the culture of destruction

What are characteristics of these destroyed/rebuilt cities? Cities that have suffered a disaster, period of persecution, or an event of extreme devastation tend to be rich in a culture of music and art - if not before their destruction, this culture develops from the wreckage of their broken buildings.

In Dresden, Richard Peter published a photo book called Dresden - eine Kamera Klagt an (Dresden - a camera accuses). It is classified as one of Dresden's Dances of Death.


a photograph in Dresden - eine Kamera Klagt an by Richard Peter. image courtesy of www.praktica-collector.de.

Dresden's art, particularly of those who were alive during the city's bombing, has a stoic aura about it. War and the static economy remain in the minds of the artists.


artwork found on the wall of a club in Dresden, according to the band MK9. image courtesy of www.mk9.org.

Dresden was known for its porcelain China and its porcelain dolls. The craft carried past the war.


Dresden dolls. image courtesy treadywaygallery.com.

Much Dresden painting includes faceless figures interacting with light, darkness, and color rather than solid objects. Perhaps there is little faith in that which is physical.

Alles, was das Herz begehrt..." ("All that the heart desires...") by Eva-Maria Korsmeier. courtesy of dresden-art.de.


"Zwei Menschen im Licht und Shatten" ("Two persons in Light and Shadow") by Jutta Damme. courtesy of dresden-art.de.



In comparison to Dresden art, the art of Hiroshima also portrays figures in some sort of physically boundless environment, but in more detail outlines the gruesome physical details of the atomic effect on the human body.

"Melting Hand" by Takakura Nobuko.













"Charred Child" by Yamashita Masato.









"Hiroshima Horse" by Shimada Tsuruhiko.













"The Last Drink" by Ono Kiaki.









the above four images are all courtesy of art-for-a-change.com.



"Monument to the Victims of Hiroshima" by Arto Tchakmaktchian. image courtesy www.naregatsi.org.

This artwork is highly descriptive, unlike the mostly ambiguous Dresden art. Hiroshima's disaster seemed to be focused on the ability of the nuclear bomb to do things to the human body that were never expected.

The art of San Francisco surrounding the earthquake of 1906 focuses on the large scale of the destruction rather than the human scale; the levelling (from shaking and burning) of an entire city.


"San Francisco Fire, 1906" by Walter A. Coulter. image courtesy the California Dept. of Conservation.


(Some of the) stills from a film (called "1906," by Jeremy Blake) exploring the famous Winchester Mansion as affected by the 1906 earthquake. Image courtesy fiegencontemporary.com.


As we study New Orleans' struggle to (re)establish its identity, my next post will explore the culture of destruction as it exists in New Orleans.

sources:
www.dresden-art.com
"Dis/Continuities in Dresden's Dances of Death" by Christiane Hertel. The Art Bulletin.
Art Academy, Dresden. www.art-academy-gmbh.com/
Art-For-A-Change: the Nagasaki nightmare.
Feigen Contemporary.

recovery:Dresden

The last case study of a revived city is a study of Dresden. Dresden had a much longer and arduous recovery from being nearly leveled by World War II than did Hiroshima or San Francisco. It is believed that the firebombing of Dresden caused more than 10,000 deaths in one night. Bombing Dresden was part of a strategic effort on the part of the Allies to confront Germany from its eastern, Soviet front.


Dresden shortly after its bombing. image courtesy Wikipedia.com.

It had been a beautiful tourist destination for many Europeans for a hundred years, full of art museums and theaters. It was famous for its China.


images of the Dresden devastation as graphic as these were kept hidden from the public for decades. image courtesy bbc.co.uk.

How could Dresden regain identity as a tourist attraction, as a center for culture and art and music as it once had been? The answer, for many people, was in rebuilding certain monuments, such as the Frauenkirche, Zwinger, and the Semperoper. The problem was this: these landmarks were rebuilt to imitate as best they could their former selves; it seemed to many people like a forced and false way to pretend that the bombing had never occurred.

Dresden struggled to find its identity among its ashes. These monuments (particularly the Frauenkirche, which is still not fully restored) took a long time to rebuild, and by the time they were finished, people may have been expecting something "more spectacular."

The city began its rebuilding process through the new Socialist government's agenda: bland, socialist architecture to help the people break away from their history and nationalism. The historic buildings were rebuilt but it was over time and done by private organizations. What was laid was an infrastructure of research and industry for the Soviets. While Dresden fought to find and reestablish its identity, another land had seized control and turned it into what she wanted.

Another important fact to state is that residents of Dresden were not allowed to go to the west, while trains to the west from Prague and other countries went through Dresden. The city's populations lacked the ability to choose their own homes or destinations. The identity of post-war Dresden was defined by imprisonment and war itself. The reconstructions of those sacred landmarks almost made a mocking of current affairs around the citizens.



these dolls are famous from Dresden, made with special Dresden porcelain. image courtesy http://sonia.tululuka.net/en/travel/2004/dresden/_1577/.

design within reach

The best in modern design should be accessible to the public.

This is the founding idea of Design Within Reach, a group of people who love modern design. They define MODERN as based on two principles : utility and simplicity. The design team is enthusiastic about new ways of construction and the pioneering use of new materials. This design is available for home and office at www.dwr.com. And, it as easy to purchase online as it is in one of their Studios, which not only displays the furniture, but serves as a community center and often hosts design-related events.

sources : www.dwr.com

recovery:San Francisco

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Restoring the Culture of New Orleans - article by Andrés Duany

In this Metropolis Magazine article Andrés Duany speaks of the Caribbean way of life of New Orleans as a culture that would never be restored unless there is an uncomplicated system for building. He states that it should be a “process whereupon people can build simple, functional houses for themselves, either by themselves or by barter with professionals”.

http://www.metropolismag.com/cda/story.php?artid=2510

VirAps (Virtual Apartment System)

VirAps hopes to allow for a new degree of customization in multifamily housing.
From: Jarmo Suominen

The VIRAPS-system is a database diven Web-based application allowing inhabitants to participate in the planning and design of their homes and immediate environments Flows of information and decision-making systems in the building process are relatively complex and involve a large number of players from politics, planning, financing and industry. The consumers have, until lately, had very little influence on the outcome of the process, mainly only when they've been a part of an experimental housing project. The consumers have, however, become more vocal in expressing their desires and construction companies are facing the problem of accommodating these wishes into the tight schedules of the existing building process. Furthermore, the further down the building process the changes occur, the more expensive they are for the consumer and the more pressure they put on communication within the process. Therefore the VIRAPS system has been constructed with two goals in mind: firstly to support decision-making process in the consumer end and secondly to facilitate reorganization and communication between the different companies in the building chain.
The VIRAPS-system is divided into to sections: a business-to-business section and consumer section. The business-to-customer side allows consumers make a number of choices concerning their future apartments based on the material presented on the VIRAPS Service www-pages. The VIRAPS databank gathers this material from the public sections of databanks of companies and institutions involved in the building process. From the professional point of view, the consumer becomes just another information producer within the whole building process. In the business-to-customer section choices can be made on three levels: 01.The Environment (city, area, neighborhood) 02.The Building (immediate environment, location in floor and plan, apartment size) and 03.The Apartment (organization, materials, finishes and fixtures). This division is supported by consumer studies on one hand and observations on the building chain on the other. On the professional side this division fits well with the building schedules, where certain windows of opportunity open at certain times. This is especially important in making the choices for apartment insides and possibly for the immediate environment. However, It is not enough to give consumers the freedom of choice and design. An apartment is a sum of technical, functional and aesthetic considerations. These considerations have to be met both to ensure immediate consumer satisfaction and resale value of an apartment. Therefore consumers need quite extensive support to bring their everyday experience of living in an apartment to a level where it can be used to make informed choices about their future environment. The consumer choices are fed back into the professional branch, where it will be used for two purposes. First, to design and build the kind of apartment the customer wants to buy or rent, and second to give general information of the customer preferences to the institutions (city planning) and companies participating in the system. This information helps the municipalities to target their planning and development efforts to better answer the needs of their citizens. It also allows the companies (such as developers of kitchen cabinet manufacturers) to adjust their production to the demand. The VIRAPS-system is built on using existing systems for the handling of CAD,GIS,text and pictorial information.

alternative materials: AshCrete

Image of micron-sized earth elements in AshCrete

Through my research in sustainability in architecture, I've become intrigued by the studies of Pliny Fisk. Fisk has made a significant contribution to the progression of sustainability in architecture and is pioneering new techniques and materials on this path. One material I have run across that he has coined as AshCrete, is an alternative material to Portland Cement. AshCrete is made of 97 percent recycled materials.


The discovery came about when Fisk mixed a couple spoonfuls of water into a teacup filled with fly ash from a coal fired power plant. The result was a material with the compressive strength twice that of Portland Cement. AshCrete is a mixture of fly ash, bottom ash from aluminum smelters, and a dash of citric acid, borate, and a chemical from the chlorine family (not mentioned)- which he is seeking a substitute for. One concern mentioned about the production of this material is the fine silicon inherent in the composite material, which poses no threat embedded in the concrete, but may cause respiratory disease if exposed to overtime in a factory. These concerns are ones that Fisk is attempting to resolve.
Replacing Portland Cement with AshCrete would reduce the overall carbon dioxide emissions, because the manufacture of concrete generates about 9 percent of CO2 emissions globally, and secondly it would reduce the waste stream of fly ash left over by coal-fired power plants .

GreenForms House

In designing the core for the dry-in house, finding green solutions gets difficult because it seems that these environmentally conscience materials come with a high price. A project in Austin, Texas sparked my interest, which shows a direct relation to the project we are working on now. In regards to eco-construction, Pliny Fisk has developed an eco-house that "grows" incrementally with the intended ease of an erector set.

The GreenForms house is constructed with simple post-and-beam framework made of recycled steel. The first prototypes have walls of pressed straw paneling, widely available in Texas. In other ecological and industrial zones, different recycled-content, pressed-panel materials such as sawdust/cement composites and nontoxic, recycled styrofoam might be used, says Fisk. All elements of the house, he adds, can be assembled with simple hand tools. Like the Dry-in House, the GreenForms house comes with a core, approximately 256 square feet made of a solar hot-water heater and air collector for passive heating, a radiant barrier system in the roof for venting of summer heat, and high re-radiating roof paints. Also for heating and cooling, a pipe snakes underneath a "very good looking" earthen floor of soil stabilized with cement, explains Fisk. It connects to a ground-source heat pump system buried, together with the waste-water system, in the yard..
The kitchen is also unique, acting as a "chunk," since it is completely mobile. On hot summer days it is able to be moved outside in a breezeway if desired. The cost estimate for ranges between $8,000-$10,000, with additional bedrooms estimated at $4000 each whenever the homeowner decides to make additions. The central idea behind the design is flexibility for the homeowner- allowing the expansion of the home to be made as the homeowner saves money, which potentially frees them from a punishing mortgage.

recovery:Hiroshima

It is an obvious example of an established city violated and reduced to a mere pile of itself.


image courtesy http://www.internetbolaget.se/~stefan-a/hiroshima/atomeng1.htm

Though we are familiar with these statistics, I'll restate them. An estimated 100,000 people were killed instantly by the bomb; within a 2-mile radius people's bodies literally evaporated. Over the following months, 60,000 more people died by radiation or injuries (although neither of the numbers can really be verified due to the confusion at the time).

68 percent of the city's built environment was destroyed.


"Hiroshima" by Stephane Chabrieres. image courtesy perso.orange.fr.

When Mayor Nagin woke up the day after Katrina destroyed his city, did he stand outside and look around and ask himself, "Now what?" What did the rulers of Japan say after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?


a painting of destroyed Hiroshima by Christoph Draeger. image courtesy Roebling Art Gallery.

Hiroshima was rebuilt, and it was rebuilt well. Today it is home to 1.1 million people and is a prosperous, modern city. How did a city that was wiped off the face of the planet recover? The first step was promoting peace rather than revenge; in order to rebuild, the survivors of the bombing had to unify and focus. The government of Japan agreed to allocate funding to cities damaged from the war, but only if there were approved plans for reconstruction. (The majority of Japan did not know exactly the degree of the damage of the two bombs, because the United States controlled Japan at that point and confiscated film of the incident in hopes to eliminate the threat of rebellion).

Immediately, Hiroshima's planners and (re)developers wanted to reinvent the city - the decision was made immediately because they saw no future in rebuilding an obliterated past, but rather wanted to build around a peace memorial - a city anchored by its identity. This became the Peace Memorial Park near ground zero and designed by Kenzo Tange; its center was a memorial museum. This progress moved the government to give extra aid to Hiroshima and, according to today's mayor Akiba, this was the turning point in the reconstruction of Hiroshima.


Peace Memorial Park. image courtesy planetware.com.


part of the Peace Memorial Museum (called the Peace Dome); one of the few remaining signs of the devastation of nuclear warfare in Hiroshima. image courtesy www.jal.com.

The reconstruction of Hiroshima brought its population to a higher number by 1980 than it ever had been, and it is known as one of the most pleasant tourist attractions in Japan. The interesting aspects of the city's rebirth are probably possible because of the government's tight control over what happened in Japan; the city officials decided immediately that the attitude would be peace and chose a new identity for the city and rebuilt toward that identity.

In earlier posts there is discussion about New Orleans' struggle to assert a new identity; it is only a year and a half after the hurricane but the government doesn't have the same level of authority as the Japanese government. What is the identity of New Orleans? The Japanese government and planning officials identified Hiroshima as a modern city with a devastating event in its past; the architecture and development was meant to show it. What New Orleans must do is decide whether it is a new city or an old city, a city with a disaster in its past or a city with a drastic change. Granted, NOLA did not experience near the level of damage that Hiroshima or Nagasaki did, but until a psychologically determined goal for the entire city is defined, people will struggle to rebuild their own individual lives.

The Japanese thrive off of invention and reinvention; there are new solutions to restoring New Orleans and preserving its old charm. It is the art of subtle presentation.


sources:
The Bomb Project
Bill Powell: "How Hiroshima Rose from the Ashes." Time Magazine.
"Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki." Wikipedia.

Flood Line and other Inscriptions of a Storm – The Urgency to Rebuild

Our trajectory through the vastness of the devastated New Orleans by car followed a line – blurry, brown, wide, thin yet so evident as if a drawn line on the elevation of the city, every neighborhood, every house, business, structure seemed to bear this mark… a line, at times bold at times fading, at times gone. The line traversed the city on this horizontal plane as continuous yet sometimes dashed – dashed as it began to intermittently, seldom disappear behind new paint or pressure washing.

Nonetheless, it was always there present as we traversed the city, there marking and reminding us of the outstanding height of the flood of Hurricane Katrina which submerged the city more than a year ago. The height of the line also dropped and raised as we moved from neighborhood to neighborhood revealing to us visually and dramatically the topography of a city recently under water. Its height on each neighborhood shifted up and down - the height of a person, the height of a house. This section line which dissected the city horizontally marked belongings submerged, gone – washed away, disintegrated, molded.


Other marks also populated the surfaces of the city – ranging from rescuer notes on facades of houses to the markings of residents’ outcries and messages. The rescuer notes indicated the date and group which surveyed the house after the storm as well as if any bodies were found. As a kind of postscript other messages where added which indicated if a dead dog or other pet possibly was found in or more often under the house. The outcries of the residents ranged from informational to informational yet sarcastic like “my cat are fed, don’t rescue them” to FEMA critiques, to “house for sale”. The shells which bear this text, this line and other scars of the storm – dislodged sliding, torqued roofs, broken windows… disembodied structures, encased objects are former dwellings… empty, open, moldy, stripped.

White, barren, trailers at times occupied the in-between lots or front yards of these homes as temporary living structures for the out rooted families – FEMA trailers, yet many of these also stood empty. Without the infrastructure to provide life - sitting unhooked, without electricity or plumbing… months and months after their arrival.

There was a kind of abstraction to all of this devastation. The magnitude of a city overtaken by these markings of the catastrophe of the hurricane which took place more than a year ago became repetitive and numbing. So much we saw that at times a perception of normality began to overcome our experience as we moved through the city.

However, we had the opportunity to meet several residents who while devastated were still with spirit and hope to rebuild. Talking to them gave us a glimpse into the reality of this line which submerged the city. Diane who was smiling and somewhat upbeat earlier during our first meeting became quiet and subdued upon entering her house – now moldy, abandoned… empty, without walls, without objects. Later at her mother’s house, Mrs. Tilton, destroyed and now overcome by nature, she told us “we grew up here”.

We discovered that the intermittent line – the fading line is really still there. Some of her friends Diane told us, superficially cleaned off the line – took off the mold with chorine and moved back in. Seeing the exposed structure of Diane’s house impregnated with green, brown, black fussy matter made us wonder how those families could possibly breathe and live in such environment.

On the attic a few objects were evident yet Diane told me that the few things she had been able to lift and store up high were later stolen by another phase of the storm – looting. Mrs. Tilton spoke of her chandelier having been cut out of the ceiling by intruders who walked into their exposed home.

Another mark inscribed the topography of New Orleans. It caught Mrs. Tilton attention while we were talking - truck marks in the backyard of her property. The latest physical lost – minimal to all rest that has been lost, families, friends, neighbors, life’s belongings - the clean up being performed by the city took whatever they found floating about. In this case the clean up involved some belongings found spilling out of Mrs. Tilton broken and exposed storage space behind her house.

The vastness of what we saw, empty and scarred and the conversations that we had with some of the residents of Hollygrove Earl, Diane, Harvey, and Mrs. Tilton as well as other community members who are so eager to rebuild left me (us) with a feeling of urgency to move so much more quickly. It is not just one house but thousands which need to be raised quickly to get neighbors, communities back home.

100_x_better

key framing the assembly of a CNC cut shelving unit/office space designed by 100xbetter

D-FAB arch

From D-FAB

The architecture firm D-Fab, used a very unique method for constructing a wall in a house located in Weingut Gantenbein, Fläsch (Switzerland).
Each brick's orientation was vectorized according to a computer-modeled design intended to evoke an apparently three-dimensional image of circular forms through the pattern of the bricks and the resulting play of light and shadows. Each individual brick in the field has a function similar to that of the matrix dot in a printed image.

The brick infill panels were made in the summer of 2006 at ETH Zurich. The bricks are bonded by means of a special adhesive which makes the panel construction resistant even to tension forces. The entire production process for the 300-m2 facade was developed at ETH on the basis of initial trials in automated wall-building conducted that spring. An industrial robot constructed the panels in a fascinating spectacle: It grasped and turned each brick according to the programmed command sequence, applied precisely calculated lines of adhesive at specified angles to its underside and placed it in its exact position – brick by brick, course by course, panel by panel. Then the finished infill panels were transported from Zurich to Fläsch, where they were installed.

This computer-controlled process was employed with the goal of an extremely individualized result. By digitizing the design drawings of the facades and converting them to the scale of the bricks, they were produced materially and with relentless precision. The process makes a significant contribution to the 'iconic turn', here not in the sense of the image replacing the word, but of the expected flat wall surface or painted decoration giving way to a three-dimensional material image – to 'informed matter', in the words of the architects."

Katrina:oil

As discussed in greater detail in a previous post, the oil industry had at one point been the biggest industry of Louisiana, and it was based in New Orleans and managed to stealthily destroy the environment and geological stability of the city at the mouth of the Mississippi. According to environmentalchemistry.com, the United states lost 4000 sq. kilometers of wetlands due to the construction of flood control levees. These places require a different solution. The industry all but disintegrated with lawsuits from residents and the government's environmental agencies.

The question now is what did Katrina do to affect this industry? We all remember the soaring gas prices and the oil panic in Katrina's immediate aftermath. The flooding of New Orleans was indirectly caused by this ecosystem damage from the industry, but did Mother Nature wipe out its own enemy with hurricane Katrina?


repairwork being done on a NOLA levee by the US Department of Defense.

Environmental chemistry states that recovery is not about fixing the levees. There is discussion about replacing silt to the wetlands in a controlled way to eliminate the need for flooding the area, but the wetlands could be slowly replaced by controlled flooding done by a dam. The new sediments would offset the sinking of NOLA, and perhaps lessen the drastic consequences of the next hurricane.


statistics of the oil industry as of December 2005 (immediately following Katrina). courtesy of the Energy Information Administration.

The oil industry itself across the Gulf of Mexico experienced the temporary closing of 9 refineries, most for well over a week, and 2 permanently (there were only 20 total across the Gulf). The US weekly oil supply reduced by eight percent. The US tapped into the emergency oil reserves to help soften to blow to consumers. Slowly in the weeks following the store, companies were able to restart their refineries after the destroyed pipes, platforms and moorings were fixed, but not for long before lawmakers and industrial analysts could point out how strained the refineries themselves were in the first place, susceptible to spills, fires, and malfunctions. There has not been a new refinery built in the US since 1976 due to political and environmentalist opposition.


an oil refinery after Katrina (notice some oil on the water). image courtesy carleton.edu.

Regardless of these barriers to expansion and recovery, output is on the rise since January of 2006. The Bush administration has sought $105 billion for repairs of the oil refineries and to fight off these obstacles toward rebuilding. Besides the collection and refining of the crude oil, the shipment of it became substantially difficult after Katrina. When the first refineries were back in operation, much of the oil had to be shipped around - to Corpus Christi, TX, causing more delay in getting the oil back to the rest of the nation.

The oil industry has been much faster to bounce back than the tourism industry, partially because there is more funding for it since it is much more of a nationwide issue. As it turns out, the oil industry is carrying NOLA right now, even after its steady 30-year decline. Ironically, the very industry that destroyed the foundation of the city is supporting its (non)recovery. In my last post about the tourism industry, the general consensus is that in order to generate tourism in a productive way, Katrina must be considered part of the NOLA identity and the identity must be reestablished.

There is opposition to the oil industry defining the identity of the new NOLA, just as there is opposition to the occurence of Mardi Gras. Residents feel that more emphasis is being placed on the oil industry than their displacement and individual struggles. This is a two-sided problem: the economy (and therefore reconstruction) of NOLA is dependent on these two major industries being in tact, but money is being stretched so thin that when people have nowhere to live, there is no one to work these oil rigs and tourist traps. There is a perfect balance that must be achieved to give the economy just the boost it needs while addressing the problem of the displaced residents.


sources:
"New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina, and the Oil Industry": environmentalchemistry.com
"Hurrican Katrina Underscores Tenuous State of U.S. Oil": pbs.org