The end of August at the Netlab brings the end of the Infrastructural Los Angeles project and little by little it's getting assembled into a book. From now until publication (hopefully by Christmas!) I will be showing off projects from the book.

To start, take a look at Lane Barden's trilogy of aerial photographs of Los Angeles. Lane and I taught at SCI_Arc together and it's a privilege to have his work grace our book.

Three series of photographs, all taken from helicopter, show the Alameda Corridor, the Los Angeles River, and Wilshire Boulevard. Together these demonstrate the force of these
entites—in turn devoted to moving objects, fluids, and people—as they shape the city in their very different ways. Together, they suggest that it is not the urban plan as much as the infrastructural project that has shaped—and continuous to shape—the city. 

Although you will have to purchase the book to see these in print glory, you can see a selection (together with other great work by Lane) at his Web site.

It's rare that I like a Flash site, but The Los Angeles's Conservancy's Curating the City impressed me. At present, the site consists of an interactive map of Wilshire Boulevard that allows you to look back at the the history of that sixteen mile long street in detail. Even though I lived on Wilshire for a decade, I learned quite a bit from the site.

Little by little my summer book projects draw nearer to completion. Here, as a teaser, is the text that ACTAR is publishing in the next catalog, together with some photos I took to accompany it.

Los Angeles: Infrastructural City

Kazys Varnelis, editor

Once the greatest American example of a modern city served by infrastructure, Los Angeles is now in perpetual crisis. Infrastructure has ceased to support architecture's plans for the city and instead subordinates architecture to its own purposes. This out-of-control but networked world is increasingly organized by flows of objects and information. Static structures only avoid being superfluous when they join this system to become temporary containers for the people, objects, and capital. Featuring a provocative collection of research through photography, essays and maps, Los Angeles: Infrastructural City uses infrastructure as a way of mapping our place in late capital and the city, while remaining optimistic about the role of architecture to understand it and affect change.

A project of the Network Architecture Lab in collaboration with the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design.

[note oil wells off the coast of Long Beach in second photo from top]

At the Washington Post (via Wired), you can read about yet another instance of unreasonable behavior by the post-9/11 national security state, in this case, the unlawful harrassment of a photographer shooting a random installation that turns out to be the DARPA headquarters.

Through actions such as this one—or the calculatingly demeaning but ineffectual "remove your shoes" security measures at the airport—the Bush-Cheney regime builds a regime of fear.

Then again, perhaps their fears are warranted…after all, a bunch of photographers, plane spotters, and the like, could cause a great deal of trouble.

On the positive side, I had zero harrassment while I was taking photographs for the infrastructural city book in Los Angeles, including this one, not far from city hall.

If there is anything that has struck me the most about coming back to the Northeast after a decade of exile in Los Angeles, it is the nature of sociality here.

In what would no doubt come as a massive surprise to any Angeleno reading this post, New York and its environs are intensely social. Whether hyper-scheduled playdates for kids in suburban Montclair (or the city for that matter) or a relentless barrage of events in the city (I swear that you could go to one super-cool architecture event every night of the year), the area is relentlessly filled with a pursuit for activity. In contrast, L. A. is a city that exists virtually without any social interaction. This is a city which in the eve of the millennium could do little more than turn the Hollywood sign green, after all.

But let's not let the Northeast off so easy. What it has to offer instead is massive social division. If people see each other at orchestrated and semi-orchestrated social events, they see not so much individuals as representatives of micro-clusters. In L. A. whether you live in Paris-Hilton-infested Bel Air, polka-dot Silver Lake, or the pseudo-city of downtown is ultimately irrelevant, just a subtle inflection within a diffuse urban field. By contrast, New Yorkers take their lifestyles seriously…whether you live in Tribeca, Park Slope Montclair, or the Upper West Side is a decision of grave importance. Identity, it seems, is real. Or is it? in an amusing—but biting—special issue, Time Out NY addresses the "Hipster," a particular, highly contrived urban breed. A quote should entice you in...

The mouth of a real-estate agent is rarely the source of truth, but Mr. Desjadon knows his territory (and is no doubt cashing in on this knowledge). He has unwittingly explicated the transformation of the hipster into the “indie yuppie,” an avatar we might imagine as the fusion of Kurt Cobain and Adam Gopnik. The indie yuppie is (literally) the child of the bobo, and just as his father the baby boomer did, he has learned to simulate rebellion while procuring and furnishing a comfortable two-bedroom.

Read more at The Hipster Must Die.

So what interests me about this is the need of individuals to fit into certain molds and the question of whether the NY or LA model of socialization is more future-forward…

Alas, it's been a while since I've updated. Between repeated trips to the GSD to lecture, a difficult and still incomplete server transition, and final reviews at Columbia, time has been scarce. Moreover, I've been waiting on word on some projects that I'll be running from this blog, working behind the scenes on NetLab material (the launch of our office is just around the corner!), and waiting for Blue Monday to appear en masse in the states (try later this month).

And, as happens when I don't post for a while, the opening post seems all-too-important. The stakes rise. I begin to ponder site redesigns and it is that time of year again…these usually happen in May (hint: reader feedback wanted).

Then smaller topics don't get posted. And all the while you, dear reader, begin to wonder if I have passed on, or if I've finally tired of the longest running individual blog in architecture, or if you should just hit the delete key in your favorite RSS reader…

So, how better to start than with a heady dose of doom and gloom?

There's little question that the real estate bubble is starting to come apart across the US. It's a slow implosion rather than a fast pop, but things are starting to look grim in the overpriced landscape of the coasts. If under postmodernism, the most autonomous processes of architecture were colonized by capital (translation: the drawing became capitalized in shows like Houses for Sale and galleries like Max Protetch) then under early network culture the built domain has been thoroughly removed from reality by pricing that bore no relationship to reality and ever more irreal financial instruments (you didn't get that 5 year adjustable interest-only balloon-payment mortgage with 0% down, did you?).

But even the most advanced delusions ultimately have to come down to earth.This is something I've been pointing out for a while, but here is more grist for the mill. The Orange Country Register reports that job growth is slowing and suggests that the declining real estate is responsible for this. 16.7 percent of OC jobs are in real estate, construction, or related financial fields. The construction industry has ballooned by 148% in the 14 years since the bottom of the last cycle. The statistics in Los Angeles are little different.

Construction is the new factory job, highly paid work for unskilled labor. Illegal immigrants and cash workers are far more common than in other industries (in Southern California, Home Depot has begun to institutionalize the lines of day laborers in front of their centers).

How much of the much vaunted decline in crime has to do with the fact that you can get great pay and a good lifestyle legally in construction as opposed to risking your neck in crime? What will happen to the legions of unskilled laborers, many of whom have no papers and no command of English, as the bubble continues its downward trend? As these jobs go bust, crime will rise as it always does. As family bread-winners who have been employed in an industry subject to cyclical downturns find themselves without a job—and in many cases face foreclosure of loans given under criminal terms—their reaction will be, understandably, not pretty.

On of my current projects is a book on Los Angeles during the last decade. Even as it tells the improbable story of the recovery of Southern California, by the time it is published, the region's economic landscape will likely resemble Mike Davis's City of Quartz once again. If you look at the demographics for the area since 1940 (!), each decade shows Southern California being divided more and more into poor regions worthy of the developing world (note well: the amount of terrain devoted to these grows every decade) and insanely rich mountain and coastal communities. The City of Quartz may be back, with a vengeance.

UPDATE:

Another option, of course, is that the immigrant workers just head home, as the Washington Post suggests. But that would pose problems of its own for the poorer inhabitants of those communities who can't afford to go home and all the businesses dependent on these workers.

Via archinect, the BBC video "Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles."

link (via Archinect)

Self-promoting plug... my own essay on Reyner Banham's Los Angeles

I have uploaded the text to Prada and the Pleasure Principle, an article I wrote for issue 6 of Log. In this piece, my theoretical interest is in architecture's confrontation with new media and ambient informatics. Like many of the pieces that I've written in the last few years, the work of both AUDC and the NetLab (watch those spaces in 2007!) can be construed as a response.

Now on realplayer, the University at Buffalo's Nees@Buffalo Testing facility is streaming video that simulates a hit by the 1994 Northridge quake. A wood-framed, stucco covered town house will be subject to a 6.7 magnitude earthquake generated by a massive shake table. See the LA Times. As the director of the center just said, this building is designed to a certain specification. This is beyond that, this is a big one.

Broadcasting began at 10.45am EST and will continue through the test at 11.30am with a post-test inspection afterwards.