Armageddon, USA

WIRED magazine story Welcome to Armageddon, USA

In the latest issue of WIRED, the article Welcome to Armageddon, USA exposes the story of Picher, Oklahoma, a town shut down by industry and contamination. The mining of lead and zinc contaminated the land to a point where it was no longer suitable to live. It reminds me of the very public controversy of the love canal in the 1970's. In the situation of the love canal, chemical waste was buried beneath the grade to reveal itself decades later.

Love Canal in 1995 by MotionBlurStudios

Ben Paynter, writer for WIRED, points out that "for all the famed cities with thousands of years of continuity - Paris, London, Cairo, Athens, Rome, Istanbul - most cities just stop. Picher isn't simply another boomtown gone bust. It's emblematic of what happens when a modern city dies: A few people say behind, trying to hold on to what they can. They are the new homesteaders, trying to civilize a wasteland at the end of the world."

These towns and cities that have seen the end of one generation of industry and are struggling so hard while wounded to carry on to the next phase are displaced and detached from the connected socio and economic flows. These places are the remnants of what was once useful and now unbearable to many as they simply walk away. How can these sites be fostered and remediated for those radicals who find themselves in solitude? Is there a way to bring back a life to the city, expand the possibilities of what the space was from before while also being able to nurse back to health the land and place to a richer and more fruitful ecology?

While the Love Canal is now a barren neighborhood with sidewalks that lead to nothingness, and Picher, OK is a hostile town fallen apart with no one to pick up the pieces, there are terrains of flight or fight that situate the opportunities for interventions calling for a new generation and definition of a place, waiting to be put back together.

Terrain Vague

Terrain : [tuh-reyn]

area of land of a specified nature

Vague : [veyg]

not clearly expressed, indistinct

From a call for papers I notices at the beginning of the summer and a essay response from Kazyz Varnelis about Robert Smithson's, “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey” I began to notice many connections between my thesis, Stormfront and the topic of Terrain Vague. Coined by Ignasi de Sola Morales Rubio in his paper “Terrain Vague” in Anywhere in 1995, the term has again been stimulated by the field of architecture. Why is it now that we are again interested, specifically myself in these middle places of gray scale between colorful borders? The proximity and witness to Detroit and it honesty of its own downsizing of the disproportional amount of vague terrains within the city exposes what is happening in varying amounts globally. With foreclosures and the recession the surplus of vague spaces will only exceed the tolerance and new opportunities must be found for these places. From the purely abandoned industrial Battleship Island to the adopted terrains unofficially claimed by homeless, the sites of intervention vary tremendously. It can be about creating a process of collecting the embodied energy of the site and utilizing its characteristics to transform it into a place of possibilities unable to be realized on the other side of the vague boundary.

I have collected pieces from writings that tackle, define and expose the potentials of Terrain Vague. They all carry through the defining features set out by Sola Morales “Void, absence, yet also promise, the space of the possible, of expectation”, but each one adds active definitions that contribute to a new process of envisioning the unrealized.

“Terrain Vague recalls the process of evolutionary biologist call expatiation in which a trait or capability, repeated within the context of successful growth and adaptation, becomes co opted for unforeseen uses”.

-Alan Berger Drosscape

“Terrain Vague is a different kind of surplus, a waste product, that in lying abandoned, performs no function except to contain sheer potential. 'Dormant' was a place in which something had happened, long ago... such sites contain trace heat of the past occupation”.

-Kazyz Varnelis The Potential of Passaic

“Indeterminate zones that punctuate the urban landscape and represent unacceptable socio-economic deterioration and abandonment... offering room for spontaneous creative appropriation and informal uses that would have otherwise had trouble finding a space for resistance to emerge and alternate ways of experiencing the city”.

-Luc Levesque The Terrain Vague as Material

Terrain- “A larger and perhaps less precisely defined areas of territory, connected with the physical idea of proportion of land in an expectant state, exploitable with definition”

Vague-”Seaswell, Vacuus, Vagus” Movement, oscillation, flux, vacuum, empty, unengaged, indeterminate, blur

-Sola Morales Terrain Vague

“Actually, the landscape was no landscape, but 'a particular kind of heliotypy' (Nabokov), a kind of self-destroying postcard world of failed immortality and oppressive grandeur”.

-Robert Smithson A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey

“Marginal, semi-abandoned spaces in or along the edge of a city”

•site situation • forms of documentation • contextual definitions/theories • urban wilds • transgression and recreation • urban natural history • environmental justice • interventions

-Site Situation Call for Papers

The call for papers topics refresh my approach to the House as Thesis with these concepts in mind:

Who or what resides in the house?  • From what are they sheltered, and relative to what is inhabitation conditioned? • Inside/Outside :  How is the boundary defined and the threshold permeated? What kinds of veils condition the envelope or extents of the construct? • Site: at multiple scales, in geologic and climatic material considerations • Materials, Construction, and modes of Assembly • Time / Timeline / Seasons / Duration / Weathering

Within the first gambit, it seems that all these things can be tackled to understand and define a House as Thesis with recognizable similarities to Terrain Vague. 

Lexicon : Stormfront

James Corner : "Eidetic Operations and New Landscapes"

Occupied tunnel, Withdrawn city  

Chosen as terms of opposites occupation and withdrawal can find themselves both in the fields of topical as well as active. They are terms of engagement with an other object. Relational terms activate the environment around them, a term not of solitaire. The patterns of occupation and withdrawal and back again in reference to a single point or scenario then engages the proportion between the two and their effects on the place and spaces in which they engage. Sometimes they can even occupy the same space in time. 

Occupation
"[A] deep and intimate mode of relationship not only among buildings and fields but also among patterns of occupation, activity, and space, each often bound into calendrical time".

[òkyə páysh'n]
•to inhabit in relationship with

•the possession, use or settlement of land

•the act of process of taking possession of a place or area

Withdrawal 
"If detachment and estrangement engender the very concept of landscape -- as distances prospect -- then perhaps, too, landscape itself precipitates only further estrangement and withdrawal. This is landscape's dark side..."
[wi th dráw əl]

•distancing oneself from something that was previously closer in relationship with

•the act of taking back or away something that has been granted or possessed
•removal from a place of deposit
•the act of drawing out of a place or position

Keller Easterling : "Introduction - Organization Space : Landscapes, Highways and Houses in America"

merged motion

Keller Easterling references the practices and modes of static exploration and the limited ability to understand objects instead through time. The concept of time has never been easily accessible, while the first three dimensions are tangible to our understanding, time is always transforming. Temporal components and housekeeping are both terms of sequential action. Components can transform over time and an activity is more definitive than the object. Transformational qualities of something may define it more than the geometrical quantities, understanding how all of these characteristics work together allow the ability to exploit the object or activity to its full potential.

Temporal Components
"...few common terms to describe spatial organizations with active parts, temporal components, or differential change. For instance, biological terminology must express relationships and duration or characterize systems that evolve, 'learn', or adapt over time".
[témpərəl]
•relating to time : relating to measured time
•of this world : relating to the life in the world, not to spiritual life

[kəm pṓnənt]

•part of something, usually of something bigger than oneself
•one of a set of vectors whose combination resultant is another vector


Housekeeping
"It is also possible to describe the amplification of a simple move across a group of separate agents... This architecture is not about the house but rather about the housekeeping. It is ... about timing and patterns on interactivity, about triplets and cycles..."
[hówss keeping]
•the maintenance of a household, or the range of tasks involved in this
•the management and upkeep of property

Stanford Kwinter : "Wilderness"

Winter vine on concrete

Defining the edge of something, and edge that is neither hard and defined nor completely obscure gives the ability to explore a narrow fault line of possibilities. As a culture of knowledge and rigor the idea of a blurred boundary with definitions relative only to context is unstable to our understanding. It is the ability to give way to the possibilities based on relative understanding that allows emergent exploration. It is at the fault line that we might intervene and then allow the design to meaner itself along the edge until it settles itself in a scene of equilibrium.

Outside
"Wilderness emerges in a system once we lost the ability to predict -- from the outside -- what it will do".
[owt síd]

•beyond: crossing over towards a place beyond that which is familiar

•past immediate environment: located on or beyond the outer surface or edge of something

•other side of the boundary of something: happening, existing, or originating in place, people, or groups other than your own

Indirectness
"...approximate rather than finished and perfect parts, and incrementally over time, rather than in one fell swoop of assembly. Indirectness, it appears, is actually the secret to achieving a robust, adaptive, flexible, and evolving design".
[ìndi rékt,ìn dī rékt]

•not in a straight line: not in a direct line, course or path
•not immediate or intended of effect or consequence

Manuel de Landa : "Geological History : 1700-2000 AD"

The social and economical complexities determine the occupied landscape. To such a degree that any variation or instability can alter an entire geography of people and industry. Understanding the social operations of that dwell in these places can explain the value of the land based on inhabitants and their needs. While some places exploit the land and other places exploit the occupants, each has its natural order for balancing the needs of the society. The interplay between multiple values and relationships have the ability to exponentially hinder or facilitate the function of the places and their future outcomes. 

Hinterland

"The intensification of the flow of knowledge also affected the dynamics of cities and their industrial hinterlands".

[híntər lànd]

• remote country region: away from cities or their cultural influence

Intensification
"As with earlier intensifications, it was the interplay of several innovations (electricity and electrical products, the automobile and its internal combustion engine, plastics and other synthetic materials, steel and oil) that allowed this intensification to sustain itself".
[in tensse fi]
• make or become greater
• increase effort or concentration

Mark Wigley : "Recycling Recycling"

Through re-examining the object and its relation and evolution to ourselves we have the ability to adapt and invent new pieces more relevant to ourselves. 

Body

"It also means passing that apparatus right into the internal nervous system, letting the machinery of the body interact with the machinery that is outside it to produce a new kind of body. The limit between interior and exterior, organic and technological, gives way".

[bóddee]

•the main mass of a thing

•complete material structure or physical form

Disperse

"Ideas, like bodies, can be prosthetically transformed and dispersed. Inside the even larger, interconnected, and entangled network that envelops the planet are layers of concepts that evolve and interact continuously like the weather".

[di spúrss]

•distribute widely: over a wide area, to become widespread

•cause to disappear

Robert Smithson : "A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey"

There have been many other papers written about what Smithson tackled in Passaic, New Jersey. Through different authorships the ideas of monuments and identities of space this exploration has emerged into a greater piece than the place itself. I am currently working on unpacking the connections and continuities between multiple contributors of the same topics. 

Ruin

“That zero panorama seemed to contain ruins in reverse, that is-all the new construction that would eventually be built, This is the opposite of the "romantic ruin" because the buildings don't fall into ruin after they are built but rather rise into ruin before they are built”.

[ roÓ in ]

• the physical remains of something such as a building or city that has decayed or been destroyed

• 

complete moral, social, or economic failure

Reflection

“That monumental parking lost divided the city in half, turning it into a mirror and a reflection – but the mirror kept changing places with the reflection. One never knew what side of the mirror one was on”.

[ ri flékt ]
• to redirect something that strikes a surface, especially light, sound, or heat, usually back toward its point of origin
• to express or be an indicator of something
• to bring credit, discredit, or another judgement on somebody or something

Peter Sloterdijk : "Air/Condition"

The position between perception and conditions can be as variable as the weather. Through multiple lenses of understanding conditions and perceptions of space and time in architecture can reveal new ideas for the development of place. It is in the reaction and redefinition through these components that may allow us to understand a new place for architecture. One which deals with a state between to opposing oscillating ends or one that pushes past the the previous extremes of that oscillation.

Weather

“So long as meteorology presents itself as a natural science and nothing else, it can pass in silence over the question of the weather's possible author. Taken as a purely natural context, climate is something that is entirely self-made, ceaselessly proceeding from one state to the next. As such, it suffices merely to describe the most important factors~ of climate in their dynamic effects on one another”.
[we ther]

• an atmospheric state of rain, wind, temperature or other meteorological conditions

• to wear down through outside conditions 

• Oscillation

“Dali's function in this game is characterized by an ambivalence that speaks volumes about his oscillation between romanticism and objectivity: on the one hand, he recommends himself as a technologist of the Other, that is inasmuch as in his undelivered speech he planned-this much is evident from its title "Authentic Paranoid Fantasies” ~ -to demonstrate a precise method to

make it possible to master access to the "unconscious'”.

[ óssə làyt ]
• to move back and forth between two points with a rhythmic motion
• indecisive: sway between to positions or points of view
• cause something to change predictably with variations between extremes

Scanning the Earth

Humans can only see a fraction of the light spectrum which limits what we we believe to what we see. Illusions and magic tricks perplex us because we only see half of that whih is happening in front of our eyes. Now what if I said I could make an ancient city appear out of thin air? Would it be magic, an illusion or possibly just utilizing more tools than nature has blessed us with.

This image is taken from a satellite which can capture much more of the spectrum than the visual light we see.

"For 3,000 years the city of Ubar thrived on the edges of the Rub' al-Khali. But by 300 AD it had vanished from history, swallowed by the desert's infamous sands. It remained hidden until 1992, when orbital radar revealed a web of paths (seen in red) etched across the desert: three millennia of caravans had stamped their mark on the land, and in this case all roads led not to Rome, but to Ubar."
"Earth: A New Perspective" by: Nicolas Cheetman

We are now able to reveal places of past ccupation and excavate them to discover the riches of why people settled in these places before. With the right tools and systems of investigations these places can again be a wealth of landscape all by being revealed by the traces left in the grade of earth.

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Islands

As I make my way up to a famous Michigan island I began thinking about a couple other islands a bit more relevant to my current investigations. This idea of an island as a trace presents its own perspectives on the scenario. When tracing past occupations and exposing a gradient of culture, material and mingling ecologies the island can collect them into a refined bundle rather than the loose webs of broad landscapes. The nature of the space can be confined to the definiion of a shoreline and as such nearly quarantine itself.

An island that has removed itself so mug that it does not appear on tourist maps is that of North Brother Island. Off the shores of Manhattan towards the north east side it now sits abandoned, closed to the public and a protected bird sanctuary. During the typhoid outbreak this island had an entire hospital complex constructed for the quarantine of patients. After use it was used briefly as a medical facility for the military before closed completly. Now the brush and vines has taken over collapsing roofs and blanketing the complex in green. Lush life and a santuary for birds from the chaos of Manhattan now occupies what was left behind. Only park rangers head towards the North Brother Island now to observe and monitor the birds.


An island that has yet to find its lush green endings is Hashima Gankanjima Island, nicknamed battleship island in Japan. It is instead a hard dry monolith of industry. Discovered for its coal miners headed to the island and built a village on the island. It was once the most densly populated place in the world and now not one resident remains. The harsh salt waters have sprayed at the concrete buildings, making them brittle and rusting the metal understructures that support them. Only recenlty opened for visitors on one end of the island because most of the large apartment buildings are now structurally unsafe because of the lack of care and the weathering from the environment, occupation is still only brief by locals and the tourist they take interested in seeing the dense goast town of decay.

Aesthetics of these places are always enticig to talk about as well as the mystery and past that lies in the ambience of the site. What is most compelling about these two places to me is the surge of occupation followed by a sudden lull followed by the immediate transition again. The context and ecologies of these confined landscapes allows them either to return back to its natural state because the tightly networked systems or can not return back because of its detachment from the larger working systems on the mainland. Its a curious situation to design for a sudden surge of people and then be prepared for transitions toward nature an the temporal trace inbetween.

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Garden in Motion

"The Garden in Motion based on the waste land: living space left for the free development of species that live there." 


"At La Vallee, the arrival of Hogweed modified the volume of the open centre of the wet meadow, its movement over the plot exemplifying quite concretely the basic principle of the Jardin en mouvement. When an apple tree fell, its trunk created an obstacle that had to be bypassed, which inspired the creation of an " island " of grass around it . The shape of the island was not predetermined , but develop ed while I was working on it .This gave rise to a second principle of the Jardin en mo­uvement, that the garden takes shape not on a drawing board, but on site."

-Gilles Clement

Topic: PLATFORM: a simple structure, especially one composed of wooden planks, serving as a base for keeping things clear of the ground
[political:  a document stating the aims and principles of a political party, manifesto]

Constructed of planks resting on a bed of stones, furnishing it with an umbrella for protection and a mattress and pillow for longer visits. The platform became a raft for the field , and the field , a place in which to immerse oneself.

Desc/Active: DORMANT: - not actively growing: in an inactive state, when growth and development slow or cease, in order to survive, temporarily inactive: temporarily inactive or not in use

From a site of dormant species, the simple act of mowing the lawn once a year at the end of the summer helped to reinvigorate the landscape. Soon species that once laid dormant in the fields began to gentrify and overwhelm the once mono garden into one with numerous plant and life species. Simple gestures of intervention amplify the place into a garden in motion.