Night White Skies

This week is a conversation with John May and we're discussing a book he recently wrote called 'Signal, Image, Architecture. It's a short book with an objective to define the playing field today for this discussion. The book makes a clear distinction between that of a drawing, a photograph and an image. And in doing so makes it clear that those first two (drawing and photograph) are not what architects and designers are likely to be producing in school or practice anymore.

Instead, we're producing images that can look like a photograph or a drawing. The distinction is important because the argument could be made that we are not taking full advantage of the proclivities of the images and therefore not engaging the tools that might best help us understand and shape our times. There are fundamental differences to the image, and it's best to understand them and how they are likely intertwined with how we engage many of the pressures surrounding us today.

John May is founding partner, with Zeina Koreitem, of MILLIØNS, a Los Angeles-based design practice. John May is Assistant Professor of Architecture and Director of the Master in Design Studies Program at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. He previously served as a visiting professor at MIT, SCI-Arc, and UCLA, and was named 2012 National Endowment for the Humanities Visiting Professor in Architecture at Rice University. He is the author of Signal, Image, Architecture and the founding co-director and co-editor (with Zeynep Çelik Alexander) of Design Technics: Archaeologies of Architectural Practice—an exploration of the philosophical and historical dimensions of contemporary design technologies.

Today is a conversation with Holly Jean Buck and we're discussing her book After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair and Restoration.

I think for many of us that like to think we're working in at least the general wheelhouse of climate change, we still don't have a firm grasp of what geoengineering entails. For most of us, it's a singular black box technology that will either help our current situation or make it worse. It's often portrayed as a technology more so than as policy or even design. It's characterized as a singular action rather than as a series of discrete, temporal actions that are rather wide ranging in approach. It's also often assumed to be an already defined action waiting to be executed, which it is not.

In After Geoengineering, Holly Buck brings into focus the importance of asking what we as inhabitants of Earth are looking for on the back end of these climate remediation projects? What are we working towards and who has been part of these discussions? The book and the discussion here raise questions for the need of participatory design. The book highlights the upcoming struggle in preparing for infrastructure scale projects that if successful will be temporary in some cases. How do we restructure our value systems in order to work collectively at such a global scale.

Holly Jean Buck is an Assistant Professor of Environment & Sustainability at the University at Buffalo in New York. She researches how communities can be involved in the design of emerging environmental technologies, and works at the interface of geography, social science, and design. Her diverse research interests include agroecology and carbon farming, new energy technologies, artificial intelligence, and ecological restoration. She has written on climate engineering including humanitarian approaches, gender considerations, and human rights issues, and is the author of After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair and Restoration, from Verso Books.

James Bradley is an author and critic. His books include the novels, Wrack, The Deep Field, The Resurrectionist and Clade, a book of poetry, Paper Nautilus and the Penguin Book of the Ocean and of course most recently Ghost Species.

Today is a conversation with the author and critic James Bradley and we're discussing his recent novel Ghost Species which looks to the implications of the great upheaval occurring around climate change.

But instead of focusing solely on the technological or statistical indicators that often represent change - or focusing on a cataloguing of climate catastrophes to drive home the point – the book instead follows the lives of resurrected extinct species including our own long lost relative the Neanderthal. And it's through this storyline that we as readers' begin to question our expectations for our future, we question our terminologies and disciplinary structures set up for defining everything around us through difference.

As we learn the important of diversity, we are somehow simultaneously trapped in our own systems of cataloguing difference to express that diversity.

James gives us a quick introduction about his book just as the episode begins so I'll leave it to him in just a moment. I really enjoyed the conversation; it was a pleasure speaking with him. Hope you enjoy it as well.

Today is a conversation with Sylvia Lavin and we're discussing her recent book 'Architecture Itself and Other Postmodernization Effects'.

Book

Sylvia Lavin is Professor of History and Theory of Architecture at Princeton University. Prior to her appointment at Princeton, Lavin was a Professor in the Department of Architecture and Urban Design at UCLA, where she was Chairperson from 1996 to 2006 and the Director of the Critical Studies M.A. and Ph.D. program from 2007 to 2017.

She is the author of Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture. Her most recent books include, Kissing Architecture, published by Princeton University Press in 2011 and Flash in the Pan, an AA publication from 2015.

Professor Lavin is also a curator: including, Everything Loose Will Land: Art and Architecture in Los Angeles in the 1970s, was a principal component of the Pacific Standard Time series supported by the Getty Foundation and traveled from Los Angeles to New Haven and to Chicago. Her installation, Super Models, was shown at the 2018 Chicago Architecture Biennial and most recently Architecture Itself and Other Postmodernists Myths, was an exhibition at the Canadian Center for Architecture.

Natasha Sandmeier's work and research straddles the worlds of architecture and visualization – with a long-standing interest the role of media within the creation and production of speculative architectures and environments. She is an educator and leads the postgraduate Entertainment Studio at UCLA Architecture & Urban Design. She is an architect and founding partner of Studio OUR, and the author and editor of Little Worlds (London, 2014); a monograph of projects and essays re-examining the role of the architect within contemporary architectural culture.

Links:

Deep Fake of Nancy Pelosi

Unreal Engine 5 launch

William Gibson Article

Just yesterday two astronauts launched into outer space from the United States for the first time in 9 years. Interesting side note, this launch was the first time in 40 years that NASA astronauts launched in a new space craft...The Space Shuttle had been around for over thirty years. Today is a conversation with Jeffrey Nesbit and we're discussing the book 'Extraterrestrial' co edited by himself and Guy Trangos. In looking to the extraterrestrial, the book is a collection of essays from a range of disciplines about tied to the term- extraterrestrial. And as you'll here in the discussion today, the book includes an array of perspectives for how the term 'extraterrestrial' might be beneficial for exploring our own existence here on earth.

As Jeffrey mentions during our discussion, extraterrestrial is more than just about that which originates 'beyond' our planet. This 'extra' along with the word 'terrestrial' also includes the heightening, exaggerating and intensifying of what we as humans or a planet might assume to be. Extraterrestrial might not be a found condition existing beyond us but something we strive to become. Becoming extraterrestrial! Now, I may have taken a bit of artistic or editorial license with that last sentence, but I like where it's going. Maybe we can all strive to be a little more extraterrestrial these days!

Jeffrey S Nesbit is an architect, urbanist, and recently received his Doctor of Design degree (DDes) from Harvard University Graduate School of Design. He is a research fellow in the Office for Urbanization at Harvard and founding director of the research group Haecceitas Studio. His research focuses on processes of urbanization, infrastructure, and the evolution of "technical lands." Currently, Nesbit's research examines the 20th-century American spaceport complex at the intersection of architecture, infrastructure, and aerospace history. He has written several journal articles and book chapters on infrastructure, urbanization, and the history of technology, and is co-editor of Chasing the City: Models for Extra-Urban Investigations (Routledge, 2018), Rio de Janeiro: Urban Expansion and Environment (Routledge, 2019), and New Geographies 11 Extraterrestrial (Actar, 2019). Nesbit has taught architecture and urbanism, along with leading many design studios and theory seminars at Harvard University, Northeastern University, University of North Carolina Charlotte, and Texas Tech University. He also holds a Master of Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania and a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from Texas Tech University

A big thanks you to the Graham Foundation in Chicago for supporting this program!

Until next time...Take care.

Jane Hutton is a landscape architect and Assistant Professor at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture. Her research looks at the extended material flows of common construction materials and their social and ecological relations. Recent publications include Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of Material Movements (Routledge, 2019) as well as an edited volume, Landscript 5: Material Culture – Assembling and Disassembling Landscapes (Jovis, 2017), and Wood Urbanism: From the Molecular to the Territorial (Actar, 2019), co-edited with Daniel Ibanez and Kiel Moe.

A big thanks you to the Graham Foundation in Chicago for supporting this program!

Larry Busbea is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Arizona. He is the author of Topologies: The Urban Utopia in France, 1960-1970 (MIT Press, 2007), The Responsive Environment: Design, Aesthetics, and the Human in the 1970s (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), and Proxemics and the Architecture of Social Interaction (forthcoming from Columbia Books on Architecture and the City).

Fred Scharmen teaches architecture and urban design at Morgan State University's School of Architecture and Planning. He is the co-founder of the Working Group on Adaptive Systems, an art and design consultancy based in Baltimore, Maryland. His work as a designer and researcher is about how we imagine new spaces for future worlds, and about who is invited into them. His first book, Space Settlements—on NASA's 1970s proposal to construct large cities in space for millions of people—is out now from Columbia Books on Architecture and the City. He received his Masters Degree in Architecture from Yale University. His writing has been published in the Journal of Architectural Education, Log, CLOG, Volume, and Domus. His architectural criticism has appeared in the Architects Newspaper, Slate, CityLab, and in the local alt-weekly Baltimore City Paper.

Christopher Schaberg is Dorothy Harrell Brown Distinguished Professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans, USA. In addition to his new book Searching for the Anthropocene: A Journey into the Environmental Humanities, he is the author of The Textual Life of Airports: Reading the Culture of Flight (2012), The End of Airports (2015), Airportness: The Nature of Flight (2017), and The Work of Literature In An Age of Post-Truth (2018). He is series co-editor (with Ian Bogost) of Bloomsbury's Object Lessons.