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THRESHOLDS 40

JOURNAL OF THE MIT DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE

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S

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Editorial Policy

Thresholds , Journal of the MIT Department

of Architecture, is an annual, blind peer-

reviewed publication produced by student

editors at the Massachusetts Institute of

Technology. Opinions in Thresholds are those

of the contributors and do not necessarily

reflect those of the editors, the Department

of Architecture, or MIT.

Correspondence

Thresholds —MIT Architecture

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Published by SA+P Press

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Copyright © 2012

Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The individual contributions are copyright

their respective authors.

Figures and images are copyright theirrespective creators, as individually noted.

ISSN 1091-711X

ISBN 978-0-9835082-1-2

Book design and cover by Donnie Luu

www.donnieluu.com

Printed by Puritan Press, Hollis, NH

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1



THRESHOLDS 40

EDITED BY JONATHAN CRISMAN

Cambridge, MA

SOCIO—



5 EDITORIAL:

SOCIO-INDEMNITY AND

OTHER MOTIVES

— JONATHAN CRISMAN

11 CONJURING UTOPIA’S GHOST

— REINHOLD MARTIN

21 LE CORBUSIER, THE BRISE-SOLEIL,

AND THE SOCIO-CLIMATIC PROJECT

OF MODERN ARCHITECTURE,

1929-1963

— DANIEL A. BARBER

33 MOVE ALONG!

THERE IS NOTHING TO SEE

— RANIA GHOSN

39 FLOW’S SOCIO-SPATIAL

FORMATION

— NANA LAST

47 COLLECTIVE EQUIPMENTS OF

POWER: THE ROAD AND THE CITY

— SIMONE BROTT

55 COLLECTIVE FORM:

THE STATUS OF PUBLIC

ARCHITECTURE

— DANA CUFF

67 TUKTOYAKTUK: OFFSHORE OIL

AND A NEW ARCTIC URBANISM

— PAMELA RITCHOT

75 BOUNDARY LINE INFRASTRUCTURE

— RONALD RAEL

83 DISSOLVING THE GREY PERIPHERY

— NEERAJ BHATIA AND ALEXANDER D’HOOGHE

91 PARK AS PHILANTHROPY:

BOW-WOW’S REDEVELOPMENT

AT MIYASHITA KOEN

— YOSHIHARU TSUKAMOTO

99 MUSSELS IN CONCRETE: A SOCIAL

ARCHITECTURAL PRACTICE

— ESEN GÖKÇE ÖZDAMAR

105 PARTICIPATION AND/OR

CRITICALITY? THOUGHTS ON AN

ARCHITECTURAL PRACTICE FOR

URBAN CHANGE

— KENNY CUPERS ANDMARKUS MIESSEN

113 THE SLUIPWEG AND

THE HISTORY OF DEATH

— MARK JARZOMBEK



121 EXTRA ROOM:

WHAT IF WE LIVED IN A

SOCIETY WHERE OUR EVERY

THOUGHT WAS PUBLIC?

— GUNNAR GREEN AND BERNHARDHOPFENGÄRTNER

127 SCULPTURE FIELD : FROM THE

SYMBOLIC TO THE TECTONIC

— DAN HANDEL

135 ON RADIATION BURN

— STEVE KURTZ

163 CAIRO DI SOPRA IN GIÙ :

PERSPECTIVE, PHOTOGRAPHY,

AND THE “EVERYDAY”

— CHRISTIAN A. HEDRICK

175 HUSH

— STEVEN BECKLY AND JONATHAN D. KATZ

189 NORCS IN NEW YORK

— INTERBORO PARTNERS

209 UNCOMMON GROUND:

AETHER, BODY, AND COMMONS

— ZISSIS KOTIONIS

217 EDENS, ISLANDS, ROOMS

— AMRITA MAHINDROO

225 THE PRINCE:

BJARKE INGELS’S SOCIAL

CONSPIRACY

— JUSTIN FOWLER

233 BEYOND DOING GOOD:

CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE AS DESIGN

PEDAGOGY

— HANNAH ROSE MENDOZA

237 AID, CAPITAL, AND THE

HUMANITARIAN TRAP

— JOSEPH M. WATSON

245 THE END OF CIVILIZATION

— DANIEL DAOU

255 TOWARD A LAKE ONTARIO CITY

— DEPARTMENT OFUNUSUAL CERTAINTIES

263 SOCIOPATHS

— JIMENEZ LAI



THE PRINCE:

BJARKE

INGELS’SSOCIAL

CONSPIRACYJUSTIN FOWLER



“OUR WORLD COULD BE MUCH

MORE ACCOMMODATING,

ECOLOGICAL AND ENJOYABLE

THAN IT IS; OUR CITIES COULD

BE MORE FIT FOR HUMAN LIFE,MORE ADAPTIVE TO THE SPECIFIC

CLIMATES WHERE THEY ARE

LOCATED. THE REASON THEY’RE

NOT IS THAT THERE ARE INTERESTS

THAT ARE UNCONCERNED WITH

THE COMMON GOOD, AND NOT

INVESTED IN CREATING THE BEST

WORLD POSSIBLE. BY CLAIMING

THAT THESE INTERESTS HAVEFORMED AN UNHOLY ALLIANCE

AND ARE SYSTEMATICALLY KILLING

ARCHITECTURE’S PROTAGONISTS,

PERHAPS IT’S POSSIBLE TO GET A

BIGGER AUDIENCE INTERESTED IN

UNDERSTANDING THE CHALLENGES

FACED BY ARCHITECTS. THERE’S

NOTHING LIKE A GOOD OLD

FASHION CONSPIRACY THEORYTO GET PEOPLE’S ATTENTION;

WHINING ARCHITECTS DO NOT

EXACTLY MAKE A BESTSELLER.”

—BJARKE INGELS 1

“SUDDEN AND RELENTLESS

REFORM NEVER SITS WELL WITH

ENTRENCHED INTERESTS AND

POWER BROKERS. THAT’S WHYTRUE REFORM IS SO HARD TO

ACHIEVE. BUT WITH THE SUPPORT

OF THE CITIZENS OF ALASKA, WE

SHOOK THINGS UP. AND IN SHORT

ORDER WE PUT THE GOVERNMENT

OF OUR STATE BACK ON THE SIDE

OF THE PEOPLE.”

— SARAH PALIN 2

Few architects working today attract

as much public acclaim and disciplinary

head-scratching as Bjarke Ingels. Having

recently arrived in New York, this self-

proclaimed futurist is undertaking his own

form of Manifest Destiny, reminding Americanarchitects how to act in their own country.

While his practice is often branded by the

architectural establishment as naïve and

opportunistic, such criticism is too quick to

conflate Ingel’s outwardly optimistic persona

with the brash formal agenda it enables. In the

current economic climate, there are

any number of gifted purveyors of form

languishing in New York City. Despite this,

Ingels has somehow managed to get away

with proposing a pyra-midal perimeter block

in midtown New York FIG. 1, a looped pier in St.

Petersburg Florida FIG. 2,and an art center in

Park City, Utah massed as torqued log cabin

while maintaining a straight face. How, then, is

his mode of operation considered uncritical by

so many within the discipline? Clearly, Ingels

has figured something out about harnessing

and transforming “the social” and American

architects would do well to identify what that

happens to be. In this search for a method, itmight help to be a little paranoid. So, in the

manner of any good conspiracy theorist, let’s

go to the chalkboard, or rather,

the diagram...

“ A WISE PRINCE SHOULD ESTABLISH

HIMSELF ON THAT WHICH IS IN HIS

OWN CONTROL AND NOT IN THAT

OF OTHERS; HE MUST ENDEAVOUR

ONLY TO AVOID HATRED, AS IS NOTED.” — NICCOLO MACHIAVELLI 3

Part of the answer may lie with Ingels’s

brand of populism, which is as much about

1 Bjarke Ingels, “Bjarke Ingels: Interview by Jeffrey Inaba,”

Klat , no. 4 (Fall 2010): 89.

2 Sarah Palin, “Acceptance Speech at the RepublicanNational Convention,” September 3, 2008.

3 Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince , trans. W. K. Marriott

(Costa Mesa, CA: Plain Label Books, 1952), 92.

226

T H R E S H O L D S 4 0

JUSTIN FOWLER



Fig. 1 — BIG, West 57th , New York City. Image by BIG and Glessner, courtesy of BIG.

Fig. 2 — BIG, St. Petersburg Pier . Image by BIG and MIR, courtesy of BIG.

227

S O C

I O—

THE PRINCE



being social as it is about the social. From

his “archicomic” monograph (now published

for the iPad) to his recent appearance in a

number of glossy, culture magazines, Ingels

is cutting out the middleman and bringing his

message directly to the people. Bred as aninsider (first at OMA, and then at Columbia

and Harvard), he has since gone rogue by

positioning himself outside of the elitist

currents that make up avant-garde practice.

The message is that Ingels is of the people

and therefore his work has the people’s best

interests at heart. This Palin-esque sleight

of hand is not only powerful as a means to

attract clients, but also to provide him with

tactical agility. Architects have always tried

to slip design elements past their clients

through flattery, but Ingels goes beyond the

timid hide-the-medicine-in-the-applesauce

approach. His is one of radical transparency,

quite literally telling the client everything in

order to free his forms from political oversight

and its requisite headaches. Ingels’s mentor,

Rem Koolhaas, remains a critical darling

because despite all of his fashionable

rhetoric, architectural insiders consider him a

sinister figure. While the most straightforwardreading would suggest that Ingels has

jettisoned the schizophrenic attitude of

the latter in favor of a singular, wide-eyed

deliriousness, one might also view his project

as being far more complex in its coupling of

populism and Machiavellian exceptionalism—

the two seemingly opposite poles of American

political thought.

Ingels’s paean to optimism, Yes is More ,

opens by suggesting a direct parallel

with Obama’s campaign slogan, “Yes we

can.” While Obama’s phrase served as a

stand-in for his goal of consensus-building

pragmatism, Ingels’s slogan suggests excess

over compromise, or perhaps excess via the

rhetoric of compromise. Demand to resolve

the impossible and something interesting

might emerge: “What if design could be the

opposite of politics? Not by ignoring conflict,but by feeding from it. A way to incorporate

and integrate differences, not through

compromise or by choosing sides, but by

tying conflicting interests into a Gordian

knot of new ideas.”4 While the Gordian

allusion may be apt, it seems that Ingels

is simultaneously playing the roles of both

Gordius and Alexander, weaving difference

into a coherent formal puzzle while cutting

through “politics” with a decisive stroke.

In Taming the Prince , Harvey Mansfield

locates this political ambivalence as a latent

Machiavellian thread inherent in the executive

branch of the US government. Unlike an

authoritarian ruler who exerts power based

solely by claiming the right to do so, the

executive executes decisions on behalf of the

sovereign who have elected to abide by such

rulings. Being of the people allows a leader

an exceptional capacity to take decisive

actions while remaining distanced from theiroutcomes. This rhetorical latitude is a double-

edged sword, being both extra-constitutional

(outside) and grounded in its formal provision

(inside). For Mansfield, the ambivalence of the

executive is the position’s greatest strength. It

is absolute formal power in a populist guise.

Curiously, such power can also be considered

“performative” which, as Robert Somol

suggests, “operates in such a way that the

saying of it makes it so.”5 Ingels’s “pragmatic

utopian” brand of the performative is its own

kind of Tea Party Express—that undeniably

revolutionary platform that somehow manages

to reconcile such outwardly incommensurable

positions as tax reduction and increased

military spending into one loud, populist

leviathan. It remains to be seen whether

Ingels’s desire to have his cake and eat it too,

or “BIGamy,”6 is more closely related to the

Tea Party’s brand of cognitive dissonance

or some imagined urban win-win scenariobrought to bear through sheer force of will.

But, then again, does it even matter so long

as the strategy pays off?

4 Bjarke Ingels, Yes is More (Cologne: Evergreen, 2009),14–15.

5 R. E. Somol, “Green Dots 101,” in Hunch , no. 11

(Winter 2007): 29.

6 Bjarke Ingels, “Bjarke Ingels,” 94.

228


JUSTIN FOWLER



“THE LOGO CAN SLIP FROM

FOREGROUND TO BACKGROUND

AS THE SITUATION WARRANTS.”

— R. E. SOMOL 7

“THE UNITY OF THE OFFICE

[OF THE PRESIDENT] IMPLIES

THE POSSIBILITY, THOUGH A

REMOTE ONE, OF AN IDEAL

EXECUTIVE. SUCH A PERSON

WOULD COMBINE IN HIMSELF THE

AMBIVALENCE INHERENT IN THE

OFFICE, DUCKING OUT OF SIGHT

AND LEAPING INTO VIEW WHENNECESSARY AND APPROPRIATE.

AND HIS KNOWLEDGE... WOULD

ENCOMPASS THE DOCTRINE OF

EXECUTIVE POWER, UNITING ITS

TWO ASPECTS WHILE JUSTIFYING

THEIR SEPARATION.”

— HARVEY C. MANSFIELD, JR.8

As with BIGamy, the disruptive potential

of the Tea Party, like so many populist

movements before it, lies in the directness

of its attitude rather than the consistency

of its positions. Its ideological diversity is

kept in check through cults of personality

and patriotic displays. Likewise, one could

say that the seemingly irreconcilable socio-

political issues that Ingels seeks to absorb

into his work are held together through the

use of shape. His projects straddle the gulf

between the scale of the building and of theurban master plan. Unable to exert building-

scale control over his projects, and conversely

unwilling to relinquish formal control over

the design of the larger plan, Ingels uses the

bluntness of shape to broker a tenuous peace

and gain some degree of maneuverability

within this scalar high-wire act. Shape, then,

corresponds to attitude, a mode of operatingthat covers for ideological ambivalence.

Contrary to Robert Somol’s largely de-

politicized conception of shape in which the

“non-necessitarian possibility”9 of the graphic

allows it to disappear into the background,

Ingels’s work demonstrates the efficacy

of shape as an insurgent socio-political

force. Somol perhaps unintentionally hints

at this capacity when he suggests that “the

graphic can only be artificially asserted and

subsequently played out.”10 In the context

of American executive power, however, the

exceptional assertion is permissible only

through an appeal to necessity and to the

extraordinary circumstances that force a

leader to go beyond the normal call of duty.

For Ingels, the necessity of materializing

his projects requires the construction of a

receptive audience, primed to believe that

the abstraction of the diagram somehow

corresponds to their experience of the city.Whether post-rationalized or generative, BIG’s

diagrams project an attitude of inevitability,

suggesting that the final form is the necessary

result FIG. 3. While such alibis are not new to

the architecture profession, Ingels takes it

a step further, actively working to shape the

social environment within which the final

project is judged—placing himself in the

world, so that his forms retain a degree

of autonomy.

7 Somol, “Green Dots 101,” 33.

8 Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., Taming the Prince: The

Ambivalence of Modern Executive Power (Baltimore, MD:

The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 15.

9 Somol, “Green Dots 101,” 37.

10 Ibid., 34.

Fig. 3 — BIG, West 57th Massing Diagram . Image courtesy of BIG.

229

S O C

I O—

THE PRINCE



“GOVERNMENT HAS THE AMBIVALENT

TASK OF BRINGING NECESSITY

HOME TO THE PEOPLE, SO

THAT THEY SURVIVE, WHILE

CONCEALING IT FROM THEM, SOTHEY ARE HAPPY AND INNOCENT.”

— HARVEY C. MANSFIELD JR.11

“BJARKE INGELS IS A ‘YES MAN.’

HE RISES TO THE CHALLENGE OF

JUST ABOUT ANY DEMAND, BE

IT REASONABLE OR OTHERWISE,

WITH AN UNQUALIF IED ‘YES.’ THIS

FUELS HIS AMBITION TO ABSORB ALL THE POLITICAL INTERESTS

SURROUNDING A PROJECT AND

TO TURN THEM INTO BACK-

BENDING FORMS THAT DISARM

THE OPPOSITION.” — BJARKE INGELS12

From the image of a mountain screen-

printed onto the side of his housing complex

in Copenhagen known simply as “The

Mountain” FIG. 4, or the projection of the face

of Princess Victoria onto the façade of the

Arlanda Hotel, to the use of Lego peoplein “Lego Towers” FIG. 5, Ingels constructs a

graphic social ecology that is as hermetic

as it is self-serving. For all the rhetoric about

embracing a diversity of socio-political and

economic forces, Ingels’s work is relational

only within the autonomous social context

that he has rendered for himself. Within this

framework, there is little tangible embrace

of the contingency of urban life. Rather, the

value of the work lies in the reductive and

monolithic fiction of the world he presents,

and its quality as a plausible alternate reality

only just removed from the conditions it

recasts in such a positive light. Ingels’s craft is

in acting as though this gap doesn’t exist. The

apparent straightforwardness of his work

Fig. 4 — BIG, The Mountain, Copenhagen. Photo by Carsten Kring, courtesy of BIG.

230


JUSTIN FOWLER



belies the articulation of his negative critique.

In our world, yes is great but no means no.

By subverting the necessity of trade-offs in a

zero sum game, Ingels is offering an internally

coherent conspiracy theory and seeking

converts to share in the BIGamy.

By reframing how we see our world

through the presentation of an exuberant

alternative, he is insuring that we cannot

return from exposure to his visions without

having unwittingly undergone some formof attitude adjustment that prefigures our

subsequent experiences. It is interesting,

then, that someone who claims to have

the capacity to “absorb” all differences

within a project can also claim that he has

an “opposition” to “disarm,” as the idea

of opposition seems foreign to his win-win

conceptual narrative. The critical potency of

Ingel’s work, however, comes from this very

project of making the impossible into a viablealternative through the seeding of an attitude

within the public imagination.

“THIS IDEA OF THE PARANOID—

OF NOTICING ASPECTS OF THE

WORLD THAT OTHER PEOPLE

DON’T SEE—IS A VERY POWERFUL

TOOL FOR THE ARCHITECT.”

— BJARKE INGELS13

One of the defining features of

any conspiracy is its internal coherence.

Irrespective of the ends, conspiracies perform,yet how well they perform is a function of the

skill with which these autonomous Gordian

constructs are planted within the collective

consciousness. Such skill underwrites the

soft power of influence. While architects’

desire for influence is not new, the strategies

for achieving it have varied widely. They

11 Mansfield, Taming the Prince , 145.

12 Bjarke Ingels, Yes is More , author’s note.

13 Bjarke Ingels, “Bjarke Ingels,” 86.

Fig. 5 — BIG, Lego Tower . Image courtesy of BIG.

231

S O C

I O—

THE PRINCE



often entail an appeal to the architect’s ability

to manage material and economic efficiency,

effectively abandoning the excess inherent in

any architectural act. Ingels, however, engages

the social so as to justify this excess, using his

own personal brand as a sideshow to secureautonomy for his exuberant formal agenda. The

bi-polarity of this maneuver reflects at once a

profound sympathy for Koolhaas’s appropriation

of the Paranoid-Critical method in Delirious

New York as well as an intuitive understanding

of the ambivalence that underwrites American

power structures. If, paradoxically, Ingels has

conspired to pry open a space for division, or

disciplinary autonomy, through a social project

of unity and consensus-building, then an

evolution in his work will emerge when he moves

to free his shapes from the lingering rhetorical

vestiges of populism and examine the role

that form plays in relation to the irreconcilable

political necessities that drove him to conjure

such an ambivalent knot from the start.

***Justin Fowler received his MArch from Harvard University

and previously studied Government and the History of Art and

Architecture at the College of William and Mary. He is an assistant

editor of Invention/Transformation: Strategies for the Qattara/Jimi

Oases in Al Ain (Harvard GSD, 2010) and his writing has appeared

in Volume , Pidgin , Speciale Z Journal , Scapegoat , PIN-UP , Topos ,

and Conditions , along with book chapters in The New Urban

Question: Urbanism Beyond Neoliberalism (TU Delft, 2009), Urban

Interventions (Slovart, 2011), and Material Design: Informing

Architecture by Materiality (Birkhauser, 2010). He has worked as a

designer for Dick van Gameren Architecten in the Netherlands and

currently manages research and editorial projects at the Columbia

Lab for Architectural Broadcasting (C-Lab) in New York.

232


JUSTIN FOWLER



THRESHOLDS 40SOCIO—

Editor

Jonathan Crisman

Designer

Donnie Luu

Assistant Editors

Ana María León

Jennifer Chuong

Antonio Furgiuele

Irina Chernyakova

Advisory Board

Mark Jarzombek, Chair

Stanford Anderson

Dennis Adams

Martin Bressani

Jean-Louis Cohen

Charles Correa

Arindam Dutta

Diane Ghirardo

Ellen Dunham-Jones

Robert Haywood

Hassan-Uddin Khan

Rodolphe el-Khoury

Leo Marx

Mary McLeod

Ikem OkoyeVikram Prakash

Kazys Varnelis

Cherie Wendelken

Gwendolyn Wright

J. Meejin Yoon

Patrons

James Ackerman

Imran Ahmed

Mark and Elaine Beck

Tom BeischerYung Ho Chang

Robert F. Drum

Gail Fenske

Liminal Projects, Inc.

Rod Freebairn-Smith

Nancy Stieber

Robert A. Gonzales

Jorge Otero-Pailos

Annie Pedret

Vikram Prakash

Joseph M. Siry

Richard Skendzel

Special Thanks

To my family,

Mark Jarzombek,

Sarah Hirschman,

Adam Johnson,

Donnie Luu,

Nader Tehrani,

Adèle Santos,

Rebecca Chamberlain,

Jack Valleli,

Anne Deveau,

Kate Brearley,

Deborah Puleo,

Michael Ames,

and all of the authors, the

editorial team, the advisory

board, and the patrons.

This issue would not have

been possible without you.

Opposite: Intergalactic Sculpture , 1994.

Copyright Ezra Orion.



5 SOCIO-INDEMNITY

AND OTHER MOTIVES

— JONATHAN CRISMAN

11 CONJURING UTOPIA’S GHOST

— REINHOLD MARTIN

21 LE CORBUSIER, THE BRISE-SOLEIL,

AND THE SOCIO-CLIMATIC PROJECT

— DANIEL A. BARBER

33 MOVE ALONG!

THERE IS NOTHING TO SEE

— RANIA GHOSN

39 FLOW’S SOCIO-SPATIAL FORMATION— NANA LAST

47 COLLECTIVE EQUIPMENTS OF POWER

— SIMONE BROTT

55 COLLECTIVE FORM

— DANA CUFF

67 TUKTOYAKTUK

— PAMELA RITCHOT

75 BOUNDARY LINE INFRASTRUCTURE

— RONALD RAEL

83 DISSOLVING THE GREY PERIPHERY

— NEERAJ BHATIA AND ALEXANDER D’HOOGHE

91 PARK AS PHILANTHROPY

— YOSHIHARU TSUKAMOTO

99 MUSSELS IN CONCRETE

— ESEN GÖKÇE ÖZDAMAR

105 PARTICIPATION AND/OR CRITICALITY?

— KENNY CUPERS ANDMARKUS MIESSEN

113 THE SLUIPWEG AND THE

HISTORY OF DEATH

— MARK JARZOMBEK

121 EXTRA ROOM

— GUNNAR GREEN ANDBERNHARD HOPFENGÄRTNER

127 SCULPTURE FIELD

— DAN HANDEL

135 ON RADIATION BURN

— STEVE KURTZ

163 CAIRO DI SOPRA IN GIÙ

— CHRISTIAN A. HEDRICK

175 HUSH

— STEVEN BECKLY AND JONATHAN D. KATZ

189 NORCS IN NEW YORK

— INTERBORO PARTNERS

209 UNCOMMON GROUND

— ZISSIS KOTIONIS

217 EDENS, ISLANDS, ROOMS

— AMRITA MAHINDROO

225 THE PRINCE

— JUSTIN FOWLER

233 BEYOND DOING GOOD

— HANNAH ROSE MENDOZA 237 AID, CAPITAL, AND THE

HUMANITARIAN TRAP

— JOSEPH M. WATSON

245 THE END OF CIVILIZATION

— DANIEL DAOU

255 TOWARD A LAKE ONTARIO CITY

— DEPARTMENT OFUNUSUAL CERTAINTIES

263 SOCIOPATHS

— JIMENEZ LAI

thresholds40socio 23 fowler

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