Sunday, November 28, 2010
Jason Fried on Why work does not work - Tedtalk
Pretty crazy to think that our entire society is based on this system...
Aaron Huey on America's Native American - Ted talk
This is a pretty moving story about one of the dark spots in our country's history. I can't lie that it makes me quite ashamed and not so proud to be an American.
The World As I See It
I found this article just as interesting as the previous C.S. Lewis one. Both of them I found through stumbleupon.com, which I'm sure I've listed before in the Post Link section, but will do so again and also add the link to this website. This is an essay that Albert Einstein wrote about a few of his beliefs and perceptions of the world.
C.S. Lewis Article
This is an interesting article I stumbled across, I am always amazed at how wise and prophetic C.S. Lewis has proven to be.
One of the many stories that grew out of John F. Kennedy’s aborted term as President has to do with an idle question put to him by a reporter aboard Air Force One. What would happen, the reporter wondered, if the plane went down, killing all on board?
One of the many stories that grew out of John F. Kennedy’s aborted term as President has to do with an idle question put to him by a reporter aboard Air Force One. What would happen, the reporter wondered, if the plane went down, killing all on board?
“Your name will be in the paper,” the President assured him, “but it will be in the small print.”
Something like that happened to a pair of famous men who died on the same day President Kennedy was assassinated. While the world’s attention was focused on Dallas, Texas, and Washington, D.C., few noticed that across the ocean in England two literary giants had also breathed their last. Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, and C.S. Lewis, author of the “Narnia” series of children’s stories and numerous books and essays about the Christian faith, both died on November 22, 1963. Their deaths did, within the next couple of days, receive more recognition, and in larger type, than might have been spent on that unknown reporter on Air Force One. But to say their passing was overshadowed by the event in Dallas would be a rather large understatement.
Boston College philosophy professor Peter Kreeft made that interesting historical coincidence the basis of an imaginary conversation among the three men, all of whom arrived within a few hours of each other somewhere Between Heaven & Hell — the green room of Eternity, perhaps. It is a lively and imaginative read, but not as fascinating as the imaginary letters from the devil and one of his minions chronicled by Lewis in his enormously popular 1941 tale The Screwtape Letters. That book was even mentioned in the announcement of his death. “C.S. LEWIS DEAD; AUTHOR, CRITIC, 64” said the headline in the New York Times of November 25, 1963, with the subhead: “Cambridge Professor Wrote ‘The Screwtape Letters.’” What made that book, then more than two decades old, so remarkable among the many that Lewis produced? Thomas Howard described it well in The Achievement of C.S. Lewis.
Something like that happened to a pair of famous men who died on the same day President Kennedy was assassinated. While the world’s attention was focused on Dallas, Texas, and Washington, D.C., few noticed that across the ocean in England two literary giants had also breathed their last. Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, and C.S. Lewis, author of the “Narnia” series of children’s stories and numerous books and essays about the Christian faith, both died on November 22, 1963. Their deaths did, within the next couple of days, receive more recognition, and in larger type, than might have been spent on that unknown reporter on Air Force One. But to say their passing was overshadowed by the event in Dallas would be a rather large understatement.
Boston College philosophy professor Peter Kreeft made that interesting historical coincidence the basis of an imaginary conversation among the three men, all of whom arrived within a few hours of each other somewhere Between Heaven & Hell — the green room of Eternity, perhaps. It is a lively and imaginative read, but not as fascinating as the imaginary letters from the devil and one of his minions chronicled by Lewis in his enormously popular 1941 tale The Screwtape Letters. That book was even mentioned in the announcement of his death. “C.S. LEWIS DEAD; AUTHOR, CRITIC, 64” said the headline in the New York Times of November 25, 1963, with the subhead: “Cambridge Professor Wrote ‘The Screwtape Letters.’” What made that book, then more than two decades old, so remarkable among the many that Lewis produced? Thomas Howard described it well in The Achievement of C.S. Lewis.
"In the early days of World War II, an odd book appeared in England and America. It seemed to be a collection of letters from an old devil to a younger one, telling him how to handle a man who had been assigned to him as his special demonic responsibility,” wrote Howard. What was remarkable, both for that day and our own, Howard noted, was the way the book “assumed blithely and unapologetically, that the Devil is real, for heaven’s sake. Here was Christian theology, anxiously plucking at coattails of the Western world, assuring everyone that we don’t for a moment believe in any nonsense about miracles and God-in-the-flesh, and parthenogenesis and so forth, and along comes a book, not by a white-sock stump-preacher from the boondocks, but by a vastly civilized and luminously intelligent don, who obviously believed this awkward stuff."
Yes, Clives Staples Lewis, the eminent and erudite professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University, believed not only in God, but in the literal existence of an evil spirit known as the devil, who is very much at work in the world, luring souls into the abyss of hell and eternal damnation. Lewis’ devil, known to millions of readers as “Uncle Screwtape,” is much more subtle than he appears in the stereotypical depiction of a demon in red pajamas with a pitchfork. Indeed, as Lewis described him, he might easily pass for a respectable British bureaucrat.
The seduction of the human mind is a subtle business, after all. In our time we tend to think of temptation, if we think of it at all, as a matter primarily of sexual lust. Lewis’ Screwtape goes much deeper to manipulate that part of the mind where reason has abdicated, leaving the field to chaos. The book’s opening letter from Screwtape to his deputy, Wormwood, gives the reader a clear view of the kind of war being waged for the “hearts and minds” of men.
The seduction of the human mind is a subtle business, after all. In our time we tend to think of temptation, if we think of it at all, as a matter primarily of sexual lust. Lewis’ Screwtape goes much deeper to manipulate that part of the mind where reason has abdicated, leaving the field to chaos. The book’s opening letter from Screwtape to his deputy, Wormwood, gives the reader a clear view of the kind of war being waged for the “hearts and minds” of men.
I note what you say about guiding our patient’s reading and taking care that he sees a good deal of his materialist friend. But are you not being a trifle naïf? It sounds as if you supposed that argument was the way to keep him out of the Enemy’s clutches. That might have been so if he had lived a few centuries earlier. At that time the humans still knew pretty well when a thing was proved and when it was not; and if it was proved they really believed it. They still connected thinking with doing and were prepared to alter their way of life as the result of a chain of reasoning. But what with the weekly press and other such weapons we have largely altered that. Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to have a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn’t think of doctrines as primarily “true” or “false,” but as “academic” or “practical,” “outworn” or “contemporary,” “conventional” or “ruthless.” Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don’t waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong, or stark, or courageous — that it is the philosophy of the future. That’s the sort of thing he cares about.
Screwtape’s advice to his protégé has proven prophetic. The weekly press and “other such weapons” create many jangling but unheeded contradictions in the mind of man, and the daily press, television, and the cable channels’ round-the-clock news and talk programs do a more thorough job. Indeed, unacknowledged contradictions of the mind have made great progress since Lewis’ time. Today seemingly intelligent adults are fully capable of saying on Sunday morning they believe in “the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life,” and voting on the following Tuesday for someone who solemnly promises to protect the “right” to destroy prenatal human life as a matter of personal “choice.” If that doesn’t bear out the dark prophecy in Screwtape’s letter to Wormwood, it’s hard to imagine what would.
It is doubtful the Oxford don and professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge’s Magdalene College ever expected sales of his imaginary little tale of demons at work subverting human minds would soon reach into the millions, with the number still rising nearly 70 years after its initial publication. He lived long enough to see The Chronicles of Narnia become classics in children’s literature, even as adults also read and praised them for their lively and imaginative portrayal of a moral order in the universe. But he probably never imagined that sales of all his books and essays — including Mere Christianity,Miracles, The Abolition of Man, the Weight of Glory, A Preface to the Psalms, A Grief Observed, and others — would soar into the neighborhood of 200 million and still be popular nearly half a century after his death. The rigor of his thought, the unrelenting honesty of his pursuit of truth about things that eternally matter, and the graceful clarity of his writing have earned him a lasting place in the hearts, minds, and bookshelves of millions.
His appeal rests in part on his genuine disinterestedness. Though himself a devout Anglican, Lewis made clear, most explicitly in his preface to Mere Christianity, that he would not try to convince the reader to become an Anglican, Lutheran, Methodist, Presbyterian, or Roman Catholic. He confined his efforts to pointing out the supporting role of reason in affirming the principles common to those and other communions within the Christian faith.
The same was true of what little he had to say about politics. Lewis was surely no partisan. What he resented and argued against was the reduction of persons to things, whether as consumers to be manipulated through the workings of a market economy or as masses to be herded in a collectivist state. He argued, most notably in The Abolition of Man, that political efforts at improving the human race lead inevitably to the tyranny of a small group of men over the rest of the populace on the principle, made famous in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, that some “are more equal than others.” He argued with eloquent logic against regarding a proposition as true or false, based on whether the idea is new or old. In the unlikely event he was paying attention to America’s politics in 1960, he might have laughed at Kennedy’s charge, ever pleasing to the cheering crowds, that Nixon’s “ideas are as old as McKinley.” Lewis might have calmly pointed out that both as an American and a Catholic, Kennedy professed allegiance to a great many ideas that were a good deal older than McKinley.
Lewis was well aware of the dozens or more “incompatible philosophies dancing about together” in the head of 20th-century man and proved extremely capable of meeting and defeating them on their own terms. But he was concerned primarily with eternal truths. And he remained to the end a disciple of “Jesus Christ the same, yesterday, today and forever.”
That explains, at least in part, the enduring popularity of Lewis’ works. He was instinctively suspicious of the Latest Thing in religion as well as politics. He preferred the old wine as well as the old wineskins of the Christian faith.
He accepted his place in a race of “miserable sinners,” confident that we yet have a merciful Redeemer. A pop theology of “I’m OK, You’re OK,” would not have moved him, save perhaps to pity. Today’s enthusiasts for “liturgical reform” would find little support for their cause in the writings of C.S. Lewis. Yet some of the controversies into which he ventured remain lively today, and his observations are no less insightful now than they were 60 years ago.
Consider, for example, his thought-provoking essay first published in 1948, called “Priestesses in the Church?” Lewis readily conceded that at first glance common sense would suggest that a woman could represent God speaking to humanity as well as a man. But he insisted that first glances and “common sense” can only take us so far and, in this case, not far enough. For the unchanging teaching of the Gospels is that no less an authority than Christ, the eternal Son of God, taught us to call God “Our Father.” Drawing on his lifelong study of literature, Lewis opined that “image and apprehension cleave closer together than common sense here is prepared to admit.” And one of the images central to the New Testament is the relationship of Christ to the Church as that of bridegroom to the bride.
Gender roles have become increasingly interchangeable in offices and factories, Lewis acknowledged. “As the state grows more like a hive or an ant-hill,” he wrote, “it needs an increasing number of workers who can be treated as neuters. This may be inevitable for our secular life. But in our Christian life we must return to reality. There we are not homogeneous units, but different and complementary organs of a mystical body.”
As a Christian, Lewis resisted the notion that the mystical body, the Church, must ever be changing to “keep up with the times.” He believed precisely the reverse: that the timeless message of the Church must be proclaimed against the errors of “the times.” The old truths are not to be discarded like the pages of calendar, he insisted, and error does not become truth simply because today is not yesterday. When challenged on how he could believe in some article of his faith — the existence of a spirit called the devil, for example — “in this day and age,” his response was to coolly ask what the day and age had to do with the question at hand.
Like many of his contemporaries, Lewis abandoned in his teens the (Anglican) faith of his parents and came to regard Christianity as one of many myths concocted over the centuries to explain the world and man’s role in it. As a young boy in his native Northern Ireland, he had developed a fascination with fanciful tales of a spirit world populated by elves, leprechauns, later Norse gods, and other ancient creatures of human imagining. His love of books brought him in contact with poets and philosophers, and as a young man, he had his own bits and pieces of conflicting philosophies “dancing about” in his head at more or less the same time. “I was at this time living, like so many atheists or antitheists, in a whirl of contradictions,” he wrote in his autobiographical Surprised by Joy. “I maintained that God did not exist. I was also very angry with God for not existing. I was angry with him for creating a world.”
He lacked, apparently, the conceit of many young men who, after a smattering of learning, imagine themselves to be too intelligent, too well educated, too sophisticated to believe in the “simple faith” in which they were raised. He read more widely than most men, and the more he read and thought about what he had read, the more he was drawn back to the faith he had left behind. The writings of George MacDonald made a deep impression; Chesterton “made such an immediate conquest of me,” though he was charmed by the humor so artfully imbedded in Chesterton’s prose before being persuaded by the logic of his thought. Lewis soon began to realize what he was getting into. “A young man who wants to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading,” he later observed. God had outdone old “Screwtape” in setting traps for a truly inquiring mind. “God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous,” Lewis wrote.
Today’s atheists and agnostics, and even many nominal Christians appear, for the most part, in little danger of reading too much or reasoning their way to anything other than a vaguely religious belief in a god “or something,” a deity that might be called the great Whatever. Dwight Eisenhower, whose résumé included a stint as president of Columbia University, would later, as President of the United States, encourage a civic religion remarkably free of form and content. “Our government makes no sense,” Eisenhower declared, “unless it is founded on a deeply felt religious belief — and I don’t care what it is.”
Eisenhower may have been partially right (“Our government makes no sense”), but it hardly makes sense to feel deeply about something without caring what it is. Lewis cared deeply about the “what,” the essence and purpose of things. The popular notion that the universe — all of what is called creation — came into being by accident, without any purpose or design, offered to Lewis an example of the kind of contradiction, disguised as thought, that slips so easily into the mind of man, there to take up permanent, unchallenged residence. For if the universe were meaningless, Lewis argued, we would be incapable of discovering that it is meaningless. For we would have no concept of either meaning or meaninglessness — just as, if there were no light, we would have no concept of darkness.
But for Lewis the question of “what” was less important than “who” God is. The discovery that left Lewis “Surprised by Joy” was that not only does God exist, He became one of us, the sinless One who bore the sins of fallen man and Who “ever lives to make intercession” for us. The world can reject Him now, as it did then, but at least the men of His time took Him at His word. They heard His outrageous claims — “The Father and I are one,” “Before Abraham was, I am,” “No one comes to the Father but by me” — and concluded He was a blasphemer, deserving of death. The modern world would kill Him with a condescending and indifferent “kindness.” Lewis would have none of that, as he explained in Mere Christianity:
It is doubtful the Oxford don and professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge’s Magdalene College ever expected sales of his imaginary little tale of demons at work subverting human minds would soon reach into the millions, with the number still rising nearly 70 years after its initial publication. He lived long enough to see The Chronicles of Narnia become classics in children’s literature, even as adults also read and praised them for their lively and imaginative portrayal of a moral order in the universe. But he probably never imagined that sales of all his books and essays — including Mere Christianity,Miracles, The Abolition of Man, the Weight of Glory, A Preface to the Psalms, A Grief Observed, and others — would soar into the neighborhood of 200 million and still be popular nearly half a century after his death. The rigor of his thought, the unrelenting honesty of his pursuit of truth about things that eternally matter, and the graceful clarity of his writing have earned him a lasting place in the hearts, minds, and bookshelves of millions.
His appeal rests in part on his genuine disinterestedness. Though himself a devout Anglican, Lewis made clear, most explicitly in his preface to Mere Christianity, that he would not try to convince the reader to become an Anglican, Lutheran, Methodist, Presbyterian, or Roman Catholic. He confined his efforts to pointing out the supporting role of reason in affirming the principles common to those and other communions within the Christian faith.
The same was true of what little he had to say about politics. Lewis was surely no partisan. What he resented and argued against was the reduction of persons to things, whether as consumers to be manipulated through the workings of a market economy or as masses to be herded in a collectivist state. He argued, most notably in The Abolition of Man, that political efforts at improving the human race lead inevitably to the tyranny of a small group of men over the rest of the populace on the principle, made famous in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, that some “are more equal than others.” He argued with eloquent logic against regarding a proposition as true or false, based on whether the idea is new or old. In the unlikely event he was paying attention to America’s politics in 1960, he might have laughed at Kennedy’s charge, ever pleasing to the cheering crowds, that Nixon’s “ideas are as old as McKinley.” Lewis might have calmly pointed out that both as an American and a Catholic, Kennedy professed allegiance to a great many ideas that were a good deal older than McKinley.
Lewis was well aware of the dozens or more “incompatible philosophies dancing about together” in the head of 20th-century man and proved extremely capable of meeting and defeating them on their own terms. But he was concerned primarily with eternal truths. And he remained to the end a disciple of “Jesus Christ the same, yesterday, today and forever.”
That explains, at least in part, the enduring popularity of Lewis’ works. He was instinctively suspicious of the Latest Thing in religion as well as politics. He preferred the old wine as well as the old wineskins of the Christian faith.
He accepted his place in a race of “miserable sinners,” confident that we yet have a merciful Redeemer. A pop theology of “I’m OK, You’re OK,” would not have moved him, save perhaps to pity. Today’s enthusiasts for “liturgical reform” would find little support for their cause in the writings of C.S. Lewis. Yet some of the controversies into which he ventured remain lively today, and his observations are no less insightful now than they were 60 years ago.
Consider, for example, his thought-provoking essay first published in 1948, called “Priestesses in the Church?” Lewis readily conceded that at first glance common sense would suggest that a woman could represent God speaking to humanity as well as a man. But he insisted that first glances and “common sense” can only take us so far and, in this case, not far enough. For the unchanging teaching of the Gospels is that no less an authority than Christ, the eternal Son of God, taught us to call God “Our Father.” Drawing on his lifelong study of literature, Lewis opined that “image and apprehension cleave closer together than common sense here is prepared to admit.” And one of the images central to the New Testament is the relationship of Christ to the Church as that of bridegroom to the bride.
Gender roles have become increasingly interchangeable in offices and factories, Lewis acknowledged. “As the state grows more like a hive or an ant-hill,” he wrote, “it needs an increasing number of workers who can be treated as neuters. This may be inevitable for our secular life. But in our Christian life we must return to reality. There we are not homogeneous units, but different and complementary organs of a mystical body.”
As a Christian, Lewis resisted the notion that the mystical body, the Church, must ever be changing to “keep up with the times.” He believed precisely the reverse: that the timeless message of the Church must be proclaimed against the errors of “the times.” The old truths are not to be discarded like the pages of calendar, he insisted, and error does not become truth simply because today is not yesterday. When challenged on how he could believe in some article of his faith — the existence of a spirit called the devil, for example — “in this day and age,” his response was to coolly ask what the day and age had to do with the question at hand.
Like many of his contemporaries, Lewis abandoned in his teens the (Anglican) faith of his parents and came to regard Christianity as one of many myths concocted over the centuries to explain the world and man’s role in it. As a young boy in his native Northern Ireland, he had developed a fascination with fanciful tales of a spirit world populated by elves, leprechauns, later Norse gods, and other ancient creatures of human imagining. His love of books brought him in contact with poets and philosophers, and as a young man, he had his own bits and pieces of conflicting philosophies “dancing about” in his head at more or less the same time. “I was at this time living, like so many atheists or antitheists, in a whirl of contradictions,” he wrote in his autobiographical Surprised by Joy. “I maintained that God did not exist. I was also very angry with God for not existing. I was angry with him for creating a world.”
He lacked, apparently, the conceit of many young men who, after a smattering of learning, imagine themselves to be too intelligent, too well educated, too sophisticated to believe in the “simple faith” in which they were raised. He read more widely than most men, and the more he read and thought about what he had read, the more he was drawn back to the faith he had left behind. The writings of George MacDonald made a deep impression; Chesterton “made such an immediate conquest of me,” though he was charmed by the humor so artfully imbedded in Chesterton’s prose before being persuaded by the logic of his thought. Lewis soon began to realize what he was getting into. “A young man who wants to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading,” he later observed. God had outdone old “Screwtape” in setting traps for a truly inquiring mind. “God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous,” Lewis wrote.
Today’s atheists and agnostics, and even many nominal Christians appear, for the most part, in little danger of reading too much or reasoning their way to anything other than a vaguely religious belief in a god “or something,” a deity that might be called the great Whatever. Dwight Eisenhower, whose résumé included a stint as president of Columbia University, would later, as President of the United States, encourage a civic religion remarkably free of form and content. “Our government makes no sense,” Eisenhower declared, “unless it is founded on a deeply felt religious belief — and I don’t care what it is.”
Eisenhower may have been partially right (“Our government makes no sense”), but it hardly makes sense to feel deeply about something without caring what it is. Lewis cared deeply about the “what,” the essence and purpose of things. The popular notion that the universe — all of what is called creation — came into being by accident, without any purpose or design, offered to Lewis an example of the kind of contradiction, disguised as thought, that slips so easily into the mind of man, there to take up permanent, unchallenged residence. For if the universe were meaningless, Lewis argued, we would be incapable of discovering that it is meaningless. For we would have no concept of either meaning or meaninglessness — just as, if there were no light, we would have no concept of darkness.
But for Lewis the question of “what” was less important than “who” God is. The discovery that left Lewis “Surprised by Joy” was that not only does God exist, He became one of us, the sinless One who bore the sins of fallen man and Who “ever lives to make intercession” for us. The world can reject Him now, as it did then, but at least the men of His time took Him at His word. They heard His outrageous claims — “The Father and I are one,” “Before Abraham was, I am,” “No one comes to the Father but by me” — and concluded He was a blasphemer, deserving of death. The modern world would kill Him with a condescending and indifferent “kindness.” Lewis would have none of that, as he explained in Mere Christianity:
I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: “I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.”That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said, would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.
And neither did C.S. Lewis. His books still pay us the compliment their author paid to the men and women of his time, the compliment of respecting our intelligence and believing that minds adrift on oceans of narcissism, agnosticism, and self-doubt are still capable of being opened by and to old truths — that we are still capable of being “Surprised by Joy.”
If you have read through all this I'd be pretty impressed. This is the website I found it at, a news page called The New American. I'll put the link in the Post Link section.
Recent Musings
These are just some randome thoughts from the last few days. I feel like they are going somewhere but not sure yet. I doubt it will make any sense to anyone, just some notes really.
Identity
Income
Influence
If you lay it down I’ll make it come alive
If you try and do it yourself it will turn on you?
Identity
Income
Influence
What are you going to do with what you’ve been given?
What is in your hand? What do you have that you’ve been given? What are you doing with what you’ve been given.
This is what being purpose driven is all about.
What am I wired to do, why has God wired me to be this way?
Look at what’s in my hand, what is my Identity, Income, and Influence, and say it is not about me, it is about making the world a better place?
It is about honor and glorifying God, which in turn would make the world a better place.
Reconnect with who we really are, not who others expect us to be.
So what has brought me to this point and why am I here?
Through my studies in Architecture and Religion…I’ve developed quite the interest in human living. Such as how we are living, why we are living the way we are, where we are headed as humans and how can we understand that and make wiser decisions for our future?
I can’t stop thinking about patterns and how things are connected and working together. In the same way this makes me look at things that are contrasting or not working together and how they might be able to.
I feel like I’m becoming more and more interested in research, analysis, understanding, and then applying or experimenting,
Listened to a really good sermon today. Really inspired me in regards to having a devoted family and how important it is to our great commission calling. I think I’ve been lulled to sleep by the fear of not sure, but for some reason I’ve been under this spell that no one is perfect and can earn their favor with God and so I’ve been finding it hard to be disciplined enough to be good morally and try to be an obedient follower. But Teri Johnson brought up the fact that John was born into a family of priests, and that his parents were without blame…not meaning sinless but were devoted to following God and his mandates, so quick to repent and do it in the way God specified. Luke 1:5-? Talkes about how God specifically chose Zacharias to rear John, who would be great. Great not in man’s terms but in God’s eyes. Also Jesus himself defined John as the greatest man to ever be born of a woman…
So yes God does do a lot of amazing things, often using the under privileged and oppressed/underdog, but he does take pleasure in devoted faith and rewards justly. We can strive to be great in his eyes because he takes pleasure in it. BUT – must never forget that we are only great on his accord and are unable to do so on our own.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Space Saving Storage
This is awesome, not only is the design incredible, but the woodworking and details does it justice. Why can't these type of products be mass produced? Under today's Post Link, you can find Danny Kuo's profile and a few more incredibly efficient designs.
Life without Lawyers
I came across this video last night and thought it was pretty cool. Some very wise things being said here by Philip K. Howard and it is too bad our legal system is so imbedded in our everyday lives. This video and many more riveting talks can be found from the website provided within Post Links.
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
Quotes
I usually find these things to be incredibly tacky, but I found some of these to be actually pretty intelligent.
“Fall seven times; stand up eight.” – Japanese proverb
“You must give up the life you planned in order to have the life that is waiting for you.” – Joseph Campbell
“The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time is now.” – Chinese Proverb
“You must be the change you want to see in the world.” – Gandhi
“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.” – Theodore Roosevelt
“I can’t change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination.” – Jimmy Dean
“All is flux, nothing stays still.” – Heraclitus
“For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.
“I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day.” – James Joyce
“I don’t need a friend who changes when I change and who nods when I nod; my shadow does that much better.” – Plutarch
“Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.” – Epicurus
“Be a first rate version of yourself, not a second rate version of someone else” – Judy Garland
“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.” – Anne Frank
“The mind can make a heaven out of hell or a hell out of heaven” – John Milton
“Try not to become a man of success but a man of value.” – Albert Einstein
“The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance; the wise grows it under his feet.” – James Oppenheim
Cigar-Box Guitar
How cool is this. I stole this from Joel, who I must thank for posting such cool stuff all the time and constantly inspiring me. Make sure you check out his blog, posted under Post Links.
Saturday, November 6, 2010
Thinking Graphically
This will certainly not be the last time this happens, expect many many more in the future. These are a few "doodlings" I've done recently in response to the context and concept research I've been doing for the competition. Often times I like to sit down and start drawing shapes, geometries, and patterns. Somehow, at the end of it I always have more clarity and understanding of what I was thinking about or just life in general. For a number of different reasons that I will not get into here, I've become fascinated with fractals and as of late hexagons. I have thoroughly been enjoying my exploration of them both.
Food for Thought
I found this interesting as I seem to always go back and forth on urban density and urban green space. I am completely against what has happened within this suburban era, which makes me feel obligated to push high density in city dwelling. However, would it not be possible to create low density urban areas while not completely segregating the different aspects of life therefore stimulating life rather than relocating it?
If you have the time check it out, it raises some good questions...
The categories of agrarian and urban are usually understood as distinct. Across many disciplines, and for centuries, the country and the city have been defined in opposition to one another. But today, in striking contrast, design culture and discourse abound with claims for the potential for urban agriculture. As environmental literacy among designers and scholars has grown, so too has enthusiasm for agricultural production in and around cities. Fueling this trend is rising public interest in food and its production and distribution in a globalized world.
Contemporary interest in food is being shaped by various authors and interests, who argue for the more sustainable practices associated with local food production, reduced carbon footprint, better public health and the related benefits of pre-industrial farming techniques, including enhanced biodiversity and ecological sustainability. Among the strongest advocates for these goals are the slow food and locavore movements.
While much has been written about the implications of urban farming for agricultural production, public policy, and food as an element of culture, little has been written about the potentially profound implications for the shape and structure of the city itself. To date the enthusiasm for slow and local food has been based, on the one hand, on the assumption that abandoned or underused brownfield sites could be remediated for their productive potential; and on the other it has been based on the trend toward conserving greenfield sites on city peripheries — on dedicating valuable ecological zones to food production and to limiting suburban sprawl. But these laudable goals are not much concerned with how urban farming might affect urban form. This suggests that we need to probe further into the possibilities of agricultural urbanism: so these brief notes outline a history of urban form perceived through the spatial, ecological and infrastructural import of agricultural production. The choice of projects is based on the idea of agricultural production as a formative element of city structure, rather than as an adjunct, something to be inserted into already existing structures; thus this tentative counter-history seeks to construct a useful past from three projects organized explicitly around the role of agriculture in determining the economic, ecological and spatial order of the city.
Many 20th-century urban planning projects aspired to construct an agrarian urbanism — in some cases to reconcile the seemingly contradictory impulses of the industrial metropolis with the social and cultural conditions of agrarian settlement. In many of these projects, agrarianism offered a counterpoint to the increasingly dense metropolises that grew with the great migrations from farm villages to industrial cities in the 19th and early 20th centuries, especially in Western Europe and North America. Some early modernist proposals took their agrarian inspirations from the relatively decentralized industrial model favored by Henry Ford and others in the 1910s and '20s — a preference that led to spatial decentralization and the abandonment of older, denser cities. A decade or so later, partly in response to the Great Depression, planners saw agrarianism as a kind of bridge between the rural practice of subsistence farming and the increasingly vulnerable urban workforce. Through mixing industry with agriculture, some modernist urban planners imagined a rotational labor system in which workers alternated between factory jobs and collective farms; usually these new spatial orders were conceptualized as vast regional landscapes, and their representations conflated aerial views and orthographic maps.
We can read these emerging tendencies through three unbuilt projects that advocated for decentralized agrarian urbanism: Frank Lloyd Wright's "Broadacre City" (1934–35), Ludwig Hilberseimer's "New Regional Pattern" (1945–49), and Andrea Branzi's "Agronica" (1993–94), and its further development, "Territory for the New Economy" (1999). [1] Although produced decades apart by three very different authors, these projects, considered collectively, illustrate many of the implications of agricultural production for urban form; they also form a coherent intellectual genealogy, with Branzi referencing Hilberseimer, who earlier had been informed by Wright. Each of these projects proposed a profound reconceptualization of the city — a radical decentralization and dissolution of the urban figure into a productive landscape. The dissolution of figure into field rendered the classical distinction between city and countryside irrelevant, replacing it with a conflation of suburb and region — a suburbanized regionalism. Given contemporary interest in urban agriculture, these propositions offer compelling alternatives to what has become the canonical history of city form.
Implicit in the work of these urbanists were two large assumptions: that cities would continue to be decentralized, and that landscape would become the primary medium of urban form. The suburban landscapes in the projects of Wright, Hilberseimer and Branzi were fleshed out with agricultural landscapes — with farms and fields; the projects encompassed large territorial or regional networks of urban infrastructure that brought existing natural environments into new relationships with planned agricultural and industrial landscapes.
Broadacres / Usonia
In the depths of the Depression, lacking good projects and reasonable prospects for the recovery of his once towering reputation, Frank Lloyd Wright persuaded his lone remaining patron — Edgar J. Kauffman, who would later commission Fallingwater — to fund a traveling exhibition of Wright's grand proposal for an organic American urbanism.Broadacre City consisted of a large model — 12 feet by 12 feet — and supporting materials produced by student apprentices at Taliesin in the winter of 1934–35. Although the intellectual premises of the project were evident in Wright's lectures as early as the 1920s, and fully articulated in his 1932 book The Disappearing City, the Broadacre model and drawings were not debuted until an exhibition in 1935 in New York City. Subsequently, the exhibition toured extensively, and the remarkably durable project was further disseminated in such publications as When Democracy Builds (1945) and The Living City (1958). [2]
Broadacre City offered American audiences the clearest crystallization of Wright's damning critique of the modern industrial city; it posited an indigenous organic model for North American settlement across an essentially boundless plain of cultivated landscape. Eschewing traditional European distinctions between city and countryside, Broadacre proposed a network of transportation and communication infrastructures, with the Jeffersonian grid as its principal ordering system. Within this nearly undifferentiated field, the county government (headed by the county architect) replaced other levels of government, administering a population of landowning citizen-farmers. Wright was clearly conversant with and sympathetic to Henry Ford's notion of decentralized settlement, and the closest built parallel for Broadacre can be found in Ford's instigation of what would become the Tennessee Valley Authority — the New Deal-authorized public agency that oversaw the construction of a network of hydroelectric dams and highways along the Tennessee River, enabling the electrification of the region and seeding its urbanization. [3]
With ownership of one acre of land per person as a birthright, residents of Broadacre (or Usonia, as Wright would later call it) would enjoy modern houses sited amid ample subsistence gardens and small-scale farms. This basic pattern of variously scaled housing and landscape types was interspersed with light industry, small commercial centers and markets, civic buildings and, of course, the ubiquitous highway. Despite Broadacre's extremely low density, most of the ground was cleared and cultivated. Occasionally this constructed and maintained landscape relented in favor of extant waterways, topographic features, or other existing ecologies. Presumably the extrapolation of Broadacre City from its chiefly middle-western origins to the margins of the continent would have been accomplished with varying degrees of accommodation to local climate, geography and geology, if not cultural or material history. The status of previously urbanized areas remained an open question; perhaps these would need to be abandoned in place, again following Ford’s lead.
Wright's critique of private ownership, conspicuous consumption, and the accumulation of wealth associated with cities was no small part of the social critique embodied in Broadacre, which was conceived in the worst years of the Depression, when bankrupt family farmers were fleeing their mortgaged fields in the middle of the country and migrating to California. Ironically, given his anxiety over the corrosive effects of wealth and speculative capital, Wright found in Ford's notion of regional infrastructure the basis for an American pattern of urban development: Broadacre was intended to provide a respite from the relentless demands of profit associated with the industrial city, even as the American city was well on a course toward decentralization, driven by the highly capitalist strategies of Fordist production.
The New Regional Pattern / The New City
Another modernist architect and urbanist who grappled with the impacts of decentralization on urban form was Ludwig Hilberseimer. Born and educated in Karlsruhe, Germany, Hilberseimer worked with Mies van der Rohe at the Bauhaus until the rise of fascism precipitated their emigration to Chicago and the Armour (later Illinois) Institute of Technology in 1938. While Hilberseimer is most notoriously known for the strict, even totalizing rationalism of projects such as Hochhausstadt (Highrise City), Hilberseimer had in fact quickly abandoned those schemes in favor of projects that explored decentralization as a remedy for the ills of the industrial city. This was evident as early as 1927 in a sketch depicting "The Metropolis as a Garden-City" [4]; and in the 1930s Hilberseimer was increasingly influenced by European precedents for the garden city. His projects from that time deploy landscape and mixed-height housing to create low-density settlement; starting with his 1930 Mischbebauung (Mixed Height Housing), this pattern would inform his U.S. work over the next decades.
By the 1940s, Hilberseimer's concept of the "settlement unit" was taking clear form, especially in its anticipation of an interstate highway system and its precise articulation of relationships among transportation networks, settlement units, and the regional landscape. In the postwar years Hilberseimer's interest in organic urbanism was further fueled by civil defense imperatives that encouraged decentralization. [5] In this context — and influenced too by Broadacre City as well as the progressive TVA and its proponents in the Regional Planning Association of America — Hilberseimer developed his New Regional Pattern as a strategy for low-density urbanization based on regional highways and natural environmental conditions, and he disseminated his ideas in the 1949 The New Regional Pattern: Industries and Gardens, Workshops and Farms. [6]
As was Broadacre, the New Regional Pattern was organized around transportation and communication networks that unified an essentially horizontal, landscape-dominated suburban settlement. Housing, farms, light industry, commercial buildings, and civic space: all were located across an extensive territory. But the New Regional Pattern did not defer to the abstraction of the grid; it was informed by the natural environment — by topography, hydrology, vegetation, wind patterns, et al. It conflated infrastructural systems with built landscapes and used environmental conditions to produce a radically reconceived type of North American settlement. Although Hilberseimer's exquisite drawings (many are the uncredited work of IIT colleague Alfred Caldwell) did not make an explicit case for the kind of ecological awareness apparent in contemporary landscape urbanism, they clearly inflected urban infrastructure to ambient environmental conditions. [7] In this regard the project offers a profound critique of traditional 19th-century urban form, as well as the associated architectural and urban practices that have persisted.
Agronica / Territory for the New Economy
The work of the Italian architect and urbanist Andrea Branzi is equally relevant to the emerging discourse on agrarian urbanism. Branzi's work reanimates the long tradition of using the urban project as a social and cultural critique — of seeing urban design as an opportunity not simply to illustrate a "vision" but also to demystify and critically describe ongoing social problems. In this sense Branzi's work is less concerned with utopian possibilities than with the critically engaged and politically literate delineation of the power structures, forces and flows shaping contemporary urbanism; and in the past four decades he has articulated a remarkably consistent critique of the failings — social, cultural, intellectual, also economic, environmental and aesthetic — of laissez-faire development and of the realpolitik assumptions of much design and planning.
Born and educated in Florence, Branzi studied architecture in the cultural milieu of the Operaists and the scholarly tradition of Marxist critique. He came to international visibility in the mid 1960s as a member of the collective Archizoom, which was based in Milan but associated with the Florentine Architettura Radicale movement. In projects such as "No-Stop City," Archizoom envisioned an urbanism of continuous mobility, fluidity and flux; indeed, though widely perceived as a satire of the British technophilia of Archigram, No-Stop City was really more an exploration of a kind of "degree zero" urbanization, an urbanism without qualities. [8] In their use, for instance, of typewriter keystrokes on A4 paper to represent the non-figural planning of No-Stop City, Archizoom anticipated contemporary studies in indexical and parametric formulations of the city. Their work also prefigured the current interest in mapping how financial and ecological flows shape the modern low-density metropolis; and it anticipates the focus on infrastructure and ecology as non-figurative drivers of urban form. A generation of contemporary urbanists — ranging from Stan Allen and James Corner to Alex Wall to Alejandro Zaera-Polo — has thus drawn from Branzi's intellectual commitments. [9] Still more recently, Pier Vittorio Aureli and Martino Tattara's "Stop-City" project directly references Branzi's use of non-figurative urban projection as a kind of social and political critique. [10] Branzi's projects have also informed contemporary attention to such diverse topics as animalia, indeterminacy and genericity.
Just as he has influenced younger designers, Branzi himself was influenced by the leading postwar thinkers; in his focus on urban design as social critique, No-Stop City drew upon the projects and theories of Hilberseimer, especially the New Regional Pattern. [11] Not coincidentally, both Branzi and Hilberseimer chose to illustrate the city as a continuous system of relational forces and flows, as opposed to a collection of objects — which makes them particularly relevant to contemporary discussions of ecological urbanism. What is more, Branzi occupies a singular historical position as a hinge figure between the social and environmental aspirations of mid-century planning and the politics of 1968.
Branzi's Agronica, of 1993-94, illustrates the relentlessly horizontal spread of capital across thinly settled territory, and the resulting "weak urbanization" that neo-liberal economics has enabled. Commissioned by Philips Electronics, and created in association with the Domus Academy — a research institute Branzi cofounded in the '80s — Agronica explores the potential relationships among agricultural and energy production, new versions of post-Fordist industrialism, and the cultures of consumption they produce. [12] More recently, in 1999, Branzi extended this work in a project in Eindhoven; here too he shows, with typical wit, a "territory for the new economy," in which agricultural production shapes urban form. [13]
Branzi's "weak work" maintains its critical and projective relevance for a new generation of urbanists. His longstanding call for the development of what he defines as weak urban forms and non-figural fields — forms and fields that are flexible, mobile, open to change — influenced the formulation of landscape urbanism over a decade ago and promises to animate the emerging discussions of ecological urbanism. [14] And his projective and polemic propositions illuminate the possibilities for agrarian urbanism.
My brief pre-history of agricultural urbanism raises more questions than it answers, and it might not convince contemporary readers of the efficacy of organizing the city in this way — but it seems a useful step in understanding the larger implications of contemporary food culture for the design disciplines. Wright, Hilberseimer and Branzi each pursued agricultural urbanism as part of critical positions that engaged economic inequality, social justice, and environmental health. Each has contributed an important legacy for today's agrarian urbanists.
If you have the time check it out, it raises some good questions...
Notes Toward a History of Agrarian Urbanism
"The City in the Landscape," 1944. [From Ludwig Hilberseimer, The New City (Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1944), Ludwig Hilberseimer Papers, Ryerson & Burnham Library Archives, The Art Institute of Chicago.]
The categories of agrarian and urban are usually understood as distinct. Across many disciplines, and for centuries, the country and the city have been defined in opposition to one another. But today, in striking contrast, design culture and discourse abound with claims for the potential for urban agriculture. As environmental literacy among designers and scholars has grown, so too has enthusiasm for agricultural production in and around cities. Fueling this trend is rising public interest in food and its production and distribution in a globalized world.
Contemporary interest in food is being shaped by various authors and interests, who argue for the more sustainable practices associated with local food production, reduced carbon footprint, better public health and the related benefits of pre-industrial farming techniques, including enhanced biodiversity and ecological sustainability. Among the strongest advocates for these goals are the slow food and locavore movements.
While much has been written about the implications of urban farming for agricultural production, public policy, and food as an element of culture, little has been written about the potentially profound implications for the shape and structure of the city itself. To date the enthusiasm for slow and local food has been based, on the one hand, on the assumption that abandoned or underused brownfield sites could be remediated for their productive potential; and on the other it has been based on the trend toward conserving greenfield sites on city peripheries — on dedicating valuable ecological zones to food production and to limiting suburban sprawl. But these laudable goals are not much concerned with how urban farming might affect urban form. This suggests that we need to probe further into the possibilities of agricultural urbanism: so these brief notes outline a history of urban form perceived through the spatial, ecological and infrastructural import of agricultural production. The choice of projects is based on the idea of agricultural production as a formative element of city structure, rather than as an adjunct, something to be inserted into already existing structures; thus this tentative counter-history seeks to construct a useful past from three projects organized explicitly around the role of agriculture in determining the economic, ecological and spatial order of the city.
"Bird's-eye view of commercial area and settlement unit," 1944. [From Hilberseimer, The New City.]
Many 20th-century urban planning projects aspired to construct an agrarian urbanism — in some cases to reconcile the seemingly contradictory impulses of the industrial metropolis with the social and cultural conditions of agrarian settlement. In many of these projects, agrarianism offered a counterpoint to the increasingly dense metropolises that grew with the great migrations from farm villages to industrial cities in the 19th and early 20th centuries, especially in Western Europe and North America. Some early modernist proposals took their agrarian inspirations from the relatively decentralized industrial model favored by Henry Ford and others in the 1910s and '20s — a preference that led to spatial decentralization and the abandonment of older, denser cities. A decade or so later, partly in response to the Great Depression, planners saw agrarianism as a kind of bridge between the rural practice of subsistence farming and the increasingly vulnerable urban workforce. Through mixing industry with agriculture, some modernist urban planners imagined a rotational labor system in which workers alternated between factory jobs and collective farms; usually these new spatial orders were conceptualized as vast regional landscapes, and their representations conflated aerial views and orthographic maps.
We can read these emerging tendencies through three unbuilt projects that advocated for decentralized agrarian urbanism: Frank Lloyd Wright's "Broadacre City" (1934–35), Ludwig Hilberseimer's "New Regional Pattern" (1945–49), and Andrea Branzi's "Agronica" (1993–94), and its further development, "Territory for the New Economy" (1999). [1] Although produced decades apart by three very different authors, these projects, considered collectively, illustrate many of the implications of agricultural production for urban form; they also form a coherent intellectual genealogy, with Branzi referencing Hilberseimer, who earlier had been informed by Wright. Each of these projects proposed a profound reconceptualization of the city — a radical decentralization and dissolution of the urban figure into a productive landscape. The dissolution of figure into field rendered the classical distinction between city and countryside irrelevant, replacing it with a conflation of suburb and region — a suburbanized regionalism. Given contemporary interest in urban agriculture, these propositions offer compelling alternatives to what has become the canonical history of city form.
Implicit in the work of these urbanists were two large assumptions: that cities would continue to be decentralized, and that landscape would become the primary medium of urban form. The suburban landscapes in the projects of Wright, Hilberseimer and Branzi were fleshed out with agricultural landscapes — with farms and fields; the projects encompassed large territorial or regional networks of urban infrastructure that brought existing natural environments into new relationships with planned agricultural and industrial landscapes.
Broadacre City. Frank Lloyd Wright, 1950-1955. [Image via urbannebula.nl.]
Broadacres / Usonia
In the depths of the Depression, lacking good projects and reasonable prospects for the recovery of his once towering reputation, Frank Lloyd Wright persuaded his lone remaining patron — Edgar J. Kauffman, who would later commission Fallingwater — to fund a traveling exhibition of Wright's grand proposal for an organic American urbanism.Broadacre City consisted of a large model — 12 feet by 12 feet — and supporting materials produced by student apprentices at Taliesin in the winter of 1934–35. Although the intellectual premises of the project were evident in Wright's lectures as early as the 1920s, and fully articulated in his 1932 book The Disappearing City, the Broadacre model and drawings were not debuted until an exhibition in 1935 in New York City. Subsequently, the exhibition toured extensively, and the remarkably durable project was further disseminated in such publications as When Democracy Builds (1945) and The Living City (1958). [2]
Broadacre City offered American audiences the clearest crystallization of Wright's damning critique of the modern industrial city; it posited an indigenous organic model for North American settlement across an essentially boundless plain of cultivated landscape. Eschewing traditional European distinctions between city and countryside, Broadacre proposed a network of transportation and communication infrastructures, with the Jeffersonian grid as its principal ordering system. Within this nearly undifferentiated field, the county government (headed by the county architect) replaced other levels of government, administering a population of landowning citizen-farmers. Wright was clearly conversant with and sympathetic to Henry Ford's notion of decentralized settlement, and the closest built parallel for Broadacre can be found in Ford's instigation of what would become the Tennessee Valley Authority — the New Deal-authorized public agency that oversaw the construction of a network of hydroelectric dams and highways along the Tennessee River, enabling the electrification of the region and seeding its urbanization. [3]
With ownership of one acre of land per person as a birthright, residents of Broadacre (or Usonia, as Wright would later call it) would enjoy modern houses sited amid ample subsistence gardens and small-scale farms. This basic pattern of variously scaled housing and landscape types was interspersed with light industry, small commercial centers and markets, civic buildings and, of course, the ubiquitous highway. Despite Broadacre's extremely low density, most of the ground was cleared and cultivated. Occasionally this constructed and maintained landscape relented in favor of extant waterways, topographic features, or other existing ecologies. Presumably the extrapolation of Broadacre City from its chiefly middle-western origins to the margins of the continent would have been accomplished with varying degrees of accommodation to local climate, geography and geology, if not cultural or material history. The status of previously urbanized areas remained an open question; perhaps these would need to be abandoned in place, again following Ford’s lead.
A square-mile section of Broadacre City, proposed to be a continuous fabric of inhabited landscape across the American continent. Frank Lloyd Wright, 1934. [Image via dkolb.org.]
Wright's critique of private ownership, conspicuous consumption, and the accumulation of wealth associated with cities was no small part of the social critique embodied in Broadacre, which was conceived in the worst years of the Depression, when bankrupt family farmers were fleeing their mortgaged fields in the middle of the country and migrating to California. Ironically, given his anxiety over the corrosive effects of wealth and speculative capital, Wright found in Ford's notion of regional infrastructure the basis for an American pattern of urban development: Broadacre was intended to provide a respite from the relentless demands of profit associated with the industrial city, even as the American city was well on a course toward decentralization, driven by the highly capitalist strategies of Fordist production.
The New Regional Pattern / The New City
Another modernist architect and urbanist who grappled with the impacts of decentralization on urban form was Ludwig Hilberseimer. Born and educated in Karlsruhe, Germany, Hilberseimer worked with Mies van der Rohe at the Bauhaus until the rise of fascism precipitated their emigration to Chicago and the Armour (later Illinois) Institute of Technology in 1938. While Hilberseimer is most notoriously known for the strict, even totalizing rationalism of projects such as Hochhausstadt (Highrise City), Hilberseimer had in fact quickly abandoned those schemes in favor of projects that explored decentralization as a remedy for the ills of the industrial city. This was evident as early as 1927 in a sketch depicting "The Metropolis as a Garden-City" [4]; and in the 1930s Hilberseimer was increasingly influenced by European precedents for the garden city. His projects from that time deploy landscape and mixed-height housing to create low-density settlement; starting with his 1930 Mischbebauung (Mixed Height Housing), this pattern would inform his U.S. work over the next decades.
By the 1940s, Hilberseimer's concept of the "settlement unit" was taking clear form, especially in its anticipation of an interstate highway system and its precise articulation of relationships among transportation networks, settlement units, and the regional landscape. In the postwar years Hilberseimer's interest in organic urbanism was further fueled by civil defense imperatives that encouraged decentralization. [5] In this context — and influenced too by Broadacre City as well as the progressive TVA and its proponents in the Regional Planning Association of America — Hilberseimer developed his New Regional Pattern as a strategy for low-density urbanization based on regional highways and natural environmental conditions, and he disseminated his ideas in the 1949 The New Regional Pattern: Industries and Gardens, Workshops and Farms. [6]
"Masterplan Strijp Philips, Eindhoven," model view, 1999–2000. [Image: Andrea Branzi, et. al.]
As was Broadacre, the New Regional Pattern was organized around transportation and communication networks that unified an essentially horizontal, landscape-dominated suburban settlement. Housing, farms, light industry, commercial buildings, and civic space: all were located across an extensive territory. But the New Regional Pattern did not defer to the abstraction of the grid; it was informed by the natural environment — by topography, hydrology, vegetation, wind patterns, et al. It conflated infrastructural systems with built landscapes and used environmental conditions to produce a radically reconceived type of North American settlement. Although Hilberseimer's exquisite drawings (many are the uncredited work of IIT colleague Alfred Caldwell) did not make an explicit case for the kind of ecological awareness apparent in contemporary landscape urbanism, they clearly inflected urban infrastructure to ambient environmental conditions. [7] In this regard the project offers a profound critique of traditional 19th-century urban form, as well as the associated architectural and urban practices that have persisted.
Agronica / Territory for the New Economy
The work of the Italian architect and urbanist Andrea Branzi is equally relevant to the emerging discourse on agrarian urbanism. Branzi's work reanimates the long tradition of using the urban project as a social and cultural critique — of seeing urban design as an opportunity not simply to illustrate a "vision" but also to demystify and critically describe ongoing social problems. In this sense Branzi's work is less concerned with utopian possibilities than with the critically engaged and politically literate delineation of the power structures, forces and flows shaping contemporary urbanism; and in the past four decades he has articulated a remarkably consistent critique of the failings — social, cultural, intellectual, also economic, environmental and aesthetic — of laissez-faire development and of the realpolitik assumptions of much design and planning.
Born and educated in Florence, Branzi studied architecture in the cultural milieu of the Operaists and the scholarly tradition of Marxist critique. He came to international visibility in the mid 1960s as a member of the collective Archizoom, which was based in Milan but associated with the Florentine Architettura Radicale movement. In projects such as "No-Stop City," Archizoom envisioned an urbanism of continuous mobility, fluidity and flux; indeed, though widely perceived as a satire of the British technophilia of Archigram, No-Stop City was really more an exploration of a kind of "degree zero" urbanization, an urbanism without qualities. [8] In their use, for instance, of typewriter keystrokes on A4 paper to represent the non-figural planning of No-Stop City, Archizoom anticipated contemporary studies in indexical and parametric formulations of the city. Their work also prefigured the current interest in mapping how financial and ecological flows shape the modern low-density metropolis; and it anticipates the focus on infrastructure and ecology as non-figurative drivers of urban form. A generation of contemporary urbanists — ranging from Stan Allen and James Corner to Alex Wall to Alejandro Zaera-Polo — has thus drawn from Branzi's intellectual commitments. [9] Still more recently, Pier Vittorio Aureli and Martino Tattara's "Stop-City" project directly references Branzi's use of non-figurative urban projection as a kind of social and political critique. [10] Branzi's projects have also informed contemporary attention to such diverse topics as animalia, indeterminacy and genericity.
"Agronica," model view, 1993–94. [Image: Andrea Branzi, et. al.]
Just as he has influenced younger designers, Branzi himself was influenced by the leading postwar thinkers; in his focus on urban design as social critique, No-Stop City drew upon the projects and theories of Hilberseimer, especially the New Regional Pattern. [11] Not coincidentally, both Branzi and Hilberseimer chose to illustrate the city as a continuous system of relational forces and flows, as opposed to a collection of objects — which makes them particularly relevant to contemporary discussions of ecological urbanism. What is more, Branzi occupies a singular historical position as a hinge figure between the social and environmental aspirations of mid-century planning and the politics of 1968.
Branzi's Agronica, of 1993-94, illustrates the relentlessly horizontal spread of capital across thinly settled territory, and the resulting "weak urbanization" that neo-liberal economics has enabled. Commissioned by Philips Electronics, and created in association with the Domus Academy — a research institute Branzi cofounded in the '80s — Agronica explores the potential relationships among agricultural and energy production, new versions of post-Fordist industrialism, and the cultures of consumption they produce. [12] More recently, in 1999, Branzi extended this work in a project in Eindhoven; here too he shows, with typical wit, a "territory for the new economy," in which agricultural production shapes urban form. [13]
Branzi's "weak work" maintains its critical and projective relevance for a new generation of urbanists. His longstanding call for the development of what he defines as weak urban forms and non-figural fields — forms and fields that are flexible, mobile, open to change — influenced the formulation of landscape urbanism over a decade ago and promises to animate the emerging discussions of ecological urbanism. [14] And his projective and polemic propositions illuminate the possibilities for agrarian urbanism.
My brief pre-history of agricultural urbanism raises more questions than it answers, and it might not convince contemporary readers of the efficacy of organizing the city in this way — but it seems a useful step in understanding the larger implications of contemporary food culture for the design disciplines. Wright, Hilberseimer and Branzi each pursued agricultural urbanism as part of critical positions that engaged economic inequality, social justice, and environmental health. Each has contributed an important legacy for today's agrarian urbanists.
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