woʀds aɴd cɪtɪes : tʜe ʀʜetoʀɪc aɴd meaɴɪɴɢ of statɪstɪcaʟʟʏ ɪmpʀoʙaʙʟe pʜʀases

Transcription

1 woʀds aɴd cɪtɪes : tʜe ʀʜetoʀɪc aɴd meaɴɪɴɢ of statɪstɪcaʟʟʏ ɪmpʀoʙaʙʟe pʜʀases When I use a word, Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, it means just what I choose it to mean neither more nor less The question is, said Alice, whether you can make words mean so many different things. 1 As architects, we subject the physical material of city-making to ruthless interrogation; buildings, streets, cities and neighborhoods are mapped, drawn, and analyzed to discover structure, precedent, formal and even informal qualities. (Even high modernist discourse, which abjured the surface evocation of type and context, reveled in the physical structure of cities, and its analysis as an engine of new urban design.) Yet when talking of the elements that drive and shape urban environments streets, plans, neighborhoods we have a tendency as a profession (emerging both from the ubiquity of language, and a traditional suspicion of the role of talking in design; Mies design, don t talk ) to underestimate the power of words themselves as a shaping force in the physical environment. It will be the thesis of this seminar that language has a primary role in the creation of human environments, and especially in those particular environments cities which emerge from the collective fabric of a society of which language is the instrument of negotiation, shared identity, and, often, division and conflict. Borrowing from the vocabulary of contemporary information space (where, in an effort that itself recalls the long history of urban navigation and mapping search engines and online catalogs search for pattern in sprawl), our goal will be to identify, catalog, and tease apart those phrases and words which seem themselves to reveal that urban environments are being discussed. Furthermore, we will catalog not only those words in the language of information, Statistically Improbable Phrases that seem to define historic discussions of cities, but also those phrases, which, in their recent emergence into discussions of the city, critique existing vocabulary, and offer new possibilities and limitations for urban thinking and form. The phrases below, and associated readings, are offered not as a conclusive catalog, but rather, a starting point for discussion; the goal of our first meeting will be to accept, reject, and critique this list, substituting terms and agreeing on the semester s lexicon. Over the course of the semester, each student in the seminar will assist in the discussion and evaluation of a particular term, and contribute their work to a collective publication of findings. (A note on the sessions and readings: The choice of terms and readings here are the suggestion of the instructor, subject to discussion and agreement amongst the seminar members. This discussion is scheduled for the first seminar session. For the suggested terms, the proposed readings have been selected to show the maximum variety of meanings for the term in the context of cities and urban environments) 1 On Language : Introduction and Choice of Terms Michel De Certau, Spatial Stories from The Practice of Everyday Life (Berekely, University of California Press, 1984) pp Adrian Forty, Words and Buildings, A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture (London: Thames and Hudson 2001.) Introduction and first section Lewis Carrol, Through the Looking Glass, Chapter VI (with apologies to Adrian Forty.)

2 2 Map Denis Cosgrove; introduction to Mapping (New York, Oxford University Press, 2001) Cities for Sale: Land Speculation in American Planning. Chap 13 of Reps, The Making of Urban America, A History of City Planning in the United States (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1965) Kevin Lynch, Image of the City (Boston, MA, MIT Press, 1960) The Plan of Chicago by Daniel H Burnham and Edward H Bennett: Cartographic and Historical Perspectives Gerald A Danzer, from David Buisseret Ed, Envisioning the City, Six studies in Urban Cartography (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1998) Richard Saul Wurman "Mapping and Cartography in Metropolitan Areas," in Beyond the City, the Metropolis.(Milan, 1988) 3 Walk Michel De Certau, Walking Through the City from The Practice of Everyday Life (Berekely, University of California Press, 1984) pp Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2000) p Gordon Cullen, The Concise Townscape (London, Architectural Press, 1971) Walkscapes : el andar como práctica estética = Walking as an aesthetic practice / Francesco Careri ; [traducción al castellano Maurici Pla, english translation Steve Piccolo, Paul Hammond]. (Barcelona, Editorial Gustavo Gili, 2002) 4 "Body Georges Teyssot, The Mutant Body of Architecture in E. Diller and R. Scofidio, Flesh, Architectural Probes (New York : Princeton Architectural Press, 1994) William J. Mitchell, Cyborg Citizens from City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn(Boston, MIT Press, 1995) pp Goerg Simmel "The Metropolis and Mental Life" in K. Wolff (ed.) The Sociology of Georg Simmel 5 "Street Donald Appleyard, John R Meyer, Kevin Lynch The view From the Road (Cambridge: MIT, 1964) Jane Jacobs "Eyes on the Street" from The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York, Vintage, 1961 ) Anthony Vidler "The Scenes of the Street: Transformations in Ideal and Reality, " in On Streets, Stanford Anderson, ed. (Cambridge, MA; MIT Press, 1978) Alison Smithson As in DS : an eye on the road (Delft : Delft University Press, 1983.)

3 6 "Planning" Kenneth R. Hammond Human Judgement and Social Policy (New York and Oxford; Oxford University Press, 1996) Henri Lefebvre "Theses on the City, the Urban, and Planning" in Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas, Ed and trans Henri Lefebvre; Writings on the City (Oxford and Cambridge, MA; Blackwell, 1996) p. 177 Aaron Wildavsky. (1973). If Planning is Everything, Maybe it's Nothing. Policy Sciences(4); Richard E. Klosterman. (1985). Arguments for and Against Planning. Town Planning Review, 56, 1; Susan S. Fainstein and Scott Campbell. (2002). Introduction: Theories of Urban Development and Their Implications for Policy and Planning. Readings in Urban Theory, Susan S. Fainstein and Scott Campbell, eds, 2 nd ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell; John de Monchaux. (1989). Getting Things Done in Messy Cities. Places(5)4; Community Gilles Deleuze "The Rise of the Social," Foreword to Jaques Donzelot, The Policing of Families (New York, Pantheon Books, 1979) Elinor Olstron Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (New York and Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1992) Christopher Reed, Ed. Not at Home;The Supression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture (London; Thames and Hudson, 1996) Thomas Y. Levin, Ursula Frohne, Peter Weibel, Eds, Ctrl [Space]; Rhetorics of Surveillance from Benthan to Big Brother (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002) 8 Leisure J. Mark Schuster, Ephemra, Temporary Urbanism and Imaging from Vale/Warner Imaging the City (Rutgers, 2001) p 361 Andrew Ross, The Celebration Chronicles : life, liberty, and the pursuit of property value in Disney's new town (New York: Verso, 2000) Christine Boyer, Times Square in Daidalos 67, Constructing Atmospheres, Natural Nature from Adrian Forty, Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architectutre(New York, Thames & Hudson, 2000) Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York : Oxford University Press, 1964). Linda Pollak, Pieces of the World: Nature-Object and Nature-Space, in Daidalos 65, Sept 1997, pp

4 Anne Whiston-Spirn. (1984). The Granite Garden -- Urban Nature and Human Design. New York, N.Y.: Basic Books 10 Conflict Emily Thompson "Noise and Modern Culture " Ch. 4 of The Soundscape of Modernity; Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, " Peter Galison, War Against the Center from Architecture and the Sciences: Exchanging Metaphors (New York, Princeton Architectural Press/Princeton Papers on Architecture, 2003) Paul Virilio, The State of Emergency from Speed and Politics : an Essay on Dromology (New York, Semiotext(e), 1986) Mike Davis, City of Quartz, Excavating the Future in LA (New York; Verso, 1990) Fortess LA, p Gregory J Ashworth, War and The City (New York, Routledge, 1991) Chapter 4 The Insurgent City. Lee Kennett A History of Strategic Bombing, (New York: Scriber Son s, 1982) Chapter 9 The battle of Germany. 11 Infrastructure Bill McKibben, The Apartment in The New Yorker, March 17, 1986, pp Joel A. Tarr Sewerage and the Development of the Networked City in the United States, from Technology and the Rise of the Networked City in Europe and America Tarr and Dupuy, eds (Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1989) Wolfgang Schivelbush, Disenchanted Night. The Industrialization of Light in the 19th Century (Oxford and New York; Berg Publishers, 1988) Duncan Watts, Six Degrees : The Science of a Connected Age Chapter 10 The End of the Beginning Metropolis, November 2000 Cell Theory Anthony Townsend, Mobile Communications in the Twenty-first Century City. Wireless World. (Boston, MIT Press, forthcoming) 12 Computing Richard Rhodes Visions of Technology (New York, Simon & Schuster, 1999) Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World : Computers and the Politics Of Discourse in Cold War America (Boston, MIT Press, 2000) Paul Cerruzi A History of Modern Computing (Boston, MIT Press, 2003) The imaginary real world of CyberCities Chapter 1 of Christine Boyer, Cybercities, (Boston: MIT Press, 1996) William Mitchell, City of Bits (Boston, MIT Press, 1996) pp Soft Cities

5 Petran Kockelkoren Technology: Art, Fairground and Theatre (Rotterdam; NAI, 2003) also, Eric S. Raymond The Cathedral and the Bazarr: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary (Sebastopol, CA; O'Reilly, 1999) 13 Material Gerhard Auer, Editorial and Building Materials are Artificial by Nature in Daidalos56, June 1995 pp Roland Barthes Plastics from Mythologies trans. Annette Lavers (New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1957) Cecil D. Elliot Technics and Architecture: The Development of Materials and Systems for Buildings (Cambridge, MA; MIT Press, 1992) Charles Simmonet., "The Origins of Reinforced Concrete" Rassegna no 49, 1992, p Atmosphere Reyner Banham, The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment (London : Architectural Press, 1984). Reyner Banham, Los Angeles, The Architecture of Four Ecologies Mark Wigley Architecture and Atmosphere from Konstruktion von Atmosphären = Constructing atmospheres. Daidalos 1998 June, n.68 Peter Buchanan Musings on Atmosphere from Konstruktion von Atmosphären = Constructing atmospheres. Daidalos 1998 June, n.68 Emily Atwood, Carrier: a history of Air Conditioning (Princeton Undergraduate Thesis, 2000; unpublished) 15 Complexity Jean-François Lyotard Ticket to a New Décor in Copyright 1, Fin de Siecle 2000 (Paris, 2000). Kevin Kelley Out of Control : The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World (New York, Addison Wesley, 1994) pp. 1-28, , Thomas Hughes. (1998). Rescuing Prometheus. Coping with Complexity. New York: Pantheon Books. Chapter 5;