challenges
and opportunities too but as architects
we owe it to the cities and landscapes
that that we seek to engage and sustain
to really understand what makes them
tick
which is not like a big you know thing
that you know a big box like sitting on
a cafeteria of architecture sitting on a
cafeteria tray of landscape but it's the
extent to which everything's connected
and when you pull one little thing in
the city you end up pulling the whole
city with it and so we can't design this
you know for that we can't even predict
it it's a complex dynamic system we
would never be able to they're there to
really to predict what's going in the
city you would need to do more
computations than there are atoms in the
universe but you can work with what is
there and the way in which those
landscapes work and seek to augment
resilience where it already exists and
not just declare it there you know by a
big thing
I am trying to stitch together a lot of things in the lecture and so this might be jumbled up
and I am really fascinated by the way you kind of set up your project which is why I am so curious about it
so one thing I am really interested in is the tension that seems to exists both between your approach
and the approach you bring through Gordon Matta-Clark and then even within your own project
between the politicization of these spaces through say making them visible which is grounded in
vacant states but also then the coding on the one hand the kind of making visible like the modern art
like Matta-Clark which seems to be about the individual agent and the ability for that individual subjectivity
and then the coding to collect but also equalize the variable through
no so my question is sort of wondering
about that tension and how you see that
maybe how you see architecture or design thinking or the discipline  as operating within that kind of moment of tension
yeah it's a very very good question you
know the the relationship between I mean
if I can try and summarize my
understanding request units to juxtapose
that our individual agency as as people
who are able to envisage the city as a
whole and and and and understand and
tease out questions are form and and and
meaning in the larger landscape of the
city and then the kind of the tyranny of
form you know of imposing form on the
city and the flattening of all you know
of everything into a kind of sameness
which is not how that landscape actually
actually is now I agree that its
attention in the work I think that the
you know one of my enduring efforts in
all of this is and maybe our guy we're
this Court is really true or not but it
was once described to me that I haven't
been able to actually find the reference
that Christopher Alexander reportedly
said in the last Siam conference that
computers will never be useful in
architecture because they can only
replace the work of a thousand clerks
and there are no problems in
architecture susceptible to the work of
a thousand clerks which again I don't
know if the quotes true but if it is
true it's one of the smartest things he
ever said because you know fundamentally
we we as it as a discipline you know my
my own experience of architectural
school I was the literally the very last
dog end of architecture students at my
school to be taught with like a main line
in year one and by year three Brian can
you know attest to this by my final year
we were all in like Dilbert cubicles
white painted double cubicles with like
computers on every desk and that that
moment was gone so we've we're we are in
this in still in the midst of an
enormous cultural social economic
political shift and how we make things
in the world as how the world makes
things and that's how we as architects
have to operate and the major shift is
the advent of computerization of
everything we do and this leads to a
kind of it you know in in the guise of
something like you know Patrick
Schumacher's parametric urbanism this
can lead to a to a highly positivistic
you know insane notion that somehow we
can compute and predict and form will
solve everything in the city by its kind
of optimization computers seek to
optimize this is what all this like
aerospace
software does and so but optimizing in
the city just doesn't work
you can't optimize a city to be itself a
city is like inherently suboptimal at
many you know any individual things but
really robust and doing a whole bunch of
different things because of its
complexity interconnectivity trying to
figure out the this project was one
sweet I wanted to move beyond just
mapping into design because I'm a
designer it's what I do it's what and
and and yet the project was an attempt
to think through maybe not entirely
successfully well what can the computer
do here the computer you know maybe in
some socially mediated future could help
us do community engagement but we're not
there yet it maybe it could help us do
collaborative design we're not quite
there yet
what it can do is help us visualize the
thermodynamics of all these spaces and
show as cities and mayors and other
people precisely not just in the
abstract how all these sites could do
this in expensive and valuable
infrastructure work but rather show with
a series of very definite proposals this
is exactly how you could spend the
minimum resources spread out on these
1500 sites or 3,000 sites to accomplish
these goals and the simulant we can you
know third we can simulate
thermodynamics with computers we can
simulate water flow we can do you know
there's validated models for all of this
we can literally do it and so it was it
was an attempt to you know like the
drunk guy looking for his keys under the
under the streetlight because it's where
you can see it's an attempt to
accomplish that part of the work that
can be done with computation as we have
it you know when I was doing the work
but but not to try and imply that we
were doing more than that and that was
the real struggle of the work it was an
it was and I it's a struggle I don't
feel it's truly resolved in the work
we're just part of the way I present
part of the reason why I presented the
way I do by saying well this is the work
and here at least a couple of problems
with it but I'm sure you can have more
of their own but the work is trying to
point its way towards dealing with you
know computers and informatics allow us
to deal with whole collections of
specificities instead of averages in a
way that we were never able to perform
so it's a way of saying this could be a
very important opportunity for
architects to move upstream in the
design process to
design I mean it would be possible for
example to design you know to take this
a little bit further to say design a
prefabricated housing assembly line that
when in which the each prevent
prefabricated house would be aware of
the latitude and longitude and landscape
and slope of where it was going and
arranged the the in a you know a
digitally inflected construction process
arrange the louvers and orientations so
it is to be generate and not use the
most that use the least energy and
generate the most energy in any
individual site you know we're probably
15 years away from being doing that and
yet as a profession we're not thinking
about those opportunities we're not
thinking about how you know only 2% of
buildings by some definitions actually
are designed by an architect for the
place in which they go in the world and
I guess I mean a part of the larger
background to this work is the
understanding well we're never gonna get
an architect hired individually to
design each building on each localized
place but the digitization of the
process along with making a whole bunch
of ways architects used to think about
the world in some ways obsolete also
opens up very important opportunities
for design but have to be that have to
be thought of more broadly and have to
be thought of with a deep understanding
of what computers are actually good at
as well as a deep understanding of what
they're really crap right and and of the
differences between the two so that's
where that Alexander quote comes in I
don't know if that's an answer your
question but yeah ok you've all been
super super super patient and I'm going
to dinner with this guy so I'll get his
question later thank you so much
