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Gotham’s Subconscious Violence

I spent three hours in a packed movie theater last night waiting to see The Dark Knight Rises. Rotten Tomatoes’ statistics would show that many of you did too. If you’re like me, you’ve been trying to pick out what sets this Batman trilogy apart from every other superhero movie. Sure, the acting is great, the screenplay is well-written, the soundtrack causes me to leak unhealthy amounts of spinal fluid. You could go on for days talking about cinematography, lighting, and the films’ spectacular ability to avoid nearly every cliché that ruins other big-budget hero movies. But really what makes the trilogy great is the use of architecture. The city serves as much more than a back-drop for action-packed fight scenes and touching dialogues; Gotham is the films’ greatest character, and their most terrifying villain.

Gotham, of course, is not a real place. So how do you film on-location in a location that does not exist? Director Christopher Nolan felt that rendering a city of that size using computers would have cheapened the viewing experience, and would frankly be taking the easy way out. Instead, he stitched Gotham together using pieces of the world’s great cities. In an interview, Nolan stated, “Every film should have its own world, a logic and feel to it that expands beyond the exact image that the audience is seeing.”.To film the third movie alone, Nolan shot in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, London, Pittsburgh, and Glasgow. He takes special care to make sure the movies don’t feel like any one city, but rather a mixture of many. Most wide shots stop just before the tops of skyscrapers so that they are nearly unrecognizable. It’s often hard to figure out which city he’s using at any given moment. One minute, our hero is flying his bat helicopter thing in front of what is clearly downtown L.A., while the next shot features the unfinished One World Trade Center. And when the camera gets down to street level, location becomes nearly impossible to discern. The result is that Gotham feels completely real, but at the same time manages to escape the details of any one location, and therefore is its own city. But while this technique successfully transports the viewer into an incredibly realistic alternate universe, the effect of Nolan’s city-melding can be much darker than simple escapism. 

Think about how you dream. Your subconscious builds its worlds in much the same way that Nolan builds Gotham. The environments are never concrete, each element taken from different places in your memory. The result is a landscape that shifts and contorts with the changing action. You may recognize pieces, but the whole is always something more, something new. When your mind chooses the good bits from your memory, pieces from places you like, the result is an amalgamation of different areas of your reality. But when it chooses the bad bits, the feeling is entirely different. 

It’s clear to me that Nolan knows this, because at times, Gotham is terrifying. This collage of urban textures begins to get under the viewer’s skin, even if he or she isn’t aware of how the scenes were made. As Gotham rapidly sheds and regrows its many layers, it takes on a monstrous and terrifying anonymity. And that’s what makes it such an unstoppable force.

Nolan has created a city that like its greatest hero can become anything it needs to be. And in many cases throughout the series, Gotham eagerly shows its dark side. When prompted about his films’ use of architecture during an interview with Wired Magazine, Nolan said,

“I’m very interested in the similarities or analogies between the way in which we experience a three–dimensional space that an architect has created and the way in which an audience experiences a cinematic narrative that constructs a three–dimensional -reality from a two-dimensional medium—assembled shot by shot. I think there’s a narrative component to architecture that’s kind of fascinating.”

The towers of Gotham seem to rise and fall depending on the tone of the scene, becoming taller and darker as the mood intensifies. The viewer is subjected to a constant and unrelentingly violent barrage of angles and mass. The characters are often dwarfed by the city they are trying to save; the scale of the city often feels too much for one man in a bat suit to tame. 

Scale is arguably Gotham’s greatest weapon. The weakness that plagues all other of the trilogy’s villains is their status as a human being. They are at the end of the day one amongst millions. But Gotham is both the millions and the few. It can stretch to envelope everyone that inhabits it, or shrink to taunt one character more personally. Nolan plays a sinister mind game with Gotham’s size. He makes it feel that no matter how far out the camera pans, there is still more of Gotham lurking out of view. Even the widest shot in the third film feels like only a glimpse. The city can feel infinitely tall and vacuous as in this shot…

…dark and oppressive (even in broad daylight) as in this one…

…or as if the weight of an entire city hangs directly above one’s head.

Nolan has a way of using the urban landscape that no other director (or architect, for that matter) can match. He’s aware of the ways that a city can shape and drive our daily lives, and that when tweaked in just the right way, what was once an average city street can become a place of terrifying subconscious warfare.

Vespoidea

Ever destroyed an ant hill? I know I have. As a kid, I used to savor the sadistic pleasure of pouring water down their holes, kicking them, or even once dowsing it in nail polish remover and setting the whole mess ablaze. This love of killing ants came from the fact that every summer, the inside of my house would coated in a million sugar ants as my family and I cowered in fear of their kitchen-devouring power. To me, destroying ant colonies was like getting revenge.

I’ve since grown out of this feeling, and even though I still fight my annual battle with the ants in my house, I’ve developed a tremendous appreciation for the little bugs, and particularly their knack for architecture. It started with Ender’s Game, one of the most famous science fiction books of all time, written by Orson Scott Card. In the novel, the Earth is attacked by aliens that resemble ants. But one of the key turning points in the story comes when Ender and his fellow space soldiers realize that the ant-liens are thinking not as individuals, but as a whole, the millions of brains functioning as one.

But you don’t need to live in a world of science fiction to observe this kind of group thought. It’s been happening right under our feet for millions of years. Individually, ants are pretty dumb, even compared to other insects. Instead, they construct their massive cities by combining their brain power to function as a superorganism. Ant colonies both big and small operate as a unified entity, gathering food, constructing cities, and defending against predators. They are able to solve complex problems with ease that would baffle an individual. Ants do this by communicating with pheromones, chemical signals which are passed from one ant to another via smell and taste. In this way, messages can be passed almost instantly throughout the entire colony. Their chemical language is as effective as our verbal language because it surpasses the need for argument and gets straight to hard data.

What did ants do with all this power? They became architects. Along with their natural ability for food collection and defense, ants are some of nature’s best builders. Their underground colonies are as complex as human cities, but take only a few months to build. Vast labyrinths of tunnels and chambers stretch far below the surface, each part designed with a specific use in mind. From the surface, we can only see a fraction of a percent of their enormous cities, the construction of which requires the tireless effort of millions of individuals. But there is no architect ant who sits around and gives orders, no contractor, no construction manager, and no interior designer. The superorganism functions as one mind, whose instinct for construction can make a seemingly impossible task feasible. Ants have an innate sense of what, where, and when to build that is gained both genetically and through learning via the collective brain. On its own, a single ant would be incapable of such a massive undertaking. Each can only carry a few grains of sand in its mandibles, and could not possibly conceive the scale of the tunnels and chambers, which on a human scale would cover hundreds of miles. But they have the ability to come together as one and build some of the most astonishing cities in the world.

So how does this relate to us? There is no question that humans are the most intelligent species on the planet, but that does not mean we cannot learn from our insect colleagues. We are superior builders, but as we are presented with more tools and new ideas about how to build our world, we need a point of reference, and I think that ants are just the place to look. Simply put, ants are socialists, in that the means of production are directly in the hands of the people…er…ants. In the human world, socialism is a viable form of governance because it ensures that everyone gets a piece of the cake they helped cook.

This is all well and good for things like healthcare and energy, but what about architecture? Buildings in our society have always been designed by a person or small group for a price. But with the power of the internet, we have the power to behave like ants. Using crowdsourcing, humans can become as efficient builders as ants, functioning as a democratic and collective building force. To some degree, we are already doing this. Cities aren’t built by one person, but by millions. Yet there is an enormous lack of input that has made most cities very inefficient and unfriendly. If we were to take the power of our collective minds, it’s possible to change that.

To use a real world example, let’s look at Los Angeles. The US’s second largest city is known for being the car culture capital of the world. This is not because Americans love our cars (we do) but because the city was built in such an impenetrable and inefficient manner that most people have no other option than to drive. Had the task of designing LA been given to one person, it would look nothing like it does. But because there is such a lack of communication between architects and inhabitants, between need for efficiency and desire for space, the city is nothing but a massive cesspool of pollution and traffic (sorry, it’s true). But if the city had been built by the people, by the superorganism, things would be different.

The city is in the process of designing a new football stadium for the LA Live area downtown. It’s being designed by an architecture firm, as all of today’s buildings are. There is a massive opposition to the stadium, from every corner of the city. There are questions on its impact on the economy, on traffic, and on the aesthetic of the city. These are big problems, and in my opinion, too big for one person to sort out. We all love to play god, but things would be better if we relied not on an individual perspective, but on the ideas of the population as a whole. Imagine instead that the stadium is being designed by everyone. LA residents could use the internet to voice opinions, vote on design aspects, and submit ideas of their own. It wouldn’t take any experience in architecture to change the built world a person lives in.

So maybe it’s time we stop our childish love of destroying ant cities, and instead learn from their perspective. As we move into a changing and growing world, it’s time to consider building our cities in a new way, the ant way. Only then can we truly reflect the needs and desires of the people that actually live there.

The Seed Cathedral (Touch Part 2)

Last week I talked about Heatherwick Studio, which is moving to reintroduce a certain materiality and soulfulness that seems to be lost in the jump between small objects and big buildings. One of the criticisms of modern architecture is that it lacks any kind of tangibility, that it’s too cold and removed from our sense of the world’s intricacies. 

With Heatherwick’s Seed Cathedral, it seems the problem may have been solved. Simply put, it’s one of the single most powerful buildings of our time. For their pavillion at the Shanghai Expo in 2010, the United Kingdom chose the studio to carry out the project on a relatively small budget, with only the premise that they represent the country as a center both for creativity and environmentally friendly. 

Thomas Heatherwick is always drawn back to his childhood spent in his mother’s bead shop. He remembers the power held in even the smallest objects, learning their tiny beauties and appreciating them on the large and small scale. So, when he was looking for a theme for the pavilion, he chose another small object, the seed. Recently, there has been a massive movement in the UK to catalog and preserve the seeds of millions of plants from around the world. The seed was a natural choice to put at the center of his pavilion, because it embodied his idea of soulful materiality, as well as represent his country as a global leader in environmental preservation.

He had to look at the seed itself. Humans have always held a special relationship with these precious little objects. Without knowledge them, we would not be able to farm, and our society would never have developed. And in an age of Monsanto and Dow, it’s easy to forget the mighty power that has always been held in these tiny objects, with or without human intervention. Seeds are the culmination of a plant’s reproduction, containing all of the genetic and nutrient material needed to begin the next generation. Each plant has its own way of distributing its seeds, whether it be by wind, water, or animal ingestion. Each is unique, each is beautiful.

How to build a monument to something so vitally important to our past and future? Heatherwick could have put them on display in a pretty museum behind cases of glass, but that would not have done nature or architecture justice. Instead, he focussed his energy on making a singular structure that would be as powerful as those seeds, and as meaningful to both him and the buildings visitors as the feeling of small objects were. 

The Cathedral is built unlike any other building in history. It is one singular rounded cube, with one opening. Every square inch of its surface is adorned with more than 60000 ten foot transparent acrylic rods that jut out of the building. Inside the building, the tubes each have a seed at the bottom, which can be seen by guests. The tubes are flexible and sway in the breeze like blades of grass. During the day, they carry light into the building, and at night they broadcast outwards in a dazzling fiber-optic light show. From a distance, the building looks like a mirage, its edges blurry and undefined. Heatherwick jokes that it’s the only building that looks more like a computer rendering than an actual structure. 

There are no frills, nothing to distract the visitor from the personal feeling of the seeds and the building. There are no ads, no televisions, no fountains. It’s smaller than most of the other pavilions, but it’s surrounded by rolling and jagged hills of synthetic grass that mimic the texture of the building’s facade, creating an interesting and peaceful public space, with nature and architecture at the center. It invites the guest to first experience an open space for play and relaxation and then draws them in to have a personal and tangible experience with one of nature’s greatest wonders. Simply put, he’s made modern architecture more human.

And like the seed which it honors, the Cathedral has given itself up. The rods with the seeds embedded in them have been distributed to schools across China as a gesture of the UK’s care towards those children’s future and just how important the seed, and good architecture, truly is. 

The Rapture

If you hadn’t heard, the Rapture is on May 21. That gives us only two days before the righteous go to heaven and you and I are left here. But that’s more than enough time to talk a bit about churches. What will Jesus think when he sees our chapels and cathedrals? When we’re all floating in the air waiting to be judged, can we look down on our Christian architecture in pride or disgust?

I live in New Mexico, which is a mixed bag when it comes to churches. On one hand, we have beautiful Pueblo-style missions like the San Francisco de Asis Mission Church in Taos, made famous by Georgia O’Keefe. On the other hand, Albuquerque is thick with Big-Box churches that put most football stadiums to shame. I live a few blocks away from Hoffmantown Church, which most people mistake for a shopping mall.

So maybe it’s best we direct our buddy Jesus’ attention elsewhere. Since the beginning of time (which everyone knows was like, 4000 years ago), the Church has always been the main motor of architecture. Up until the 20th century, the worlds greatest and largest buildings were always churches.

The most beautiful church I’ve ever visited is the Tours Cathedral in the French city of the same name. I had not known this masterpiece of architecture even existed until I rounded a corner and nearly passed out in shock. Notre Dame be damned, because photos cannot even begin to do the Tours Cathedral justice. I had the fortune of seeing it at night and I can honestly say it was one of the single most beautiful things I have seen in my life. While the two massive towers are Romanesque, the styling is purely Gothic. The facade is adorned with beautifully intricate patterns and carvings, which at night catch multicolored floodlights in a way that makes me shiver just to think about. 

That’s all well and good, but not all of us live in Tours or the 13th century. Let’s talk modern. I’m going to skip over Le Corbusier if you don’t mind. Today’s churches are not designed as the lavish status symbols Tours and others were; rather, they’re designed for one purpose: fear. More specifically, fear of God. Despite what they would have you believe, one of Christianity’s main goals in its architecture is to make even the biggest atheist tremble in his Toms. If a church has enough money, they will build the biggest, heaviest, most testosterone structure they can get their hands on.

I mean for Christ’s sake, look at that, God dammit. This is the Mormon LDS temple in Salt Lake City, Utah, and if that shit doesn’t scare the Buddhism out of you, I don’t know what will. Though it’s disguised under a cheap layer of faux-Gothic that ends up looking like something Disney would build, it’s pretty new. It was only built in 1853, long after the Classic ship had sailed. It’s here, it’s modern and it frankly doesn’t give a damn what you think of its special underwear.

If we travel to the even more recent past, we find a trend start to develop. Art seems to have been sacrificed to save our functionality (pun intended). As our demand for crackers and wine grew, so did our churches, but only at the cost of once-great church design. Above is the Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas. It is the definition of a mega-church as it rivals most sports stadiums. How can Houston be the fattest city in the world when it takes you forty minutes to walk down one pew? Maybe they serve hot dogs.

Modern church architecture isn’t all as extreme as Lakewood, however. Thank Jesus. Much of the architecture of smaller churches has evolved (pun intended!) with the Deconstructivist movement. Though most still remain rather masculine and imposing, some churches have managed to use modern architecture to make them beautiful instead of just big. 

Oh well. It doesn’t matter anyway, does it? After Saturday, everyone left on Earth won’t give a crap about Christianity and will probably use churches for their Michael Moore-themed orgies, right?

Albu(QR)que

Its literal meaning is “drift”, but it really stands for much more than that. It’s a technique for urban exploration, in which the individual is immersed into a rapid series of ambiances supplied by a city. In a dérive, a person drops his or her relationships, work, daily activities, and modes of movement, and is drawn instead by the details of the terrain and the encounters found there. Chance reigns in this experience : from a dérive point of view, cities have geographical and architectural contours, with constant patterns, fixed points and gravities that guide the drifter through them. By letting chance be the guide, a person can easily pass through the psychological and physical barriers that prevent movement through and exploration of cities.
But sometimes such hidden beauty can be hard to find. This is the case in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where I live. I used to think that the problem with Albuquerque was that there was nothing to discover. The New Mexican city I call home sits in a neat, shallow valley with what many call a “river” running through the center. From the East side, I could look out my window and see all of the West side because of the slight tilt. Everything is built in a tidy grid system but still manages to be hopelessly impractical. Our apparent claustrophobia has turned the suburbs where I grew up into an urban planner’s sprawling nightmare. Everyone has a car because stores, offices, and schools are built in such a way that for most of my childhood, “walking distance” seemed a topographical impossibility. It takes me half an hour to get to school and up to 45 minutes depending on traffic to get to my friends’ houses. Dérive fails here because the distance between the small number of interesting things is enormous compared to other cities, like a museum in which the paintings are fifty feet apart.

So, I thought Albuquerque would never yield anything interesting. But I soon proved myself wrong. Though it’s not exactly Paris or New York, my dry and spacious city is thick with hidden gems, and its beauty is most concentrated on Central Avenue. The street is a hotbed of everything Albuquerque, and in the past few years I’ve grown to think of it as an oasis in a desert of banality. I’ve spent a lot of time over the last few months exploring what I had previously taken for granted. I’ve learned so much about the city I grew up in, and have a renewed appreciation for the people that inhabit it.I decided I wanted to share this with others, but it’s not like I could walk around giving guided tours of Nob Hill. I wanted to share my love of Dérive with my fellow Burqueños and have them appreciate the city in the same way I do.



My friend Keila and I had an idea. We could create some kind of hidden language or code that would draw people’s attentions to the things they had maybe taken for granted. Hidden but noticeable messages that say call for a second look at a piece of the city. It couldn’t be obvious or striking, otherwise the focus would become the presentation, not the message. So we settled on something that can’t be misinterpreted: QR codes. They’re a kind of bar code that can be easily read with a camera-phone. There are hundreds of QR reading apps, and the increasing number of smartphones makes them all the more accessible. 
So we started printing our own little 1 inch square QRs and leaving them all over Central and Nob Hill. They contain messages that help draw attention to the urban jungle around them. It’s sort of an integrated Drift Deck. They’re small enough to go unnoticed by the city cleaners and will remain part of the city. We’re hoping that this catches on and people will both grow their appreciations of Albuquerque and embrace the philosophy of Dérive exploring their urban surroundings. We’re also looking for people interested in expanding the project. Let me know if you’re interested or have any other ideas you want to share.

Evolution/Creationism

One of my first posts talked about the slime mold and how it’s the perfect model for a sustainable city, in which all production and consumption are completely integrated. I still stand by this idea, because I think it’s one of the best ways to make cities completely efficient.

But I recently read about something called Zira Island. It’s a plan for a brand new carbon-neutral island city in Azerbaijan. When I first heard of it, I got excited, thinking maybe someone had finally this dream a reality. On first glance, it seems great. The island city, if built, would be powered entirely by renewable energy sources, including wind and solar. Nearby metropolis Baku is known as the “Wind-swept City,” making the island the perfect place to fully implement wind turbines. Azerbaijan receives sunlight for almost the entire year, so solar energy seems very viable. Waste and storm water is collected, sanitized, and used for irrigation, while the solid containments are turned back into soil and fertilizer to support the lush green landscapes envisioned. In all, Zira would produce 100% of the energy it needs without any reliance upon outside resources. 

This all sounds great. Amazing, in fact. My problem is not energy, but architecture. The entire city would be designed by one firm, BIG. To an architect, this would be a dream come true, being able to design a completely new city from scratch. But from the standpoint of someone who would live in that city, the prospect is a bit less thrilling. Looking at the designs for the various apartment buildings, family houses, and luxury villas on Zira, I got chills. It was the same feeling of architectural despair I get when I look at the suburban neighborhood I grew up in.

It’s sort of like evolution vs. creationism.

The world’s beautiful cities, New York, Paris, and others, evolved. They grew slowly, with thousands of architects learning from and adapting to the architecture around them. Vast diversity created the natural selection of styles, as ugliness and dysfunction was systematically and organically pushed out of the system. What resulted is far from perfect, but it is a rich and nurturing architectural environment, to some extent adapted to best suit its inhabitants and environment, while still growing.

The American suburbia in which I was raised, does not evolve. It is created from nothing. On the second day, God created Carriage Estates (which, I kid you not is the name of my childhood neighborhood) in which the only thing that lets you know your house is different than the next is that weird stain in the driveway. Vast neighborhoods were built in one whack, usually by just one architect. As much as architects would love to play god, it just doesn’t work. Any design flaw is replicated a thousand times over, with no room for improvement. We are left, despite an architect’s best intentions, with cookie-cutter homes and urban environments that squash artistic expression and individuality. 

So while Zira is a spectacular proposition from an environmental standpoint, its architecture won’t create the perfect world we envision. Your city could be powered by unicorn farts, but without natural, competitive architectural growth, it will be just as mundane as Rio Rancho. 

So I propose this: don’t build new cities. Fix the old ones with new architecture. Blanket construction doesn’t really solve anything, so do it slowly and carefully. Install solar panels on old buildings, create new parks, rebuild the slums. To build a better humanity, let’s act as catalysts, not gods. 

Prefab

Everyone needs a home. Birds build nests, but they are fragile and impermanent. Bees build hives, but it can take years before they are habitable. Ants build hills. Moles dig tunnels. All this is great, but it takes considerable effort to do so, and none provide any significant protection. 

But some have figured out a better way. Above is the Nautilus. The sole survivor of the ancient family Nautilaceae does not build a home. Instead, it creates a totally mobile and secure shell around its body. The shells is not some one-size-fits-all thing like that of the Hermit Crab, but rather a completely personalized go-anywhere prefab home with all the necessary compartments and layers. The Nautilus does not waste any time or energy building a home from scratch every season, because everything is built right in and is completely portable. And it’s beautiful too, unlike certain other crustaceans that frankly give me the heeby-jeebies. 

For humans too, construction is costly, even on a small scale. But when most people think of prefabricated homes, they probably think of a trailer or of the typical mobile home found in so many American cities. Most people would consider these types of houses unappealing, and though they are a very inexpensive living solution, anyone who can afford not to live in one chooses to do just that.

But what if we were to take the Nautilus’s lead and make prefab cool? What if our homes could be completely portable, efficient, and inexpensive while at the same time offering good looks and quality protection from the elements? Well, now we can do just that. A new breed of prefab homes is making many think again about what it means to live in a mobile home.

In the United States, most people would tell you that bigger is better. But even the smallest of apartments can be the most beautiful, efficient, and comfortable homes around. Our obsession with big houses on large pieces of land has lead to out of control sprawl in all major cities, while the poor are forced to live in run-down trailer parks or fixed-rent housing. The problem here is not that people actually need more space. They don’t. It’s just that there has never really been much in the way of good design at a low price in the world of architecture. So we either spend a ton of money on huge houses that take months to build and consume massive amounts of energy or resign, usually not by choice, to dismal and depressing structures. 

But take the E.D.G.E for example. It solves the problem of space, construction costs, energy consumption in one simple, compact, mobile, and beautiful design. The house can be easily transported and erected on any kind of terrain, eliminating the need for complex foundations and the destruction of soil. It has a “kinetic facade that allows for passive solar heating, eliminating the need for powered heating. It contains two lofts and comes fully equipped with modular and and multi-functional furniture that makes compact living feel spacious. It looks as good a custom-designed house and functions as efficiently as a studio apartment. And it only costs $60000, a fraction of the price of any house. 

Another interesting design comes from Dwelle, which manufactures a range of prefabricated houses from $15000 to $35000. While they don’t offer as many of the same environmentally friendly touches as the E.D.G.E, it is even more portable and customizable. They come in a range of sizes up to 24 square meters, but multiple “dwelle.ings” can be joined together to accommodate larger families. There are tons of different styling and placement options, and the company will fulfill just about any request. And like with the E.D.G.E, the company will send a transport truck if you ever get the urge to move. 

So now that prefab can be cool, what are we waiting for? Those who buy these houses are benefiting the environment through energy and land conservation as well as taking the load off their wallets. In a changing world, maybe it’s better to think like the Nautilus.