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Abstract
Architecture is a medium of tolerance. It is a space of negotiation which straddles and accommodates different material and social entities and tensions within urban development. The ongoing techno-material-social paradigm shift that started with the rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s and a growing “experience economy” is changing tolerance in architecture. Under neoliberalism, new technological developments are shaped by/shaping spatial imaginations and their material manifestations. This article examines the dynamic co-production of technology and society in the nexus between urban mega-developments, variable/hyper-precise tools for design and fabrication, and neoliberalism through the study of the Barclays Center at Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park in Brooklyn, New York. From the Barclays Center study we argue that to effectively respond to the changing real estate conditions, architecture must propose different/variable/multiple value propositions through how it engages with environmentality, governance, and the performance metrics of digital technologies in order to provide a medium of tolerance today.
Notes
Notes
1 Anna Klingmann, Brandscapes: Architecture in the Experience Economy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 1.
2 Ibid., 1–2.
3 Ed Finn, What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 16; Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 31.
4 Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 260–61; David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 2–4; Neoliberalism, as we use it here and throughout, describes a capitalist system of political economy based in a kind of laissez-faire competitive consumerism that engenders a form subjectivity as well as a self-aware process of subjectivization connected to global technological and social changes during the 1970s and the financial deregulation, privatization and tax policies of the 1980s.
5 Reinhold Martin, “Points of Departure: Notes Toward a Reversible History of Architectural Visualization,” in The Active Image: Architecture and Engineering in the Age of Modeling, ed. Sabine Ammon and Remei Capdevila-Werning (New York: Springer, 2017), 6–8.
6 Ibid., 4–5.
7 Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 186.
8 Ibid., 259–60. In keeping with the conception of freedom of choice as a constitutive element of neoliberalism, while political, economic or other environments shape the framework and protocols in which subjectivization takes place, they do not determine particular subjects or epistemic stances, but instead structure the material and relational conditions of subjectivization and the legitimation of subjectivity such that developmental tendencies emerge.
9 Ibid.
10 Joseph Berger, “Impact of Atlantic Yards, for Good or Ill, Is already Felt,” New York Times April 16, 2012.
11 Ibid.
12 Lev Manovich, “Generation Flash” (2002), available online: http://www.manovich.net/DOCS/generation_flash.doc.50.
13 David Harvey, “Neoliberalism as Creative Destruction,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 610 (2007): 23.
14 Manuel Shvartzberg, “Foucault’s ‘Environmental’ Power: Architecture and Neoliberal Subjectivization,” in The Architect as Worker: Immaterial Labor, The Creative Class, and the Politics of Design, ed. Peggy Deamer (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), 191.
15 Ibid.
16 Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Vintage, 2008), 196–97.
17 Rahman Azari, Naomi Javanifard, Debra Markert, Kristen Strobel and Jason Yap, Modular Prefabricated Construction: Constraints and Opportunities (Seattle: University of Washington, 2013), 57, available online: http://cm.be.washington.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/pub_modprefab_-Skanska_08082013_web.pdf.
18 Tom F. Peters, “Technological Thought and Theory, A Culture of Construction,” in Proceedings of the 1st International Congress on Construction History, ETSAM, Madrid, January 20–24, 2003, ed. S. Huerta (Madrid: I. Juan de Herrera), 1630.
19 Sabine Ammon, “Epilogue: The Rise of Imagery in the Age of Modeling” in The Active Image: Architecture and Engineering in the Age of Modeling, ed. Sabine Ammon and Remei Capdevila-Werning (New York: Springer, 2017), 305.
20 Edward Soja, Thirdspace (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1996), 57.
21 Umberto Eco, The Open Work (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 69.
22 Daniel Cardoso Llach, Builders of the Vision: Software and the Imagination of Design (New York: Routledge, 2015), 23.
23 Dermott McMeel, “Material Control: Reflections on the Social and Material Practices of Digital Fabrication,” Design Philosophy Papers 15, no. 2 (2017): 108. doi:10.1080/14487136.2017.1375739.
24 Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 260–61; Mario Carpo, The Second Digital Turn: Design Beyond Intelligence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 153–59.
25 German Aparicio, “Data-Insight-Driven Project Delivery: Approach to Accelerated Project Delivery Using Data Analytics, Data Mining, and Data Visualization,” in Proceedings of the 37th Annual Conference of the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA), Cambridge, MA, November 2–4, 2017, 104.
26 New York State Urban Development Corporation, Atlantic Yards Land Use Improvement and Civic Project Modified General Project Plan, New York, December 8, 2006 (accessed November 28, 2018), available online: https://cdn.esd.ny.gov/subsidiaries_projects/ayp/AtlanticYards/AdditionalResources/AYP_2006_GPP.pdf, 4.
27 Philip Nobel, “Make it Whole: On Valuing Means and Ends in the Practices of SHoP,” in The Changing Shape of Practice: Integrating Research and Design in Architecture, ed. Michael U. Hensel and Fredrik Nilsson (New York: Routledge, 2016), 77–79.
28 Ibid., 77.
29 Andrew Rice, “From Barclays Center to Modular High Rises, SHoP Architects is Changing the Way We Build Buildings,” Fast Company, February 10, 2014 (accessed November 26, 2018), available online: https://www.fastcompany.com/3025601/shop-architects-the-new-skyline, 114–132.
30 Nobel, “Make it Whole,” 78.
31 Charles V. Bagli, “At Atlantic Yards, Ready to Test Plans for Prefab Tower,” New York Times November 27, 2012 (accessed November 27, 2018), available online: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/28/nyregion/groundbreaking-soon-at-atlantic-yards-on-prefabricated-tower.html?rref=collection%2Ftimestopic%2FAtlantic%20Yards%20(Brooklyn); Carpo, Second Digital Turn, 77–78.
32 Reinhold Martin, “Financial Imaginaries – Toward a Philosophy of the City,” Pavilion, January 13, 2015 (accessed August 10, 2016), available online: http://pavilionmagazine.org/reinhold-martin-financial-imaginaries-toward-a-philosophy-of-the-city/.
33 Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “On Software, or the Persistence of Visual Knowledge,” Grey Room 39, no. 18 (Winter, 2005): 47. doi:10.1162/1526381043320741; Alexander Galloway, The Interface Effect (Malden, MA: Polity, 2012), 66–68.
34 Manuel Kretzer, “The Ever-Changing Nature of Materiality and the Meaning of Materials in Architecture and Construction,” in Information Material: Smart Materials for Adaptive Architecture (Cham: Springer, 2017), 42–44.
35 Reinhold Martin, “Real Estate Agency,” in The Art of Inequality: Architecture, Housing, and Real Estate, ed. Reinhold Martin, Jacob Moore and Susanne Schindler (New York: The Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, 2015), 97–104.
36 N. R. Kleinfield, “Opponents of Atlantic Yards are Exhausted by Long, Losing Battle,” New York Times November 25, 2012 (accessed November 26, 2018), available online: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/26/nyregion/exhausted-from-an-angry-and-losing-battle-against-barclays-center.html?rref=collection%2Ftimestopic%2FAtlantic%20Yards%20(Brooklyn).
37 Reinhold Martin, Utopia’s Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism Again (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 145–46.
38 Kretzer, “Ever-Changing Nature of Materiality,” 26–28.
39 Ibid., 30.
40 Friedrich Kittler, “Preface to Gramophone, Film, Typewriter,” in Literature, Media, Information Systems: Friedrich A. Kittler Essays, ed. John Johnston (Amsterdam: Overseas Publishers Association, 1997), 30.
41 Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1961), 116–18.
42 David Benjamin, “Beyond Efficiency,” Digital Workflows in Architecture: Designing Design, Designing Assembly, Designing Industry, ed. Scott Marble (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2012), 14–16.
43 Ajla Aksamija and Mir Ali, “Information Technology and Architectural Practice: Knowledge Modeling Approach to BIM,” in Proceedings of AIA IL Conference: Breaking New Ground, Moline, IL, November 7–8, 2008, 9; Carpo, Second Digital Turn, 24–27.
44 Joann Gonchar, “Barclays Center,” Architectural Record, December 16, 2012, available online: https://www.architecturalrecord.com/articles/7549-barclays-center.
45 Stephen Wolfram, “How Do Simple Programs Behave?,” in Architectural Design 76, no. 4 [Programming Cultures: Art and Architecture in the Age of Software] (2006): 35.
46 Keller Easterling, Medium Design (Moscow: Strelka, 2018), 3.
47 General Counsel of the American Institute of Architects, 2017 Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct, E.S.1.5 (Washington, DC: American Institute of Architects, 2017), 1.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Dane Clark
Dane Clark is an architect, educator and fabricator living in Boston, Massachusetts. He teaches at the Boston Architectural College and has recently taught at Roger Williams University. He is currently working for Payette designing university laboratory buildings and conducting research on the role of computational and fabrication tools in architectural production and the construction of meaning in the built environment. Clark attended the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) on a graduate fellowship for his Master of Architecture. While at RISD, he was awarded a 2014 Graduate Studies Grant to commence his thesis work through research in Detroit, studying the relationship between property ownership structures and capital in cities with ambitious owners and depressed economies. Clark obtained his Bachelor of Science in Architecture at the University Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning.
Aaron Tobey
Aaron Tobey is a Ph.D. student at Yale University studying architectural history and theory. He is currently conducting research on the relationship between digital tools, forms of representation and political agency. He attended the Rhode Island School of Design on a graduate fellowship for his Master of Architecture, where he was awarded a 2015 Graduate Studies Grant to continue his thesis work through field research aboard the container ship ZIM San Francisco, and the 2016 Alumni Travel Award to study the border between Israel and Palestine. Tobey obtained his Bachelor of Science in Architecture at the University of Cincinnati during which time he also attended the École Spéciale d’Architecture in Paris. His academic work has explored the effects of using global trade mechanisms, new media and perception on architectural space as a tool to affect social change.
