Shrinking City

Boston’s a small city. It’s even smaller when the skyline turns into a set of stacked alphabet blocks. Spelling out a shared feeling here. Go Sox. The buildings will look tall again in another few days, but for now Red Sox nation’s playing baseball.

Thinking with my hands

I’ve been tempted several times to write here about the idea of a virtual world. I’ve imagined that the Sims or Second Life are more than games. Our world is full and they are providing new digital frontiers and the freedom that comes with them. These online communities offer opportunities for the adventurous to build rooms, houses, cities— even characters and identities for themselves. Spaces open up online and relieve some of the stress of physical and social constraints that surround us.

Still, I have never actually entered this world. I’ve been tempted intellectually by the idea, but not the reality. There is something about creating a virtual world in the image of the one we live in that continues to leave me unimpressed. It’s too literal and seems almost unnecessary. Yes, the rapid rise of these worlds amazes me. Commerce, entertainment, communication, relationships all occur now in these digital spaces. But, I can’t help but wonder if the appeal of an alternate digital world comes at the cost of diminishing our own. The depth and success of the simulated world can be measured best by one’s own detachment from this one.

I’m not interested in predicting the path of Second Life or how much of our time we will spend in digital worlds as they become more established and further linked to people and products in this one. I’d rather try to get at what about this vision of the internet feels limited to me and whether there are others that push further.

Though imperfect and dated, the first time I opened Google Earth I felt like I had been given a gift— in this case a colorful ball that I could toss and spin and whose scale was slippery. It was all encompassing at one moment and intimate at another. I loved it how it could be grabbed with the mouse and rotated and how it would spin just past where you let it go, suggesting physical laws mirroring those in this world. It enforced the idea that its interface needed not to be seen as a screen. It could be a ball. It was a continuous and smooth surface. Not something distant to be controlled by clicking on arrows or by remote control, but an object apparently close and able to be directly affected by the movement of my hands on the mouse.

As infants we learn how we can with our hands and voice make an impact on the world around us. Materials give at our touch if they are soft, press back if they are hard. A flame feels hot and yet can be extinguished with a breath. I need to use childlike imagery to describe my experience with Google Earth and I think its the this quality of regression that marks the sophistication of the program and my hopes for digital technology.

There is a scene in Spielberg’s Minority Report in which the police officer played by Tom Cruise stands in front of a glass screen and thinks with his hands, grabbing information, sorting through it, repositioning it. His eyes move as quickly as his hands. He’s searching for something and the balance of command and uncertainty is masterful. It was mesmerizing even as it was really a superfluous moment in the movie. More a physical retelling of the Sorcerer's Apprentice than a vision of the dystopian future. But the attraction of this theme is worth paying attention to— and the Youtube videos that pair scenes from Minority report and advances in computer interfaces suggest that many are. I’m attuned to the the idea that we can use our bodies to aid our minds in understanding the world. Finding ways of organizing and using the information available to us is, maybe, an extended infancy— one we are only beginning to get used to.

The idea that thinking is something that could be given a shape, and that we could someday “think with our hands” as easily as we now talk with them, is rich. The potential of the internet and its ultimate integration into daily life seem to be here more about illustrating the extent of our own inner life than in creating ever expanding virtual simulacra of the world outside.

(Note: I’ve used Google Earth for years now and really wanted this post to be a lead-in to an amazing product from Microsoft call Photosynth, but the post veered in another direction. I’ll come back to it.)

Architecture and The Sleep of Reason

I expect that mine won’t be the only architecture blog to talk about Eyal Weizman’s new book, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. This book more than any other I have recently come across argues that at the intersection of culture, politics, and violence lies architecture. And that is a seductive idea for anyone working in a field that too often feels headed for cultural irrelevancy.

Weizman sees architectural practice and theory at the roots of the conflict, informing specific strategies implemented by individuals, groups, and institutions over the past forty years, and grounding the rhetoric used to frame the extents and nature of the occupation. Proposed solutions to the conflict even turn to a redesign of the disputed territory, offering an architectural solution when none can be found in politics, economics, or diplomacy. Individual chapters of the book cover aspects of Weizman’s research into each of these, but perhaps more than his journalism it is the illustrations he uses in the book that may be what make it so provocative— particularly to designers.

Among site photos, film stills, charts and many, many maps, Weizman includes collages he has made of the occupied territories juxtaposing existing Israeli and Palestinian settlements with the proposed infrastructural projects intended to keep them apart. Described as “vertical partitioning,” these projects are proposed solutions to the re-division of space claimed by both states. Their sweeping—massive bridges, tunnels, and walls— carve up a single continuous landscape into independently occupied and controlled territories. These proposals apply bold Modernist planning to a post-modern or post-structuralist conception of space and the result is dizzying, both formally and intellectually. It is also exciting. Forty years of settlement, violence, and politics have produced a spatial landscape so complicated that even a familiar vocabulary of highway infrastructure and concrete barriers becomes fantastic and strange when manipulated to address the political and cultural landscape of the conflict. Their literal function— connecting parts of the territories while separating others— is subsumed by their appearance as a snapshot of contemporary Israel. As such they feel more like the projects of an architectural studio, students’ projects whose success is gauged by their ability to use a vocabulary of building to address ideas of identity, culture, and power.



But Weizman seems wary of letting his illustrations leave the world for the shelter of the studio, for the isolation of architectural theory and debate. The collages he includes are not his solutions. Though trained as an architect, he uses his graphic abilities to serve his research into areas as disparate as military maneuvers, settlement patterns, and international law. He represents architectural interventions upon the occupied landscape as white voids superimposed over photographic montages of the landscape. The addition of architecture is depicted as an absence. It’s an attractive solution to representing something that exists for the moment only as an idea, but its graphics are loaded. Their snaking white forms cut out of the landscape are appealing. In an arid desert landscape, the interventions are a dominant feature and their clarity reads in contrast to the the accreted patterns of settlement and their complicated relationship to topography and to each other. They not only illustrate, but organize, the political and cultural factors not apparent in a photograph. The architect’s, and my own, undeniable attraction to designs that introduce visual and functional order onto a site, I’m reminded of a prophetic image warning against the seduction of clarity. Critiquing darker side of Enlightenment thought, Francisco Goya warned in an eighteenth century print that “the sleep of reason produces monsters”. The collages contained in Hollow Land make me question whether I am looking at a well-intentioned attempt to produce a functional solution to an intractable problem or a sanitized version of the cloud of nightmare creatures lurking just beyond such a rational approach.


Weizman suggests that in the face of political and cultural injustice, the professional may have to transform his or her practice to adequately address the situation. Borrowing strategies and language from Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) and founding member Rony Brauman, Weizman ends his book urging that architects’ roles in the Middle East conflict may be primarily to “bear witness” to events and practices there. It is a step away from the sweeping architectural proposal and the idea that a solution to the conflict might have an identifiable shape. While attempting to offer humanitarian support, whether providing shelter for those without it or providing visual representations of diplomatic proposals, designers can use their skills to introduce a narrative of the ways in which architecture and planning are used as weapons. Architecture is a weapon with pervasive but less immediately recognizable effects on international conflicts. In Hollow Land, Weizman offers a testimony to the particular ways in which the Israeli occupation has used this particular weapon. Ultimately this is not a book for architects. I was heartened to see that the Harvard Bookstore (where I found the book) it was not shelved with books on architecture but with books on the Middle East. As a testimony to strategies of occupation, this book will hopefully be read by those mediating the peace process and the determination of the shape and relationships between Israel and Palestine.