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Thursday 26 January 2017

Power and Interest on Sumatra's Rainforest Frontier: Clientelist Coalitions, Illegal Logging and Conservation in the Alas Valley

Introduction 
The Indonesian archipelago contains the world's second largest expanse of tropical forest and is a major world centre for biodiversity. Yet, Indonesia has one of the highest rates of deforestation, an issue of increasing international concern. This problem has become more acute since a political and economic crisis struck Indonesia in 1997, leaving the country wracked by an epidemic of unregulated logging. Despite the significance of extra-legal resource extraction, however, the dynamics shaping the problem at the local level have not been well studied. This article combines theoretical approaches developed by legal anthropologists and others to develop an analytical framework for studying the problem. This framework is then applied to examine the institutional matrix associated with logging and forest pioneering in Southeast Aceh district during 1996-9. 
As other studies suggest, particular institutional or socio-political structures are characteristic of upland or frontier areas of Indonesia. As this case from Sumatra illustrates, in an upland frontier district networks of power and interest affect the distribution of key resources. I argue that as district networks of power and interest reach out into the wider society, they exert various degrees of control over access and use of the most valuable resources found in the area. As these networks encompass both state and customary (adat) authority structures, they constitute the most serious obstacle to the implementation of state policy, thwarting the best efforts of external project interventions and, seemingly in this area at least, leading inexorably to the transformation of the rainforest ecosystem. 
The article itself is divided into four parts. The first section provides the theoretical framework whilst the second describes both the area where this study was carried out and the research methods used. The third section discusses the actions and interactions of village communities, logging networks, field foresters and other officials, district politicians and conservation agencies, before drawing some final conclusions. 
Theoretical orientation
Legal scholars have long observed that in the context of a developing country, government attempts to use law as an instrument for change have often led to unforeseen or unwanted consequences. (2) Legal anthropologists have sought to explain this problem in terms of 'the primacy of "folk law" and "indigenous social ordering" over legislation and formal legal ordering'. (3) This approach, sometimes referred to as 'legal pluralism', endeavours to understand law as part of a far more encompassing and complex social organisation. In other words, it seeks to comprehend the consequences of the coexistence of more than one set of institutional arrangements pertaining to the same set of activities and relationships. (4) 
A critical moment in this tradition of social thought was Sally Moore's description of what she called 'semi-autonomous social fields' or SASF. Moore developed this concept as a methodological device to investigate 'a small field observable to an anthropologist's These SASF can be identified by a 'processual characteristic' -- their ability to generate their 'own custom and rules and the means of coercing or inducing compliance'. (5) In other words, what is essential to these SASFs is that they 'have some degree of autonomous regulation of behaviour', and that 'they can bring forth and maintain their own rules'. (6) However, Moore noted that given the multiple sources of rules, these SASFs do not exist on their own. A SASF needs to be analysed in connection with the wider society: it is 'semi-autonomous' because it 'is simultaneously set in a larger social matrix which can, and does, affect and invade it, sometimes at the invitation of persons inside it, sometimes at its own insistence'. (7) 
As Moore herself showed, the SASF concept is a particularly useful tool for providing insights into the ordering of social life in complex settings. …

For further details log on website :
https://www.questia.com/library/journal/1G1-84798487/power-and-interest-on-sumatra-s-rainforest-frontier

Design Business

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Design Business

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ScaleScope Introduction
The years of the competition-driven, unpurchased idea-giving, and endless anticipation for the phone to ring deserves to be a page in history.
It often seems that for the last decade, tech firms have done a better job of advocating for design than more traditional design disciplines of architecture, landscape and graphic design. Large companies like Apple and smaller start-ups like Fitbit have distinguished themselves and succeeded by keeping design at the core of their business model. Wells Riley, a business writer and consultant, advocates for the hand-in-hand relationship of design and entrepreneurship. His sleek infographic-filled websitediscusses how design is more than a logo or website—“it’s a state of mind. It’s an approach to a problem. It’s how you’re going to kick your competitor’s ass”. If the business sector has fully embraced the power of design thinking, it should open up doors for the design field to join the conversation and learn from the creative financing and market networking of the twenty-first century start-up.
Scale/Scope, a symposium at PennDesign, brought together a diverse group of designers who are all attempting to expand the scope of their design practice. Collectively, they have come to call themselves “proactive practitioners,” often proposing projects rather than solely responding to clients. Presenters shared work on a variety of scales that collectively begin to reimagine design culture and explore this generative term. Here are some of the ideas that came out of the event.
The proactive practitioner comes in all shapes and sizes. From small, young, two-person practices to giant firms like West 8 and Gensler, many are focused on bringing social and ecological issues to the forefront of their projects. In this setting, the designers argue, social impact and ecological justice are legitimate benchmarks for design, presenting an opportunity for architects who strive to create better communities and ecological consciousness through ethical, rather than purely market-driven work. The proactive practice stems from an interest in issue-based design that may not have a direct client base to foot the bill.
Heavy Trash_gate stairs
Heavy Trash, an anonymous design group, built a staircase over the locked gate of a public park. This project shows how suggestive design can call attention to the problems of our built environment. Image via gray_matter(s).
Proactive projects work on many scales. Many of the projects shown at the conference were small, one-off, guerilla-style projects that land into the public realm to highlight contradiction, spur conversation, and respond to the climate. These projects typically represent a way for young designers to speak, as much as they provide meaningful change for communities or users. Many are creative, lean and strategic.  Examples include the highly regarded Park-ing Day Parklet by Rebar in the Bay, and lesser known projects like the PPlanter by Hyphae Design Lab. The PPlanter is a response to the health and public facility condition, or lack thereof, in the impoverished Tenderloin area. This public toilet module, filtered and made private by large plastic planters and bamboo shoots, intendeds to be deployed on streets with no public facilities.  Rebar and Hyphae Design Lab designed not just small installation projects but polemics. With Park-ing Day, Rebar took a guerrilla installation project—a modest deployment of public space utilizing a clever legal loophole—and found ways to scale it. Rebar recognized the opportunity to extend the conversation around their hijacked parking spot into a global initiative. For them, the answer was not to invest in the isolated event, but build a larger network that extended through a relational icon, the omnipresent parking spot.
Proactive design seeks to reach underserved communities who may not see themselves as clients. Moving beyond polemics and engaging directly with the people, Public Architecture‘s Day Labor Station engages an underserved population, trying to legitimize them and make them more visible. By identifying a market, with constituents and potential investors, Public Architecture engaged the population of day laborers that meet daily in parking lots to apply for work. The day laborers are an aware group with needs and priorities but no infrastructure to facilitate their much-needed occupation. The Day Labor Station synthesized programmatic needs and offered pragmatic well-designed structures for a group of unrepresented peoples who had not yet organized themselves to seek initial design assistance.
PublicArchitecture_DayLaborStation
Public Architecture’s Day Labor Station identified a once-anonymous group and designed a station according to their needs. Image courtesy of Public Architecture.
Moving beyond physical designs, Emerging Terrain founder Anne Trumble has been designing public events that bring multiple groups together in cross-collaboration projects. The initial event was a public dinner party manufactured around the opening of a public art project, the Grain Elevator, in Omaha, Nebraska. With Trumble’s efforts, the party became an annual festival to celebrate the coming together of creatives in making space and food. The festival was a way for Trumble to expand the design method to include outreach and designer plus community coalitions. These events have not only brought Anne Trumble subsequent projects but became a new community amenity for the city of Omaha.
The final scale represented at the Scale/Scope symposium was that of the social network, one that extends beyond the composition of a singular space or event. MASS Design Group of Cambridge, Massachusetts, has received a lot of recognition for their Butaro Hospital project in Rwanda. The group of young designers recognized the near-absence of design in hospitals construction in the developing world, and made a case to Partners in Health’s co-founder Dr. Paul Farmer about the need for architecture to be involved in healthcare delivery. When they began, MASS had no rules for building medical facilities for developing communities. During the design of the Butaro Hospital, they worked closely with aid programs, and through this process, realized that they were designing much more than a building. MASS recognized that their hospital projects are not just health facilities but social networks that connect investors, communities, healthcare, local economies, and global public and private markets. The building of the structures become training and employment opportunities for community members that generates an internal reciprocated investment into the local economy and built fabric. In Butaro, MASS employed local craftsman and sourced local materials that led to local spin-off companies specializing in the stone building blocks used in the hospital. And by building not just for patients but doctors and their families, MASS grew the social network and provided quality facilities (including homes and schools) to encourage more physicians to settle in Rwanada. Capitalizing on the absence of sophisticated, multifaceted, social sector design work, MASS used their newfound experience with the Butaro pilot project, to develop a consultancy business that could partner with huge global organizations like USAID.
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Butaro Hospital, MASS Design Group. Photo © Iwan Baan, courtesy of MASS Design Group.
Proactive practice shouldn’t have to be a sacrifice, in time nor money. By collecting and distilling successful examples of firms that have moved past the traditional client-driven model, a new rule set for instigating one’s own projects begins to emerge. Rather than relying solely on physical proposals as the main products of design, architects are experimenting with choreographing events and assembling communities, instigating conversations and networks that may in turn attract attention, investment, and further design opportunities. The social sector and true positive impact is a ripe field for designers to reorganize and build upon. By recognizing the variety of available scales in which to operate, new potential funding streams, and ways to capitalize on the entrepreneurial mindset, the twenty-first century design thinker has the world at their doorstep.
MASS Design Group_Butaro Hospital
Butaro Hospital, MASS Design Group. Photo © Iwan Baan, courtesy of MASS Design Group.
The first step is to ask, how do we, as a group, adopt this new mode of practice? When in the education of the designer does this methodology become relevant? Design institutions often ignore or don’t openly acknowledge the difficulties of beginning one’s own practice and the harsh realities of realizing projects. That is not to say that school shouldn’t be about invention and speculative projections but rather also encourage innovation in the tired culture of our field.
To nimbly address current concerns, designers don’t have to stop doing buildings or other client-driven projects, but do need to expand their methodology to include proactive practice. Design firms could run lean start-ups, plug into and galvanize new markets, and be entrepreneurial and assertive enough to control their own narratives, while finding avenues to self-finance projects that they themselves have identified. The business world is the next frontier for design firms, and it is high time we look into not just designing the physical world, but also our design methodology.

Anooshey RahimAnooshey Rahim is from Houston, Texas and received her Bachelor of Arts from the University of Texas at Austin. She subsequently earned her Master of Architecture and Master of Landscape Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania. Many of her recent endeavors focus on exploring the transdisciplinary potential of a new design methodology. Her interest is to find the intersections between the entrepreneurial business sector and design thinking in order to bring new innovation to humanitarian design.
For further details log on website :
http://scenariojournal.com/design-business/

Book Review: The Petropolis Of Tomorrow

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Book Review: The Petropolis Of Tomorrow

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Petropolis of TomorowThe Petropolis of Tomorrow, edited by Neeraj Bhatia and Mary Casper
Off the coast of Brazil, dozens of floating oil rigs mark the first wave of an enormous boom in offshore oil extraction, with 45,000 workers already deployed offshore and more on the way. 70,000 helicopter trips every month ferry workers to and from the mainland. In the coming years, in order to service the drilling operations, the oil industry is expecting to build up to 50 new deep-water platforms, floating far beyond helicopter range. With this expansion, Brazil’s latent offshore oil industry is poised to shake up the region’s laws, economies and geopolitics, and to once again radically reshape the urban form of South America’s biggest nation and its capital city.
The Petropolis of Tomorrow focuses on the technologies, logics, logistics, and architectural possibilities of the floating mechanical islands that will serve this emerging oil boom. Edited by Neeraj Bhatia and Mary Casper, this ambitious book brings together critical essays by a number of architects and theorists, along with architectural projects, which are the products of design studios that Bhatia, now an Assistant Professor at California College of the Arts (CCA), ran at both Rice University and Cornell. Petropolis takes us on a historical and speculative exploration of oil frontiers, outposts, company towns, port cities, and artificial islands — as well as the lines of infrastructure, logistics, and capital that tie them together.
Bhatia is no stranger to infrastructure: as co-director of the research collective InfraNet Lab, founder of The Open Workshop, and co-editor of Bracket [goes soft], his work has revolved around the larger speculative agenda of territory and infrastructure as it relates to architecture.
Can networks and logistics of extraction engender city making? And what does design offer to such places (and presumably the people who live and work there)?
Petropolis explores three main ideas — first, how the idea of floating cities opens up a way to think about architecture that moves beyond objects and towards networks; second, how the geography and use of vast territories take shape around the infrastructures of extraction and production; and third, how the logistics and technical realities of extraction and transmission imprint themselves on cities and landscapes, shaping land use and subsequent urban development.  While the concepts may be heavy, the book explores them through a lush combination of photography, rich narrative, design provocations and critical theory and history — striving at once to introduce the reader to these striking landscapes, and to treat the critical topics with depth.

Throughout the book, several authors speculate on the tension between cities and company towns — asking whether infrastructure built for industrial purposes can form the foundation of actual urbanism, or whether any resultant urban form is doomed to a privatized and paternalistic existence under the parent company. To what extent is the territory off the coast of Brazil akin to the lawless frontier of the American West, which was so formative for American national identity, institutions, and individualism? What is the hidden imprint of oil on the form, location, and organization of towns? The essays and projects catalogued in Petropolis offer theoretical, historical, and speculative perspectives on the fundamental question of the book: Can networks and logistics of extraction engender city making? And what does design offer to such places (and presumably the people who live and work there)?

Alex Webb_Oil Rocks
The book features grim yet stunning photoessays by Gareth Lenz, Alex Webb, and Peter Mettler, of oil extraction operations from the Caspean Sea to Alberta, Canada.
Bhatia organizes the book into three sections: Archipelago Urbanism, Harvesting Urbanism, and Logistical Urbanism. Archipelago Urbanism tackles the theoretical formulation of the polycentric network — the island archipelago as conceptual framework — and this idea’s role in architectural theory. The second section, Harvesting Urbanism, speculates on offshore production — farming, fisheries, aquaculture — and lends a deeper reading to a maritime territory that at first glance appears featureless and undifferentiated. Marine ecology of the offshore oil territory features prominently, with several essays focusing on the potential symbiosis between oil rigs and fisheries. The last section, Logistical Urbanism, tackles the logistical relationships between entities that manifest themselves as shipping routes, port hubs, components, plug-ins, lines of transmission and the corridors of ownership that shape them.
“In addition to searching for programmatic bands that might couple the primary technological objectives of the logistical easement, landscape and architectural design might offer ways to reveal the generative capacity of the logistical landscape, its massive temporal and scalar shifts, and the material displacements it effects.”
Brian Davis, Index of Landscape Typology: Easements
Each of the three sections is inaugurated by a lush photo-essay of an oil extraction operation, from the Alberta Tar Sands to the Caspian Sea, that gives us a taste of some of today’s most dramatic oil mining hotspots; each section concludes with a speculative architecture project offering a picture of futuristic floating cities that use the logistics of oil and gas extraction as “a backbone for more comprehensive urbanism at sea,” to quote from the Foreword by Felipe Correa. While the most interesting of the critical essays operate in the speculative historicism of cultural geography, the projects operate through polemical provocation, although subsequently developed into thoroughly detailed schematic schemes. These projects, arguing for the coupling of public or civic functions with the logistics of the oil rig in the Brazilian offshore territory, graft traditional urban typologies onto the new paradigm of collective offshore living: airport, civic center, shopping mall, workers’ housing. Other floating structures take on the production side of sea-based urbanism: agriculture, aquaculture, power plant, factory. Each is cleverly considered and satisfyingly rendered in a common graphic vocabulary; collectively they take the stance that architecture can remain specific while acting systemically — that the design of discrete nodes can produce larger urban patterns and functions.
Unlike the frontier town on land, however, the floating rig cities struggle to attract the diversity of economies and populations that might enable a true urbanism to flourish. Located so far offshore, they are isolated from one another and also from the casual flows of goods and people. While many of the projects attempt to critique and subvert the private company town model, they are most useful as provocations, as diagrams of challenges and opportunities, rather than as detailed designs for actual places. They grapple with the question, which Bhatia lays out in his Introduction, of whether the larger, richer, more powerful corporate and state entities that dominate the offshore oil game can be compelled to produce the bones of a truly viable urban construct.
One of the more provocative projects proposes that a travelling “Civic Boat” visits the various offshore rigs in turn, providing needed social and law enforcement services, while establishing the island city as a municipality within the Brazilian federal government. Another project, recognizing that the density for true urbanism is lacking in any one rig, proposes to tie a spatially dispersed population of workers together through a temporal routine of mobile programs and events that sail between the scattered offshore outposts.
Emergent Civic
Programmatic identities of individual oil rigs, along with the itinerant “Civic Boat”
In many ways, the premise of floating cities is a wonderful proxy for the longstanding battle within architecture between a focus on the design of objects — autonomous exercises in form — versus that of networks, which are systemic, often invisible, and able to talk about larger logistical flows and operational relationships. The book unambiguously takes the stance of networks over objects, with numerous essays exploring the complex relationships between nodes in a system, interactions between the floating islands and the sea, and invisible lines of ownership and the physical manifestations of infrastructure. Several authors speculate on the organizational potential of archipelagos, a spatial construct that has been of interest for architects and urbanists since the 1970s, ever since Ungers’ and Koolhaas’ Berlin city-as-archipelago metaphor. Some argue for an update to this metaphor, expanding it to include the relationships between islands, as well as their differences. Others argue that the geological island metaphor needs to be merged with the biological metaphor of the organism in order to achieve an adequately operative complexity.
Drydockdom
A floating drydock city, with public space for boats and people
But the deepest and most helpful pieces, from the point of view of elucidating the role of design upon the networked territory, are those that scrutinize the invisible patterns of the political and logistical landscape of oil extraction, which are critical for understanding the overall system at work.
“Although the oil territory is a landscape of lines, axes, nodes, points, blocks, and flows, the connectivity of such extensive spatial networks is rendered unevenly in its operations. The political reclamation of the offshore thus requires the examination of linkages and containments, continuities and discontinuities, as well as flows and frictions. It calls for a grounding of the offshore in a territorial project beyond the enclave of the rig.”
Rania Ghosn, The Expansion of the Extractive Territory
For Rania Ghosn, with her essay The Expansion of the Extractive Territory, the critical patterns are these invisible lines and flows. She points out that while the oil rig is the most visible technical piece of the oil extraction operation, it is the complex world of ownership, liability, and ecological and geological relationships that is critical for understanding oil extraction’s role on the territory. She argues for a representational agenda that can capture the full complexity — the “thick space” — of the offshore system. She also argues that the quest for resources is what has historically driven nations to explore and record their frontier territory, bringing “the state directly into contact with its territory — and more precisely with the qualities of this territory” for the first time. The process of extraction thus carries a larger representational agenda. Rather than focusing on the visible object floating on the water, she urges architects to engage with the qualities of the larger territory and its web of relationships, to make “the invisible visible,” and to uncover the power relationships that drive the system.
Similarly focusing on invisible yet powerful geographical structuring devices, Brian Davis points to the easement as a potent landscape typology operating at the scale of the territory, reshaping politics at both local and regional scales. He draws a helpful distinction between technological objects (such as the pipeline), and the easement that permits the deployment of the pipeline or transmission line (which negotiates between abstract lines and the specific terrain of the territory). The technological object is autonomous — responding to its own internal logic, carefully calibrated for its precise technical function. The easement, however, cuts a unifying swath across varied terrain, across conflicting ownerships, across biomes and habitats — opening up tantalizing potentials, in the way it is designed and detailed, to create entire new easement landscapes, coupling transmission with linear industries, new habitats, recreational systems, firebreaks, productive properties. The easements of pipelines, power lines, highways, and canals tie the city to its resource flows, extending the urban territory far beyond the city.
Program Loop
A worker’s routine, dispersed in space but ordered in time, across the offshore territory
The logistics and flows of oil, shipping, and capital determine where the physical infrastructures of industry get placed, but these in turn shape urban form. Several essays explore how pipelines, ports, refineries, and logistics hubs organize patterns of settlement far into the future. Carolina Hein’s essay describes how many port cities, energized as nodes in the larger network of petroleum shipping, carry frameworks of urbanism inscribed with the spatial logistics of oil. The massive oil infrastructure in these cities lingers long after the operations have moved on, presenting a challenge of reuse, but also an opportunity for comprehensive design and planning. And as Bhatia shows in his analysis of the Trans-Arabian Pipeline, it was the technological object that formed the kernel and the armature of settlement in a vast swath of the Arabian desert. Pump stations along the pipeline, with their water infrastructure, road access, medical and educational services, worker housing, mail and communications, gathered dispersed nomadic communities into permanent settlements in the desert that continue to grow to this day.
To what extent can the private interests that deploy these enormous infrastructures be compelled to care for the urbanistic or cultural needs of the places they will utilize? Rather than provide a single answer, the projects in Petropolis offer up a rich menu of ways to start thinking about questions about the boundary between private and public, about the role of design in an industry driven by economic gain, and about the relationship between object and system. In speculating on urbanism on such challenging and dispersed sites, Bhatia posits a way for architects to operate on both the technological system and the territory, using the geospatial, analytic and projective skillset of architectural urbanism.
But most importantly, The Petropolis of Tomorrow provides an opening salvo of writings on the operations, logic, and logistics of a massive petro-economic system that is morphing rapidly while continuing to drive both energy policy and geopolitics, and where too many designers fear to tread.
For further details log on website :
http://scenariojournal.com/the-petropolis-of-tomorrow/

Exhibit: Lebbeus Woods At The Drawing Center

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LW1
Lebbeus Woods, Architect.
April 17, 2014 – June 15, 2004
THE DRAWING CENTER 35 Wooster Street, New York, NY
Lebbeus Woods, Architect, on exhibit at The Drawing Center, traces the career of Lebbeus Woods, a visionary architect whose responses to the sites of trauma have given us haunting designs — intricate, beautiful, full of memory, and ultimately optimistic. The show includes a number of Woods’ projects spanning 40 years of work, from the dynamic tensioned and cantilevered pods of bombed-out Sarajevo, to the “Freespaces” of Berlin during the time of the Wall, to the “ecological utopia” of his Demilitarized Zone in Korea, and to the San Francisco Earthquake houses. Impossibly intricate styrene study models, meticulously annotated sketchbooks, and fragments of writing accompany the powerful drawings in a space that is small yet filled with palpable humanism and love of craft.
While at first glance many of the projects appear futuristic or dystopian, his writing reveals an optimism, compassion, and resilience in the aftermath of trauma. By going to the deep, dark places of war and destruction, Woods tried to understand how to build on and with, these layers of trauma.
The show reveals the work of an architect and urbanist who cared deeply about the memory embedded in the physical apparatus of the city. His work projects a desire to grapple with and make sense of the past, rather than erasing the wounds of war. The work insists that the destruction of war-torn landscapes might create the preconditions of a new, and better, city and society.
Though he did not leave many built projects, Lebbeus Woods’ work and words have left a lasting influence on the many designers for whom he was a teacher, a mentor, a critic and an inspiration. This exhibit at the Drawing Center reminds us of the power of a few well-placed lines on paper.
Draw. Drawing is the tool of the architect on the move, on the run, the architect who is first of all a citizen of the stricken city and the new, dynamic stability. Pen, pencil, and paper are cheap, accessible. They can be used anywhere, and, if necessary, concealed. Drawings, too, can be easily hidden, or can be exhibited, published, filmed, digitized, and therefore widely disseminated, when the architect is ready to place them in the public domain. Until that time, the architect is freed by drawing’s inherent intimacy to explore the unfamiliar and the forbidden, to break the old rules and invent new ones. Drawings can be made anywhere there is light enough to see. They are instruments of spontaneous experimentation, fluidity of thought, mobility of invention. Unlike models, drawings can describe an immense range of scales with subtlety. And, most of all, drawings are fast. This is important because the architect’s work should not, by virtue of too-arduous labor, become an end in itself. All effort in projection aims at realization in building, and thus in living. This aim cannot be compromised by the fact that not all of the architect’s projections will, can, or should be built.”
Lebbeus Woods, Radical Reconstruction 1997

Lebbeus Woods, Architect closes this weekend at the Drawing Center.
Please go and see it if you can.
 
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“The shift of focus I have made from objects to fields has not been made simply as a rejection of typological thinking, which dominates the design of buildings; nor simply as a rejection of the politics of identity that buildings inevitably work to sustain; nor simply as a rejection of the illusions of authority conjured by buildings – especially innovative buildings designed and built in the service of private or institutional power. It is a shift I have made in order to liberate, in the first case, myself. If I cannot free myself from the reassurance of the habitual, how can I speak of the experimental, which is nothing without real risk even loss? If I cannot free myself from obsession with the end-product, how can I advocate the relations latent in the process of making things? Without freedom from the tyranny of the object, how can I attain the measure of independence necessary to join with others, who, in the making of things, conquer their existence in the first place by their own efforts? If I cannot free myself, how can I advocate the freedom of others, in whichever terms they might choose?”
Lebbeus Woods, 2004 

Lebbeus Woods, Architect is curated by Joseph Becker, Assistant Curator of Architecture and Design, and Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher, Helen Hilton Raiser Associate Curator of Architecture and Design, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Lebbeus Woods, Architect is organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and will be open at The Drawing Center through June 15, 2004. More information contact The Drawing Center
For further details log on website :
http://scenariojournal.com/exhibit-lebbeus-woods-at-the-drawing-center/

PennDesign Launches New Interdisciplinary Journal

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LA+ Logo
Landscape architects often point to the interdisciplinary potential of their work, yet too often talk exclusively to other designers. Now comes a new publication from PennDesign that explicitly takes on the interdisciplinary challenge: LA+, as it will be known, will curate each issue through the multiple lenses of varied disciplines pluslandscape architecture, all taking on a common topic.
The inaugural issue, to be published this coming Spring, LA+ WILD, explores the resurgent role of the concept of “wildness”—as wildness moves from a passive romantic ideal to an active process of design, involving “rewilding,” large-scale habitat restoration and species conservation, scientific experiments, the construction of novel ecosystems, and wildness’ effect on aesthetics and the human psyche. The issue includes pieces by ecologists, biologists, artists, bioengineers, landscape architects, climatologists, environmental historians, and philosophers, among others. Having seen the list of contributors, we’re very excited for the WILD issue, published and distributed by ORO Editions.
The bi-annual publication has already queued up a number of subsequent issue topics: LA+ PLEASURELA+ TYRANNY, and LA+ IDENTITY. Each one will be seeking submissions from a broad range of disciplines to complement the landscape architecture angle, stimulating cross-pollination and inspiration for designers. As Editor-in-Chief Tatum Hands explains, “We wanted to produce something completely different to the usual landscape design journal—which generally just features designers talking to other designers—and truly embrace the rhetoric that landscape architecture is an interdisciplinary field.”
As Richard Weller, the chair of Landscape Architecture at PennDesign describes it, LA+ was conceived to fill a certain void in landscape architectural publishing. “Whilst we have trade magazines on the one hand and refereed academic journals on the other there isn’t much in between and it’s in that space that the contemporary, thinking professional largely exists. Our sense is that there is a large readership who want information that is neither at the level of superficial promotion nor overly academic. So, LA+ seeks to be a bridge between the academy and practice and, most importantly, to link landscape architecture to other disciplines.”
LA+ is currently accepting submissions for its second issue, LA+ PLEASURE, inviting pieces on how the production and consumption of pleasure impacts our cities, our landscapes and ourselves.  The deadline for abstracts and expressions of interest is September 1, 2014 with submissions due October 15, 2014. For more information, visit www.laplusjournal.com.
Please join us in welcoming LA+ to the small but growing family of landscape publications, and in saluting the interdisciplinary design journal’s ambition of reaching across professional boundaries in the spirit of creative inquiry and practice.
For further details log on website :
http://scenariojournal.com/la-plus/

Call For Submissions: SCENARIO 5 Extraction

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Welcome back to Scenario Journal.  If you’re a regular reader, you may have noticed us laying low for the last couple of months, as we’ve been focusing on teaching, recovering from our latest issue, Scenario 4: Building the Urban Forest, and taking a bit of time to recuperate and refocus on our primary mission — curating and developing original content that brings together a trans-disciplinary conversation at the intersection of design, science and technology. Back with fresh energy, we are happy to launch our latest call for submissions, looking at the landscapes of extraction that sustain urbanization. The call for Scenario 5: Extraction is now open; we hope to see many of you submit critical essays, provocations, original photography, and design projects on this fascinating and urgent topic.
Scenario 5 Call for Submissions
Deadline for Submissions: January 31st, 2015
Extraction sustains our society. We rely on energy to power the technology in our lives, but are disconnected from the landscapes that must be exploited in order to yield that energy. We dig and blast materials to build and repair the physical infrastructure of our cities, but rarely think about the places from which they come. As the world population becomes more urban and more spatially removed from the landscapes that supply its raw materials and energy needs, as supply chains elongate and become more globalized, our reliance on remotely extracted natural resources only continues to increase, while our relationship to the landscapes of extraction recedes ever-further from daily view.
The logistical and infrastructural connections of the city to its hinterland effectively expand the urban territory— connecting sites of extraction, transmission and consumption. How do these landscapes fit into the larger urban social, economic, and ecological systems? What meaningful connections can contemporary cities make to their extraction landscapes? How can designers, mangers, and researchers operating on these sites engage public narratives, make visible natural resource flows, and energize cultural production? How might these sites engender new ecological opportunities, experiment with new techno-landscapes, and jump-start new possibilities for settlement? How do landscapes of extraction bridge the spatial disconnect between city and hinterland?
Scenario 5: Extraction welcomes the submission of critical essays, provocations, and design projects that explore the role, reality, and potential offered by landscapes of extraction.
Submission Requirements:
  • Design projects and photo essays should have a clear and focused text no longer than 1000 words, accompanied by 6-10 images.
  • Article-based submissions should range in length from 1000 to 4000 words.
  • We prefer to receive submissions as Microsoft Word documents with images embedded with the text. All sources and citations should be clearly indicated and included as footnotes or endnotes according to the Chicago Manual of Style.
  • Please alert us if work has been previously published or if it has been submitted simultaneously to another publication.
  • Send submissions to mail@scenariojournal.com, with ‘ISSUE 5 Submission′ in the subject line. Submissions will be reviewed on a rolling basis.
  • DEADLINE: Submissions are due January 31st, 2015. 
Image (above): Open coal mine Garzweiler by Bert Kaufmann
For further details log on website :
http://scenariojournal.com/call-for-submissions-scenario-5/

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