Vertical Farms in Nairobi

http://blogs.worldwatch.org/nourishingtheplanet/vertical-farms-finding-creative-ways-to-grow-food-in-kibera-africa-agriculture-farmers-food-security-hunger-income-kenya-urban-farming-kiberia-urban-harvest-women-vertical-farms-soladarites-red-cross/

Here's an alternative concept to vertical farming. Dickson Despomier's work at Columbia is inspiring. MVRDV's Pig City is another such example of how to restructure agriculture. Would that we, as a culture, had the political will to achieve such visions. The reality is that we have a billion people on the planet without consistent access to potable water. We have a billion people who are malnourished. The solutions to this are probably a lot more humble and disperse than the megaproject, which ultimately requires large amounts of capital to produce.

Is Drawing Dead?

This weekend at Yale there was a symposium that addressed this topic. A pretty renowned cast addressed the topic: Massimo Scolari, Peter Cook, Stanislaus Von Moos, Antoine Picon, and many others.

For me, the first presentation by Cammy Brothers of U.Va probably had the most resonance. She talked about "drawing being relieved of its responsibility in the making of buildings." Also the question of the knowing the rules but willfully breaking them. And finally an issue of temporal simultaneity.

I could not stay for the entire 2 days. There was a lot of talk of the digital, as any discussion of the topic of drawing today is not only obliged to do, but required to do.

But here is my take.

Arthur Danto, in "After the End of Art" indicates that art has ended. What he goes on to describe is that the thrust of art in terms of representation came to its end in various denials of representation. This vein was exhausted. Art has ended. This does not mean that art making has ended, its just that its focus or emphasis has shifted. What has replaced it is philosophy, in Danto's thesis. Art becomes about ideas.

The role of the drawing in architecture has similarly come to an end. With the rise of BIM, parametric modeling, all manner of 3d modeling software, even things like Ecotect, the role of drawing in the representation of a building has all but ended.

What of drawing given this condition? Drawing becomes liberated from its responsibility. Drawing is freed to explore ideas. Drawing can be about drawing. Drawing, at least as it relates to architecture, is freed in much the same way as painting was freed after the invention of the camera. Drawing can focus more purely on the ideas.

To quote Mark Twain: "reports of my demise are greatly exaggerated."

Water

What usually interests me is the manner in which humans have invented forms for dealing with water - protecting from it, drinking it, storing it, using it for movement, and forms of pure enjoyment.

it's complicated

It is a very strange world in which we live. We could live in a garden of Eden, yet we accept pollution, environmental degradation, over population, squalor and ignorance. We prefer war over discussion (even at the level of interpersonal relationships).

Yet, it is a wonderful world! Trees sprout from the sidewalks, fish swim in the Gowanus canal (occasionally). Life is tenacious, complicated, beautiful.

The Greeks shall inherit the earth

I love that Monty Python interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount.

But according to the NY Times, that is just what young Greeks are doing: they are opting out of the global corporate hegemony in favor of artisanal  agriculture. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/09/world/europe/amid-economic-strife-greeks-look-to-farming-past.html?_r=1&hp

I have been looking a lot at contemporary agriculture and urban agriculture, in relation to overall systems of buildings that produce rather than simply consume. The global trend has been towards increased urbanization. Globally today, 50% of the world's population resides in cities. But upon what is the prediction that this will continue? The number of farms in Maine, for instance, increased this year for the first time in decades, reversing a trend towards consolidation. It is a complicated decision, based on economics, lifestyle, politics, philosophy... This is not an isolated trend. We see it in Brooklyn and Detroit and Nairobi as well.

"When I make a drawing, I labor."

"I can touch a letter. When I get it, I know immediately from whom it is and there is a presence of the person who did it. When something is removed from touch it has no reality for me. Email has no reality whatsoever. When you write with a typewriter… Acconci said once in a very beautiful little lecture that when you touch a letter (on the typewriter) the mechanics of the finger imprinting the letter on a white piece of paper—the white piece of paper is fragile—it might be and will be violated with the first letter you put on. In order to erase this letter you either have to destroy the paper or use the white out. But in a computer text you only have to push one button and the text is gone. Simply gone. I am fearful when I draw, when I write, because I have too much respect for the medium. When I make a drawing, I labor. It’s not easy."

-Raimund Abraham

Lebbeus Woods has been doing an ongoing series of posts about his trip with Raimund to La Tourette to have a discourse regarding architecture. The transcription is lengthy, and I have not read the whole yet. This particular quote is of interest to me. I like seeing the hand in drawings. It immediately communicates the imperfection and personality of the draft-person. There is something personal and mortal about the artifact. I recall a wall I once had in a bedroom long ago. It was exposed brick. One morning I noticed indentations in the brick. They were the marks of fingers imprinted into the wet clay made sometime in the 1860s. There is a kind of homeopathic quality to what Raimund describes - an aura left by the person even though the actual physical presence has been diluted 10,000 times.

Of course I can flip this argument around. Computer drawings are becoming more and more personal. Individual approaches are becoming more... individual. In my teaching I frequently say that drawing is not about the hand, it is about the mind. A drawing is a construction first in the mind. 

Still, I like to see the hand. A slight waver of line weight, a splatter of paint, construction lines, a change of mind. These are all traces of the life and history of a work, thus an extension of the individual.

Fire

Fire represents energy. My fire pictures are everything from actual fire, to electrical transmission lines, to gas stations. Our culture is utterly dependent upon abstracted fire (I just made that up!). By "abstracted fire," I mean the energy of fire removed from its source - a distillation.

I have a love/hate relationship with this abstracted fire. It is a marvel to be able to flick a switch and have light. We have devised many magical contrivances to modulate that light. On the other hand, this abstraction has turned into complacency. This abstracted fire typically has its origins in fossilized sunlight, in the form of oil, coal and gas. This material has been a gift to mankind as great as Prometheus'. But it is turning to a curse - climate change as a result of anthropogenic carbon dioxide.