MITPressLog

Postopolis!

Postopolis! is a five-day event at Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, which started on Tuesday and runs through Saturday, with near-continuous conversation about architecture, urbanism, landscape, and design. Four bloggers, from four different cities, will host a series of live discussions, interviews, slideshows, panels, talks, and other presentations, and fuse the informal energy and interdisciplinary approach of the architectural blogosphere with the immediacy of face to face interaction.

BLDGBLOG (Los Angeles), City of Sound (London), Inhabitat (New York City), and Subtopia (San Francisco) will meet in person to orchestrate the event, inviting everyone from practicing architects, city planners, and urban theorists to military historians, game developers, and materials scientists to give their take on both the built and natural environments. For the past five years, blogging has helped to expand the bounds of architectural discussion; its influence now spreads far beyond the internet to affect museums, institutions, and even higher education. Postopolis! is an historic opportunity to look back at what architecture blogs have achieved – both to celebrate their strengths and to think about their future.

Our own Keller Easterling (Enduring Innocence) and Beatriz Colomina (Domesticity at War) will be participating in the discussion on Saturday between 2:00 and 4:00.

Book Award Winner: Wired for Speech

Are you annoyed with the sound of the voice on your car's navigational system?  Is it a struggle to make your replies understood to automated phone systems?  You'll be glad to know that researchers are looking into these problems.  The book Wired for Speech: How Voice Activates and Advances the Human-Computer Relationship by Clifford Nass and Scott Brave addresses these voice-interface issues.

In fact, Wired for Speech has just won the 2007 International Communication Association's Outstanding Book Award for 2005-2006. The award was presented this past weekend at the ICA meeting in San Francisco.

Wednesday Blog Watch - Quotable Quotes

This week we'll let some MIT Press authors speak for themselves - well, through the voice of bloggers.  Whether quotes-of-the-day or fuel for impassioned blog posts, below is a sample of recently blogged quotations from MIT Press books.

The blog "Alexandre R. J. Francois: Thoughts about Life, the Universe and Everything" quotes Herbert A. Simon from The Sciences of the Artificial:

"Only human pride argues that the apparent intricacies of our path stem from a quite different source than the intricacy of the ant's path."

Simon's book, incidentally, has also been the source of inspiration for the title of the blog "Proliferation of Niches".  The relevant quote:

"If there is such a trend toward variety, then evolution is not to be understood as a series of tournaments for the occupation of a fixed set of environmental niches, each tournament won by the organism that is fittest for that niche. Instead evolution brings about a proliferation of niches... Vannevar Bush wrote of science as an "endless frontier." It can be endless, as can be the process of design and the evolution of human society, because there is no limit on diversity in the world."

"Ethics|Technology|Culture" blog quotes Mitchell's City of Bits:

"The uncertainties and dangers of the bitsphere frontier are great, but it is a place of new opportunity and hope. So forget the global couch-potato patches that Marshall McLuhan surveyed back in the sixties. This will be the place for a global village."

"Bilpapa.org reading (b)log" quotes a Spinuzzi critique in Tracing Genres Through Organizations:

"Yet worker’s innovations often continue to be invisible. They generally do not fit the accepted, official ways of doing things, so they tend to be ephemeral and rarely spread beyond the individual or small group that originated them. Only a very few are officially adopted by an organization and spread to a wider audience."

A blog entitled "Cyrano’s VOXPOP /•\ ||| Placebo ART" opens a discussion of consciousness with a quotation from Francisco Varela's The Embodied Mind:

”…the problem arises of how to link consciousness with the supposedly objective realm in which it is situated…the subject cannot step outside of its representations to behold the pre-given world as it really is in itself. Therefore given this basically Cartesian stance, the objective becomes what is represented as such by the subject…”

The "Knife Tricks" blog's Quote of the Day for May 21st:

"Advertising at its best is making people feel that without their product, you're a loser."

-- Advertising Executive,
       Quoted in The High Price of Materialism by Tim Kasser (MIT Press 2003).

Reginald Shepherd's blog, in the entry "Adorno, Celan, and the Possibility of Poetry", explores the history behind a famous Adorno quote from Prisms:

Adorno’s dictum on poetry after Auschwitz has become famous, or infamous. On the last page of his essay “Cultural Criticism and Society,” written in 1949, first published in 1951, and collected in Prisms in 1955, he writes that “Even the most extreme consciousness of doom threatens to degenerate into idle chatter. Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today” (Prisms 34).

Finally, an end-of-the-book quote on "sarcinae's blog" from the book Being There by Andy Clark:

“We use intelligence to structure our environment so that we can succeed with less intelligence. Our brains make the world smart so we can be dumb in peace!”

Wednesday Blog Watch - The Parallax View

It's been over a year since the publication of The Parallax View, Slovenian theorist Slavoj Zizek's self-described "magnum opus".  This week's Wednesday Blog Watch looks at a few recent blogger's reactions to reading the book:

The author of the "I cite" blog incites an academic discussion about the Marxian parallax gap in this post, and the author of "Long Sunday" cites some of Zizek's remarks about psychoanalysis in The Parallax View in this post.

Natalie of "Molecular Revolution" seems to have had some initial reservations about the book, but mentions in a further post (with the title of 'Hope'):

...apparently Zizek was what I needed to get over the utter alienation I felt last fall, when I found that literary studies was turning to cognitive science and philosophy of mind...

In this post in "Under.WeathBondage" blog, upon completing the book (or most of it anyway) the blogger describes Zizek:

If Slavoj Zizek were an athlete, he'd be Babe Ruth and Michael Jordan. If he were a musician, he'd be Mozart and Eddie Van Halen.

The blogger at "Fernando's desk" set out to read the Parallax View on May 8th.  No word since then as to whether he'd finished it, but he has since posted these links to Zizek on YouTube.

"An Introvert in Sagebrush" posts:

It'll be a while before I tuck into Zizek again, since I'm on the last chapter of The Parallax View. (It's not for nothing they call him "the wild man of theory!" At the beginning I got about one-fifth of it, and one-fifth I kinda-sorta of sussed his allusions, but three-fifths of it went fwip! over my head.  I eventually got the hang of it, though.)

Finally, the weight of the book has quite literally distorted the vision of the "Soluble Census" blogger:

This morning I inadvertently dropped  Slavoj Zizek's The Parallax View on my glasses, bending them. I was pissed, but laughing, since now my view isn't parallel.

Books - $7 or Less

The Summer 2007 MIT Press Book Sale

DAY:    Wednesday
DATE:    May 23rd
TIME:    10:00am to 4:00pm
ROOM:    10-105, Bush Room

It's time for another MIT Press Book Sale! Help us clear gently-worn and/or discontinued books from our warehouse and help yourself to some great bargains on MIT Press books. We'll have thousands of books
on sale at 70-90% off retail price. Limit 40 books per customer and 3 copies per title. Every book $7 or less!

For event information call 253-5249, email [email protected], or check here. 

Inventing the West

In today’s New York Times, critic Edward Rothstein asks how Western civilization emerged “out of what was once a diverse set of has-been or backwater cultures” and discusses Robert Friedel’s new book A Culture of Improvement: Technology and the Western Millennium. Rothstein remarks that Freidel’s book “is a rare, detailed, nontheoretical survey that exposes the veins of invention that run through Western culture, creating an astonishing picture of achievement through its careful accumulation of small details.” Here is an excerpt from the review:

Mr. Friedel surveys the kinds of inventions and technologies that developed in the West over centuries, compiling a roster of innovation that encompasses everything from textiles to time telling. Under his firm touch it begins to be possible to feel something like the primal pulse of this culture.

Consider, for example, the earliest examples of mechanical clocks in the 14th century. Somehow they had to use a continuous mechanical force — the pull of a suspended weight slowly falling — to measure discrete intervals of time. This was done through an “escapement,” which Mr. Friedel argues, could be “the single most important mechanical invention to emerge from the Middle Ages.” An escapement was originally a toothed wheel turned by the slowly dropping weight. The evenly spaced notches on the wheel were used to spur evenly timed mechanical movements: Divided space is turned into divided time. The turning wheels of a clock could also trace different measures of time, including the motions of the moon and the planets, as if its mechanism were a model of the heavens.

By the 16th century it was clear that this achievement was the reflection of certain beliefs about the world. The principles applied to the turning of a wheel in a clock were seen as mirroring, in some way, the workings of cosmic spheres. There was a faith that the world was governed by the same laws that governed the smallest of human inventions. This also reflected confidence in human ability to comprehend that world and replicate its organization. This is the faith of the scientific enterprise itself: Human ability is honored as much as universal principles.

At the same time the development of such mechanical clocks permitted the formation of certain kinds of organized human community. Mr. Friedel suggests the clocks may have evolved out of the need in monasteries to create reliable schedules for prayers. The clock created a standard for time keeping, a public accounting that could not be reliably achieved with hourglasses or sundials. Clocks created community.

Read the whole review here.

Climate Change on Campus

Global warming has become a major issue in all of our lives, and universities and colleges are in a unique position to take a leadership role in the fight against climate change. As communities they can strategize and organize effective action, and as laboratories for learning and centers of research they can reduce their own emissions of greenhouse gases, educate students about global warming, and direct scholarly attention to issues related to climate change and energy. Inside Higher Ed recently interviewed Ann Rappaport and Sarah Hammond Creighton, authors of Degrees That Matter: Climate Change and the University, about how colleges and universities can act as leaders in the green movement. Here is an excerpt from the interview:

Q: Why are colleges, in particular, well-positioned to reduce their footprint on the environment?

A: Colleges and universities are well-positioned to take actions to reduce emissions of climate altering gases because most institutions own and operate their own buildings. Or a government owns the buildings. Building owners can benefit from investments in energy efficiency during their entire operational life through reduced energy costs. Colleges and universities also can experiment and innovate, not only in the realm of technology but also in social systems.

Q: What is the main misconception about what it takes to incorporate green practices on a campus? What generally derails plans?

A: When people think about reducing heat-trapping gas emissions, they often think about putting wind turbines and photovoltaic panels on campus buildings. For most campuses, these visible commitments to alternative energy are important, but they rarely generate enough reductions to make a huge difference. Large reductions in emissions will come from changing our infrastructure. This includes modifying the way electricity is generated, dramatically increasing the efficiency of the existing building stock and ensuring that new buildings are extremely efficient, and involves re-thinking transportation. Creating extremely efficient buildings and developing transportation solutions require capital and expertise, both of which may be in short supply. Some of these actions can be controlled directly by campus decision makers, and in other cases, we can help create demand for products and services that reduce emissions through procurement practices and we can participate in public policy dialogs.

A lack of time and focus on the problem may arguably be the biggest challenge in the short run. However, we also need policy changes in Washington and in many other capitols to put in place appropriate incentives and to allocate costs properly so that actions in favor of emission reduction are accelerated.

Read the full interview here.

Wednesday Blog Watch - Oliver Grau

Our featured author this week is Oliver Grau, author of Virtual Art and the editor of MediaArtHistories.
In his work, Grau argues that new media should be studied in the context of art history.  He is professor for Bildwissenschaft at Danube University, Krems, in Austria (A quick check on Babel Fish reveals that "Bildwissenschaft" is German for "Picture Science", aka Image Science). 
A review of his edited collection, MediaArtHistories, has been making the internet rounds recently: read it here at newmediaFIX. 
Grau is also known for creating a digital art archive called the Database of Virtual Art, and the MediaArtHistories archive.  The Database of Virtual Art website explains the importance of this project:

The Database of Virtual Art documents the rapidly evolving field of digital installation art. This complex, research-oriented overview of immersive, interactive, telematic and genetic art has been developed in cooperation with established media artists, researchers and institutions. The web-based, cost-free instrument  - appropriate to the needs of process art - allows individuals to post material themselves. Compiling video documentation, technical data, interfaces, displays, and literature offers a unique answer   to the needs of the field. All works can be linked with exhibiting institutions, events and bibliographical references. Over time the richly interlinked data will also serve as a predecessor for the  crucial systematic preservation of this art.

Wednesday Blog Watch - Great Streets: where are they now?

In Wednesday Blog Watch this week, we turn to the classic title Great Streets, in which Allan B. Jacobs studied a wide array of street types and urban spaces around the world.  Let's have a look to see what's been going on around these streets since he described them in 1995. 

We were inspired by the Irvine Housing Blog, which recently posted photographs of streets and houses in the Woodbridge community of Irvine, California, and tells us:

In Great Streets, Pinewood (street name) on the Northern edge of the village off of the Yale Loop, is cited as one of the great “new urban” streets. The houses of Yale Loop and the wall and hedge which surround the development act as a shield to disguise the high-density residential products which are situated between them.

Another great street is Roslyn Place in Pittsburgh, where Jacobs once lived. This unique street is paved with wooden blocks, and  is described and pictured in this article from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Jacob's "Still Great Medieval Streets" included the Via dei Giubbonari in Rome, which can be seen here in the Roma Segreta Blog, and Strøget, Copenhagen, whose car-free virtues are extolled in this Carfree USA Blog article.

New luxury apartments are being sold on Paseo de Gracia in Barcelona - not a surprise, as this street is in Jacob's "Grand Manner" chapter.  Other streets in the Grand Manner include Cours Mirabeau in Aix-en-Provence, seen in this beautiful photo from Alexandre Istratov's Photo Blog, and Avenue Montaigne in Paris  - recently the subject of a film called (appropriately enough) Avenue Montaigne - watch the trailer here to see images of the avenue (and hear a review of the film on this NPR podcast).   

What about Boulevard Saint-Michel in Paris, another "Grand Manner" boulevard?  Well, John Lichfield (a Paris correspondent for the London newspaper The Independent), recently wrote an article about the state of the Champs-Elysees, and in this article he alludes to the current condition of the Boulevard Saint Michel:

Le Monde, in an editorial, pointed to the dire fate of part of the Boulevard Saint Michel on the Left Bank. Once thronged with bars and restaurants, the boulevard is now suffocated by chain clothes stores. After hours, it is dark and cheerless.

Still lively is The Grand Canal in Venice, which showed up recently in "Michelle's Mental Clutter" blog, where she discusses Frank Lloyd Wright's dormitory building that was never built.

A Monument Avenue website examines some of the controversies that have plagued the Richmond, Virginia boulevard, including the possible placement of tennis star Arthur Ashe's statue among the confederate statues lining the street.  The street was also mentioned in the coverage of African-American presidential candidate Barack Obama's recent stop in Richmond.   

Finally, let's have a satellite look at some of Jacob's favorite tree-lined streets:
Richards Road at Mills College, Oakland, California, Viale delle Terme di Caracalla in Rome, and the streets of Beijing.

For more inspiration you also might want to look at The Boulevard Book, which Allan B. Jacobs co-authored with Elizabeth Macdonald and Yodan Rofé.

"Audio Spotlight"

Recently the Boston Globe reported on a new technology that can aim sound directly  into a person’s ear without others hearing it. Created by an MIT grad, this technology is described as an “audio spotlight” that can deliver a beam of sound past unsuspecting ears directly into the target’s ear by stimulating a narrow stream of air.

Author Barry Blesser is wary of this new technology and its affect on our aural environments. In his book Spaces Speak, Are You Listening?: Experiencing Aural Architecture, he explores the audible attributes of physical space and their contribution to the fabric of human culture. Read his response to this new technology:

On April 24, 2007, the Boston Globe published a small article entitled “The marketers have your ears,” which described a new loudspeaker technology that most assuredly will be spreading into the general world culture. I would like to explore the social implications of an audio transducer that can create extremely narrow sound fields.

While the physics and technology of a narrow beam ultra-sonic loudspeaker are abstruse and arcane, its properties are simple. The loudspeaker is the aural analog of a narrow bean laser flashlight. Rather than flooding a space with sound, as would be the case for a conventional loudspeaker, this new type of transducer can focus sound directly on a target person without anyone else hearing it, as if the sound were inside your head, thereby creating a message for you and you only. I first became aware of this technology some years ago when I heard a prototype. Now, only a few years later, it is being installed in stores.

By itself, the technology is socially neutral, being an application of a newly discovered non-linear property of air as a medium for sound waves. But as with all new technologies, our legal systems and social norms lag behind the way in which a technology can be used and exploited in the wrong hands.