Cold Ring Catalysts: Co-Optive Strategies of Urban Logistics

Thesis Title:


Cold Ring Catalysts: Co-Opting Strategies of Urban Logistics

Cold storage is an emerging network of public infrastructures for design opportunities along the busiest logistical corridor of North America: the NAFTA superhighway.

Much of the cold chain's pull on this highway originates from the Great Lakes Mega Region, but this thesis concerns itself with the southern tail: the emerging Texas Triangle.

The critical nexus of this global-regional crossroads is the metropolis of Laredo-Nuevo Laredo: the prototype for the logistical city.

This thesis claims that logistical entities such as cold storage have had the greatest impact on the spatial development of cities. This thesis also claims that if architects and urbanists still wish to be active agents in this process, much can be learned by studying and co-opting the logic of cold storage with a set of new design protocols.

The Scenario: Increasing Cold Trade Volumes

Global Cold Storage trade volume is projected to grow by 4% per year and its capacity will likely increase along the NAFTA Superhghway. The impact will increase carbon foot print, increased consumption of water and electricity in freezing/cooling activities, accumulation of pollution (i.e. refrigerant gasses and transport emissions) at site and arriving to the site.

With the Obama administrations restoration of the Mexican trucking program and the increasing consumer lifestyle demand for time-sensitve perishiable goods, the urban fate of Los Dos Laredos are at stake. How can architects and urbanists intervene in this inevitable process?

Catalyzing Cold Storage with New Urban Protocols

The Los Does Loredos must co-opt the inevitable and indifferent logic of cold storage with a set of urban design protocols that turns them into catalysts for potential new urban spaces, forms and programs. The first mover advantage does mean something here in this unrealized game of spatial city development. The end goal of these protocols is a phased in concentric nodal urbanism that generates a healthy and beneficial impact on the local, border, regional, and global scales of logistics.

sourcemap

http://www.sourcemap.org/

Loophole

Underground Storage of Thesis Projects

Hacking big ice boxes is tougher than expected.  Two maneuvers are of worth consideration for this thesis.  

First, despite the explicit rules imposed by a storage facility for tight efficiencies of space, every site and architecture must have unexpected consequences or byproducts as a result of these rules.  After all, no generated spreadsheet for the planning of a new storage facility can possibly account for every cost or benefit. At best, these logistical regimes default to coping mechanisms of categorically placing these very unknown variables in insurance terms of "contingencies" or "acts of god".  The small details that are left out of this planning equation is where architect as hacker needs to be looking at closely.

As of now, byproducts that are worth considering at the architectural level:

• Emissions from the mechanical systems that support the temperature controlled rooms
• Accumulations that are brought to the site via trucking and rail.
• Impervious surfaces and drainage of phosphorus.

Second, the code for formatting the spatial development of storage facilities resides in the faulty language of bureaucratic planning documents.  Again, its rule making explicitness is prescribed in quantitative measures of x-feet above, below, or back from the street.  This logic is buried in the bureaucratic pages of planning documents but inevitably physically manifests in the forms of setbacks and property lines  staked into the ground.  The legal loopholes of the language needs to be hacked, then a demonstration of the set of hacking tactics needs to be demonstrated (Alex Lehnerer's Grand Urban Rules or Sub Plan).

Underground Storage

Meanwhile, the default mode of hacking projects resort to program.  The legacy of Dutch architects have taught us that its the program stupid!  Tongue-in-cheek as these projects maybe, these projects have been successful in repurposing, infilling, and retrofitting of depleted or used up post-industrial sites seems to be in vogue.  Pertaining to the thesis at hand are underground storage facilities cropping up in old limestone mines.  The melting waters of ice age past and the coursing water of the Missouri set the stage for productive industrial sites of extraction.  The activity continues, but not of the same intensity nor of the same locale.  Its productive work resides in the network of gravel pits that pave way for the expanding suburban streets.  The old sites of extraction becomes a relic of Fordist economies.  In this case, the functional repurposing of a site of extraction into one of conveyance and accumulation of goods 

Docking Area

Springfield Underground

If the thesis project was to employ the same kind of program centric tactic, it would look like the following equation:  

Intermodal Distribution Center in Cold Commodities + ___(x-plus)                         

                                                                                              education                     

                                                                                          __tourism                         

                                                                                              shopping/dinning         

                                                                                          _  recreation                     

                                                                                          __hotel   _____________

All of the above mentioned x-plus that the supposed architect as agent brings to the table are tinged with a consumer culture of fetishizing the box.  NeoMarxist critiques are powerful and hard to escape, something I don't think you can totally escape from, but if this thesis really is going to consider combining the topic of health, it needs to be worry about health becoming a derivative for a fast-serving IKEA of Health and Personal Health products and services on full spectacle.  

Offices

This thesis project acknowledge program as a method, but aspires to hack without having to solely resort to such means. 

Working Project Titles:

Cold Empires
The Cold Chain Complex

Cold Chain Complex
ProtoPharmopia
Pharmopia
Pharmoplis

Pharmacopic Follies

Pharmacopic Post

Mall Medica
Medi-log
Meditopia
Mecha-Medilistics
Mega Medical Stop

Mega Medical Exchange

Medi-Mart

Mega-Mini Mart

Medical Mechanica

MechaPharm
MechaPharm Logistics
Mecha-Medi-Mart

The Medi-market exchange

Medica's
Medilistic's

Guns-Meds-Foods
The Cold Zone

Health Zone
The Ice Stop

The Health Stop
The Health Exchange

Boomers and Doctors

Notes from Networked Cities

Universal  Situated
anytime-anyplace | responsive place

     mostly portable | mostly embedded

          Ad hoc aggregation | Accumulated aggregation

context is location | context is activity

           fast and far | slower and closer

uniform | adapted

-Malcolm McCullough

NAFTA as text

When completed, the highway will run from Mexico City to Toronto, slicing through the heartland like a dagger sunk into a heifer at the loins and pulled clean to the throat. It will be four football fields wide, an expansive gully of concrete, noise and exhaust, swelled with cars, trucks, trains and pipelines carrying water, wires and God knows what else. Through towns large and small it will run, plowing under family farms, subdevelopments, acres of wilderness. Equipped with high-tech electronic customs monitors, freight from China, offloaded into nonunionized Mexican ports, will travel north, crossing the border with nary a speed bump, bound for Kansas City, where the cheap goods manufactured in booming Far East factories will embark on the final leg of their journey into the nation's Wal-Marts.

-Christopher Hayes, in "The NAFTA Superhighway" The Nation, April 9. 2007

The landscape of Healthcare

Cardinal Health's The Healthcare Landscape.

KC SmartPort

Storage Wars

Architectural discourse isn't the only crowd of conversation fascinated by the flow of prized materials into the city.  Reality television series Storage Wars, chronicles the quick hands and exchanges of locals that make their living off of scavenging what remains of the lost storage units put up for auctions.

Sci-Arc 2010 Student Thesis: Latent City

Latent City by Yaohua Wang from Foral on Vimeo.

Re-Hacking the Expanded Field

Hacking the Expanded Field

In Rosalind Krauss’s 1979 essay Sculpture in the Expanded Field, she observed how sculptural works of the 1960s and 1970s in America were experiencing a paradigmatic shift in its logic and rule making abilities of the discipline.  Set in backdrop of an aesthetic polemic that posited post-modernism's opposition to all things modern, Krauss' theoretical repositioning of sculpture was in parallel to the times.  Sculpture's rules and logics were redefined by setting it in opposition and exclusion to the categories of other major creative fields such as landscape and architecture (see figure 1).  Sculpture in the traditional modern aesthetic sense, had actually been left behind as sculptors began to hack at different mediums at the edge of these expanded fields.  Visually represented in a Kline group structure, Krauss also identified 3 additional emerging practices with their own set of logic: site construction, marked sites, and axiomatic structures.  

In 2009, the architectural blog InfraNet Lab, posted a similar but revised diagram of architecture’s relative position in its newly expanded field (see figure 2a).  Whether the zeitgeist of a paradigmatic shift runs in a similar streaming thought of Krauss' time is questionable but the blog stakes its claim:

“Architecture is in need of a range of situational qualifiers to establish its position amongst the rapidly expanding terrain of landscape architecture and within the fractured and troubled territory of urbanism.”  

Unlike Krauss’ maintenance of sculpture at the edge of her field, InfraNet cleverly removes the term architecture and replaces it with urbanism.  The proposed Neo-Kraussian diagram no longer displays 'architecture'  but more powerful exposes its hacked logic.  InfraNet has managed to slip architecture into this self-propagating disciplinary framework model which results in even wider disciplinary implications.  For example, the original logic of the Kline Group structure (i.e., its reliance on exclusive qualifiers) generates disciplinary topics and operable spaces such as infrastructure, productive surface, civic conduit, and spatial container which are of relevancy to architecture. Furthermore, these terms also imply wider disciplinary fields of flows, velocities, ecologies, economics, and energies.  

InfraNet's hacking play is in alignment with the earlier quoted observation and perhaps its hopeful goal of re-situating the architectural field.  A better position anticipates that architecture can address critical "disciplinary loopholes" that are being displaced in traditional fields of economics, geography, ecology, and landscape.  Furthermore, they pose the open ended question of ‘now what’ or ‘how’ to the architects that must propose a design!

Re-Hacking an Expanded Field

Hacker as architect not only assumes the playing field of logistical cities but the architectural discourses at hand.  In the ethos of disciplinary hacking, the hacker as architect further problematizes the lingering set of questions asked by InfraNet by asking ‘what else?’  

First, the current InfraNet iteration of the Kline Group still maintains the logic of exclusion and opposition to the organization.   This is a quick and simple way of organizing the discipline by distinction but perhaps limiting in its ability to contextualize and encourage interdisciplinary streams for new knowledge.  The hacker proposes the removal of these ‘not-’s of distinction.

Second, the hacker agrees with InfraNet that marking the expanded field in architecture with their four newly generated terms (see figure 3a) can be helpful for understanding new purposes or opportunities for architecture within the local and regional networks.  However, further reconfigurations of these opportunities are in order due to the removal of the ‘not-’s that supported each respective term, except for infrastructure. 

Third, the hacker also acknowledges the newly defined disciplinary territories of ecologies, economics, energies, velocities that emanate from flows. InfraNet’s insertion of ‘flows’ into the diagram’s logic is perhaps the most ingenious iteration.  However, the hacker is aware that in our finite existence of a continuing conversation, we don’t always recognize this central configuration.  Many times we are busy controlling and regulating the flow of discourses- and materials- through our own expanded territories of production and accumulation (see figure 3c).

Fourth, the Kline diagram may have evolved to an organization of expanding networks but lacks critical elements of linearity and time (see figure 4).  Critics such as Easterling comment on how architecture has “few common terms to describe spatial organization with active parts, temporal components, or differential change.”  Perhaps the flow may be non-linear in order of progression as DeLanda likes to suggest.  However, at a certain point there must be a continuity which leads to produced and accumulated knowledge.  After all, flows emanating from a center inevitably turn into many streaming narratives as it must engage the barriers and obstacles of entry into each respective disciplinary territories.  Otherwise the streaming narratives would regress to systems of purely abstracted points and lines of intersection.  What happens to the flow as it engages each territory is the most crucial for hacker’s operations to commence in what is called the  “exchange”.

Thus, this thesis re-hacks contemporary working models of an expanded field of architecture.  The never ending generative net of narrative streams that emanated with a central area of flows has evolved into inverted characteristics with the direction of flows traveling in a linear movement (see figure 5) .  The ever expanding disciplinary territories (i.e., production and accumulation) encroach and networking with one another as its re-displace terms of infrastructure, urbanism, landscape and civic conduit occupy its overlapping areas.  Meanwhile, the linear flow reorganizes the four terms into a sequence that enables it to shuttle back and forth between the peripheral territories of production and accumulation and remains hyper active in the center of exchange.

Code for Hacking Logistical Cities

Logistical Formula to the Expanded Field

more explanations to come...

2 scentence abstract

Two possible thesis statements:

A:  Hack the logic of emerging logistical cities in its given expanded playing fields and finite plays; infinite campaigns to flow. Then we too might exercise our agency to the fullest.

or

B:  Hack the finite logic of emerging logistical cities in its given expanded playing fields and finite plays; infinite campaigns to flow. Then we too might exercise our role as synthesizer and bearer of variance to the fullest in the many streaming narratives.


Other lexicons to consider:

Game/System
Insert
Slip
Operate
Tactic
Strategy
Variance/Xplus
Accommodate
Expand
New
Finite
Infinite

Concerning the Intent of the thesis or perhaps role of the architect as hacker:

Respond with tactics that are seeking to accommodate these influences in a more expansive way

or

with tactics that seek to use the act of architecture as an opportunity to alter the processes influencing that territory.

Hacker must be mindful of two kinds of time-based play of rule making in this game: the finite and infinite.  Logistics is quite skilled at the finite, and increasingly better at the infinite due to its amassing of digital tools of projection.  Architects are skilled at the infinite, but needs work on the finite. Why? Because these small endgame plays are when the stakes are the highest if architects are to ever exercise their agency in the infinite.

Relative Thesis Position in the Paradigm Map/Expanded Field:

not too satisfied with this layout of expanded field diagram, as it still deal with conditional statements as a way to organize and topical in nature (legacy of dualism in Western dialogues pervade).  maybe a future exercise that re-arranges the diagram of discipline in a field of expanding and contracting linear streams? for now, relative interest in the thesis in the right half.

Thesis Allies of Precedents and Design Practices:

Easterling for analysis,
Varnelis for projections,
Lateral Office for tactics and strategies

Quote worthy:

The field of Game Theory, which studies the dynamics of negotiation, lays out similar bargaining strategies players (in the case of the city, these include property owners, neighbors, merchants, city agencies, etc.) use as they cross their own political and economic objectives with a finite set of available options. [...] Even if never precisely predictable, the endgame is nearly always the same: to settle upon an equilibrium enforced by each player’s self-interest. More than any other single logic, it is the nature of how this inevitable quid pro quo, or tradeoff is settled that offers the greatest potential as a productive instigator of change-by-design: where design is nothing less that a strategy of both staging and creatively working out the causal relationships that comprise the city-as-ecosystem, and in so doing not only makes evident but actually constitutes the tie that binds the system.
-Roger Sherman

working polemic

Hacking Logistical Cities

In an increasingly globalizing and urbanizing world, no other entity in North America has been adept at formatting the urban playing field than logistics.  The latest typologies to emerge from generative iterations are the corridors, zones, ports, and distribution centers.

What makes logistics so successful?  They make, break, and mend the rules.  Its rules are not always the explicit, the best are often implicit.  Not always positive but powerful in their openended ness.  Rules are the inverted, abstracted and extracted image of a city’s actual situation.

Setting up rules is first and foremost a cultural act.  In fact, we read cities by their rules.  Rules are the infrastructure that link the digital and physical with the social city, connecting quality with quantity and latent characteristics to manifest ones.

Rules, thereby and almost unnoticed, are design instruments.  In fact, regarding rules as tools is a valuable urban design attitude.  This departs from wielding the ‘wild’ or visionary dreams that clings to control all.  Better a move towards a non–fatalistic form of control between freedom and coercion.

Architects and planners also make rules, yet we were never to assume the privileged positions of total urban reprogram.  In fact, we are but a discrete set of entities or players exercising agency in the urban playing field-often at the expense of cities.  Logistics understands this.  Planers realize this.  Architects are slow to.  Mimicking the action of Derridean difference, ac endlessly defers its agency across the urban infrastructural network.

If architects play but a part, why bother learning the logic of logistics?  Because we have yet to fully exercise our agency.  Architects bring the variance to the rules.  We collect all streaming urban trajectories to synthesize, project and anticipate via deliverance of our intervention  A hacker’s mentality is in need; one that is reflexive towards the city, logistics, and all other entities that exercise agency on the indifferent yet reflective spatial material: the program.

Acknowledge and understand the logic of logistics.  Impossible to master all the rules.  Architects are better positioned to act among the urban landscape of cities.  Lessons of the rule making abilities of logistics should be studied if we still aspire to play in the newly emerging landscape:  the logistical city.

Program as thesis

the program as code

post-fordist program

Program in this thesis operates as the indifferent, open-ended, multi-authored, and unscripted material code or logic to the spatial development of the city. In the past, planning and architecture have coveted it as a righteous tool to maintain their supposedly autonomous disciplines’ intellect and its practices. Such endeavors though have often served to marginalize the public face of these professions and failed at fully exercising their agency. This is due to their lack of anticipation, let alone their lack of recognition of the capacity for other entities to program the city. For every entity that interacts with the program as code brings their town set logic or rule making abilities to the table. The code is self-reflexive of this and reflects it back onto the urban fabric. Thus, program is not completely neutral, as it is has always been under the influence of the last entry of code. If anything, it is more of an impressionable conduit than a container for facilitating the development of the city’s spatial make up. No other entity understands this better than the organizational logistics of multi-national corporations, as they have been most successful into programming the city.  As ephemeral as this whole process maybe, program inevitably leaves behind its organizational logic in disparate physical formats of building envelopes, zones, and into the book stacks of codes and property lines.  Thus thesis as program concerns itself at the urban scale and its possible implications on the regional level.

the client as player

 Outfoxing Urbanism

If program is a set of conditions for various entities to respond, we the “client” are more than witnesses or accomplices but active participants.  We exercise varying levels of agency at various turns.  In fact, the client is but a short-cited social-construct of advanced capitalist mythology into consumerism.  We are all players in the game of re-programming the city, like it or not.  Do nothing if you like, but skipping one’s turn in this game is just as much of move that is reflected in the urban fabric.  Within this context, one might think that the player to benefit the most are those with a hacker's relentless mentality of making, bending, breaking, mending, and navigating around all the loopholes of program.  Logistical entities are analogous to this as various types of storage spaces form critical set-pieces for their regional campaign.  This is true, but consider program just as much of an agent as the client.  Over time, program as code inevitably change as it interacts with the players and it becomes impossible for even greatest hacking operation to exist on the the scape.

the brief as campaign.

Wallmart's Logistical Briefing of Vermont

If logistics is the savy and relentless player that is most likely to affect the urban form, than much of its data-driven approach to regional expansion campaigns will be reflected in an checklist itinerary.

Total Area of a Logistical Entity (U.S. Wal-Mart) vs. Manhattan

First, logistics must confront the limits of his own urban moves and spatial distribution: the various types and routes of its regional/global physical network, energy/fuel costs, distribution radii, and transport capacity.

Second, logistics must anticipate the various rules to be engaged.  This is especially true for a densified urban area.  Entities at play are much more complex and perhaps better organized in factors such as labor and construction.  Besides more explicit spatial rules such as urban planning and land use rules, logistics must also consider implicit rules such as real estate catchment areas and tax rates.  If logistics is not adept, their logic quickly breaks down with the scale and density of urban spaces.   This is due to the fact that many logistical entities were designed for the greenfield or agricultural parcels at the edge of suburbia.  As a result, the logistics of accessing sites and moving goods are complicated.

Third, logistics must make a reconnaissance of potential sites and buildings that are up for play:  registered and unregistered properties, empty lots, abandoned properties, brown fields, green fields, drainage basins, landfills, highway spaces, rail depots, grain silos, ports, shipping yards.  As logistiscs inventories all of its potential set-pieces, it must be aware of its presence at it steps in to overlapping political-jurisdictional zones. Its goal is to collect all the pieces in play, and use them as bargaining chips as it encounters other entities. If logistics plays its moves well, it can make any overlapping boundaries of contention into mere technicalities as it makes its inroads to the city.

new working thesis titles and reflection so far...

We all make rules to organize ourselves and others.  The essential question though isn't if the rules are just, its knowing when to make, break, bend, and mend them at will.  Architects seem to be rather wary of rules and organization but deep down they do appreciate them. After all, how else could they manage such complex generative forms in the their own microcosm digital world? Why not this same attitude be taken to the urban level.

However, the 21st century cities are simply too complex for an architect to be making their own rules. Past ego-centric visionary cities may certainly have been logically robust were but were exclusive of other rule making entities.  No entity perhaps better illustrates this than the speed and adept abilities that the logistical operations of multi-national corporations have had on the city.  Perhaps the biggest player to arrive in the city, Wall-Mart is already campaigning its own logic into the urban fabric while its trademark PR smile pleasantly awaits in front of bureaucratic lines for admittance.  This is not to say that we should stop being visionary or be politically correct in the way we shape our cities. Instead, we are ought to be more cognisant of the capacities of other rule making entities in the design of our cities.

Current thesis working titles:

coding logistics
coding urban logistics
coding conduits
coding conveyance
conduit city
conveyance city

lawless logistics
ruling on logistics
logistical rulings
unruly logistics
logistics and the law

urban logistics
the logistical city
logistics city

hacking logistics
the logistical hacker
hacking landscapes of logistics

the logistical urbanist
the urbanist's guide to logistics
the urbanist’s guide to the logistician
the logistian’s guide to the urbanist
the hacker's guide to the logistical city
the logistian’s guide to the urbanist
the logistician and the city
the hacker, the ubanist, the logistician...
a hacker, an urbanist, and a logistician walk into a bar...
urbanist + logistician = hacker

urban logistical loopholes
lonely logistics
loophole logistics
redisplaced logistics

Many of these working thesis titles inevitably bring up the question of agenda.  Is it to make people aware of current urban conditions as part of a rhetorical point that logistics do impact our cities?  Is it to amplify or exaggerate latent urban conditions so their different trajectories of the city can be foreseen?  If these conditions are anticiapted, then is it this thesis’ position to propose interventions for or against these possible futures?

Perhaps a more radical thesis position is to simply not to propose anything. After all, doing nothing is something but only be suggestive of the architectural agency opportunities. This kind of thesis would act as a digital voyeurism sifting through urban codes and Excell spreadsheets of GIS data but becoming more productive at transmitting this knowledge across the discipline in a visual spatial manner. This seems to be the relative position that Keller Easterling takes in Enduring Innocence. She is not the on-the-ground anti-globalization protester, but she is an activist in her deft and poetic writing that a journalist might have on elucidating the complex globalization issues to bizarre but mundane specificity-hinting at architect’s agency in opportune moments.

For the initial part of this thesis, the agenda is to play both those roles of a deft quantitative and anecdotal observer. However, to design and finish thesis, you need to play the game. The observer will become a player and in a few turns will inevitably inform the designer what kind of player he is.
A few turns will also reveal the implicit and explicitly defined rules of the game. The agenda is to be the analyzer that Easterling was but exercise agency in a more pragmatic and participatory way by anticipating these scenarios in a game full of rules and making design proposals. Beyond analyzing and suggesting the various streams or trajectories that the current urban logistical condition could take, the objective of thesis then is to selectively synthesize or hybridize them into a responsive design scenario.

Another question to ask for this thesis is the 'tone' of the polemic and design to be proposed.  This thesis is not the playful but indifferent and sarcastic tone of the late Dutch hypermodernist architectural theories and proposals. Similarly, it is not the techno-bureaucratic approach of a SimCity objective of winning points with the push of a button or import of a cheat code/script. As of now, this is still not well defined due to the lack of context (i.e., site, city, urban demographic) for this thesis to react to. The thesis as a player with all of its attitude will emerge from the research phase. If anything, the tone will be more of unscripted negotiation of Monopoly that deals with various entities (i.e. people, organizations, randomness, or rules themselves).

Having said that, I think it is still use full to refer to the perhaps overly simplistic Dutch logic of dumbing down things and asking pertinent questions like:

Q: What if...we take the same kind of logic that Wall-Mart has and build a city? modify the city?
A: It would look like this.
Q: Great!...but wait, why isn’t this already like that?
A: I dunno
Q: What about other rules? some rules are explicit and implicit, right?
A: Oh
Q: How about zoning, covenants, physical conditions of the site? If you take into account all of these other rules, what kind of city would you get?
A: You would get this!
A: Great!!!

Initial seminar projects such as the 4 panel cave drawings and storage facility were all indicative of broader interest that this thesis has finally come to grips to in the area of logistics and urbanism Not a post-rationalization, but realization that caves were of interest to me because of the overt element of control in the form of rule making that were taking place to create ever so smaller discrete worlds unto themselves. Everything had specific function to be displaced and closed off, only to be forgotten. I tried to visually narrate this at the level of a house starting from a tour of the images and line diagrams of basements, closets, attics and back to the garages. Similarly, investigations into automated storage units was waiting to revealed of the widespread logic of urban logistics. Methods exhibited in these two projects: a visual narrative, cu ration of images, will also be helpful in further developing the gaming techniques and rule-making approach to thesis.

Thus, the first half of the research will be a mix of quantitiave and anecdotal evidence decoding the organizational logic of logistics at the urban scale of a city. GIS mapping will certainly be of help here but equally important are outside sources of city codes, news headlines, gossip columns, and press releases (market, industry, govt). The evidence collected here will slowly start to reveal the implicit logic of logistics and will serve as dialogue for the development of characters to be demonstrated in a scenario. The second half will then be the generation of rules to be in play by the various players in the thesis design. At this stage, a specific site needs to be chosen and the number of players identified.

Outputs for the thesis project include:
+paradigm map
+figure-ground mapping
+logistical brochures
+booklet of urban rules
+site massing models of various zones, envelopes, and bldg. typologies
+3 scenarios being played out in detail from urban sections, renderings, to the urban material language.

Critical Texts/Blogs/Precedents thus far:
Free Association Design (F.A.D.):  Product Placement and Cargo Cults
thiswill_this.net
Self Storage Association
Self Storage Self by NYTimes article
Grand Urban Rules
Sub + Plan
Visionary Cities
Reality Properties
The Landscapes of Contemporary Infrastructure

Space Elevators by Otis'

In 1895, Russian scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was inspired by the spindle shaped Eiffel Tower that he speculated how one could put a "celestial castle" atop as Jack had climbed the beanstock to the Gaint's castle above.  The tower would be built from the ground to an altitude of 35,800 kilometers.

Technology...There are two area in which recent innovation can make a radical difference, control and transport...Robotics replace laborious, unwieldy process of storage, retrieval, sorting, and reshuffling with smooth movements of frenzied ease that force us to rethink entire systems of classification and categorization....the second innovation is in transport. as more and more architecture is finally unmasked as the mere organization of flows-shopping centers, airports-it is evident that circulation is what makes or breaks public architecture...two simple, almost primitive inventions have driven modernizations towards mass occupancy of previously unattainable heights: the elevator and the escalator. . one moves only up and down, one only diagonally.

At the dawn of the 21st century, a number of advances in vertical transportation's are being made, from cable-less self-propelled elevator systems to Otis’...Odyssey, a small train, platform, or large box that moves horizontally, vertically, and diagonally-literally opening up new architectural potential: to extend the urban condition itself fro the ground floor to strategic points inside a building in a continuous trajectory.

-Rem Koolhaus, Delirious New York

Currently, NASA's dream of building such space elevator holds on the principle of earth's geosynchronous orbit.  The dream "castle" positioned in geosynchronous orbit would remain over the same spot on the earth. Otis, a major world wide elevator company says that such projects are possible based on current elevator technologies capable of producing transportation systems several miles high.

program: draft

the program.

Program in this thesis is conceived of as the indifferent, open-ended, multi-authored, and unscripted material code or logic to the spatial development of the city. In the past, planning and architecture have coveted it as a righteous tool to maintain their supposedly autonomous disciplines’s intellect and its practices. Such endeavors though have often served to marginalize the public face of these professions and have failed at exercising their agency. Instead, the organizational logistics of giant multi-national corporations, the ants of small self-organized entities, and rapid advancement in digital technology have exercised more agency into programming the city. Having said this, program here is not completely neutral, as it is has always been under the influence of the last entry of code. If anything, it is more of a conduit than a container for facilitating the development of the city’s spatial make up in its various typological building and zoning incarnations.