ON SITE
41 : 2022 infrastructure r e v i e w
lead pencil studio
Roadside utilities, invisible unless noticed, photographed, at night, with a long exposure, at which point the elements become strangely communicative:
a small symphony of unattractive things.
$18
See Lead Pencil Studio’s proposal for what to do with all our excessive, redundant roadways on p34
print copies: www.onsitereview.ca
Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta, Hannah Appel, editors The Promise of Infrastructure Raleigh: Duke University Press, 2018 ISBN: 978-1-4780-0018-1
https://www.dukeupress.edu/ the-promise-of-infrastructure
From U.S.-Mexico border walls to Flint’s poisoned pipes, there is a new urgency to the politics of infrastructure. Roads, electricity lines, water pipes, and oil installations promise to distribute the resources necessary for everyday life. Yet an attention to their ongoing processes also reveals how infrastructures are made with fragile and often violent relations among people, materials, and institutions.
liberal equality, and economic growth. This tension, between aspiration and failure, makes infrastructure a productive location for social theory. Contributing to the everyday lives of infrastructure across four continents, some of the leading anthropologists of infrastructure demonstrate in The Promise of Infrastructure how these more-than-human assemblages made over more-than-human lifetimes offer new opportunities to theorize time, politics, and promise in the contemporary moment.
While infrastructures promise modernity and development, their breakdowns and absences reveal the underbelly of progress, read the introduction: https://www.dukeupress.edu/Assets/PubMaterials/978-1-4780-0018-1_601.pdf
Kyle Devine and Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier, Audible Infrastructures: Music, Sound, Media Oxford University Press, 2021 ISBN-10 : 0190932635 ISBN-13 : 978-0190932633
https://global.oup.com/academic/ product/audible-infrastructures- 9780190932640?cc=ca&lang=en&
concerted archaeology of music’s media infrastructures. As contributors reveal the material-environmental realities and political- economic conditions of music and listening, they open our eyes to the hidden dimensions of how music is made, delivered, and disposed of. In rethinking our responsibilities as musicians and listeners, this book calls for nothing less than a reconsideration of how music comes to sound.
Audible Infrastructures takes readers to the sawmills, mineshafts, power grids, telecoms networks, transport systems, and junk piles that seem peripheral to musical culture and shows that they are actually pivotal to what music is, how it works, and why it matters. Organized into three parts dedicated to the main phases in the social life and death of musical commodities — resources and production, circulation and transmission, failure and waste — this book provides a
much of this book appears to be readable online at Oxford Scholarship Online here: https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/oso/9780190932633.001.0001/ oso-9780190932633
Joseph Heathcott, editor The Routledge Handbook of Infrastructure Design Global Perspectives from Architectural History New York: Routledge, 2022 ISBN 9780367554910
This is an exploration of the multifaceted nature of infrastructure through the global lens of architectural history. Infrastructure holds the world together, yet even as it connects some people, it divides others, sorting access and connectivity through varied social categories such as class, race, gender, and citizenship. This collection examines themes across broad spans of time, raises questions of linkage and scale, investigates infrastructure as phenomenon and affect, and traces the interrelation of aesthetics, technology, and power. https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Handbook-of-Infrastructure-Design-Global- Perspectives-from/Heathcott/p/book/9780367554910
Contributors from South and East Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, South America, North America, Western Europe, the Middle East and the former Soviet Union, pay close attention to the materials, functions and aesthetics of infrastructure systems as they unfold within their cultural and political contexts, conceptualizing, studying, and understanding infrastructure as a worlding process.
ON SITE 41 : 2022 infrastructure r e v i e w
On Site review is published by Field Notes Press, which promotes field work in matters architectural, cultural and spatial.
F I E L D
2 3 4 8
Stephanie White
introduction
Photolanguage
a billboard of infrastructural imaginaries
Shai Yeshayahu
be∙spec·ta·cled
Gabriel Fries-Briggs
air
12 20 26 32 34 38 41 42 48 52 58 60
Katherine M Boles
guest room: multi-species condensers
N O T E S
Jonathan Manzo
Hunters Point remediation
For any and all inquiries, please use the contact form at https://onsitereview.ca/contact-us
Roger Mullin
almost invisible
Daniel Milhayo+Annie Han
when the road ends
ISSN 1481-8280 copyright: On Site review. All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopied, recorded or otherwise stored in a retrieval system without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of Copyright Law Chapter C-30, RSC1988. these are listed in the website menu in three groupings: issues 5-16, 17-34 and 35-39. editor: Stephanie White design: Black Dog Running printer: Emerson Clarke Printing, Calgary back issues: https://onsitereview.ca subscriptions: libraries: EBSCO On-Site review #3371594 at https:// ebsco.com individual: https:// onsitereview.ca/subscribe This issue of On Site review was put together in Nanaimo on unceded Coast Salish territory, specifically the traditional territory of the Snuneymuxw Peoples, and in Calgary under Treaty 7 comprised of the Kainai, Siksika, Piikani, Tsuut’ina and Stoney Nakoda First Nations,whose descendents continue to live on this land.
Christian Stewart
locating Monck Road
Bradford Watson
deliberately slow
Alexa MacCrady
street work
Ruth Oldham
the subtle poetry of French electrical substations dams
Simon Shim Sutcliffe
Lejla Odobasic + Anisa Glumcevic
re-adaptive infrastructure as survival
wier man seit
NIRSA
42: atlas of belonging 43: temporary architecture
calls for articles
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on site review 41 :: infrastructure
infrastructure stephanie white
Just as we sent out our call for articles for this issue, Routledge's magisterial Handbook on Infrastructure Designs: Global Views from Architectural History , edited by Joseph Heathcott, was published. He sent me the introduction in which he outlines infrastructure in an expanded field: 'not only the immediate artifacts of infrastructure - the dams, bridges, water pipes, fibre optic cables - but also the materials of which they are composed, the processes that produce them, the labour that animates them, the human affects that they reflect and engender, the landscapes and ecologies that they transform and the stories within which they are enmeshed. ' 'Rather than view infrastructure as a taken-for-granted element of modernity, this volume approaches infrastructure through Bruno Latour's assertion that modernity is itself a multiform narrative. Infrastructure, then, consititutes a historically contingent element in the construction and dissemination not of modernity, but of the story of modernity – that contradictory knot of dreams, aspirations, and values that shape how we narrate the world.' 1 I re-read Rosalind Krauss's 1979 essay 'Sculpture in the expanded field', written as epistemological categories were losing all definition: she warned that the new was being critically historicised rather than being recognised as a true break with past movements. 2 Sculpture, in the 1970s, was borrowing from architecture, agriculture and mining; land art was one result – for example, Nancy Holt's concrete culverts in the desert, aligned with movements of the sun, were both ancient and modern – fragments of infrastructural materials as sculptural as stone. Land art did not aestheticise infrastructure as much as borrow its inherent grandeur while politically undermining it. We realise, forty years on, that the seemingly a-political, un-commodifiable and critically innocent materials of infrastructure are actually deeply implicated in political and cultural processes. Infrastructure Designs: Global Views from Architectural History tells the back-stories of dams, power stations, roads and canals. Projects are described by narratives that expand and expand to reveal the sheer complexity of any infrastructural act which literally and figuratively encompasses the world. Which leads us to our present startled dismay at how easily vital infrastructure with all its history, connections and inter-dependencies, can be demolished by eight well-placed HIMAR shells: Antonivskyi Bridge across the Dnipró in Kherson: broken, irreparable. And the targeting of housing blocks: empty shells, service infrastructure blasted to bits. One way to decide whether something is infrastructure rather than structure, or metaphor, or a narrative, is to think of one's world without it. Infrastructure, no matter what its story, is the essential, little thought-of facilitator of habitus. 3 Without infrastructure, we have nothing. p
https://www.routledge.com
https://bulgaria.postsen.com/world/30824
https://www.newsweek.com
1 Joseph Heathcott, editor. Handbook on Infrastructure Designs: Global Views from Architectural History , London and New York: Routledge, 2022. p6
2 Rosalind Krauss. 'Sculpture in the Expanded Field' October Vol. 8 , pp. 30-44 Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 1979
3 Pierre Bourdieu. Habitus and Field: General Sociology, Volume 2. Lectures at the College de France 1982-1983. Cambridge, Oxford, Boston, New York: Polity Press, 2020
https://www.ndtv.com
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a billboard of infrastructural imaginaries photolanguage : nigel green and robin wilson
Commissioned by Tempo Arts Hastings, UK, a 2 x 5m billboard occupies a derelict space previously owned by Network Rail. The image juxtaposes a history of social protest with local themes of modern infrastructural heritage and contemporary, speculative redevelopment. It re-situates one of the 1930s coastal shelters and car park vents of the Hastings and St Leonards seafront by Borough Engineer Sidney Little, re-categorising it as a proposed 'Pavilion of Insurrection and Pleasure'. The aim of the work was to activate a site-specific, poetic and utopian space of visual play, whilst critiquing the often vacuous nature of the contemporary developer’s digital render and the weakness of institutions to propose alternative urban futures. The image involves a direct sampling of details from the surrounding environment (such as the nearby office block, Ocean House and the site’s colony of buddleia), and postures as a proposed architectural intervention, alluding to the billboards of proposed redevelopment projects of the contemporary townscape: ‘ Coming Soon ’. A fake planning notice accompanied the billboard, recording an initial rejection of the proposal and then the altered specification of its accepted form. The naming of the pavilion aligns it with the utopian infrastructural architectures of Nicholas Ledoux in eighteenth century France. It invokes radical forces that are suppressed in the contemporary city, announcing their imminent manifestation in this hinterland space, the terrain-vague of the billboard site. A restless host gather about the pavilion: a utopic intersection between historical periods. African and Chinese migrant workers from Paris of the 1920s associate with student protesters from May 1968 — a composite crowd of demonstrative figures, the ‘ideal’ operators of this hybrid object of existential utility. p
photolanguage
Photolanguage (Nigel Green & Robin Wilson) is a collaborative art practice documenting and reimagining the legacies of modernity in urban and landscape sites. It is currently working on a new book on Parisian Brutalist architecture. https://photolanguage.info
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be·spec·ta·cled | b ’spektekeld by images shai yeshayahu A tech-driven life collapses our perception of time, habits and habitats. We can now stitch together the frames made for livestock, plants, pipes, wires and roads that gradually turned into a series of transactional infrastructures across the globe. In record time, flying machines, rocket ships, and artificial satellites invented during WWI, WWII, and the Cold War spread so far – so fast that we can feel, in real time, how signals and images exponentially infiltrate our thoughts, ideas, and imagination. Yet, in a remarkable inversion of power, characteristically reserved for military might, NASA’s CubeSat Launch Initiative deploys your personal satellite into space. Like superman, we can expand our eyesight, flying above the troposphere at an increased pace.
time travel Long before the aerospace race came into existence, Hera, the goddess of the sky, had an all-seeing giant named Argus Panoptes. He was able to selectively turn on or off any of his one hundred eyes at will. Such power amplified his ability to stay abreast of information even when one or a few of his eyes napped. In the twenty-first century, that ancient mythology has come to fruition. A multitude of transistors on microchips turn currents on and off; they activate a series of artificial eyes and sensors across every atmospheric stratum surrounding earth. These instruments are now humans’ supernatural eyesight; millions of panoptic eyes proliferate information that aid in discerning the past, present and future of human design. craf t At the Design of the In/Human Symposium in Germany, Beatriz Colomina dates this evolution from the invention of the aircraft. Flying, she said, ignited a resurgence for architectural practices and educational praxes. She explained the phenomenon by citing a post from Le Corbusier’s sketchbook, dated January 5, 1960, quoting, ‘In 50 years we have become a new animal on the planet.’ She reflects on his text, This posthuman is an animal that flies; the airline network is its ‘efficient nervous system’, its web covering the globe. The hyper- mobile architect is a symptom of a globalized society in which humanity will be necessarily transformed. 1 Colomina built on Le Corbusier’s flying agenda to declare that air travel did not simply represent a metamorphosis for his practice but also for how he learned, reimagined and redistributed ideas about his spatial thinking and modes of building. In essence, she
explained, ‘the tight economy of space in the airplane gave him ideas for his projects, just as the ocean liner and the car had once been the source of inspiration’. ibid Unquestionably, Colomina positioned the plane as a tool to ‘craft’ the mobility of ideas, concluding that: The AA generation that circulated ideas through teachers and books would form the core of a new generation of global practitioners. Some of the best and most mobile teachers, such as Rem Koolhaas and Tschumi, and their students, for example Zaha Hadid and Steven Holl, would lead an international avant-garde with major projects throughout the world. A generation that grew up trafficking in ideas is now trafficking in projects. ibid habits from space Over the decades since Le Corbusier’s pronouncement, humans gained access to visual sensor systems, telescopes, space stations and many communication satellites. This access enabled them to receive, deliver and alter all kinds of information regardless of distances and without the gruelling schedule Le Corbusier endured. Trafficking in ideas increased exponentially, particularly for design thinkers engaged in the digitisation and digitalisation of earth. Digits, as it turns out, allow designers to model and simulate a representation of the real world using satellite signals and images 2 , an occurrence that begins to blur the micro- and macro-scales of real and artificial infrastructures enabling life.
1 Colomina, Beatriz. ‘Towards a Posthuman Architect’ Design of The In/ Human . November 19-21, 2009 http://www.design-in-human.de/symposium/colomina.html
2 Longley, Paul A, Michael F Goodchild, David J Maguire and David W Rhind. Geographic informationsystems and science . John Wiley & Sons, 2005
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The discourses that May and Easterling are forwarding lie within a plethora of research work concerned with the mass production of images availed by digital equipment. They are part of a broader design discussion circulating among academic forums and private practices that define digital models as either final renditions or modifiable models. Complex bodies of data, such as digital models, are like sets of instructions calibrated precisely for computer to computer communication and dialogues between computers and printers or robotic processes. These models can also yield diverse outcomes due to their editable potential and numerical condition, enhancing their capacity to resize, adopt and adapt in response to commands. For this reason, digital models are never final; they are intellectual weapons with endless opportunities and consequences. As an example, consider The Slow House . In 1989 it was a design-built commission, and now it is part of MOMA’s architectural collection and Diller-Scofidio+Renfro’s unbuilt archives. Like other digital models, it is a spatial entity exposing the ability to exist in different locations at any given time. It can appear and reappear as an original piece in prominent exhibits across the globe. In its transformative state, it is more valuable and resourceful than any built rendition would be. 8 Rebuilt with different instruments, a digital home defies traditional expectations for curators, educators and researchers, who can record, assess, store and retrieve its content according to its immediate locality. Like all digitalised information, The Slow House is not fixed on-site and does not travel on a vessel; instead, it can travel as a packet from one machine to another. Models of this kind introduced novel modes to redefine the functions and performances of architecture as reproducible, active and evolving objects tailored by codes and transactional agreements.
Historians see this conditioning as a transfer outside the ‘posthuman animal that flies’ and closer to a ‘god-like animal that designs and engineers life’. 3 Oddly, in this superhuman state, data mining and processing through digits scapes the specificities of a site, creating a physical separation from reality rendered by ‘pseudorthography’: Pseudorthography is orthography after simulation: a mobile army of skeuomorphism in which the world appears just enough as it used to. Immediately beneath those appearances is another world, ‘produced from miniaturized units, from matrices, memory banks, and command models-and with these, it can be reproduced an infinite number of times’. 4 Based on architectural practices and John May’s writings for SIG-NAL. IMAGE. ARCHITECTURE , design is without choice ‘mummified in stunning resolutions’. 5 This idea stands within a 2D–3D tug of war based on a 2D–3D dilemma first spun by anime slang, where 2D is beautiful, and the physical tangibility of 3D is a condition now known as ‘three-dimensional pig disgusting [3DPD]’. 3DPD indicates that 2D experiences are superior to 3D experiences. 6 Keller Easterling, architect and theorist, expressed concerns for this spatial reconditioning, noting that in the absence of gravity, this dematerialization of physical information represents a shift in perception where ‘the light, the blizzard of photons coming from everywhere is blinding and ugly’. 7 3 Bratton, Benjamin H. The stack: On software and sovereignty. MIT press, 2016 4 Harari, Yuval Noah. Homo Deus: A brief history of tomorrow . New York: Random House, 2016 5 May, John. SIGNAL. IMAGE. ARCHITECTURE (Everything is already an image) .
Columbia books on architecture and the city, 2019 6 giantparakeet. ‘3DPD’. Know Your Meme . 2007. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/3dpd 7 Easterling, Keller. ‘IIRS’. e-flux Journal . April 2015. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/64/60837/iirs/
8 Latour, Bruno and Adam Lowe. 'The Migration of the Aura Exploring the Original Through Its Facsimiles' in T. Bartscherer and R. Coover (editors) Switching Codes. Thinking Through Digital Technology in the Humanities and the Arts . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. pp 275-297.
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on site review 41 :: infrastructure
shai yeshayahu
the scale of HOME In the opening monologue of Alfonso Cuarón’s 2013 film Gravity, five sentences set on a black backdrop convey the hostile conditions humans would encounter in the Thermosphere and beyond: 1 At 600km above planet earth, the temperature fluctuates between +258 and -148 degrees Fahrenheit. 2 There is nothing to carry sound. 3 No air pressure. 4 No oxygen. 5 Life in space is impossible. 9 Artificial satellites are not living organisms. They thrive without air pressure or oxygen. On low orbit [LEO], Middle orbit [MEO], and geosynchronous [GEO] zone, their positions ensure that daily blizzards of data would reach home. But, if ‘a massive solar storm disrupting satellite communications, a cyber attack partially disabling the GPS system, and debris knocking out Earth-monitoring satellites’ 10 occurred, it could cause total disruptions to our way of life. Transport, energy, and computer services will be affected and fear will engulf our sense of existence. People would start to believe that life without artificial satellites would be impossible to sustain. Then, bespectacled by digits and microchips, it would take days for our analogue processes of design to respark. p 9 Cuarón, Alfonso, director. Gravity . Warner Bros. Pictures, 2013. 91 min. https://www.warnerbros.com/movies/gravity 10 Hollingham, Richard. ‘What would happen if all satellites stopped working?’ BBC. June, 9, 2013. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20130609-the-day-without-satellites
image sources for the graphics ESA - Analysis and prediction https://www.esa.int/Safety_Security/Space Debris/ Analysis_and_prediction Clker.com, Airplane silhouette/icon, 2012, Pixabay, CreativeCommons 1.0. susannp4, Hot Air Balloon Silhouette, March 4, 2019, Pixabay, CC0 1.0. NatuskaDPI, Deep Sea Life Illustrations & Clip Art, Getty Images/iStockphoto Adobe Stock, vegetable silhouette, 2022, stock.adobe.com A-Digit, Fertile Ground stock Illustration, December 21, 2012, Getty Images/ iStockphoto Manga, George, Drone Silhouette, May, 13 2015, Stock Illustrations
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RF-Pose,'uses artificial intelligence (AI) to teach wireless devices to sense people's posture and movement.
By analysing the part of your genetic code determining susceptibility to nutrition-related health conditions like diabetes, DNANudge tells you which foods are best for you and which you should avoid.
Whenever Van Es (who is he?), throws something in the trash, he runs the wrappings through a barcode scanner connected to an online database using his laptop. He says: the robots will scurry in the cool shade beneath a wide variety of plants, pulling weeds, planting cover crops, diagnosing plant infections, and gathering data to help farmers optimise their farms.
Biohacking is the art and science of giving users more control over their own biology.
My toilet is fitted with technology that can detect various disease markers in stool and urine, including cancer markers such as colorectal or urologic.
HEY SIRI, can you ask ORI to make my bed?
shai yeshayahu
Shai Yeshayahu is the co-founder of VerS +, an international research and design practice responsive to how ancient, emerging and local knowledge and data informs making. He is an assistant professor at the Creative School, Metropolitan University of Toronto.
quotes inside graphic strip Adam Conner-Simmmons and Rachel Gordon, 'Artificial Intelligence Senses People Through Walls.' MIT CSAIL , June, 12, 2018. https://news.mit.edu/2018/ artificial-intelligence-senses-people-throughwalls-0612 Broom, Douglas, ‘This wristband tells you what food to buy based on your DNA', Freethink , April 25,2022. https://www.freethink.com/health/food-dna Van Bergeijk, Jerden. 'Public Viewing of a Private Life.' WIRED , November 16, 1998, https://www.wired.com/1998/11/public-viewing-of-a-private-life/ Sigal Samuel, 'How biohackers are trying to upgrade their brains, their bodies and human nature,' Vox , November 15, 2019:
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/6/25/18682583/biohacking- transhumanism-humanaugmentation-genetic-engineering-crispr Hanae Armitage, 'Smart toilet monitors for signs of disease,' Stanford Medicine , April 6, 2020, https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2020/04/smart-toilet-monitors-for-signs-of- disease.html Dani Deahl, ' I would spend $10K to furnish my apartment with MIT’s robot furniture,' The Verge , June 6, 2017, https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/6/15746884/ mit-ori-systems-automated-furniture-preorder (accessed December 1, 2020)
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air gabriel fries - briggs
To condition a substance is to bring it into its desired state for use. Matter, conditioned through infrastructure, is frequently categorised according to functional criteria: government funds are earmarked for transportation infrastructure, water infrastructure, telecom, waste, power generation, and so on. These categories often overlap – we need roads to get to the power plant. Or we couple infrastructures – stormwater ditches and train lines provide linear easements for bike paths. However, the infrastructure of air cuts across categories because air is and goes everywhere. With air it is difficult to distinguish between ‘natural’ and human- made infrastructure. The geologic effect of human actions (the anthropocene, the capitalocene) seen through the quality of air make this distinction particularly blurry. Air is a precondition for our ability to live in the world so the condition of that air is germane. Difficult to contain, channel or direct, infrastructures of air can be hard to see, yet they are in every pollution source, climate regulation, policy decision, and in the formation of ‘interior’ atmospheres. Air is a direct link between local conditions – weather, and global phenomena – climate change. It is also a system of scalar relations. In the multitude of designs for air tempering, one can see the infrastructures of being and cultural conditioning, of street design, public spaces, social habits, of buildings and their range of permeability – all ways of living in one’s climate. Conditioned air ranges from a respirator to the planet. In a constructed interior, systems for conditioning air trace a history of building mechanisation and the standardisation of comfort. While there are regional differences in conditioning systems, the projects of modernisation, industrialisation and globalisation work towards generic levels of temperature and humidity. Ideals of mechanically- produced comfort remain relatively stable across geographies, obscuring differing cultural relationships to comfort and climate. The ubiquity and design of air conditioning systems is symptomatic of mechanical inertia and a cultural-reliance on the technologies of comfort, despite their implication in the climate crisis: a major consumer of energy, primarily from fossil fuels, the stock of global air conditioning units is projected to double by 2040. Unlike water treatment or power generation, infrastructures of tempered air are located at the site and scale of the individual building, reducing the scope of public intervention and resulting in extreme disparities in atmospheric composition. While it may go everywhere, the quality of air is highly unequal. If the material artefacts of infrastructure elude governmental control, they can be conditioned by policy – laws and legislation that attempt to control the quality or inequality of air. In the United States, the Clean Air Act of 1963 regulates emissions from stationary and mobile sources and establishes National Ambient Air Quality Standards. These, however, have not prevented concentrations of polluting sources, legal and illegal, in under-served areas and near communities of colour, partly due to historical practices
Joshua White
such as redlining and a lack of political representation to control zoning. Poor air quality, sensed in real-time by our bodies and recorded in long-term health disparities, is scientifically monitored by networks of connected sensors. In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency requires permanent air-pollution monitors in metropolitan areas with populations greater than 200,000. If sensing networks can be understood as a distributed infrastructure of air, the Air Quality Index is its central delivery system. Rendering air as a scientific object, the Air Quality Index has moved from a position at the margins of attention, guiding policy and climate modelling, to a metric governing daily habits. Over the past few years, Air Quality Index has been integrated into the weather apps for both iOS and Android mobile devices where public data is available. For smartphone users, Air Quality Index displays alongside forecasts for temperature and precipitation. Infrastructural networks for sensing airborne particulate-matter tell us when to close the windows and turn on the air conditioning, when to avoid going outside, and what to talk about when we talk about the weather.
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Joshua White
While we can locate many sites of conditioning air – the mechanical assemblies producing interior climates, policy and regulation, pollution sources, and sensing – others remain more elusive, historically and culturally contingent. We also condition air by telling stories about it. Architecture and allied disciplines propel technological narratives about comfort, passive and active ventilation, air-exchange rates and systems integration. These are narratives about performance, understood both quantitatively and qualitatively; as energy use and space-making. However building performance is increasingly linked to the conditions of our planet; climate is regionally specific yet globally situated. A pluralistic conditioning entails tempering air while considering the network of relations it forms, the stories that link bodies, ducts and environments across scales.
above and left: installation of Dune Ducts in the Perloff Gallery at UCLA in Los Angeles, October - December, 2019
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this page –
top: the profile of an aeolian dune
middle: the methodology: dune morphology formed by angles of repose, air direction, crests and slip faces is translated to the constraints of metal duct manufacturing. left is the aeolian plan, right the section. bottom: section of the dune ducts installed; a ventilation landscape
facing page –
dune ducts installed, and the reflected ceiling plan showing the installation in the gallery context.
Gabriel Fries-Briggs
dune ducts An assemblage of entities, ventilation threads together a social- ecological-technical system. The project here, Dune Ducts, is a narrative of air reflective of these systemic origins, linking comfort, mechanical ventilation, landforms, climate and daily experience. Installed in a gallery in Los Angeles, it adapts the industrial techniques of sheet metal fabrication to construct a ventilation landscape. It considers the sand dune as an example of air as built form: assembled by aeolian processes, these are forms outside the traditional built environment. The erosion, transportation and deposition of sediment by wind manufactures a common profile of a long shallow angle, or stoss , facing the wind, a crest, and steep lee side. Looking to geology and meteorology, this installation- as-building system overlays multiple categories and narratives of ventilation. Suspended in the ceiling plenum, the ducts-as-dunes act as a prosthetic device extending the existing diffusers. Air escapes at gaps or breaks in the dunes, injected across the space
in a distribution of small gusts. Expanded ventilation and its uneven release of air calls attention to a varied set of environmental conditions. Shifting expectations away from a uniform, idealised climate to one of difference makes the relationship between air quality and climate change less a demand for uniformity and its high environmental price, and more a specific response to a place and time. How we sense infrastructure visually, how we sense its presence in a space, landscape, or territory, how we sense its relationships to other forms, or how we sense the way it conditions us might heighten our awareness of its vitality. Exhibiting air brings it to the foreground of experience and makes visible its precondition for being. Air can be conditioned categorically as a symptom of global warming, a metric of comfort or discomfort, as central to health as is engineering or building science. Threading these readings together and putting them on display is one step in building new relationships to our life-supporting systems. p
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Joshua White
Gabriel Fries-Briggs
Gabriel Fries-Briggs is a designer, educator, and Assistant Professor at the University of New Mexico School of Architecture and Planning. His work examines architectural intersections of land, labour, technology and the environment.
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guest room: multispecies condensers katherine m boles
We are in the Sixth Extinction. 1 Biodiversity, critical for functioning ecosystems, is threatened worldwide. In an era where both human population growth and nonhuman species loss are exponential, a design paradigm shift such as the Nonhuman Turn 2 which decentres humans and prioritises cohabitation between humans and nonhumans is essential to our mutual health and survival. The Chihuahuan Desert Ecoregion, one of the most biodiverse arid regions in the world, is an example of significant loss but also a place of hope that many species call home. Major threats to biodiversity include overgrazing, increased water use and urbanisation that damages or destroys habitat. Effects of climate change – increased temperatures and decreased precipitation – threaten life. Multispecies climate migrants seeking more suitable conditions will relocate, as will the desert itself in time.
In a sense, we are all companion species interlocked through cohabitation on Earth. When we design spaces for humans, we are also (often unintentionally) designing or destroying spaces for nonhumans. Thinking about who we design for, the concept of a guest room is helpful – a welcoming space of temporary shelter with a flexible program, it becomes what it needs to be for its occupants. We can expand the concept of a guest room to nonhuman species as a multispecies condenser.
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In this project, each guest room is constructed with an expanded wall: typical functional layers (thermal protection, water pro- tection, sun protection) expand as spatially habitable microclimates. The basic elements of an expanded wall act separately, but in concert with each other to make a multispecies condenser for a particular climate.
A note about the structure of the project – these designs were conceived in section as infrastructural cyborgs with an emphasis on systems thinking and performance. 3 These designs exist somewhere between typology and singular design project, as conceptual slivers intentionally without the context of a larger building plan or program. The site is not a parcel but instead a specific ecological community to which the project is attuned. Grassland, aquatic and urban systems interweave, support and interact to provide refuge over at least a 75-year time frame. This project develops an architecture of adaptive cohabitation where, in recognition of our mutually intertwined existence, design improves conditions for nonhumans as well as humans. Within architecture is the potential to restructure the relationship between humans and other species.
An expanded wall is the productive tool for thinking about space as a series of different microclimates that form the multispecies condenser. Climate shelters extend the range of species that each condenser supports. What follows here are details of the expanded wall system of a multi-species condenser, a building system that provides refuge and regeneration for vulnerable species of the Chihauhuan Desert.
Grassland, aquatic and urban systems interweave, support and interact to provide refuge over at least a 75-year time frame.
1 Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin, The Sixth Extinction: Patterns of life and the future of humankind , 1995 and Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An unnatural history, 2014, explore the Sixth Extinction, (alternately the Anthropocene Extinction or Holocene Extinction) as the most recent and ongoing mass extinction in the series: Big Five mass extinctionsn – periods in geologic history where there was a significant loss in biodiversity. 2 The Nonhuman Turn , 2015, came out of a 2012 conference, 'The Nonhuman Turn in 21st Century Studies'. Richard Grusin writes in the introduction, “… to name, characterize, and therefore to consolidate a wide variety of recent and current critical, theoretical, and philosophical approaches to the humanities and social sciences … engaged in decentering the human in favor of a turn toward and concern for the nonhuman …” 3 Landscape theorist Elizabeth Meyer, in 'The Expanded Field of Landscape Architecture' 1997, proposes the landscape cyborg as a hybrid of human and nonhuman natural processes (p53) within the context of questioning problematic binary pairings such as man and nature.
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grass land Large-scale land change, such as the conversion of more than 70,000 acres of grasslands near Janos to crop rings in a five-year span leads us to ask – what if human practice instead generated grassland refugia? Not a 1:1 replacement of agriculture with refugia but an augmentation of how life dwells in this environment. As happened with the species retreat to Pleistocene refugia during the last ice age, grassland species by 2090 should have been able to retreat to grassland refugia focused on surviving, albeit with population decreases, until a time with more favourable conditions arrives. The structure and systems of a refugia generate the conditions, a range of microclimates and habitats, for heterogenous grassland community pockets to grow and adapt.
Let's say it is 2090, 65 years after the last grasslands of the Chihuahuan Desert Ecoregion disappeared. An infrastructural system of grassland refugia are all that remain to support grassland species, at least until the climate changes again. As with ice-age refugia, soil composition plays an important role in determining the matrix of grass and forb-based plants, and by extension other associated species such as migratory birds – certain plants adapted to soils too harsh for others. Keystone species, such as the Black-tailed Prairie Dog further increased the biodiversity of the grasslands by creating habitats and food sources for numerous other organisms.
Speculative image of refuge through bird ultraviolet vision. Crumbling adobe seed bank walls provide materials and shelter.
Janos irrigation circles, overlaid with multispecies condenser refugia (the small black dots) provoke a different land use approach. They are spaced to provide an overall regeneration of the Chihuahuan Desert eco-region.
90% of grassland birds that breed in the US Great Plains, winter in the various Chihuahuan Desert grasslands. In the Janos Grassland Priority Conservation Area, the six most common migratory bird species each prefer a different type of grassland habitat – for example, the Horned Lark prefers bare ground near prairie dog colonies, the Chestnut-Collared Longspur avoids grass taller than a foot.
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Surrounding the building and reaching into the landscape, seed bank adobe walls – located to block strong winter winds – erode, regenerating grassland. When a wall is built, a shrub hedge that will eventually replace it is planted. The walls are seed banks. Spaces between bricks provide shelter and perches and allow wind and water access to the wall to speed erosion. After the walls erode, the soil supports prairie dog burrows. The main component of the sun protection layer is a wood shade structure. At times it is covered in cholla pieces, edited for increased or decreased light transmittance, or used to shade roof waffle garden soil pockets. Daylighting through south-facing glazing and small skylights support a vegetable garden and a climate extension garden, respectively. Bird nests made from repurposed skeletons of cholla cactus, an indicator species of grassland degradation, provide shade and nesting locations for non-migratory birds. The water protection layer is made of structural concrete arches that transition from convex (water shedding) on the roof to concave (water collecting) underground. Rainwater collected in the V between arches waters roof plants before draining into a narrow, but deep, underground pond. Shallow steps at the pond’s edge provide safe drinking water access for small species such as skinks, mice and birds while the depths provide habitat for aquatic species. Any overflow is drained by culverts to irrigate grasslands; municipal water piped to the building is recycled after use to provide additional irrigation An air space functions as the building insulation layer. Earth tubes precondition incoming air and hot air is exhausted via a solar chimney. Although operable glazing layers allow adjustments, in the main the design takes advantage of natural air stratification and evaporative cooling. A semi-conditioned building space acts as a climate shelter for sensitive species and extends the range of species the refugia supports.
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aquat ic It’s 2051, 30 years after the first Replenisher was powered up, and there has since been only minimal loss of aquatic habitat and biodiversity within the Cuarto Cienegas Basin of the Chihuahuan Desert Ecoregion. Aquifers have stopped decreasing and have even started to rise. Replenishers, which remediate agricultural practices that deplete aquifers, are arrayed along rivers, plugging into historic acequia long-lot agricultural systems and protecting aquifers which have held water and bacterial life since the Precambrian. The aquatic ecosystem of Cuatro Cienegas Basin is fed by runoff from a ring of surrounding mountains. Water saturates marshes on the basin floor and is exposed at the surface as springs. Small rivers drain the springs; some eventually feed the Rio Saldado and others terminate in no-outlet playas that drain by evaporation only. Each of these habitats (the marsh, spring, river and playa) support distinct species communities. Although much the same fish species live in the different habitats, the relative abundance of fish is inverted between the springs and the harsher habitats of the playas/ ephemeral pools/marshes. A heterogenous mix of habitat important to the overall biodiversity of the system.
Fish species abundance relative to aquatic habitat type
Seen from a fish’s perspective, the replenisher is an oasis within a drying world. Shade structures reduce evaporative loss while simultaneously providing protective cover for fish. Shallow areas provide a smooth transition between marsh and deeper pools, or poza , facilitating access to the water for many species. Beneath the elevated acequia is a favourite hang-out for many fish. Catfish are especially fond of deeper water areas. Schools of open-water fish dart about, stopping to feed on an algae-encrusted textured ECOncrete retaining wall.
Replenishers (black dots) in existing lots along rivers in the Cuatro Cienegas Basin
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The building, elevated above the water on piles, shades water surfaces and acts as a distillation machine and aquifer replenisher. River water flows into the marsh via dry-stacked rock seeps and an elevated acequia. During flash floods, the banks overflow and the project acts as a large detention basin. Overflow crosses weirs in the concrete retaining wall and evaporates in the playa habitats. A sun protection layer harvests solar energy to run a passive solar still on the roof. Diffuse daylight enters the building from the water storage tube south wall and tubes under the skylight. A rebar grass stalk screen shades the building from low sun angle west and east light. Dead grass, replenished seasonally as an act of building maintenance, is woven across the rebar for additional shading and nest and cover material. A water protection layer is fully integrated with the water systems of the site. The upper surface of the solar still clear arched covers is sloped to drain rainwater north off the roof and into the poza. A structural set of lower arches are sloped to drain collected condensate the opposite direction into the south façade before feeding aquifer injection wells housed in the building’s structural piles. To feed the still, water from the poza is sucked up by steel tube straws powered by wind turbines. Water systems double as the thermal layer. South-facing thermal water storage tubes provide passive conditioning. On the east and west ends, walls of water treatment tanks act as a thermal buffer layer. Below the building, the water body buffers temperature change and provides evaporative cooling of air entering the building through floor vents.
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urban
It’s 2031,ten years into the City of Chihuahua’s Agave Acupuncture program, an incentive-based municipal strategy to pair the reintroduction of desert scrub species with an urban social program. The sustainable urban agriculture economy has increased concurrently with populations of traditional species of the Chihuahuan Desert Ecoregion. The desert scrub ecosystem – shrubs such as tar bush, mesquite and sagebrush as well as a staggering diversity of cacti, yuccas and agaves, dominates the Chihuahuan Desert Ecoregion. In fact, the range of one desert scrub succulent, Agave lechuguilla , is sometimes used to define the edges of the ecoregion. How might living with this regional landscape enrich human and nonhuman lives?
Condensers (black dots)spread urban acupuncture across Chihuahua
Imagined bat echolocation view of bat roost
These designs are a family of related ideas, seeds to inspire a diversity of solutions engaging the complex entanglements of human and nonhuman survival. Adaptive cohabitation design iterations, taken together and paired with policy change, have a chance to affect meaningful large-scale change. The project suggests a shift in design focus to value nonhuman species, and perhaps nonhuman entities in a broader sense, as clients is an important step toward ecologically net positive design. p
Plant-pollinator specificity resulting from coevolution is a form of heterogenous habitat; many diverse species are needed to support a diverse array of associated species. This exists on a species level (such as yucca and yucca moths), and at a genera level (one species of bat can pollinate many different species of agave, above).
Katherine M Boles, MArch (UNM), is a Lecturer at the University of New Mexico and a licensed landscape architect. Her research focuses on developing an adaptive architecture for cohabitation.
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Habitecture features support the revival of desert scrub species within a human- dominated context. Here, using echolocation, bats return after a night of foraging to roost in bat boxes under a cholla trellis. Their guano stains the concrete arches. Some bats still swoop above the roof garden and its buffet of agave nectars while native bees rest in bee boxes embedded in soil on the roof. Nearby, pollinator insects swarm around their nests within the hollow clay brick habitat wall. Following the practice of urban acupuncture, urban multispecies condensers are strategically inserted into existing lots. To respect existing patterns of development, buildings can line the sidewalk or are set back with a front yard. The back yard becomes a shared alley city-community farm and safe play space to expand economic and social infrastructures. A sun protection layer wraps the building; bookended hollow clay brick habitat walls shade the road and alley sidewalks while supporting a lightweight wood lattice structure that shades the soil on the roof. A flexible system of cholla skeleton pieces is added seasonally over places that require additional shade and on doorway gates. This building layer also provides security and privacy within the urban context. As in the previous two designs, high-tensile concrete arches form a water protection layer. The roof slopes toward the street; rainwater is captured and transported by gutter and pipe to a pumice wick in the alley. The high side of the roof curves down to an arcade of bat guano flush storage columns: wastewater from the columns is combined with street stormwater runoff, treated and stored in the alley pumice wick before being used as irrigation and fertiliser for corn and other more water- and fertiliser-intensive vegetables. Continuous thermal insulation forms a thermal envelope: an earthen floor, adobe walls and a planted soil roof. Large earth-filled columns help buffer indoor temperatures; they also provide much deeper soil than a typical green roof and structurally support the added roof weight. A wind scoop on the roof brings in fresh air (cleaned somewhat by roof plants) and exhausts hot air.
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