“Globalization destabilizes and redefines both the way architecture is produced and that which architecture produces. Architecture is no longer a patient transaction between known quantities that share cultures, no longer the manipulation of established possibilities, no longer a possible judgement in rational terms of investment and return”

—Rem Koolhaas, Globalization, S,M,L,XL

Your lungs are full of foam fumes, your eyes are bloodshot from exhaustion, you’ve slept at your desk. But you stick with it, because you enjoy a pleasing degree of freedom to pursue design ideas that challenge accepted reason, so long as the lead designer sees something they like. Sound familiar?

If so, it’s likely that you work in one of the many global architecture offices who practice in the style of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). Your work may look different but that’s not the focus of this discussion. The operations follows a similar logic.

Amongst the most critically acclaimed offices of the last two decades, OMA has consistently produced innovate architectural ideas, methods, and as we will see below, organizational models. This much is undeniable. The question at hand is whether the almost contagious ability of OMA to replicate itself in the habits of other offices is the result of duplication by admiration, a legitimate response to the challenges of globalized architecture practice which OMA may have pioneered, or the charismatic quirk of OMA’s success overshadowing other possibilities.

This essay is written without any direct knowledge of the inner workings of the offices in question. It’s largely a mythology of the habits of organization, production, and decision making that one office has pursued, written from the outside, aided by accumulated anecdotes.

If the OMA style of working has become a popular drug, this is an attempt to figure out what we’re all taking, why, and what other options may exist. It’s a story that begins in the British countryside 39 years before the founding of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture.

Computing Success

Half way between the brain trusts of Cambridge and Oxford sits Bletchley Park, a spunky but anonymous building that came to house one of the most important British installments of World War II. Inside, a team of scientists and mathematicians were focused on breaking the codes that the Germans used to protect their communications from the prying eyes and ears of the Allies. With some of the brightest minds in the country assembled, the task was difficult enough to still evade them, leaving the Allies no choice but to employ a technique called brute force code breaking.

When a message is encrypted one must have the password— or cipher—to decrypt the message from a jumble of nonsense into legible text. The right password returns sensible text, while the wrong password merely turns gibberish into a different kind of equally useless gibberish. If one cannot obtain the cipher they must devise a way to get it. In other words, if you can’t find the right password, another way to break through is by trying every… single… one… of the wrong possible passwords until you’re left with the single, working, correct option. Those at Bletchley and others in the community of cryptographers call this a brute force attack.

A young mathematician named of Alan Turing was working on a bruce force code cracking machine called the Bombe. It was like playing a game of “guess what word I’m thinking of” by starting on word one, page one of a dictionary and going from there. Except in the case of the Turing’s team their dictionary had up to 150,000,000,000,000,000,000 ‘words’ that had to be tested before the right answer could be found.

When it’s not possible to intelligently find a flaw in the algorithm used to encode the message, the brute force attacker simply tries every possible option until one proves useful. It’s the same technique that lends hackers access to email accounts today: attempt millions of different passwords and one is bound to work. This is why banks and other sensitive sources encourage us to use c0mpLic4t3d! passwords. Each extra letter, number, or punctuation mark expands the possible number of combinations, or “search space”, and makes the password exponentially harder to guess.

As the name implies, brute force attacks are uncomplicated and rely on the most basic ability of the computer to do repetitive tasks ad nauseam without stepping out for a smoke. The faster all the wrong answers can be eliminated, the sooner the correct cipher will be revealed. Two variables determine the speed that a cipher will be broken: the time it takes for each break attempt, and the number of attempts you can make simultaneously. The latter is akin to dividing up the dictionary into sections A-H, I-N, O-Z and giving them to three people to work on at the same time. Parallel processing, as it’s called, only works in situations where the overall task can be neatly divided and the piecemeal portions worked on in isolation of each other.

Decades after Alan Turing and others who made Bletchley Park a famous mansion of mathematics, the same methods were being put to in another industry altogether.

Through the unlikely combination of innovations in drawing and model making techniques, combined with a new theoretical understanding of architecture, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) rewired their office of the late 1990s into a brute force computational device whose efficiency would become wildly contagious.

OMA has been one of the most consistently interesting offices during the past couple decades but we’re more concerned with the how than the what. In probing these depths we want to gain a more sophisticated understand of this engine of success, and perhaps discover some ways in which the downsides may be minimized without losing the potency of its output.

Keeping everything in play

Lesson number 36: Abstraction is a requirement for design because you just can’t take everything into account.

—OMA Progress exhibition pamphlet, curated by Rotor

Architecture can be a hard thing to discuss because it’s an art of integration. The difficulty of separating the overall design task into smaller units of work is at least part of the reason that the stereotype of the architect is one of obsessive detail-oriented control, the Maestro, the creative genius. The lead designer is often one of the only people privy to the way that all of the cumulative decisions in a project come together; seeing, as it were, the many narrowly avoided conflicts that any matter battle is riddled with.

The factors that go into an architectural proposition run the gamut from calculable aspects such as structural performance under gravity loads, financial constraints under a given budget, and the practical realities of human ergonomics as much as they rely on the cultural and symbolic meaning of forms and materials, or even the individual whims of the client. Looking at any of these elements in isolation leads to woe, yet integrating all of them all of the time leads to paralysis.

The design process in most offices follows a general progression from a prompt, to wide range of options, to narrowing in on one or two promising possibilities for further refinement. At the beginning a lead designer offers their team a design question such as “how should this building sit on the site” or “how will people move around this structure” and the team work as individuals to sketch a variety of proposals that answer the question. This basic process is repeated again and again at successive levels of detail until the ‘scheme’ for the entire building has been resolved and can be drawn up as construction documents.

In architecture offices that discuss design proposals as integrated and holistic, these design cycles are drawn out into discussions can take a long time because even the smallest detail, such as a handrail, must be coherent with the logic that defines the whole building. Idea generation and evaluation phases tend to be less distinct in these kinds of offices, as there is an ongoing dialog among colleagues about whether a particular design tactic is appropriate to the project, and to the office’s work in general. Such discussions are often lengthy and full of nuance, consideration, and coffee breaks. It’s a perfectly good model, but it’s one that works best when everyone on the team share a similar level of acumen and are present for the full duration of the design process—if possible in the same room. This is the classic mode of the design atelier complete with a strong-willed lead designer at the helm.

OMA’s invention was to turn lead designers into grand editors. For an office who had global aspirations and highly mobile directors, a more efficient way of working was needed that would allow idea generation phases to happen without extensive indoctrination of young designers to the office’s philosophy and stylistic interests, and without constant supervision of the frenetic leaders. Diversity within any design cycle would be maximized and the ‘time cost’ of decision making would be lowered. Together these two changes made OMA more efficient at iterating through proposals until a viable one could be found.

OMA’s first breakthrough came in the writing of Rem Koolhaas. Initially as analytical observations in Delirious New York and later in a theoretical essay entitled Bigness, Koolhaas describes buildings as related collections of ideas rather than integrated wholes. If previously a building’s outside and inside were meant to add up to one coherent thing, in Koolhaas’ logic they are free to be separate, each with their own logics. This essential cleavage was levied against all aspects of the building. The old model of seeing a building as one integrated design task was now shattered into a family of many individual tasks.

The Dis-integrated building

“Beyond a certain critical mass, a building becomes a Big Building. Such a mass can no longer be controlled by a single architectural gesture, or even by any combination of architectural gestures. This impossibility triggers the autonomy of its parts, but that is not the same as fragmentation: the parts remain committed to the whole.”
—Rem Koolhaas, Bigness essay in S,M,L,XL

Although post modernism had already legitimized the collage aesthetic that this approach encourages, Koolhaas’ writing made it OK for designers—especially those in his office—to treat the design of a building as many separate, smaller design tasks and the outcome of each did not necessarily need to bear clear resemblance to the others. On the contrary, buildings that displayed multiple ideas, forms, and materials became central to the aesthetic of OMA.

Koolhaas’ radically dis-integrated approach to architecture relieved junior designers from having to understand the full nuance of the overall project and freed the lead designer from the burden of providing constant ongoing feedback to keep their team on track with the big picture. Instead, feedback need be applied only at specific points (such as internal reviews) where a range of options are evaluated for their intrinsic value more than than their appropriateness to an external, overriding logic. In this operational model the lead designer need not play the role of Maestro. Rather, they initiate the design process with a provocation and continually curate the results. It’s more like editing a live broadcast than it is painting an image.

With the theoretical means to suspend disbelief during productive phases of idea generation, the individuals on a design team were free to go wild. If the review after a period of wild design proposals did not yield anything satisfactory the process could be repeated again. And again. And again until something useful came out.

The phases of production and evaluation were allowed to become distinct and extreme. Production phases could involve maximum divergence, and evaluations could be viciously binary. Here we find the basic mechanism of brute force hacking: find success by exhausting failure. As many former employees could tell you, it could also be the motto of OMA (and the many offices that now use its model).

The quicker a yes/no decision could be made, the quicker the search space of answers to a given design problem could be iterated through by a group of young designers, even working almost at random. But how to accelerate this process even further?

Blue Foam

New and faster ways to evaluate architectural proposals were needed, namely new means of drawing and model making that shortened the time it required to definitively say yes or no. The answer was blue foam.

OMA is famous for its use of blue foam as a model making material, a technique that uses polystyrene foam cut into desired shapes with a heated wire. Working with foam is a skill that one learns relatively quickly and it allows quick and easy iterations that would be more time consuming to achieve in cardboard. For instance, making a cube from foam can be done with as few as two or three cuts. The same shape out of cardboard would require 24 cuts and the gluing of 6 pieces. Whereas working with cardboard requires planning ahead and some translation of ideas into a workflow of making, with foam the workflow and ideas are collapsed into one. Making is thinking.

One can picture the spark that must have lit up in the eye of a young model maker as their tired fingers parted with a bright yellow Olfa knife and embraced the electrically charged wire of a foam cutter, slicing effortlessly through a block of cool blue foam for the first time.

Working with foam instead of more traditional materials allowed the design teams at OMA to model their ideas quicker, which in turn allowed more ideas to be considered in the same span of time. The adoption of this new technique was akin to upgrading the processor speed of the office.

More so than cardboard or other model making materials, blue foam erases the signature of its creator allowing for an easier ‘apples to apples’ comparison. The anonymizing uniformity of the cut surfaces and alien blueness of the foam itself allowed multiple workers to prepare options in parallel without the differences of personal craft becoming an element of distraction during moments of evaluation. The cumulative effect means that a table covered in foam models all produced by different individuals can be assessed for their ideas rather than the quirks of who made them or how they were created. What’s on display are the ideas themselves, without any distracting metadata or decoration. This is the model making equivalent of Edward Tufte’s quest to eliminate chartjunk.

With extraneous degrees of difference eliminated from the process, the signal to noise ratio of the discussion could be as high as possible. Under these conditions the person making a decision is set up to compare and execute quickly. Once a promising option is chosen, the team can quickly produce an entirely new table of variations based on that as a starting point. The time required for each cycle of development is reduced as much as possible such that a maximum number of iterations are seen, tested, and discarded on the way to finalizing a design proposal.

What blue foam did for model making, the diagram did for drawings. Traditional architectural drawings are laden with detail whereas the diagram is all punch. Favoring diagrams over more traditional means of plans and sections, even in sketch form, allows for the essence of an idea to be transmitted in as compact a form as possible so that it can be iterated as quickly as possible.

This is the essence of brute force architecture. To test and discard as many ideas, produced as quickly as possible, is a luxury that is only afforded to an office that has a theoretical framework allowing design tasks to be simplified and separated, the right tools to do so, and a large pool of able and willing hands to put those tools in motion.

Geography, language, labor, and practice

Thanks to the clarity of roles, the relative degrees of freedom afforded to junior designers, and the reining effect of the blue foam and diagram tactics, brute force architecture is a mode of working that is more resilient to participants coming and going. OMA’s office in Rotterdam could be humming with proposals for the facade of a hotel in Manhattan while Koolhaas and was lecturing in Seoul, without being impeded by the low bandwidth media of international telephone calls and grainy intercontinental facsimiles. The media of decision making was already so compressed that it could survive even the most dreadful of landline connections and thermal paper.

OMA is famous for two things: its astounding output, and the extent to which its operations chew through the majority of the human capital that walks through its doors. As an office that had already made a name for itself and was lucky to enjoy a steady flow of applications from aspiring young interns, OMA could organize around a workflow that depended on the maximum variety and quantity of design explorations before electing one to carry forward. Like Turing 60 years prior, OMA’s operations are based on brute forcing through the search space. Whereas Turing relied on something that would later come to be known as computing power, OMA relies on employees who willfully work long hours to be part of the magical machine.

This maximum variety is the direct output of the bloodshot eyes and over-caffeinated bodies of the legion workforce pushing themselves to create just a few more iterations before calling it quits. Now taking advantage of the very globalized condition that brought it into being, the diversity of the individuals in the office (nationality, language, design background) further enhance the spread of the collective design iterations they churn through, effectively expanding the ability of the machine to exhaust possibilities at an accelerated pace.

The simplification of the way in which ideas were presented through models and diagrams smoothed over the difficulties of running an office with many different mother tongues by giving preference to image over language, in effect turning a potential hurdle into a mechanism to bolster the brute force production system.

The sum of this way of working is one where the search space of ideas is exhausted seconds before the individuals doing the searching. If so, success has been achieved. If not, the office collapses under its own entropy. So far OMA has been able to keep the lights on, but at significant cost. Particularly to the lower ranks who put the “brute” in “brute force”.

OMA has been singled out because their contribution has been so definitive to the last couple generations of professional practice. Although the offices of Renzo Piano, Zaha Hadid, and others are on similar or perhaps even higher levels of success in terms of productive output, none have had as large an impact on the practice of architecture as OMA.

From the point of view of architectural practice, the dominant story of the last twenty years of architecture has been one of OMA-ification. It’s hard to walk through an office nowadays without feeling some shadow of OMA. If not the obsessive model making, then the diagrammatic drawings as idea telegrams. If not the masses of interns, the hands-off yes/no interaction between junior employee and lead designer. Beyond these high level similarities, the specific tactics of OMA are contagious: sections with oversized text stuffed into different programmatic zones, barcode diagrams, unrolled plans, renderings collaged with glib inhabitants, etc.

The pervasiveness of OMA’s habits in other offices are so extreme that one is tempted to ask whether this way of working is a logical outcome of globalized practice, but the dearth of competing operational models hints that perhaps this is not the case. At a moment when formal, tectonic, and material diversity are at the extreme, we as a community of architects lack a healthy discussion of operational models. OMA’s model trundled into a second generation with firms such as MVRDV, BIG, and REX but who else has proposed a coherent idea about how to operate an architecture firm?

Yes, interest in potential futures for architecture as a discipline and this is incredibly important work, but there remains room for innovation in the most traditional of practices. How else might the idea of an office that designs and oversees the construction of buildings be articulated in a way that’s relevant to a global market, and able to survive its wiles? The search space for ways of working hardly seems exhausted, so what’s next?

When thinking about the future of practice after Brute Force, one wonders what models we may employ to develop not only the next generation of architectural ideas, but the next generation of architectural offices as well.

How does an office represent ideas to itself? How do they evaluate proposals as fast as possible? How does an office continually challenge itself by entertaining the most divergent set of propositions it can muster? What mechanisms does an office use to know when they are producing good work?

In a way, these are the easy questions. Or at least the ones that architects and designers have battled with implicitly or explicitly for centuries. The challenge that will define the next generation of architecture is one of organization and operation. How do offices effectively divide tasks? How do they honor a commitment to both community and client? How do they contribute both hard and soft value to the world?

New models of organizing work, new business models, new income streams, and new value propositions are the rich territory for tomorrow’s architects to figure out. As the global market struggles with deleveraging, architecture’s connection to the real economy is an asset waiting to be articulated.

Those who dare to do so assume all the risk of taking the leap away the dissatisfying-but-known practice of brute force architecture. If they’re luck, and if we’re lucky, a few will land on solid ground.

I wrote the essay below for Helsinki Beyond Dreams, a book edited by Hella Hernberg and available… today! It’s a collection of essays from a variety of contributors speculating on how to use the city as a resource for all. A bit exasperated after writing a lot earlier in the year, I chose to write my piece as a bit of near-future fiction.

Illustration by Pent Talvet

A generation from now, will Helsinki and Tallinn be connected as a twin city filled with local urbane industries: small factories, craft workshops, courtyard cafes and scientific research labs flourishing side by side in the city centre?

—

As soon as she glances at the teacup rattling in its saucer, the jostling stops. “Eighteen minutes left”, Anna says to her seatmate. The rail tunnel between Helsinki and Tallinn – the longest in the world – is also its largest timepiece. It tells one time only, but does it precisely. Eighteen minutes before coming to a careful stop at Helsinki’s Hernesaari station the train passes over a small dimple in the tracks that sets things jittering about, as if to let you know there’s still time for another cup of tea. It’s the kind of quirk that inevitably comes from making real things. Anna appreciates this as she can share the same charms with customers who seek out the bikes built in her courtyard factory in downtown Helsinki.

The train comes to a stop beneath a station built as a careful snowflake of timber and glass. Ghanaian and Chinese tourists are snapping pictures of this curious crystal, as they always do, while daily commuters drowsily sip flat whites and cinnamon rolls at the station’s reputable cafes.

Built in the 2020’s, during a time of careful but daring investment, the connection between Tallinn and Helsinki is now the crown jewel of the Baltic Ring Rail. Many were skeptical about the project, but with some hindsight it was an infrastructural gambit that has breathed a new spirit into the pair of sleeper capitals. It was sold as a mere ‘link’ between the two cities but instead it has proven to be more substantial. Essential, even. At a moment when global cities were fighting aggressively to distinguish themselves, Helsinki and Tallinn willingly rebuilt themselves as conjoined twins.

People who move back and forth frequently refer to “the other side of the lake”. Anna is one of those, having traded her apartment in Vallila, uptown Helsinki, for a townhouse just inside the walls of medieval Tallinn. Although most days she can and does work from home, Anna looks forward to the opportunity to visit her small factory in Punavuori.

Seven minutes by tram and Anna finds herself in the center of Punavuori’s lumpy streetscape. The district is now living a new revival as its many courtyards, previously closed and divided between housing cooperatives, have been opened up. In the end it was a citizens’ initiative in the neighborhood council that pushed through changes to property law and real estate tax and enabled new uses for the large interior spaces of the blocks. Many of the district’s courtyards have been converted into thriving pockets of activity including communal gardens, micro industrial parks, and restaurants.

In the past fifteen years, Helsinki has managed to capitalize on its deep legacy of craft. The hybrid businesses of neighborhoods like Punavuori are recognized as world-leading for their unique blend of technical excellence and pragmatic whimsy. The city’s bet on making better use of the numerous courtyards has paid off by creating new jobs, sure, but also by knitting the city together through the casual necessity of collaboration. Small business in the district’s many manufacturing hotspots would be difficult propositions on their own, but an immense asset when joined up into a flexible network of collaborators.

The building on Tehtaankatu (Factory Street) attracted Anna because its courtyard is renovated into something of an industrial piazza. The large doors that line the court reveal behind them enough talent and tools to manufacture just about anything. It’s a beautiful and productive chaos.

Today’s mix in the block suits Anna’s business better than it did in the past. The addition of an appliance repair shop has allowed her to quickly pull in additional help by hiring their staff during downtimes. This diversity makes sense for her business, and also helps the neighborhood feel more knitted together. The ma  who operates the adjacent shop, comes out to offer a friendly “mooooooi” as Anna watches the front of her bicycle factory slowly fold into the ceiling.

“What do you have for me today?”

“The coating I mentioned yesterday is behaving better. Nothing sticks to it!”

“When you can figure out how to apply that to carbon fibre we have a mountain bike waiting to happen.”

That a nanochemist and a cycling entrepreneur would have anything to chit chat about at the start of the day, let alone collaborate on, was the gamble that the cities of Helsinki and Tallinn took when they adopted the Joined, Overlapping, & Dense strategy. By encouraging a diversity of endeavors to flourish in proximity to each other, by making this legible and by creating new incentives to encourage collaboration between business, individuals, and the public sector, this strategy continues to pay dividends.  The “lake”, née Gulf of Finland, is now a go-to node in global innovation conversations, attracting clients from all over the world who desire the best of bespoke products.

Fifteen years ago it would have been almost unthinkable to find scientific research companies, factories, coffee shops and a school all in the same neighborhood, but now this kind of diversity is what allows Helsinki/Tallinn to punch above its weight.

Walking from the courtyard into the depth of her shop, Anna passes by assembly bays of differing levels of messiness containing bicycles at various states of completion. As the lights dance to life, she looks across the low tables of accessories and other wares that occupy the retail half of her shop, and out through the windows to spot the first people of the morning already on a stroll.

Despite a lucrative offer to move her family and the business to Rio de Janeiro, Anna stays because for her Helsinki/Tallinn is a city of happiness. It’s a place where small gestures matter, where connections are made easily, and where the streets are diverse and active. This is a place where one may feel part of the rushing flows of information, goods, and opinion – but still have time to enjoy a cup of tea and a bit of chatter with a friendly neighbor.

In the summer of 2008 I shared a brief residency at PROGRAM initiative for art + architecture in Berlin with the LA-based artists Katie Herzog. Katie is a painter but works in multiple media, including public librarianship. Also, she’s my cousin; but I don’t think that’s part of her art practice.

Our project in Berlin was a meditation on two unlikely concepts: Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon prison design and the art of Feng Shui. Although they may seem to be wildly divergent ideas, they are connected by a thread of geomancy. By combining the practice of Feng Shui with the spatial logic of the Panopticon we found unlikely allies. These opposites share a deep commitment to the corrective, rehabilitative, or restorative capacity of geometry itself.

But could they be rectified into a single thing? Could one single object satisfy Feng Shui’s rules for avoiding evil and Bentham’s attempt to eliminate it?

As you might suspect, the answer was elusive. We consulted a coterie of Feng Shui specialists from Berlin to New Zealand but each conversation ended in inspired gridlock. Not to be deterred, the outcome of this collaboration was a mirrored prototype panopticon. Using Bentham’s original drawings and sheets of adhesive mirror, we built a small scale structure that gobbles up the geometry of the world around it and reflects back a carefully shattered view. It’s the rhetorical product of 18th century and ancient wisdoms combined, but the physical progeny of a disco ball. The Feng Shui Panopticon is incapable of dispensing with evil, but equally unable to prevent joy.

Katie has since been working on a book of art and essays around this theme which is due out later this year. But in the meantime, if you’re in LA you can stop by the Cirrus Gallery to see the model that we produced while in Berlin. It’s on display as part of the Once Emerging, Now Emerging group show that is up till May 5, 2012.

Somewhere in a dusty book there is likely an agreed upon point at which an ex-patriot makes the graceful transition to being, simply, a patriot minus the paperwork. I’m not there yet, but after three years living in Finland I begin to wonder about such distinctions. Not that I was ever an ex-patriot anyways. Perhaps an also patriot.

March, 2011

The third anniversary of my arrival here has been on my mind for a week or two now thanks to a stalwart reminder in my calendar. Trusty, that. In the modern world we never forget dates, even the ones that are probably best left to the leaves of discarded calendars. In this time I’ve reaffirmed my own particular interest in noting such events on a yearly basis. No need to take a personal holiday or anything, but it is nice to have a nudge to reflect on the previous 365 days in a way that is free of Hallmark.

October, 2011

The story of my third year in Finland was largely a domestic one. In both senses of the word I spent more time here, in my apartment and in the country.

Living alone in the center of town I am struck by how quite Helsinki can be even on an average work day—how excruciatingly quiet, and how marvelously quiet. It has taken me until now to enjoy it, but I am grateful that I can appreciate the nothingness without needing it or becoming addicted to it.

I have met people who claim that even Helsinki is too loud for them and I wonder where such delicate creatures will ever be happy. After visiting a cabin in Lapland I do have a deeper appreciation for the addicting ring in your ear of nothingness, but for me this remains more of a salve than a solution.

While I spent more time than usual at home it was not always my home. I also enjoyed many visits to the gracious households and neighborhoods of friends around town. Especially Dan and Celia, whose move to Helsinki was during this period under consideration, and Justin, who despite living elsewhere occasionally shows up for a week or two and makes a go of ‘apartment’ living when he’s here.

My third year has been more about cooking too. Lohikeitto, pastas, cakes, and giant piles of roasted vegetables were most common. The most successful venture was probably a jar of cocktail cherries made at the tail end of summer and which I have been enjoying since. The bump in cooking has been less about food and more about being OK with being home. Being at home. And testing out the arch-Finnish trait/habit of being alone.

July, 2011

It was also pragmatic, as I spent the first half of 2011 engrossed in writing a book with my colleagues Marco and Justin. That mean’t a lot of time cooking so as to remove for myself the temptation to socialize instead of writing. The irony of locking myself away to complete a task that is inherently collaborative is not lost on me. 2011 was a year of connected isolation at home and in the city.

April and then September, 2011

In Helsinki it’s easy to feel alone, even when you are not. Here the blocks in the center of town present uniform street walls ranging from 125-150 meters. These almost-square blocks are divided up into a number of buildings around the perimeter and again on the interior. The result feels like a massive, solid chunk of inhabitation that has landed next to the sidewalk. But weasel your way into the block and you are likely to find a circuit of 6, 8, 12 or more courtyards, some of them stunning and many waiting to be wonderful just as soon as the parked cars are removed.

My apartment here on the 5^th floor looks onto one of these courtyards. From my window I can see four housing blocks each with about five floors and in total perhaps 20-30 units. From what I can tell, two of these units are inhabited regularly. Another two have occasional occupants. Some almost never show signs of life. One set of neighbors across the way have had holiday lights on their balcony since November. And I don’t just mean physically present, I mean on and shining continuously. I noticed that they were home once when they briefly opened the blinds and then shut them again.

March, 2011: the owners are visible once every 5 days or so

So who lives in this block? Apparently not very many people, despite what the apartment nameplates say (they are full). Or perhaps people who do not care much for electricity, with the exception of the absentee holiday revelers.

At times it feels like I’m watching Rear Window but without noticing I’ve accidentally sat on the pause button. Where’s the action? Where’s the life?

In observing this tableau I’ve accidentally derived a basic truth of life in Finland: the thing about those that live here enjoying quiet, silence, and being alone? It’s a coping strategy for a place that has very low effective density even in its not-so-bustling center. It’s like a tall person that is happy about being able to reach things on high shelves. Tall people are good to have around. Fair enough.

February, 2012

The mystery of Where Did Everyone Go? is one that I have yet to crack. On the other hand, the mystery of What Else Is Here? is one that I enjoyed exploring during the past year with trips to Rovaniemi, Saarisalkä, Hamina, Högsåra, Lahti, and Fiskars.

With most of these trips being conducted in the cold months, I’ve gained a few extra shades of white as a kind of chromatic upgrade to my internal palette. Perhaps the light eye strain I’ve been experiencing of late is the feeling of new rods marshaling themselves at the backs of my eyes.

This is probably the sum of my experiences so far: if years one and two were about seeing new things, year three was about seeing old things in new ways.

Since reading Peter Sloterdijk’s Foam City in Log when it was first published in translation and I was doing research for this old thing I’ve been hungry for more Sloterdijk. His massive three volume series Spharen (Spheres) has not been available in English until the first volume Bubbles was published this year by Semiotext(e). Finally!

It’s a book that probably requires a phd to make sense of, but why let that stop you? If you’re OK with letting your eyes temporarily glaze over when you wade through passages like this…

It makes an initial reference to its own appearance as a coherent body among coherent bodies in the real visual space, but this integral being-an-image-body means almost nothing alongside the pre-imaginary, non-eidetic certainties of sensual-emotional dual integrity

… then it can be a rewarding book. Sloterdijk is that special kind of European philosopher who seems to have intimate knowledge of every single text, painting, or other work of art that you’ve never heard of. But he is polite enough to wrap his rather challenging philosophical language around these tangible references. For me this yields a productive resonance. Your mileage may vary.

One of the things that I appreciate about Sloterdijk is that his language dips into refreshingly approachable moments. If one could have a favorite passage from a 600 page book, this would be mine:

72: In the foam, discrete and polyvalent games of reason must develop that learn to live with a shimmering diversity of perspectives, and dispense with the illusion of the one lordly point of view. Most roads do not lead to Rome—that is the situation, European: recognize it.

Below are some other passages I found useful.

20: Copernicus’ heliocentric theory initiated a series of research eruptions into the deserted outer reaches, extending to the inhumanely remote galaxies and the most ghostly components of matter. The cold new breath from outside was sensed early on, and a number of the pioneers of the revolutionary changed knowledge about the position of the earth in space did not conceal their unease in the infinity now imposed on them: thus even Kepler objected to Bruno’s doctrine of the endless universe with the words that “this very cogitation carries with it I don’t know what secret, hidden horror; indeed, one finds oneself wandering in this immensity, to which are denied limits and center and therefore all determinate places.”

23: Citizens of the Modern Age inevitably found themselves in a new situation that not only shattered the illusion of their home’s central position in space, but also deprived them of the comforting notion that the earth is enclosed by spherical forms like warming heavenly mantles. Since then, modern people have had to learn how one goes about existing as a core without a shell; Pascal’s pious and observant statement “the eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread” formulates the intimate confession of an epoch.

25: What makes the Modern Age special is that after the turn to the Copernican world, the sky as an immune system was suddenly useless. Modernity is characterized by the technical production of its immunities and the increasing removal of its safety structures from the traditional theological and cosmological narratives.

28: The sphere is the interior, disclosed, shared realm inhabited by humans—in so far as they succeed in becoming humans. Because living always means building spheres, both on a small and a large scale, humans are the beings that establish globes and look out to horizons.

On where ideas come from.

31: Whatever enters the imagination is not supposed to come from anywhere except somewhere over there, from without, from an open field that is not necessarily a yonder realm. People no longer want to receive their inspired ideas from some embarrassing heavens; they are supposed to come from a no man’s land of ownerless, precise thoughts.

Reconsidering the basis of Platonic forms.

42: Isolated points are only possible in the homogenized space of geometry and intercourse; true spirit, however, is by definition spirit in and in relation to spirit, and true soul is by definition soul in and in relation to soul.  … if one thinks in substances, the attributes arrive later, just as blackness is added to the horse and redness to the rose. In the intimate sharing of subjectivity by a pair inhabiting a spiritual space open for both, second and first only appear together.

Introducing the notion of ‘air conditioning’.

46: As spheres are the original product of human coexistence, however… these atmospheric-symbolic places for humans are dependent on constant renewal. Spheres are air conditioning systems in whose construction and calibration, for those living in real coexistence, it is out of the question not to participate.

71: Global markets and media have ignited an acute world war of ways of life and informational commodities. When everything has become the center, there is no longer any valid center; when everything is transmitting, the allegedly central transmitter is lost in the tangle of messages… The guiding morphological principle of the polyspheric world we inhabit is no longer the orb, bur rather foam.

84: The revolution of modern psychology does not stop at explaining that all humans live constructivistically, and that every one of them practices the profession of the wild interior designer, continually working on their accommodation in imaginary, sonorous, semiotic, ritual and technical shells.

Quoting Ficino on love.

213: Ficino remarks that humans normally do well what they do often—except in amorous matters, for “we all love constantly in some way, but almost all of us love only badly; and the more we love, the worse we love.”

220: The early Modern Age used magical terminology to communicate about the human being who will make it his business to perform acts hitherto believed impossible. What the sixteenth century… called the magus was the encyclopedically sensitive, polyvalently cosmopolitan human who learned how to cooperate attentively and artfully with the discrete interdependencies between the things populating a highly communicative universe.

Much of the book is devoted to carefully and intricately stepping through the logical consequences of imagery and stories from the earlier eras.

308: When the legendary Saint Christopher carries the baby Jesus across the water while the infant holds the entire globe in the palm of his hand, an equally paradoxical question is raised: where is Saint Christopher to place his feet while carrying the boy, when the river he is wading through is undoubtedly part of the world held by the child riding on his shoulders?

386: If individuals do not succeed in augmenting and stabilizing themselves in successfully practiced loneliness techniques—artistic exercises and written soliloquies, for example—they are predestined to be absorbed by totalitarian collectives.

415: The successful revolution is the transition to the total other that still manages to follow on from the good old days.

Describing the role of rituals, spirits, and other invisibles in human domesticity.

422: Living in house-like containers always has a dual character: it means both the coexistence of humans with humans and the community of humans with their invisible companions. It has, in a sense, always been the household spirits that have given an inhabited building dignity and meaning.

Not Sloterdijk, but Warhol in extended quotation.

462: The acquisition of my tape recorder really finished whatever emotional life I might have had, but I was glad to see it go. Nothing was ever a problem again, because a problem just meant a good tape, and when a problem transforms itself into a good tape it’s not a problem anymore. An interesting problem was an interesting tale. Everybody knew that…

473: The idiot is an angel without a message

480: Since written culture successfully asserted its law, being a subject has primarily meant this: being able, initially and usually, to resist the images, texts, speeches and musics one encounters…

Offering a possible explanation for the toppling of art by reality television and other cultural forms.

488: Siren music rests on the possibility of being one step ahead of the subject in the expression of its desire. Perhaps such an ability to be ahead is the anthropological reason for the interest of non-artists in artists, which reached its zenith in modern societies and passed it in postmodern ones.

490: Did Homer already know that bonds can only be broken by more bonds? Was it already clear to him that culture in general, and music in particular, is essentially nothing other than a division of labor in bewitching?

Taking oral fixation to a new level.

523: In order to be adequately complete human beings, we must learn at which tables we are the eaters and at which we become the eaten. The tables at which we eat are called dining tables; those at which we are eaten are called altars.

On why he thinks the Love Parades of the 1990s were cool.

527: Pop music has overtaken religious communions—Christian ones—on the archaic wing by outdoing the chances of absorption found at altars with the offer to join psychoacoustic abdominal cavities and follow passing audio gods.

And proving that he is not above humor.

90: An intellect that spends its energy on worthy objects usually prefers the sharp to the sweet; one does not offer candy to heroes.

216: As shown by the example of the husband-drinking…

447: For his entire life, the navel owner looks past the memorial at the center of his body, like someone who walks past an equestrian monument every day without ever wondering whom it represents.

One of my pastimes is to consider impossible inventions. Mentally walking through the design, construction, and use of these inventions is a way to unpick a stuck brain.

I’ve annoyed many a coworker with the cliché question of whether they would choose to have a time machine or a cloning machine. Personally I’d take the time machine. Unless it’s of the Primer units. Now that China has banned time travel and scientists in Hong Kong have cemented this ban with scientific proof that time travel is impossible, a new folly is required.

Of late the subject has been magnetism. Let’s purposefully misunderstand science and imagine that you can reach into a magnet and take out the power to attract one class of object to another. Take that power and inject it into something—anything—and see how that works out for you. It’s like using the force, except less convenient. Glass of water out of reach and you want to grab it? Find another cup and magnetically attract the water glass over to you.

The problem is, in the world of magnetism opposites attract. If you separate the concept of magnetism from the pesky science that makes it work you have the burden of finding the negative with which to attract the positive.

So the question is, what’s the opposite of a sandwich?

Answers have included miso soup, empanadas, salad, hair gell, eye glasses, dancing, and “a sandwich painted in antimatter”. What I like about this question is that to produce an answer you must first choose an angle. If soup is the opposite of a sandwich, this implies that essential sandwichness is being solid. Hot chocolate might imply that a sandwich is solid and savory, therefore the opposite should be liquid and sweet. Answering “eye glasses”, on the other hand, implies that essential sandwichness is more basic and primarily about being edible, whereas glasses scarcely are. A sandwich painted in anti matter is another thing altogether: how would you make it? What would it look like? What would happen if the sandwich and the anti-sandwich collided?

You can take the boy out of the startup, but apparently not the startup out of the boy. If I weren’t super fulfilled by what I’m working on here in Helsinki I might be exploring something along these lines right now:

On the ground floor of my apartment building is a small shop that just went out of business. It used to sell snowboard clothes but during two years of residence I never spotted a single customer inside. Lacking a great cafe in my neighborhood, I would love the next person thinking about hanging their shingle to have a way to get an idea of what the market might be interested in.

What dreams does our neighborhood have for the erstwhile snowboard shop?

Now that we have a tiki bar down the street, surely there’s something else that would compliment the existing offerings on Uudenmaankatu, or the broader neighborhood of Punavuori. The thing is, the shops and services in urban centers have very weak feedback systems. Without the support and coffers of a syndicate that is able to conduct market research, an aspiring shopkeep has few tools to use other than subjective asking around. Mostly they test their hypothesis on the mean streets the old fashioned way: scraping together some cash and giving it a go.

A website called Kickstarter has grown into a community that made 386,373 investments in 2010 for a total of $27,638,318 dollars committed to capitalize projects ranging from iphone accessories to epic dance films. One thing I like about Kickstarter is that it turns entrepreneurship into a tool rather than letting it be the endgame. It’s not about building an enterprise, but using entrepreneurship to manifest an interest that is shared by creator and investor/customers. It turned the often-brutal realm of entrepreneurship into a more supportive, community oriented way to manifest new bits of reality. This is what community-scale rapid prototyping looks like.

From the buyer’s perspective Kickstarter is a marketplace of freshness, packaging specific deliverables with an extended aura of pay as you go DIYness. It allows customers to buy something that doesn’t exist yet—to vote on the specific future they want to live in, one product at a time. This brilliantly taps into the market trends that seem to be reacting to globalization by craving the unique, the limited, and the local.

But from the producers’ side Kickstarter is something much different: it’s  a demand aggregator that de-risks entrepreneurship. By allowing would-be entrepreneurs to collect commitments, they are able to look before they leap, as it were. Thereby expanding the pool of possible entrepreneurs to include individuals and groups who may never make the leap without some reassurance.

So here’s my proposition: what would happen if you took the Kickstarter strategy and applied it to the city. How could we de-risk new shops, restaurants, cafes, services, institutions, and even government outposts by aggregating commitment in advance of capital investment?

One of Helsinki’s many under-utilized spatial assets.

What would the Kickstarter of real estate look like and how might a similar demand-aggregator offer a productive counterpart to the dreaded “not in my back yard” syndrome? Is there a “please in my backyard” platform that could act as a spatial happiness engine, better empowering individuals to inflect their own corner of the city to meet their personal desires?

Could a platform such as this translate land use and zoning decisions into terms that are more personable, assessable, and ultimately arguable? Would that make the city more or less democratic?

Using a database of vacant real estate in a given city and a platform for collecting propositions or pitches, we allow entrepreneurs a marketplace of ideas that is able to match their own predilections and interests with “please in my back yard” demand. Individuals vote on the future land use and spatial assets that they want to see in their own city and their own backyard. If that voting is done with the wallet, similar to Kickstarter, would it be enough to usefully bootstrap entrepreneurs?

In practical terms this might translate into giftcards or other pay-in-advance schemes which would then be converted into a debit account if a project was funded and realized. There are a lot of very risky “ifs” in that statement, but let’s just see if this pencils out. (Using a hodgepodge of unverified sources, of course):

In 2004 Starbucks sold 21,000,000 gift cards totaling $312,000,000. That same year they had 8,569 stores globally. Assuming that the gift cards were available in all locations, and purchasing was distributed evenly, that’s a total of $36,410 spent on gift cards per store. If we divide it evenly across the 6,132 US-based locations it yields just over $50k per store. Not too shabby.

That might be just enough to change the mind of the future antique dealer who’s eager to move in downstairs.

One year ago.

I was fooled by the warm light, really. Expecting Istanbul to be warm in March was rather shortsighted of me.

It’s hard to imagine a place with a color palette such as Istanbul’s ever being cold, but even Hannibal’s elephants made it to the Alps.

Istanbul was cooler than expected, but every bit as bountiful.

It’s is a city of stacks and piles. Domes, buildings, chestnuts. Histories. Piles and promise.

For LLL.

Two years ago today I moved to Helsinki. Having missed the anniversary last time, I’ve gone out of my way to remember the date this year. I try to compare the duration of my residency to grad school or to the time BB,CS,LB,TE and I spent on DeepLeap. Has this felt half as long as grad school? Twice as long as that time in Austin? Time is a fickle shade.

Some reflections on the city of Helsinki and my life in and around it.

April 2, 2010

Even after two years, Helsinki is still largely inscrutable. In particular, the local habit for covering ground floor windows in shops and various commercial spaces with posters confuses me. You find this walking around the outer fringes of Kamppi or the fuzzy edges of Punavuori. What happens in these protected spaces? In a place with little light and few people, why retreat even more? Opacity is special here in a way I have yet to unlock.

May 7, 2010

My favorite breakfast of 2010 was an ad-hoc assortment of unexpected delights, consumed on a day when the air was crisp with promise. Finland can be amazing at breakfast time. Milk that comes in beer bottles, pea tendrils on bread, a pillow of cheese, and milk chocolate? See also: special opacity. Thanks to Jenna and Anni for this.

June 9, 2010

May and June were a single day. Even looking at (lots of) photos now I have difficulty remembering that period of time in any plural unit. Largely because I was so consumed by the studios that I was organizing with the rest of the team at work. This is a snapshot from one of those studios, on a day when we visited the Aalto house to have a small team dinner. Alberto and I lingered in front of the house taking pictures as everyone else filed inside and I snapped this just as Emily popped her head out to look for Alberto. The simple gesture of looking again is rendered so touchingly here by Emily that this photo is very special to me. These two people had met three days before and yet already they and their collaborators shared a unique amity. It makes me happy to think that our project created moments like this. In its many quiet pockets—the forecourt of a confident house, say—Helsinki can be a city of remarkable hospitality.

July 10, 2010

Petri’s excitement about the fire was only multiplied when I introduced the special delight of smores (with digestive biscuits instead of graham crackers) to our picnic.

August 26, 2010

A tour of the plants at the botanical gardens prophetically ended here. It had been a hectic month of small pieces loosely joined. I was ferrying between desks in Kallio, Ruoholahti, and Punavuori. Working late hours. Working weekends. Pulling things together.

September 3, 2010

This was minutes after we wrapped the event that I moved to Helsinki to put together. Well before this image was taken, even before the event started, I knew that the idea of my moving to Helsinki to produce an event was a conceit. I’m tempted to believe that the reason Marco is smiling because he knew this all along. I was exhausted but proud and all I remember of the dinner that followed this photo is that it was good.

October 17, 2010

Douglas came to visit and we took day trips to Turku and Tallinn, both of which are parallel Helsinkis to a non-native. Geography is surprisingly complicit with the rules of mathematics: (T+T)/2 = H? Fall had settled into the trees by then and the shadows were starting to run long.

November 11, 2010

When a tiny tear of sky rips open during fall it’s a special thing. This morning I was headed to Tel Aviv where the temperature was 20 degrees warmer and the sky 120 degrees around the color wheel.

December 7, 2010

Walking through Plague Park rarely saves any time but it’s hard to ignore during fall, spring, and winter when it’s liable to be beautiful. In summer it smells like a toilet, because it is a toilet. Apparently a significant percentage of Helsinki is not potty trained.

January 25, 2011

Weekend mornings I make a pot of coffee and stretch bits of work out across my long desk. When the sun is low like this is reminds me of Cambridge and the mornings I spent there dull-eyed and unshaven, sipping coffee and listening to Concord avenue wake up. From my apartment in the center of Helsinki I rarely hear any traffic. The soundtrack to this photo is the heavy rumble of the #3 tram lumbering by. To an American that’s what Europe sounds like. Trams.

February 27, 2011

Cities each have their own best scale. San Francisco congeals at the scale of the neighborhood. Manhattan is a place of heroic battles fought within each plot’s zoning envelope. Helsinki is composed street by street.

No one here seems to be able to identify the neighborhoods reliably, and while many of the buildings are interesting few are captivating. Streets here, on the other hand, are artful. Humans are small in a city whose scale is the street. Maybe this is why doorways are often diminutive in Helsinki.

First off: I’ve re-jigged this site a little so you might need to update your RSS feeds and such. Sorry about that, but now everything should work much more smoothly.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the practice of architecture and trying to make sense of it in relation to the other professions which together might be called the “built environment practices” including the usual engineers, contractors and consultants of various kinds as well as developers, bankers, politicians, and others who have a more distant—but no less important—impact on the built environment.

Inspired by my previous experience steeping in the startup culture of Silicon valley, I’m trying to dig into the difficulties of running an office, especially small offices, and how these difficulties might be thought of as symptoms of a misformulated profession. Or more simply: how can we hack architectural practice to make it more effective?

This is part of the puzzle:

The difference between these graphs can be read either of two ways. On the one hand it’s depressing. The size of the design fee for a significant project, relative to the income of a small office, is often substantial. This puts the office at risk should the project be stalled or canceled, and therefore increases the likelihood said office over-extends itself to satisfy their big client.

When an office’s portfolio is dominated by one client the dynamics of satisfaction begin to change. Because of the importance of the dominant client, their needs begin to eclipse the needs of others, including the development of new clients. Losing the client can mean losing the office, so what else can be done?

The diversity of an office’s portfolio is useful as a hedge against the risk of losing any particular client, but it’s also a useful way to maintain a healthy understanding of the minimum viable product (MVP) which then, in a self-reinforcing feedback loop flowing the opposite direction, increases the office’s availability for self-initiated research and business development.

MVP is a kind of strategic laziness: it’s a reminder to be focused and only develop those threads or ideas that are relevant at the moment. If laziness is choosing not to work, MVP is about choosing when and where to work.

On the other hand, the size of the design fee relative to the overall project makes half of an excellent argument about the leverage of design and its role as a multiplier that can, in the best cases, deliver value beyond its cost. This would be a reformulation from design as spending to design as an investment. Unfortunately the missing half is hard to come by: evidence of the returns. The shining example of Bilbao is often trotted out, and someone somewhere has done real calculations on how much income has been generated by the rebirth of the town (€168 million euros in 2001 alone, according to Forbes).

But this argument is not very useful when made on a case by case basis. It’s especially useless for young offices that have none of the reputation or cache that Gehry does. The more perceived value accumulates on behalf of starchitects, the more it is drained from the profession at large.

My question is how the practice might begin to develop and keep track of small indicators. How much does a renovation increase the resale value of a home, for instance? And by what percentage does a good renovation increase it over a less good renovation? How do we define “good” in a way that non-architects can understand?

How do we measure value in financial and social terms? There’s triple bottom line accounting, which works within the confines of a firm’s balance sheet, but how do we think about the perception of value from the outside? How do we find better ways to see and understand the value of architecture and spending in the built environment in general?

If I had interns they would be reading about contingent valuation and searching for ways to instrumentalize this branch of economics within the context of the built environment. But since I don’t have any interns, I will leave you with this excerpt from a paper subtitled “How to stop worrying and learn to love economics” (PDF link) which makes mention of the difficult task of valuing the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Can the impact ever be valued in an exact way? No, but it can be rigorous. And what’s instructive about this small vignette is the use of contingent valuation to assess the indirect perceptions of value which compliments more familiar ways to value the catastrophe directly.

The method has also been subjected to rigorous scrutiny, one of its biggest tests being its use to estimate the environmental damage caused by the supertanker Exxon Valdez, which ran aground in March 1989 off Alaska. This led to careful scrutiny in the profession, given the enormous interests and large sums of money involved. The United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) hired two Nobel prize-winning economic theorists – Kenneth Arrow and Robert Solow – to chair a panel to assess the methods. The report (Arrow et al 1993) concludes “that contingent valuation (CV) studies can produce estimates reliable enough to be the starting point of a judicial process of damage assessment, including lost passive-use values”. This last term refers precisely to the non- use values of the environment consisting of existence, option, and bequest benefits – the very same benefits which we have just been discussing in connection with the valuation of art.

This post is an expanded excerpt from a lecture presented at Aalto University Department of Architecture on February 24th, 2011.