wasted

8 March 2019. Besides amazing gorges with streams of virgin water cascading through this particular city, there are also the global flows of trash running through; equally conspicuous runlets of plastic, cardboard, glass and other unidentifiable composite wrapped up stuff, trickling down the sidewalks or dressing the winter shrubbery.

The wasted stuff. Besides all the invisible dissolved and fumed garbage satiating the atmosphere, there is all this useless, drifting matter. While facing the planetary fact that other flows are about to run dry, what can you do? What can we do? What can designers do, as acting custodians of stuff?

These questions were asked in a symposium at the Cornell School of Architecture last week. There are architects and designers out there, facing the challenge, not only giving waste due attention, but trying to make use of it in constructive ways. The symposium came out of courses at Cornell and Harvard and explored the design incentives for a circular economy. With the building sector being somewhat of an environmental black sheep. producing an enormous amount of rubble, the symposium included presentations by architects who have taken on the challenge of changing this image. As for example Peter Van Assche, who like a Lewis Carroll of our times wants to change the logic and dislocate the parameters, in order to show that down the drain, the waste can still transform into “colourful beautiful stuff.” Or the Belgian Rotor architects, who launched the off-spin Rotor Deconstruction in order to take command of the material recycling of old buildings.

While up-cycling of plastic waste, systems shift for waste collection, or a ban on planned obsolescence are all necessary measures, the lingering question that remained largely untouched was the surplus logic behind the messy flows and the paradoxical addiction that these flows have created. For while it is possible to abandon the commodity logic and completely servitize architecture and design; while it is necessary to reeducate starchitects and fancy designers into assemblers-dissemblers, the question remains how to break the dependency, how stop the profitable growth of trash flows, and how to avoid developing new, diverting manoeuvres, no matter how colourful and beautiful.

There are, however, straightforward un-architectural answers.

rurality

Sunday, early March. A colleague is taking me on a trip from Ithaca and Cayuga Lake to Seneca Lake, crossing the plateau in between. We are in the north for sure; the deserted and snowy landscape could as well be ‘Norrlands inland’, that part of northern Sweden that from a southern urban outlook is just some generic form of basic resource.

Urban nature. What kind of power is executed through a concept? The rural is the negative, in a depreciative sense , of the urban. The rustic, that which, according to the dictionary, is lacking in elegance or sophistication. And even more so today; an outside with a backwards predictability. Yet here it comes in sharp, straight lines, a logic of efficiency and perfection.

Or, perhaps this is one of the places in which urbanity reveals itself. The map exposes what the senses already have registered; a land cut up with admirable precision, submitted to an urban geometry. Not a single transecting diagonal or winding line as far as the eye reaches.

Except for those Finger Lakes – clawing and gnawing, cutting through in a different way. The geological forces that created these water accumulating depressions are still present. On the way back, at Steamburg by all places, these forces make themselves known in an almost capricious way, forcing the straight line of the road to jump. A rural road, stretching far, activating childhood memories of car rides in ‘Norrlands inland’ – in the interior of the Swedish North.

reading diffractively

“Diffraction does not produce ‘the same’ displaced, as reflection and refraction do. Diffraction is a mapping of interference, not of replication, reflection, or reproduction. A diffraction pattern does not map where differences appear, but rather maps where the effects of differences appear.”

Karen Barad, ‘Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together-Apart,’ 2014

 

2 March 2019. The past week, a library week. I prefer the places by the windows, looking out towards Fall Creek and the artificial Beebe Lake, the dam before the falls. Or from this position perhaps looking ‘inwards’, into a space of scattered bodies, faces, the gazes of which go in multiple directions.

In this boundary position, I feel privileged. I am allowed to engage in this practice known as reading. Several days in a row now, I have been able to roam through texts, confronting voices, making room for that kind of dialogue known as thinking. The stencil graffiti I pass by every morning is one of those texts; a material cry in the passage by Kennedy Hall. I’ll do my best.

The texts I am engaging with are all somehow related to my interest in friction as an environmental and relational notion, also somehow a materialising trope or thought figure that rather than focusing attention, has to do with the heated and tangled, evoking an unsettling and frustrated ‘rubbing’ of unlike opinions, worldviews and bodies against each other. I am looking for friction as a way to explore discontinuities, reverse flows and resistance values, but also the diffractional energy thus produced, the energy that radiates outwards, and so not only embodies but also spatializes thinking.

One late afternoon, on my way from the library, I notice a new imperative message beside the graffiti stencil. The Red Bears, the university’s women’s ice hockey team, have reached the quarter finals in the cup. Ithaca against Troy. A game sure to be as frictional as diffractional.

 

arriving at cornell

25 Feb 2019. Cornell — a university located in the state of New York, five hours northwest of NYC, two hours southeast of Rochester, in the Finger Lake region, in the city of Ithaca at the south tip of one of those fingers, Lake Cayuga, on seized Haudenosaunee land which then became the Ulysseus Township, now close to places Etna, Ovid, Homer and Seneca…

Yet, for most people, Ithaca is Cornell; a campus with a town attached to it. There are other aspects though, including tensions and friction of different kinds. A city disrespectfully erected on top of indigenous burial grounds. An academic mountain overlooking a town in the swamps. A rural remoteness crisscrossed by fairytale gorges with hypnotic waterfalls. A vineyard landscape (believe it or not) swept by Arctic winter winds (as now). A split university, not only by its waterfalls, but divided into on the one hand the private and prestigious faculties and others, with a dubiously public mission… For a newcomer, it is hard to know.

 

Also the town has a certain twisted quality, on the one hand the obligatory shopping mall landscapes, on the other a downtown “commons” where organic hipster beer deliveries bump into four-wheel pickup trucks equipped with home snow plows, right outside of the Víva Taquería… 

OK, I have not been here for more than two and a half weeks so I shouldn’t claim a grip on the environment, not even some corners of it. What I do know though, is that the university campus is vast and sits on top of a very steep hill, the East Hill, and I know this because it means a daily morning mounteneering effort, which sometimes, like this morning, due to snowfall, has to happen, despite limited visibility.  

What I also know is that Cornell has around 23 000 students, 1700 faculty and another 8000 employees; in other words, in student and faculty numbers quite similar to MaU. It feels much bigger, though, and as an “Ivy League” university, it has a pedagogic and research infrastructure of another magnitude. My activities so far have included various contributions, such as to the broad MA program in landscape architecture (including students also from many other fields) run by associate professor Maria Goula, who invited me here. I also took part in studio critique in the course Integrating Theory and Practice  dedicated to the development of a green corridor in neighboring Buffalo (some three hours from here); today a socio-economically strained city suffering from de-urbanization (and from the whimsies of Elon Musk). At the landscape department, I also gave a public lecture on the topic of environmental value and eco-criticism, to be followed up in a second one on “design thinking” and concept development. At the adjacent College of Art, Architecture and Planning located in a fancy Koolhaas building, I will contribute in seminars on similar topics within the course Urban Temporalities: Materiality, Practice, Subjectivity. 

There is of course many other interesting and K3 related things going on here. I am in contact with the Environmental Humanities group, through ass prof Anindita Banerjee at the College of Arts and Sciences, and I will follow their seminars. I also met with Steven Jackson, ass prof in Science and Technology Studies and who is chair at the department of Information Science. His research focus, as some of you already know, is on “critical, interpretive, and historical social sciences” including “repair studies” – from a mundane American as well as Malmoitian perspective is highly relevant.  

One of my hangouts though, is the historical Uris Library, which I imagine will foster grand thoughts…