[courses]

Swarm Stadia, SCI_Arc

[02.2007]

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Some of the student work from the studio:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5-DLiopKu0

SCI_Arc
Spring 2007: Vertical Studio
SWARM STADIA
Studio - Seminar
Hernan Diaz Alonso - Benjamin H. Bratton

Guest: Peter Frankfurt (Imaginary Forces)
 
SPORTS IS THE NEW ART: expenditure, spectacle, violence, assembly
 
The stadium has displaced the art museum as the preferred commission of urban hood ornament architecture. Leaving "the next Bilbo" to second tier studios, global architects of preeminence turn instead to giant fun machines, where a new global aesthetics of form,  dissimulation and consumption is derived not from art but from sport: Herzog & De Meuron's s Beijing Olympic Stadium and Munich World Cup, Foreign Office Architect's London, Eisenman's Cardinals Stadium, no-name super high-tech stadia for Oakland's A's and Dallas' Cowboys,  etc.



If the 1980's and 90's saw a proliferation of a new kind of "global" image-based architecture, living as Jog's in newspapers and bogs, as much as on the ground in site, this big gesture gifts from big name designers (Gerry, Lambskin, Meier, Cook, Foster, Hasid, etc.) were said to galvanize attention and social energy into the symbolic centers of art, culture and high-minded demoralization.

In a network society, radically decentralized, the supposed disappearance of architecture was itself reversed by iconic architecture's most enduring power within a symbolic economy, namely to be symbolic and to over claim the (now novel) experience of real place as the new media.

And it was toward institutions organized upon and understood through a condition of economic excess (even waste,) excused from the pragmatic performative criteria of architecture for "real" organizations: art and mourning. (Eisenman's opened at roughly the same time Holocaust Memorial and Cardinals Stadium, near Phoenix.)



Does sport supplant art as the preferred format of global aesthetics? Perhaps as the market value of globally brandable symbolic architecture was affirmed by one economy of symbolic excess (art), the opportunity to verify the social, economic centrality of another (sport) becomes clear.

The Serious Economy of Games

If play is another excessive economy, then the spectacularization of play in spectator sports, is both a more extreme form of this excess, a further state of abstraction, and as well a movement of dromological precision into the otherwise spontaneous, heterologic body-culture of ludic expenditure, into disciplined, rationalized, mobilized into an important central consideration of an urban strategy of "global visibility." Sports in this simple, sense is a kind of "repressive desublimation" of the "accursed share" into a restricted economy according to generally accepted accounting principles.  


In short, sports is a multi billion dollar business (like art and like mourning) and this business is in the branded symbolism business. It guarantees victories to half the cities each week, and to one city on the annum. But as this repetitive narrative must trade on its capacity to centralize and economically rationalize the effervescence of collective festival, war, potlatch, it also requires as well a kind of symbolic reference of its own symbolic rationalization to stage and codify that, in fact, its work is in fact symbolic. This is a work of  gestural architecture.

Football=Globalization: Sports as the Virtualization of War, and
Life the Virtualization of Sports

Despite this football is also both a medium and a cipher for the intense semiotic energies of cultural globalization. It is a screen upon which both hopes and fears are projected, where the meaning of the nation, the body and the brand is experimented upon and given some provisional resolution. Like pre-Modern political theater, spectator sports work like mimetic miniaturizations of the world at large.

 
INSECT ASSEMBLAGES: form, pattern, behavior, territory
 
 
 
The Greek root of the word, "insect", refers to a thing that is segmented or cut-up. Its coherence as a singular body is through the radically segmented, differentiated form and function of its multiple components.

This is also instructive for stadia, which are always no matter who the architect- designed through the repetition of identical elements, quadrants or sub-segments. We are interested in deploying the segmentary logic of component difference (formal and programmatic) to the conception of each stadium's unique and iconic posture.

An effective stategy in designing cinematic horror is an amplification of scale that distorts anthropocentric recognition. The monster is a giant bug: out of scale, still inhuman but imbued (perhaps) with now extrahuman intelligence and autonomic homocidal rage.

We are looking at and to insects, singular bug bodies and swarms of  insects, to derive formal and procedural intelligence for our stadia. It's posture, its latent motion, its configruation to urban context, its staging of sport. The insect singular and collective- is beautiful despite and because it is designed to for a specific and relentless violence, for territory, food, or mating.

Channeling totemic and nationalist bonds into cyclical spectacles, contemporary spectator sport is also a graceful sublimation and translation of violence into a beautiful, choreographic form.

One link between studio and seminar will be that of tracing how this very simulation also serves as the condition of its own reversall: how the simulation of siege and war concentrates the emergence of actual  siege and war, and vice versa.

 
IMAGOLOGY FOR ARCHITECTS: optics, projection, motion, affect
 
 
Architecture is never displayed innocently. Any encounter with the work is framed by multiple determining contextspolitical, sensual, and spatialthat productively contaminate the moment of reception.

Format >

Techniques >


Cinematic >

Under the image of the horrific as the driving aesthetic we will develop topological mutations that will engage the manner and form of insects to create and proliferate architectural matter.

In this, the architecture's own highly charged perspective on the affects-ambiences even especially site-specific works-- becomes an invitation to visitors to trust their instincts, and to enjoy adventurously the works that they find.

Design always concerns a translation between forms and formats of image. More than "?textuality' or even "?iconography', its very form is a secondary function of how it performs as an image. Perhaps some might see this as a triumph of superficiality over depth, but it's certainly also an intensification of the conjectural and fictive logics of design, of its ability to mobilize a social imagination and with it a series of potential futures. We see this as a real and complex demand that global network culture makes on producers of architectural content

 
RES/Media:  Branding, Gaming, Ambient Media
 
 

Contemporary stadia are also showcases for advanced investments in branded entertainment and experience design. Even as they serve to displace and condense traditionally public urban centers and other theaters of collective/mass experience- they are highly programmed private events. As machines for producing capital, their programs are based on a reductive science of crowd logistics that includes the staging and aestheticizing of experience for its own sake. This is not an opposition between function and pleasure, but an intensification of the logistics of delivering a standardized experience of spectacle and safety.

Sports is predicated upon a kindn of provisional fiction. The stadium environment is highly regularized utopia. Here everyday life is simplified into a register of cyclical analogues and tempered scenarios of risk and virtual collective reward.  

Key to both the functional economics of facility management and the staging of thematized events, is the framing of the experience through and for sponsoring brands. The stadium is a themed park of advertising, franchising and loss-leader brand equity experiments.

It is also like a semi-permanent world's fair exhbit- able to leverage the scale and intensity of its audiencing capacities to support (even demand) innovations in media architecture and pervasive computing to provide the richest forms of informational logistics, display and affect. Like cars, this year's model stadia, are as much about computation as mechanical experience.

Your stadia will work to integrate the economics of a sponsoring meta-brand (in this case Yahoo!) with an architect's perspective on the deployment of integrated digital services (also Yahoo!s) nto the event experience. We'll have Yahoo!'s VP of Product Design and others come and give their thoughts. They will also chip in a bit toward model prints.
 

PROGRAM Two Footballs, Two Los Angeles
 
The seminar will serve as both the strong programming curriculum of the studio/seminar combination, as well as providing the theoretical and dramaturgical basis for student designs.

A particularly comical and lucrative variation on the mythos of United States Exceptionalism is that has developed its own version of "football," largely ignoring the game played by the rest of the world.

What is "football" in Los Angeles in 2016? Will there be more interest in Soccer or NFL? More need for Soccer or NFL?  Soccer is more popular with the ascendant Latino population; the NFL has a broader base but tends to be more Anglo and African-American.

Is the question of whose Football is built for also a question of whose Los Angeles will define the future?

A new football stadium in Los Angeles, due to open in 2016, in the parking and open space next to Dodger Stadium in Chavez Ravine, or in Irwindale, near Pomona.

The assignment is to (A) design a stadium for the LA MLS team, (B) a stadium for the LA NFL team, or (C) a dual purpose stadium for a shared-brand team, soccer and NFL



Preliminary PROGRAM REQUIREMENTS
?    seating for 70-100k spectators
?    50 luxury boxes + 10 superluxury boxes
?    scoreboard and information system visible from every seat
?    various integrated digital services
?    parking and public transportation
?    shopping and food
?    Other program innovations considered (hotel, condos, shark tank?)
 
CONTEXT: image, text, film, research
Required books:
?    Manuel De Landa, A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (2006)
?    Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology. (1977)
?    Franklin Foer, How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization
?    Rod Sheard, Stadium: Architecture for a New Global Culture
?    Peter Stürzebecher and Sigrid Ulrich, Architecture for Sport (2002)
?    Charles Jencks, Iconic Building
?    Adam Greenfield, Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing
?    PRAXIS, A Journal of Writing+ Building, issue 8, "Program" (2006)
?    Commodification and Spectacle in Architecture, ed. William S. Saunders (2005)
?    EA Madden NFL 07 Players Guide (2006)

Additional handouts:
?    Roland Barthes, "The World of Wrestling" (1957)
?    Pierre Bourdieu, "How Can One be a Sports Fan?" (1978)
?    George E. Marcus and Erkan Saka, "Assemblage" (2006)
?    John Bale, "Virtual Fandoms: Futurescapes of Football" (1998)
?    Allen Meek, "Walter Benajmin, the Televisual and the "?fascistic subject'" (1998)
?    Julian Pefanis, "The Gift of the Stars: Potlatch, Expenditure, Heterology" (1991)
?    Loek Groot, "Roger Caillois, Games of Chance and the Superstar" (2003)
?    Mark Wigley, "Network Fever" (2001)

Films to be screened: (handed out on DVD-R for viewing)
?    Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl (1935)
?    Zidane, Douglas Gordon (2006)
?    Real: The Movie, Borja Manso (2005)
?    Frontline Football: Bosnia vs. Serbia (2006)
?    Rainbow Man/ John 3:16, Sam Green (2005)




Suggested Readings and Viewings
?    The New Everyday: Views on Ambient Intelligence, ed. Emile Aarts and Stefano Marzano (2003)
?    A Guide to Archigram, 1961-74, curated by Dennis  Crompton, Taipei Fine Art Museum (2003)
?    Daab, Stadium Design
?    Hertzian Tales: Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience, and Critical Design, by Anthony Dunne. (2005)
?    Contest: Essays on Sports, Politics and Culture by Gary Genosko (1999)
?    Re:CP by Cedric Price and Hans Ulrich Obrist (2003)
?    Football Against the Enemy by Simon Kuper (2003)
?    Offside: Soccer and American Exceptionalism, by Andrei Markovits (2001)
?    The Thinking Fan's Guide to the World Cup by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey (2006)
?    Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby (1998)
?    UBIK by Philip K. Dick  (1969)
?    The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard (1962)
?    Rollerball by Norman Jewison (1975)
?    The Running Man by Paul Michael Glaser (1987)
?    Any Given Sunday by Oliver Stone (1999)
?    Starship Troopers by Paul Verhoeven (1997)
?    Hoop Dreams by Steve James (1994)
?    Eight Men Out by John Sayles (1988)
?    Human Game: Winners and Losers, Fondazione Pitt Discovery (2006)
?    Stadia: A Design and Development Guide by Geraint John and Rod Sheard (2000)
?    Sports Architecture by Rod Sheard (2000)
?    ME++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City by William J. Mitchell (2004)
?    Digital Ground: Architecture, Pervasive Computing, and Environmental Knowing by Malcolm McCollough (2005)
?    Where the Action is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction by Paul Dourish (2004)
?    Extra-Spatial, by IDEO (2003)

Blogs of Interest:
We-Make-Money-Not-Art
SportsBabel
UniWatch
Edge of Sports
Sports Economist
Only a Game
Digitally Distributed Environments
Interactive Architecture dot org
MIT Advertising Lab    
Mashable!
RFID in Japan
Resarch
Pink Tentacle
Technovelgy
Engadget
Unmediated
Architectures of Control in Design
PSFK
Three Minds @ Organic
Things Magazine
!


Schedule

Week One: Introduction and Overview

Week Two: Assemblage, discussion of readings
    Readings: De Landa, and Assemblage handouts

Week Three: Network and Diagram, discussion of readings
    Readings: Virilio and Wigley.

Week Four: Program. Discussion of readings and workshop
    Readings:  Praxis issue, Sheard, and Stürzebecher and Ulrich

Week Five:  Program research/experiments, and pin-up.

Week Six:  Football Globalism, discussion of readings
    Readings: Foer, Bale, Groot

Week Seven: Midterm

Week Eight:  Sports and the simulation/ sublimation// dissimulation, desublimation, discussion of readings
    Readings: Bourdieu, Barthes, Pefanis, Meek

Week Nine: Sports and Simulation, etc., Research projects pin-up

Week Ten: Pervasive Media and Computation
    Readings: Greenfield

Week Eleven: Pervasive Media and Computation, experiments and pin-ups

Week Twelve: Iconography and Imagology
    Readings: Saunders and Jencks.

Week Thirteen: Iconograpy and Imagology desk crits

Week Fourteen: Desk crits

Week Fifteen: Desk crits

Final at Super Secret Location
 
Seminar Final Paper/Book/Site Texts:

Your seminar assigment is write the positioning brief for your studio project. The structure of this brief will follow the structure of the semianr and should speak to the concerns we develop there.

Your brief will devote at least 550 words to each of these five problematics:
?    Form (Architectural Entomology)
?    Urban context
?    Sports, Spectacle, Simulation
?    Program
?    Media and branding

The brief is due in both book form (at the studio final) and online form (for the course website.)

Tags: architecture, sci-arc, mobility, spectacle

Published: 02.25.2007

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