The Algorithm that Ate the Street: The Storyboards

Abstract

These eight storyboards were exhibited at the 16th Annual International Conference of the Architectural Humanities Research Association at the University of Dundee, UK. They were designed by Paul Guzzardo and Gustavo Cardon. The tableaus are set in barrios in Buenos Aires, Argentina. They were developed for two Buenos Aires architectural graduate workshops and UNESCO presentations in France, Lithuania and Sweden.¹ The storyboards were proposed as an alternative to the desiccated storylines that gag most urban design briefs. They offer a new mythic stew, as “triage way stations” to map a way out of the digital mesh-up we are slapped hard against and as mythic blueprints for a line of firewalls against weaponized data. Despite the fact that digital buckshot is coming at hyper-speed, a conversation about myth and the practice of architecture has been ignored. Myths contain seeds of new stories, stories that incrementally increase intelligence.²

Keywords:

• mythic blueprints
• data glut
• Piranesi’s Imaginary Prisons
• triage way stations
• a space of appearance
• the grave-merry man
• Digital Street Lab in the Box
• place-making clichés

Notes

1. Buenos Aires workshops: 2018: The Digital Street Lab in the Box (DSLB), Universidad Nacional de La Matanza (UNLaM), August-September, 2018; and 2019: The Digital Street Lab in the Box (DSLB), Facultad de Arquitectura, Diseño y Urbanismo (FADU-UBA), March-April, 2019. The Buenos Aires workshops were led by Rodrigo Martin Iglesias, Paul Guzzardo and Gustavo Cardon. The participating instructors included Cristina Voto, Marcelo Robles, Rocío Agra, Leandro Dalle, Javier Albornoz, Sergio Fagilde, Pilar Dongarrá, Sebastián Fernández, Fermín Labaqui, Andrea Mech and Juan Moreno. UNESCO presentations: UNESCO MIL Section, Paris, France, June 3rd, 2019; MIL Citizens: Informed, Engaged, Empowered, Gothenburg, Sweden, September 25th, 2019; and Media and Information Literate Cities, Kaunas, Lithuania, October 24th, 2018.

2. Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World (London: Macmillan, 1997).

3. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1957); and Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003).

4. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr, “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph,” The Atlantic 3, no. 20 (1859): 748.

5. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985), 52–3.

6. Patrick Geddes, “Civics: As Applied Sociology” (paper presented at The Sociological Society in the School of Economics and Political Science, University of London, UK, July 18th, 1904).

7. Ibid.

8. Marshall McLuhan, interview with Frank Kermode on the BBC program MONITOR, 1965.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paul Guzzardo

Paul Guzzardo is an attorney and media activist based in Buenos Aires, Argentina and a Fellow at the Geddes Institute for Urban Research at the University of Dundee, Scotland.

Gustavo Cardon

Gustavo Cardon has an Architectural Practice based in Buenos Aires, Argentina and is an Instructor at the School of Architecture at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, USA.

Rodrigo Martín Iglesias

Rodrigo Martín Iglesias is an Architect and Full Professor and researcher at University of Buenos Aires and National University of La Matanza, Buenos Aires, Argentina.