It has been a while! What an insane few weeks. My semester is almost over. I committed to staying at UC Berkeley for a PhD. I hope you are healthy and staying sane. Here are some thoughts about something else.
I generally believe that engineering has a lot to learn from architectural theory, and I'm going to fumble around to make some connections here. There is almost zero "engineering theory" that I know of, and when I say theory in this context, I mean the discourse in which a field turns a critical eye on itself. The best read I've seen is Florman's The Existential Pleasures of Engineering, which is from 1996 and serves mostly to humanize the engineer in the eyes of others, rather than actually change how the profession reflects on its impacts on the world.
I'm training to be a civil engineer, which is partly why I find a connection to architecture feasible—they're adjacent fields, concerned with the built environment. The architectural lens has proven good at "articulating wicked problems" (Thanks, Toby) and generally generating discourse around its own importance, almost to the extent that architecture theory can be its own worst enemy: 21st-century architects are expected to nurture a holistic, hyper-aware sensibility, and are then given extremely little power or leverage to act on it. They are forced instead to respond to often-banal market demands.
Engineering suffers little of this existential crisis, but I think it deserves some of it. So here I am, writing. Environmental engineering (the program I am in, which often falls under the umbrella of civil engineering) is actually a great leverage point for such, because it serves as a doorway to bring in that which terrifies the engineer: messy and open systems. Engineering's technocratic worldview comes intertwined with its approach to define the bounds of its system and control only that system, taking little responsibility for the "out-of-scope" externalities. Good environmental engineering requires an awareness of ecology, which acts to introduce both revolutionary thought and non-systematic dynamics to engineering projects. This scope of the system can get cracked wide open, demanding a more nuanced awareness of the limitations of the "control volume" worldview that engineers often have. At Berkeley at least, much of the department's activism and critical thought comes out of environmental engineering, and this is my theory why.
I recognized that I enjoyed architectural theory when I picked up an edition of Log Journal in the summer of 2015. The edition—33—was about object-oriented ontology, and I ate it up, amazed at the breadth of what could fit under the term "architecture."
Ian recently lent me Log 47, subtitled "Overcoming Carbon Form," which couldn't get me more excited, now that my day-to-day work is about civil engineering and the after-effects of our carbon-based lifestyles. Elisa Iturbe's introduction, which seeks to define "carbon form," reflects on an argument you have likely heard before: that the fossil-fueled age has lead to specific conditions in the built environment that expect fossil fuel-driven "normalcy" to persist. The built environment of carbon form is made of asphalt and plastic, demands the car, and generally indexes carbon-based fuels. Iturbe investigates the vast spatial ramifications of carbon form, married to the expectation that cheap oil is a platform on which to build the future of humanity. Civilization has diverged from this narrative, but we continue to have so much momentum... some estimates see that, even amongst huge halts in activity from the global North during COVID-19, carbon emissions plow onwards with only small (<10%) drops.
I was reminded of an interview with Kim Stanley Robinson where he reminds us that "California is a terraformed space," what I think of as a near-total manifestation of "carbon form". I, of course, mostly think about how we have made similar assumptions about water supply. Water infrastructure is perhaps California's grandest act of terraforming, and it is built on unreasonable guesses as to the volume and stability of precipitation in the American West. What are the spatial repercussions of these infrastructure systems?
Amidst these questions, I finally sat down to read Koolhaas' Junkspace. Maybe he was prescient, or maybe I've only started paying attention recently, but the writing seems as (dizzyingly) relevant as ever, as he reflects on the "latent fascism safely smothered into signage" and confusion of "intention with realization" in our media landscape, no less our public architecture. Drew Austin noticed this too, and draws attention to junkspace's drive to make consumption the primary mechanism by which we can experience "public" space (COVID-19 notwithstanding!).
I noticed, as I read Koolhaas' "essay," that I craved addressing something else, something closer to the spaces the civil engineer spends time: the landfill, the freeway underpass, the water treatment plant. Junkspace, the essay, revolves mostly around the supersystems of postmodernity as they pertain to the public face of the built environment—Koolhaas calls it Public Space (tm)—despite the text starting with "junkspace is the residue mankind leaves behind". Residue connotes refuse, and the global North rarely needs to look at its refuse twice; I do not think residual spaces are the typical forms of public space to the practicing architect. Residue gets swept away, to the convenience of the client. The "Residue Spaces" generated by the mechanisms of junkspace and carbon form are more interesting to me, as they are often not designed with human experience or consumption in mind. The trash heap, the forgotten corner of a site, the things we outsource to expert systems, hidden to the typical person. (People care about the things they know, no?) Spaces outside of the control volume. "It always leaks somewhere in junkspace"—where do the dregs collect? I am speaking of the parcels of land that don't become humanized because of infrastructure service easements or because they are sites for our waste and logistics. These "leaky" spaces are necessary, in the same way the junk drawer is a necessary by-product of organizing the kitchen: you need a place to capture the rest, to relieve pressure build-up of the system of control.
(There are two other terms that I feel the need to address: Easterling's "infrastructure space" and Augé's "non-place". I think Easterling and I are interested in a similar topic—the residual spatial products of large-scale systems—but she writes at a level of abstraction and globalization that I cannot quite attend to, yet. Augé's non-place is about transience, but at its core is still about human-scale designed spaces, rather than the incidental and un-occupied.)
Locally, this has manifested in my love for Los Angeles' ubiquitous flood control channels, and for the Bay Areas's junk coastlines. The East Bay is riddled with residue spaces on the bayfront: the enormity of the Port of Oakland and its access parameters for container ships and trucks leaves many parcels of land relatively untended. Two of the most accessible bits of coastline are former landfills. In stark contrast to California's expensive and prototypically beautiful ocean coast, the Bay's muddy, less-desirable shoreline has been the site of disposal (mine tailings, nuclear waste) or industries that required distance from population centers (explosives, sewage treatment), and other infrastructural needs.
The creation of residue spaces is mostly a mechanism for displacing the unpleasant components of our society away from the people who have the ability to complain. What Francis calls the "re-localization of harm" in this fantastic piece on the state of mining network effects. You can read America's approach for caring for its people in the proclivity for un-housed people to live in residue spaces, or in the frequent spatial overlap of contamination, poor infrastructure, and disadvantaged neighborhoods. In its compartmentalization of the problem into only the "technical" (physical or chemical), and externalizing of the ways in which the residues of engineered systems overlap with lived space, engineering can fail to support equity.
Residue spaces can be places for environmental hope, though, in lieu of their neglect. Flora and fauna fill these spaces regardless, and they can serve as refugia for species that are getting squeezed out of their other habitats. (Recall that the matsutake is mostly thriving in formerly industrially-logged forests.)
Plenty more to say about residue spaces, and in more detail—but for another newsletter.
Outside the volume,
Lukas
I generally believe that engineering has a lot to learn from architectural theory, and I'm going to fumble around to make some connections here. There is almost zero "engineering theory" that I know of, and when I say theory in this context, I mean the discourse in which a field turns a critical eye on itself. The best read I've seen is Florman's The Existential Pleasures of Engineering, which is from 1996 and serves mostly to humanize the engineer in the eyes of others, rather than actually change how the profession reflects on its impacts on the world.
I'm training to be a civil engineer, which is partly why I find a connection to architecture feasible—they're adjacent fields, concerned with the built environment. The architectural lens has proven good at "articulating wicked problems" (Thanks, Toby) and generally generating discourse around its own importance, almost to the extent that architecture theory can be its own worst enemy: 21st-century architects are expected to nurture a holistic, hyper-aware sensibility, and are then given extremely little power or leverage to act on it. They are forced instead to respond to often-banal market demands.
Engineering suffers little of this existential crisis, but I think it deserves some of it. So here I am, writing. Environmental engineering (the program I am in, which often falls under the umbrella of civil engineering) is actually a great leverage point for such, because it serves as a doorway to bring in that which terrifies the engineer: messy and open systems. Engineering's technocratic worldview comes intertwined with its approach to define the bounds of its system and control only that system, taking little responsibility for the "out-of-scope" externalities. Good environmental engineering requires an awareness of ecology, which acts to introduce both revolutionary thought and non-systematic dynamics to engineering projects. This scope of the system can get cracked wide open, demanding a more nuanced awareness of the limitations of the "control volume" worldview that engineers often have. At Berkeley at least, much of the department's activism and critical thought comes out of environmental engineering, and this is my theory why.
I recognized that I enjoyed architectural theory when I picked up an edition of Log Journal in the summer of 2015. The edition—33—was about object-oriented ontology, and I ate it up, amazed at the breadth of what could fit under the term "architecture."
Ian recently lent me Log 47, subtitled "Overcoming Carbon Form," which couldn't get me more excited, now that my day-to-day work is about civil engineering and the after-effects of our carbon-based lifestyles. Elisa Iturbe's introduction, which seeks to define "carbon form," reflects on an argument you have likely heard before: that the fossil-fueled age has lead to specific conditions in the built environment that expect fossil fuel-driven "normalcy" to persist. The built environment of carbon form is made of asphalt and plastic, demands the car, and generally indexes carbon-based fuels. Iturbe investigates the vast spatial ramifications of carbon form, married to the expectation that cheap oil is a platform on which to build the future of humanity. Civilization has diverged from this narrative, but we continue to have so much momentum... some estimates see that, even amongst huge halts in activity from the global North during COVID-19, carbon emissions plow onwards with only small (<10%) drops.
I was reminded of an interview with Kim Stanley Robinson where he reminds us that "California is a terraformed space," what I think of as a near-total manifestation of "carbon form". I, of course, mostly think about how we have made similar assumptions about water supply. Water infrastructure is perhaps California's grandest act of terraforming, and it is built on unreasonable guesses as to the volume and stability of precipitation in the American West. What are the spatial repercussions of these infrastructure systems?
Amidst these questions, I finally sat down to read Koolhaas' Junkspace. Maybe he was prescient, or maybe I've only started paying attention recently, but the writing seems as (dizzyingly) relevant as ever, as he reflects on the "latent fascism safely smothered into signage" and confusion of "intention with realization" in our media landscape, no less our public architecture. Drew Austin noticed this too, and draws attention to junkspace's drive to make consumption the primary mechanism by which we can experience "public" space (COVID-19 notwithstanding!).
I noticed, as I read Koolhaas' "essay," that I craved addressing something else, something closer to the spaces the civil engineer spends time: the landfill, the freeway underpass, the water treatment plant. Junkspace, the essay, revolves mostly around the supersystems of postmodernity as they pertain to the public face of the built environment—Koolhaas calls it Public Space (tm)—despite the text starting with "junkspace is the residue mankind leaves behind". Residue connotes refuse, and the global North rarely needs to look at its refuse twice; I do not think residual spaces are the typical forms of public space to the practicing architect. Residue gets swept away, to the convenience of the client. The "Residue Spaces" generated by the mechanisms of junkspace and carbon form are more interesting to me, as they are often not designed with human experience or consumption in mind. The trash heap, the forgotten corner of a site, the things we outsource to expert systems, hidden to the typical person. (People care about the things they know, no?) Spaces outside of the control volume. "It always leaks somewhere in junkspace"—where do the dregs collect? I am speaking of the parcels of land that don't become humanized because of infrastructure service easements or because they are sites for our waste and logistics. These "leaky" spaces are necessary, in the same way the junk drawer is a necessary by-product of organizing the kitchen: you need a place to capture the rest, to relieve pressure build-up of the system of control.
(There are two other terms that I feel the need to address: Easterling's "infrastructure space" and Augé's "non-place". I think Easterling and I are interested in a similar topic—the residual spatial products of large-scale systems—but she writes at a level of abstraction and globalization that I cannot quite attend to, yet. Augé's non-place is about transience, but at its core is still about human-scale designed spaces, rather than the incidental and un-occupied.)
Locally, this has manifested in my love for Los Angeles' ubiquitous flood control channels, and for the Bay Areas's junk coastlines. The East Bay is riddled with residue spaces on the bayfront: the enormity of the Port of Oakland and its access parameters for container ships and trucks leaves many parcels of land relatively untended. Two of the most accessible bits of coastline are former landfills. In stark contrast to California's expensive and prototypically beautiful ocean coast, the Bay's muddy, less-desirable shoreline has been the site of disposal (mine tailings, nuclear waste) or industries that required distance from population centers (explosives, sewage treatment), and other infrastructural needs.
The creation of residue spaces is mostly a mechanism for displacing the unpleasant components of our society away from the people who have the ability to complain. What Francis calls the "re-localization of harm" in this fantastic piece on the state of mining network effects. You can read America's approach for caring for its people in the proclivity for un-housed people to live in residue spaces, or in the frequent spatial overlap of contamination, poor infrastructure, and disadvantaged neighborhoods. In its compartmentalization of the problem into only the "technical" (physical or chemical), and externalizing of the ways in which the residues of engineered systems overlap with lived space, engineering can fail to support equity.
Residue spaces can be places for environmental hope, though, in lieu of their neglect. Flora and fauna fill these spaces regardless, and they can serve as refugia for species that are getting squeezed out of their other habitats. (Recall that the matsutake is mostly thriving in formerly industrially-logged forests.)
Plenty more to say about residue spaces, and in more detail—but for another newsletter.
Outside the volume,
Lukas