ENVIRONMENTAL CLOUD ATLAS is the product of a graduate course taught at the School of Architecture, at Syracuse University by Assistant Professor Lydia Kallipoliti. The online database was assembled and designed by the group of students enrolled in ARC 642: Introduction to Theory and Design Research during the Spring 2014 and 2015 semesters.
Website Design: Hamza Hasan & Rebecca Suzanne Marsh; special thanks to Hassan Riaz
Student Team: Kamila Buraczynski, Jeremy Burns, Nader Daou, Rene Duchesne, Nolan Ediger, Chunqi Fang, Matthew Gins, Justin Goehring, Alyssa Goraieb, Jared Grace, Josh Graham, Maxwell Harden, Colin Hoover, Uzoma Idah, Ahren Jeffries, Yichao Kang, Jinsung Kim, Chen Jung Kuo, Keith LeClair, Fengqi Li, Taihui Li, Daniel Lin, Xiaoyu Li, Xuyun Liu, Nick LoCicero, Kun Lu, Wenhui Luo, Garrett Marini, Jim Marsh, Killian Miles, Christian Martinez Sean Morgan, Rachael Ng, Gabriel Aaron Nolle, Uche Okoye, Christopher Paulsen, Alexander Phillips, Anni Pi, Anthony Principe, Wesley Ratliff, Joshua Rubbelke, Hong Seokhyung, Sangbum Son, Yang Song, Raymond Sova, Derek Supinsky, Shuxiao Tao, Vivek Vijayan, John Waugh, Jingyuan Wang, Shuya Washido, Emily Wutz, and Shuai Yan.
ENVIRONMENTAL CLOUD ATLAS investigates architecture's agency between social reality and creative fiction throughout a series of real and imagined environments narrated and drawn as manifestos in times of intense political and economic uncertainty. From Peter Sloterdijk's Foam City to Frederick Kiesler's Correalism and Biotechnique and Patrick Geddes' Cities in Evolution, the seminar has moved through texts from the 21st century to the 19th century, to explore utopian visions of rebuilding the world anew and extruding reality to a total reconstruction project of physical space, social order and living patterns.
The journey via these imagined environments will allow us to witness that in the history of ideas, discourses get recycled. In many respects the future has already been imagined in one way or another. Concepts emerge as allegedly new, though ideas undergo long journeys of migration from one epistemological field to another. In our discipline, the permission to reproduce, translate or even "misuse" information, to observe and transform existing material and ideological structures, endows architecture with its creative potential.
The structure of the seminar was based on Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. Each class focused on a different type of environmental narrative—foam city, garbage city, enclosed city, animal city, aquatic city, farmed city, edible city, evolving city, endless city—accompanied by a series of readings from the original author, as well as supporting related bibliography.
Parallel to the reading list and the bibliographical material, each class focused on a research initiative: an unintentional exurban reality almost invisible to our perception. The environments we have focused are an extrusion of fiction through quite real; they exist beyond our sight, but constitute large-scale territories with drastic environmental impact. From early nineteenth century natural science to Jane Bennett's Vibrant Matter, Timothy Morton's Ecology after Nature and Hyperobjects, we have moved towards building a history that reflects how biological and environmental processes can invade the social sphere and ultimately the stability of the built realm. In a new reality inundated with sudden climatic changes, garbage-packed metropolises, methane gas clouds from landfills, para-economies of electronic waste and oceanic islands of decomposed and recomposed debris, a new role is cast to the notion of environment. Instead of being the inactive, static and historicized context of an architectural object, the environment quite literally becomes the object of design itself.
The product of the seminar is ENVIRONMENTAL CLOUD ATLAS, a collective visual storytelling website tracing stories of the imagined environments created throughout the class, the cities extruded from the literature and the actual real exurban locations that we have researched throughout the semester. The website includes diagrams, timelines, drawings, collages, texts, images interpreting the relationships of different environmental narratives, surveying the causes and effects of their rise and demise. The collective storytelling atlas becomes an open-source online collaborative platform where different creators, collectives, ideas and projects will mix and remix. The ENVIRONMENTAL CLOUD ATLAS is a conceptual ecology of the ideas and narratives discovered throughout the course of the class.
CLOUD ATLAS
Italo Calvino (Translated from the Italian by William Weaver), Invisible Cities (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974).
Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, "Gerhard Richter's Atlas: The Anomic Archive" in October 88 (MIT Press, Spring 1999), pp.117-145.
Mark Wigley, "Whatever Happened to Total Design," in Harvard Design Magazine (Summer 1998), pp. 18-25.
Reyner Banham, "Stocktaking: Architecture After 1960" in Architectural Review 127, 755 (January-June 1960).
Movie: Cloud Atlas by Lana & Andy Wachowski & Tom Tykwer (2012)
FOAM ENVIRONMENT [ Peter Sloterdijk's Foam City ]
Peter Sloterdijk, "Foam City," Log 9 (Winter-Spring 2007), pp. 63-76.
Peter Sloterdijk, "Cell Block, Egospheres, Self‐Container," Log 10 (Summer-Fall 2007), pp. 89-108.
Peter Sloterdijk, "Foams," Harvard Design Magazine 29 (Fall-Winter 2008-9), pp.38-52.
Reyner Banham, "The Triumph of Software" in New Society (31 October 1968), pp.629-630.
Reyner Banham, "A Home is not a House" (illustrated by Francois Dallegret), Art in America, Vol.53 (April 1965), pp.70-79.
Slavoj Zizek, "EXAMINED LIFE: on ECOLOGY," You Tube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LxkmO7hnM0
Research Initiative of the week: Styrofoam disposal, PCBs, persistent pollutants and bioaccumulation
EVOLVING ENVIRONMENT [Patrick Geddes' Cities in Evolution]
Patrick Geddes, Cities in Evolution: An Introduction to the Town Planning Movement and to the Study of Civics (Williams & Norgate, 1915).
Volker Welter, Biopolis: Patrick Geddes and the City of Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), pp.1-53.
Manuel de Landa, "The Non-Linear Development of Cities" in Amerigo Marras (Ed), ECO-TEC: Architecture of the In-Between (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), p. 23-31.
Stephen Marshall and Michael Batty, "From Darwinism To Planning - Through Geddes and Back" in Town & Country Planning (November 2009), pp.462-464.
Felix Guattari "The Object of Ecosophy," in Amerigo Marras (Ed), ECO-TEC: Architecture of the In-Between (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), p. 10-21.
Research Initiative of the week: Ship breaking in India and Bangladesh
GARBAGE ENVIRONMENT [Martin Pawley's Garbage Housing]
Martin Pawley, "Garbage Housing" in Architectural Design, Vol. 41, No. 2 (1971), pp. 86-95.
Martin Pawley, "Chile and the Cornell Program" in Architectural Design, Vol 43, No. 12 (1973), pp.777-784.
Martin Pawley, "Garbage Housing" in Architectural Design, Vol. 43, No. 12 (1973), pp. 647-776.
Martin Pawley, Garbage Housing (London: Architectural Press, 1975), pp. 47-114.
Witold Rybczynski, "From Pollution to Housing" in Architectural Design, Vol. 43, No. 12 (1973), pp.785-790.
Jane Bennet, "Powers of the Hoard: Further Notes on Material Agency" in Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome (Ed), Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects (Washington, DC: Oliphaunt Books, 2012), pp.237-272.
Lydia Kallipoliti, "Dross City," Architectural Design (AD), No.208 (London: Wiley & Sons, November-December 2010), pp.102-109.
Research Initiative of the week: Electronic Waste Paraeconomies, E-waste Villages in Guiyou, China and Lagos, Nigeria
CORREAL ENVIRONMENT [Frederick Kiesler's Correalism and Biotechnique]
Frederick Kiesler, "Space house" in Architectural Record, Vol.75 (Jan. 1934), pp. 44-61.
Frederick Kiesler, "On Correalism and Biotechnique: A definition and test of a new approach to building design" in Architectural Record, Vo.86 (Sept. 1939), pp.60-75.
Frederick Kiesler, "Design-Correlation: Certain Data Pertaining to the Genesis of Design by Light (photography) I-II" in Architectural Record, Vol. 82, (1937 July) pp. 89-92 ; (Aug.1937), pp. 79-84.
Frederick Kiesler, "Design-Correlation: Towards Prefabrication of Folk-Spectacles: Scientific Development of Sound Reproduction Proves an Important Influence on Architectural Design Theaters" in Architectural Record, Vol. 86, (June 1937), 93-96.
Frederick Kiesler, "Design-Correlation: From Brush-Painted Glass Pictures of the Middle Ages to [the] 1920's" in Architectural Record, Vol. 81 (May 1937), pp. 53-59.
Frederick Kiesler, "Design-Correlation: Animals and Architecture" in Architectural Record, Vol.81, (Apr. 1937), pp. 87-92.
Frederick Kiesler, "The Architect in Search of Design-Correlation" in Architectural Record, Vol.81, (Feb. 1937), pp. 6-15.
William W. Braham, "What's Hecuba to him? On Kiesler and the Knot" in Assemblage, No.36 (Aug. 1998), pp.6-23.
Stephen Phillips, "Toward a Research Practice: Frederick Kiesler's Design-Correlation Laboratory" in Grey Room 38 (MIT Press: Winter 2010), pp. 90-120.
Research Initiative of the week: Toxic Sublime, River Contamination by Smelting, Aquifer Pollution
AQUATIC ENVIRONMENTS [Wolf Hilbertz's Mineral Experiments]
Margaret Cohen, "Fluid States" in Cabinet, Issue No.16: The Sea (Winter: 2004/2005), pp.75-82.
Keller Easterling, "The Confetti of Empire," in Cabinet, Issue No.16: The Sea (Winter: 2004/2005).
Wolf Hilbertz, "Electrodeposition of Minerals in Sea Water: Experiments and Applications," IEEE Journal on Oceanic Engineering, Vol. OE-4, No.3 (1979), pp.94-113.
Wolf Hilbertz, "Toward CyberTecture," Progressive Architecture (May 1970), pp.98-103.
McHale, John. "The Future of the Future: Inner Space." Architectural Design 37 (February, 1967), pp. 64-95.
Katavolos, William. "Organics," in Ulrich Conrads (Ed.), Programs and Manifestoes on the 20th Century Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970), pp.163-165.
Gordon Pask, "A Proposed Evolutionary Model," H.von Foerster and G.W. Zopf, Jr. (Eds.), Principles of Self Organization: Transactions of the Illinois Symposium, (New York: Harper, 1961), pp: 229-254.
Research Initiative of the week: The Great Pacific Gyre, Ocean Garbage Patches, Plastic Soup
ANIMAL CITY [Street Farmers' magazine & The Cyborg Manifesto]
Bruce Haggart & Peter Crump (Eds), Street Farmer (No.1 & No.2), (London, UK: Self-Published Journal, 1971-1972).
Bruce Haggart & Peter Crump (Eds), Collages for the magazine Street Farmer (No.1 & No.2), (from the archives of Peter Crump, Bristol, UK).
Catherine Ingraham, Architecture, Animal, Human: The Asymmetrical Condition (London: Routledge, 2006), pp.1-29, 81-90.
Migayrou Frederic, "Extensions of the Oikos" in Marie-Ange Brayer & Beatrice Simonot (Eds), Archilab's Earth Buildings. Radical Experiments in Earth Architecture (London: Thames & Hudson, 2003), pp.21-27.
Anthony Vidler, "Homes for Cyborgs; Domestic Prosthesis from Salvador Dali to Diller and Scofidio," Ottagono, No.96 (1990), pp. 37-55.
Donna Haraway, "Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s" in Socialist Review, no. 80 (1985), pp. 65-108.
Research Initiative of the week: Garbage and animal Coptic region outside of Cairo, Egypt
ENCLOSED ENVIRONMENT [John McHale's Outer Space Vehicles and Terrariums]
Student Presentations & Group Discussion | Submit 1 paragraph and one image on readings and research by 10am
John McHale (Ed), "The Future of the Future" in 2000+ issue of Architectural Design (February, 1967).
Peder Anker, "The Ecological Colonization of Space," in Environmental History (April 2005), pp. 239‐268.
Peder Anker, "The Closed World of Ecological Architecture," in The Journal of Architecture, Vol.10, No.5 (2005), pp. 527-552.
Lydia Kallipoliti, "Return to Earth: Feedback Houses," The Cornell Journal of Architecture, Issue 8: RE (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 2011), pp.24-35.
Lydia Kallipoliti, "Feedback Man," Log. No.13/14, Any Corporation, pp.115-118.
Eva Diaz, "Dome Culture in the Twenty-first Century", Grey Room 42 (MIT Press: Winter 2011), pp. 80-105.
Janette Kim and Erik Carver, "Crisis in Crisis: Biosphere 2's Contested Ecologies," Volume, Bootleg Edition Urban China (February 2009).
Research Initiative of the week: Data Farms & The Physical Infrastructure of the Cloud
RADICAL ECOLOGY
Jane Bennet, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).
Jennifer Peeples, "Toxic Sublime: Imagining contaminated Landscapes" in Environmental Communication, Vol. 5, No. 4, (December 2011), pp. 373-392.
Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).