It's a corollary that when I have more time, e. g. between semesters, and can spend time on the blog, my readership dwindles to my most hardy readers. So for you another post, via slashdot. It's time to raise concern about the coming datapocalypse. There's going to be a bag of hurt for many people as the economy takes down their favorite site. On a related note, JPEG magazine's parent company, 8020 media, is shutting its doors. 

Via Edwin Gardner, who makes the great Prss Release, comes a link to Panayiota Pyla's "Counter-History of Sustainability," an essay for Volume, a cautionary account of sustainability in architecture, and none too soon.* Panayiota, like me, is a student of Mark Jarzombek's, and she does a great job picking apart the almost theological faith that some architects have in sustainability. For another perspective, see this interview with James Lovelock, the inventor of the Gaia hypothesis. If Lovelock is right (and his points of view have often been controversial), the rhetoric of sustainability in architecture may be more a performative style**, about as useful as shopping at Whole Foods is. Lovelock would probably suggest that we should stop building all but nonessential projects now and learn to live with what we have. In sum, however, Pyla is right on the money with her sharp critique of sustainability. Let's not let this turn into a new architectural religion. 

*One thing to point out for the reader: as the Network Culture project suggests, I disagree with her statement "Always Beware of Metanarratives," but I would agree that we should always beware of metanarratives with an ax to grind. If the network culture project is a metanarrative, it has no telos behind it. To me that's the distinction. We've lost track of our ability to create historical meaning in part because historians, paralyzed by fear of metanarratives, have abandoned macroscale attempts to produce meaning. 

**How's that for a neologism? A performative style would be a fashion for a way of doing things, replacing a fashion for form. Thus the dominnant forms of architectural design today: diagramming, parametric modeling, and sustainability would be performative styles. Or styles of performance perhaps? 

Amazon has finally made the Infrastructural City fully available on their site, roughly a month and a half after it first hit the U. S. shores. I'm not sure where the SNAFU was, but I'm relieved that it's finally over albeit annoyed that we missed the Christmas sales season. 

On Monday I'll begin a series of posts going into detail about Networked Publics and the Infrastructural City and focusing on the significance of the arguments we laid down in these books with respect to contemporary culture, in particular, new government policies on infrastructure and the Internet under the incoming Obama administration. Over the course of the next week, I'll mix these with a discussion of the Zines show and panel at Studio-X.    

I'm starting off the New Year in appearances by moderating A Few Zines: Dispatches from the Edge of Architectural Production at Studio-X accompanying Mimi Zeiger's exhibit on the topic. Over the next week I'll have a few posts relating it to the work we did in Networked Publics. In the meantime, see Mimi's blog for more. 

A Few Zines: Dispatches from the Edge of Architectural Production
January 8–February 28, 2009
Studio-X

In the 1990s, zines such as Lackluster, Infiltration, loud paper, Dodge City Journal and Monorail subverted traditional trade and academic architecture magazine trends by crossing the built environment with art, music, politics and pop culture—and by deliberately retaining and cultivating an underground presence. Much has been made of that decade’s zine phenomenon—inspiring academic studies, international conferences and DIY workshops—yet little attention has been paid to architecture zine culture specifically, or its resonance within architectural publishing today.

A Few Zines: Dispatches from the Edge of Architectural Production does both. Rather than attempting to present an exhaustive retrospective of architecture zine culture, it highlights complete runs of several noted zines that began in the nineties. The exhibition also features contemporary publications that continue to draw inspiration from the self-publishing tradition, such as Pin-Up, Sumoscraper, and Thumb.
 
To launch this exhibit, curator Mimi Zeiger has published a new issue of loud paper and organized a party and panel discussion, including:

Luke Bulman, Thumb
Felix Burrichter, Pin-Up
Stephen Duncombe, NYU professor and author of Dream and Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture
Mark Shepard, University at Buffalo professor, Situated Technologies
Andrew Wagner, Dodge City Journal and currently, American Craft
Mimi Zeiger, loud paper

Moderated by Kazys Varnelis, AUDC

When: Thursday, January 8, 2009, 7 pm
Free and open to the public
RSVP: gdb2106@columbia.edu

Studio-X, 180 Varick Street, Suite 1610, New York, NY 10014

Exhibition hours: Tuesday-Saturday, noon-6 pm

Contact: Gavin Browning, Programming Coordinator, Studio-X, (212) 989 2398, gdb2106@columbia.edu

[Studio-X is a downtown studio for experimental research and design run by the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation of Columbia University.]

Now that I've looked back at 2008 and my predictions for the economy and architecture in 2009, what's on deck for this blog in 2009? While the rest of my family and friends napped this afternoon, I came up with my blog resolutions for 2009. I know it's down time for my readership but your input is most welcome. 

The Network Culture Book

This is my big analytic project for the year. I'm already well underway with writing and should have an early draft of the introduction up soon.

I want the project to be a networked book, at least to some extent, posting it online here with comments from my readers feeding back into it in an open peer review process accompanying an official peer review process at MIT Press.  

The big question for me is how to do this using Drupal. There's no problem, unless I want to show you revisions, which could be helpful as a way of dealing with comments. For example, if you post a comment and I incorporate it, a copy of the document up prior to the correction would allow readers to see the evolution? Right now its possible, but only if I give you the right to edit the copy. Although I could see that becoming possible, this book is meant to be my work—and in that it has real academic requirements—so I'm not so sure I can do that yet. Perhaps there can be some forks of the book? I'm not sure yet.

Networked Publics, Infrastructural City, and Obama 

I'd love to hear that Obama is reading both the Infrastructural City and Networked Publics. But since he's kind of busy these days, I'll save him some trouble. Starting off the new year, I'll have a series considering the implications of both books for his policies on infrastructure and information technology.  

More Blog Posts

It sounds like a hopeless resolution, but I'm committed to more blog posts on this site. It shouldn't be too hard since last year was so dominated by book production. This year will have a healthy amount of research. But it's still tough to post on the blog when I teach studio in the fall. I hope to figure something out.

Interviews

In 2009, I'm going to start interviewing other people for this site. I have some interesting subjects already lined up. More on this later. 

Blog Pamphlet

I'm plotting curating both existing and new blog posts (especially the interviews) with comments from my readers together in a pamphlet about architecture, infrastructure, and urbanism. If you're in print publishing and interested, let me know. If not, I'm going to do this myself as a Netlab publication.  

AUDC

Robert and I intend to continue our work at AUDC. To do this, we need to think hard about what to do at the AUDC site. Your input is welcome.  

Social Software

I'm going to trying harder with social software sites. Join me at twitter, last.fm, delicious, and flickr. Missing anything? 

Podcasts

I've toyed with having my classes as podcasts before but have never done it. Should I? What are your thoughts on this? 

"All's well that ends." That was Robert Sumrell's tag line all year long. For me, its been a good year, although not without its share of frustration. But I'm adept at triumph over adversity, so I got most everything I set out to do completed, even if at times the effort required was superhuman.

The Infrastructural City, Networked Publics, and the Philip Johnson Tapes are out, although at times I wondered the first of those would ever see the light of day. My plan to have the books published a semester apart was undone by forces beyond my control. Promoting the books is going to be a lot more difficult now and that annoys me to no end. Next time I'm going to have to be a lot more strict in terms of the contracts I sign with publishers in terms of delivery and who I work with as my designer. On a positive note, Michael Bierut and Yve Ludwig were phenomenal as the designers of the Philip Johnson Tapes as was my student from days gone by Israel Kandarian, who came up with the cover concept for the Networked Publics book. Susan Surface gets a special mention for saving the summer for me as the graphic designer for the Netlab.    

The highlight of my year was that Robert moved to the city, giving us an opportunity to teach the fall Netlab studio "This Will Kill That" together and to bring new life to AUDC. Early signs of what we'll be up to can be found in Perspecta 41. I was thrilled that our studio did fantastic work. With another year drawing to a close, I'm glad that once again, I'm at Columbia.

I was also delighted to teach a course in the fall semester at MIT. My students were excellent and I learned so much from them. Going to Cambridge every Tuesday was a real treat: great friends at a great school. 

When it comes to this site, January 1st brought a new look, still in Drupal but based on Daniel Eatock and Jeffrey Vaska's Indexhibit software. I was, perhaps, wrong that 2008 was the year that blogs stopped looking like blogs although it was a year in which Wired's Paul Boutin suggested that Facebook and Twitter had stolen blogs' thunder. 

Those of you on Facebook know that it certainly captured my attention—as it did for so many people (AG, you're the only exception left among my friends, I think!) and although Twitter didn't really engage me, I'm going to try to make more of an effort to understand that scene in 2009. Twitter is still very much for the geeks, but these days the geeks are often ahead of the game. After all, if the best thing about Facebook is the status updates, maybe that's enough right there? 

My planned series on new radical architecture took a back seat thanks to the three books, and the planned book on Network Culture got delayed too but I soldiered on. 

I read a number of great books in 2008, including Nicholas Carr's The Big Switch: Rewiring the World From Edison to Google, Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, Sanford Kwinter's Far From Equilibrium: Essays on Technology and Design Culture, Felicity Scott's Architecture or Techno-Utopia: Politics After Modernism, Kevin Phillips's Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism as well as Bill Bishop's The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart.  I had hoped to post reviews of some of these, but I was never able to pull it off. It's a real shame. Read them. I did manage a review of Far From Equilibrium for Cite. Print that pays by the word still captivates. I was also fascinated by Warren Neidich's work on neuroaesthetics and hope to engage with that topic more in the future.

While at the DLD conference in January, I saw the amazing Anish Kapoor show at the Haus der Kunst. In the right venue, he's one of our best artists. 

As my long-standing prediction that the real estate market would implode became reality and—preposterously late—even the New York Times finally admitted it, I turned my critique against all pundits that think the suburbs are the source of all evil. I pointed out that cities are going to be hit hard but that this may be for the better…they have long ago become urban playgrounds for the well-off, instead of places of diversity like they once were. 

2008 was also the year that objects became suspect. Designer Philippe Starck retired, concluding "I was a producer of materiality and I am ashamed of this fact." "Everything I designed was unnecessary. … design is a dreadful form of expression." As we drown in cheap doo-dads made in China, it's hard to disagree. 

Instead, I proposed that we have all the technology we need for quite some time. iPhone version 2.0 took locative media out of the proximate future and into the everyday. Now what do we do with it? The key is going to be to figure out how to make this stuff really sing—without letting it become an excuse for the coils of the late capitalist serpent to tighten further around us. In particular, I warned about the dangers of surveillance society and echoed Nicholas Carr's concerns about the centralization of everything. For architects, I wrote an article about the Architecture of Hertzian Space in A+U. For cartographers and users of maps, I wrote Design in the Age of Intelligent Maps for Adobe Think Tank. I also began sketching out a history of the present with my essay Simultaneous Environments. Social Connection and New Media at Vodafone Receiver.  

As a Ph.D. carrying historian, I wrote a manifesto about how historians need to go beyond the microscopic and inconsequential, to think big, make mistakes and risk everything while Enrique Ramirez and I looked back to twenty years ago and how the postmodern music of its day reshaped our perception of the city. Sonic Youth was—and is—so more important, than the cheap condos of the day.  

Finally, in what was unquestionably the most controversial post this blog has ever seen, I asked if there was much significant new architecture built in this decade. If I came to that question thinking I knew the answer, I was secretly hoping to be dissuaded. Sadly, I wasn't. 

Has 2008 shown us that the owl of minerva has flown on the sort of architecture that defined the last two decades? Has the legacy of the Deconstructivist architecture show finally been put to rest as architecture has been unloaded of meaning and value? Do we have the energy and the courage to realize this and figure out what's next?

On a personal note, I said goodbye to my cat Daisy forever. My constant, funny companion was by my side or on my lap for the majority of my blog posts and all of my books as well. My friend long before I started this blog, life without her is much poorer.     

Here's to 2008: all's well that ends. As we lay it to rest, I hope that the next year is a real improvement.

My predictions—and those of a whole bunch of members of "architects, bloggers, academics, Archinect editors, and other members of [the Archinect] community" for the year ahead at Archinect.

I'll add to my prediction by adding that if we get it right, light urbanism will be all the rage. Something along the lines of this or this or this. There are lots and lots of dangers to such scenarios, but a burst of new, heavy but green infrastructure (e.g. light rail, green power plants, podcars, whatever) is pie in the sky in an age that will give new meaning to NIMBYism as homeowners seek to protect what value they have left.  

Régine Debatty posted a review of the Infrastructural City at We Make Money Not Art. Régine has kind words about Blue Monday and riffs on Infrastructural City by curating her own selection of images. Many thanks, Régine!

Archinect asked me to post with my predictions about the future of architecture and I've contributed with even more gloom than usual.

But the end of the year means that your favorite blogs will be doing year-in-review posts. Although good significant buildings have been in scant evidence, I thought it opportune to list the design highlights of the year. Some of these, but not all, are personal.

You’ll notice that almost every entry also has its down side. In our era of perpetual beta/continuous partial attention, it is difficult for designers and developers to focus long enough to get out a finished project. Speaking of which, having been sleep deprived for days (Christmas with small children does that), I’m sure I’m missing all sorts of stuff…

Anish Kapoor at the Haus der Kunst

I was floored by Anish Kapoor’s show at Munich’s Haus der Kunst. The retina-searing pigments and restrained but fluid surfaces of Kapoor’s installation created a vision of another world that architecture could learn a lot from. Sadly the show at Boston’s ICA was so much smaller in scale and failed to engage the architecture (partly the fault of it being relegated to a much smaller space). 

Situated Technologies Pamphlet Series

The Situated Technologies pamphlet series, curated by Mark Shepard, Omar Khan, and Trebor Scholz brought together some of my favorite thinkers to reflect on the evolving role of ubiquitous computing and architecture. Freely downloadable or available for purchase at Lulu, this series does present-day pamphlets right by picking a great format and impressive content. 

I’m hoping to do one too, that is if the organizers ever come around to my idea of writing the pamphlet online as a discussion with my readers on this blog.

Macbook

Although the Macbook Air was released this year, the real story was the fall’s aluminum Macbook. If its confused design and strange use of black made it less visually appealing than the more Ulm-school plastic Macbooks and if the glossy screen and the sad omission of Firewire is typical of Apple’s longtime misunderstanding of users’s needs, at least there’s finally a small, blazingly fast Mac. Adding icing, Apple’s unibody aluminum chassis means that the Macbook is much sturdier than the previous thin-skinned  models. Sporting a decent graphics card and, wonder of wonders, a hard drive nearly as easy to upgrade as the battery, the Macbook air won me over. With the Infrastructural City done, I sold my 17” Macbook Pro and moved to a Macbook that is just about as fast. My shoulder is happy.

Running atop a flavor of Unix and easily capable of running Windows via a number of different technologies, today’s Macs are great machines. Apple’s decision to focus on bugs in its next OS release is most welcome as frustrating bugs still abound.

Facebook

This was the year that I joined Facebook and, judging from my friends’ list, the year many of you did as well. Social networking sites are a remarkable phenomenon, fundamentally changing the way we connect to others. Too bad then, that Facebook’s redesign is so bad. Just how am I supposed to post links or add a photo to my profile pics again? The designers and coders for the site are clearly too busy to actually use it.

Dyson Airblade

Hand dryers in public bathrooms make me angry. They are so frustrating that I usually wind up using my jeans if towels are lacking. That’s why I’m so delighted by the Dyson Airblade, a hand dryer that works! Moreover it doesn’t require you to touch a grungy button to activate it. The Dyson Airblade made my trips through Boston Logan’s Jet Blue terminal much happier. Now if only the people in charge of mounting them on the rest stops in Connecticut’s I-95 would learn that they should be mounted much lower than the useless old hot-air blowers of the past.

iPhone 3G

Apple’s iPhone 3G is of much greater consequence than the first iPhone. Driven, perhaps, by a burgeoning DIY distribution system for iPhone apps, Apple made it possible for developers to write applications to be sold over Apple’s application store. Sadly, Apple also  limited the application store in arbitrary, sometimes insane ways. For example, if you want a video recording application or want to share your 3G connection with your laptop, you’ll need to jailbreak your iPhone. The logic behind such rules is hidden for end-users and suggests that Apple wants a happy fascist version of the Internet. I'm definitely not a fan of that approach.. Luckily, hackers have filled the gaps Steve Job created. Beyond that, the iPhone 3G is not only faster, it has GPS built in, making it the first really major application for locative media applications. If only the battery life wasn’t so pathetic, another example of Apple's lack of connection with its users.

Drupal

Like all of my sites, this site runs on Drupal, a decision I made back in 2004, and one that has proven on target. Drupal also runs many, many sites, including the sites for the architecture programs at Yale and Columbia (in the very near future!) as well as the students of the Harvard architecture programs. I was there first! This year the steep learning curve of Drupal flattened a bit at the same time. But if  user-contributed modules give it immense flexibility, Drupal also witnessed a speed bump with the upgrade to version 6 and ground-up rewrites ofmodules used by many developers. Adoption of the new version on production sites was slow (I still haven’t upgraded any of my sites to 6). Still the future is bright for my favorite content management system.

Panasonic DMC-LX3

Instead of more megapixels, better megapixels. We published a number of photos in Infrastructural City using the Panasonic DMC-LX2. The LX3 is a significantly better camera, capable of saving its output in RAW, decent low-light photography, with a nice wide lens (f2.0 and 24mm Vario-Summicron lens), able to shoot HD video, a hot shoe for flash, and even an elegant black leather case. This thing often beats my Canon 5D for image quality. What more can I ask from a pocketable camera? To save in Adobe’s open DNG format would be nice, but I’ll take what I can get .

Booby Prize:

Ares I 

As if to cement the historical verdict that Bush was a total disaster as President, NASA’s new Ares I launch system was revealed as wildly expensive, insanely complex, delayed, and possibly a crew killer. Only two things may save the manned space program. First, Obama’s transition team may realize this and cancel it outright, replacing it with either the Direct 2.0 system or a man-rated Atlas V or Delta IV. Second, if Elon Musk’s Falcon 9 is successful, it may be able to take over after the Ares pogos to smithereens during its first launch. Then again, maybe we should just save our money for unmanned space?

Perhaps, forty years later, it is time to put the self-aggrandizing myth of 1968 to rest. Much as I'd like to believe that 1968 was a great moment for the Left, it was actually a point of closure, not of opening. 

Instead, when we think of 1968, for tonight at least, let's think about not the rebellion of a hip generation coming of age but about a product of technology originated under the Nazis and finished by a government waging a Cold War. If the origins were bathed in innocent blood, the circumstances all wrong, the moment is still one of the greatest achievements of humanity.

Forty years ago the crew of Apollo 8, Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and William Anders, became the first men to fly around the moon. It was a feat of great audacity, the first manned flight of an Apollo capsule atop the mighty Saturn V stack, a Hondo Civic-sized capsule atop a structure taller than Lever House packed full of compressed explosives. On lift-off, the rocket produced more sound than any other man-made phenomenon save the Bomb. If its origins were in military technology, unlike any other manned rocket built, the Saturn V was effectively useless for military purposes (the Vostok rocket that launched Gagarin, the Redstone and Atlas that launched Mercury, the Titan that launched Gemini, the Proton which launched Soyuz were all derived from ICBMs and the Space Shuttle was envisioned as having a military role). The race for the moon may have been mad, but it was as good as madness could get. Instead of building bombs, we raced to the moon.

To the 68ers, the moon shots seemed ridiculous, what could such an expensive effort tell us about the problems of Earth, they asked?  

But, then, on December 22, 1968, the inhabitants of the Earth gazed back on it for the first time.

Below is the image of Earthrise, as taken by the Apollo 8 astronauts. Is there another image from the twentieth century as moving, as important? 

We realized ourselves, alone on a fragile blue sphere adrift in space together. Is it beyond imagination to think that without this photograph we would have blown ourselves up? All at once, during the darkest time of winter (for those of us in the Northern hemisphere) it became apparent that the world was one. Soon after the flight, Borman received a telegram, "You saved 1968." And perhaps a whole lot more.

Here's to Apollo 8 and to all that was good about the space program.