Design Week 2009 Redux

Live Blog: Networked Ecologies: Infra-Architecture

Mason White
University of Toronto
Lateral Architecture
InfraNet Lab
"Networked Ecologies: Infra-Architecture"

Since he is used to talking to architects, this is a refreshing opportunity to explore this topic without having to first educate his audience on the different nature of the landscape.

Four figures have provided guidance for this presentation:

• Benton MacKaye - coined the term geotechnics: where human settlement encounters nature
• Constantine Doxiadis - Ekistics - Ecumenopolis - a continuous city
• Cedric Price - Potteries Thinkbelt - advanced site finding
• Keller Easterling - Organization of space - Enduring innocence -

In thinking about infrastructure - somewhere in the mix there is an immense amount of science, but also an opportunity for an immense amount of design

The networks of food, economics, aeroponics, hydroponics and infrastructure are all about SYSTEMS.

One student project was from Scotland looking at seaweed agriculture. How is it moved? How is it stored? The design looked at a net system with a drying tower and seed farm on the land. The multiple public lives it could have include a nighttime use as a lighthouse.

Another project looked at the possibility of merging speculative office space with sustainable agriculture/greenhouse space.

Both have great graphics. Be sure to look closer.

In Reykjavik they looked at turning runways into greenways for production, civic/ecology, and recreations.

Their final project was a metis garden inspired by the map that changed the world and brought in soil samples from throughout Canada.

Infrastructure quotes

"The operation of infrastructure disrupts the opposition between culture and nature, which posits landscape as an unbuilt, original condition upon which architecture, as part of culture, is built. Infrastructure is a built ground onto which a landscape, nature, is built. They [infrastructures] acquire the spatial and functional characteristics of the places onto which they are grafted. They [infrastructures] emerge as frame works for urban development.”

-- Berrizbeitia, Anita, and Linda Pollak. Inside Outside : Between Architecture and Landscape. Minneapolis: F & W Publications, Incorporated, 2003.




Infrastructures are flexible and anticipatory. They work with time and are open to change. By specifying what must be fixed and what is subject to change, they can be precise and indeterminate at the same time. They work through management and cultivation, changing slowly to adjust to shifting conditions. They do not progress toward a predetermined state (as with master planning strategies), but are always evolving within a loose envelope of constraints…. Infrastructure creates a directed field, where different architects and designers can contribute, but it sets technical and instrumental limits to their work. Infrastructure itself works strategically, but it encourages tactical improvisation.

--Stan Allen, INDEX Architecture, A Columbia Book of Architecture, 2003, p. 87

Nature's Infrastructure

PlaNetizen has published a timely column by Jim LaGro encouraging the new administration to make sure that it's infrastructural development emphasizes improvements in nature's infrastructure. Since infrasturcture is central to the theme for Design Wek, this stands out as being notable.

Group think and other collective failures

The Utne Reader has two interesting articles looking at problems with groupwork.  One looks at how groups that get along well are susceptible to the problem called groupthink.

Groupthink—the go along to get along mentality that results in accelerated, false consensus—was vexing collective endeavors long before psychologist Irving Janis popularized the phenomenon in 1972. A sure sign of groupthink is team members getting along too well. Those who might dissent stifle themselves: No one wants to rock the boat, irritate superiors, or lengthen a meeting by disagreeing with the consensus. But a project can be doomed if no one stops to wonder “What if we’re wrong?”

The other makes suggestions about how to lead your group through tough times.  Great reading as you start Design Week.

Design Week Lecture

Jan 21, 2009

Mason White, University of Toronto, Lateral Architecture, InfraNet Lab
"Networked Ecologies: Infra-Architecture"
Wednesday 4:00-4:55 PM
Cook Douglass Lecture Hall 110

Mason White has a B.Arch from Virginia Tech and an M.Arch from Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Mason’s work and research privileges architecture as a mutable territory that is formed out of and responsive to its environment and history. His work, research and teaching invites readings of Architecture as a byproduct of complex networks within ecology and culture. Design is conceived more as a system for open patterns of use and active engagement rather than merely arranged objects. Recent research pursues questions of the role of infrastructure and networks within contemporary spatial practice. His design research exists at the intersection of architecture, landscape, and urbanism. It is often situated within sites where the systems and codes that determine these environments must be uncovered and rethought.

Mason founded Lateral Office <http://www.lateralarch.com> in 2002 in partnership with Lola Sheppard. He is also Director of InfraNet Lab <http://www.infranetlab.org> , an exploratory initiative launched in 2008. InfraNet Lab is a non-profit research collective probing the spatial byproducts of contemporary resource logistics.

Mason received the Alumni Travel Fellowship from Virginia Tech in 2001, and was the Lefevre Emerging Practitioner Fellow at Ohio State University in 2003-04. In 2005, Lateral Office was selected for the Young Architects Forum by the Architectural League of New York.

Mason’s work has been published in Young Architects: Situating (Princeton Architectural Press, 2006), Canadian Architect, Landscape Architecture, C3 and l’Arca. His writing has been published in Alphabet City: Fuel (MIT Press, 2008), Ourtopias (Riverside Press, 2008), MARK, Detail, A+U, and 306090. Mason has taught at Cornell University, The Ohio State University, and is currently the Director of the Master of Architecture program at the University of Toronto, Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape & Design.

Bad apples on studio projects

I know. You've spent your entire winter break thinking about how much you hated working on a team. It would have been great except for that one person. Thank goodness you'll never have to work with anyone else for the rest of your time here...

Until Design Week 2009!

Well, to get ready for a little more group work, you might want to listen to the opening segment of the recent episode of This American Life called Ruining It for the Rest of Us. To set the stage, they talk to a researcher who experimented with group behavior. He explored the three general kinds of bad behavior that could bring down a group:

• Insulting jerk - attacks others - "Are you kidding me?"
• Slacker - does less than they can - text messages other friends during team meetings
• Depressive pessimist - puts their head down - "We can't succeed" or "This isn't fun at all"

What he found was that just one bad apple could bring down the group - performance was down 30-40%. What ever the bad actor did, the behavior spread to the whole group. The jerk's insults would quickly lead to other insults, not just directed at the jerk. When he just kept his head on the table, the rest of the group would end up tired and say "let's just get this over with".

But here's the thing. A good leader should be able to recognize these behaviors and intervene. Did you have one of these bad apples on a recent team? Did you try to keep it from spreading? Or did you let their defeatism become the team's motto?

One of the challenges for Design Week 2009 will be to watch out for the bad apples and try to help them improve.

Cream Ridge

Design Week is almost here, but have you looked at the site?

We'll spend the week looking at The New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station's farm down at Cream Ridge. This has been home to Rutgers Fruit & Ornamental Research Extension Center. The farm is in Upper Freehold Township at the western end of Monmouth County. That puts it in WMA 20 and just inside the upper right corner of the New Egypt quad sheet.

There are lots of air photos. Historic Aerials has a nice 1931 and 1947 image. When in doubt, check this latlong out 40.117235,-74.526186


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Design Week Peek

Here is a quick peek at some of the activity from the annual vertical studio experience we call Design Week. It took a lot of people to make it such a success, but it was especially successful because of the leadership we got from Kathy Poole.

Lecture: Kathy Poole, ASLA

The spring speaker series starts this week with Kathy Poole, ASLA. Her lecture, which is also part of the Department of Landscape Architecture's Design Week, will be called Evolutionary Infrastructure of Boston's Back Bay Fens: Model of Cultural and Ecological Dynamics. Our weekly speaker series is each Wednesday at 4pm in CDL 110.

The lecture is open to the public.

Design Week 2008: IFLA and the Meadowlands

The theme for Design Week has been announced. Our special guest, Kathy Poole, will be giving a public lecture one Wednesday at 4 in CDL 110. Our students are breaking into teams to explore the IFLA student competition theme of “TRANSFORMING WITH WATER, THE WAY TO PARADISE?” For the week, students will be focusing on an area in the southern part of the Meadowlands that is near Snake Hill and Secaucus Junction. IFLA asks them to develop a new innovating and inspirational solution for the problem. But what problem is here?

To start thinking about the problem/s I pulled out some old Meadowlands photos of my own. These photos do not show the site for Design Week, but capture areas directly adjacent and show the basic nature of the area.

I notice that some train enthusiasts have captured glimpses of the landscape in their YouTube videos, too. It is remarkable that the landscape of the Meadowlands is more famous for its barrenness and old cultural histories and industrial past than for its remarkable natural processes and looks.

Tanner Springs Park

One of the design precedents that has been suggested for Design Week '08 is Tanner Springs Park in Portland OR. This urban park, filling one block of the Pearl District, was conceived by Peter Walker & Assoc and designed by Atelier Dreiseitl and GreenWorks. Built on the site of an old springs, this very urban park celebrates the natural processes that used to flourish in this low area near the Willamette River. The official web site from Portland Parks offers a little more background.

These photos are from the summer of 2006.