A few more books before the end of the year

Silke Langenberg. Das Marburger Bausystem. Open as a matter of principle. Sulgen: Niggli Verlag, 2013.

It is always such a pleasure to open a Niggli book. The layout is impeccable, the photographs are well printed. They get right the weight, the format, the paper, the font, everything. Their books even smell good. The object is as important as the content. Chapeau!

Felicity Scott's latest book is all about the content. I especially enjoyed the chapter about Kevin Roche and the Ford Foundation Headquarters which sets the tone for the whole book.

Felicity D. Scott. Outlaw Territories. Environments of Insecurity / Architectures of Counterinsurgency. New York: Zone Books, 2016.

Also fascinating is the topic chosen by Clare Lyster: logistics. In the book she reads urban spaces according to operation systems and procedurals flows. Ryanair route network, FedEx network operations, Amazon storage spaces... and movement: movement is the key.

Clare Lyster. Learning from Logistics. How Networks Change Our Cities. Basel: Birkhäuser, 2016.

With The Space Between the trilogy that Alison and Peter Smithson started when they published The Charged Void (check out their 1976 lecture) is completed. 

I believe the books on Herzog and de Meuron do not need any explanation.

Jean-François Chevrier. From Basel. Herzog & de Meuron. Basel: Birkhäuser, 2016.

The photographs of Richard and Cherry Kearton taking photographs in the landscape are quite unique and allow the reader to understand the labor behind their images.

John Bevis. The Keartons. Inventing Nature Photography. Axminster, Devon: Uniformbooks, 2016.

Content-wise I would certainly recommend The Apparent Marginal Activities of Marcel Duchamp. The author makes such an excellent point on the artist that makes you wonder why nobody thought about it before. If you are interested in curatorial practices you will be compelled to read it cover to cover. Together with Appearance Stripped Bare by Octavio Paz, this is the best book on Duchamp that I have read.

Elena Filipovic. The Apparently Marginal Activities of Marcel Duchamp. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016.

Spazio recommends: Ecologies of power

Pierre Bélanger and Alexander Arroyo. Ecologies of Power. Countermapping the Logistical Landscapes & Military Geographies di the U.S. DOD. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2016.

Pierre Bélanger and Alexander Arroyo chose a scary and difficult topic: the logistical landscapes and military geographies of the U.S. Department of Defence. The research they present in this book is very compelling, especially that of the first three chapters.

Taking as an example the Diego Garcia atoll, the first chapter shows how logistics islands can reconfigure the Strategic Islands Concept. Logistical islands cannot remain isolated and this is ensured by a massive maritime logistical apparatus. "77 percent of international trade moves via container ship [...] perhaps more importantly, more than three-quarters of this daily maritime traffic, including half of petroleum and crude oil imports and exports, is squeezed through a handful of manufactured and highly maintained waterways surveilled and managed by military engineers like USACE, and security forces like the Coast Guard. [...] It is precisely the addition of an information stratum woven into the topologics of force projection that allows for the unprecedented flexibility, precision, and coordination of logistical operations."

The second chapter deals with Improvised Explosive Devices (IED), the perfect asymmetric weapon, in relation to the urban field and its infrastructure. "The weaponization of the road, both topologically and materially, suggests an open relation between power and infrastructure that may be appropriated through antagonistic organizational structures, strategies of domination, and tactics of seizure." 

The third chapter is to me the most interesting, perhaps because of its historical precedents: "An army marches on its stomach," remarked Napoleon. "To successfully feed the hundred of thousands of troops and personnel at hundreds of bases around the world, around the clock, 365 days a year, the logistical operations and systems supplying high quality provisions in such high quantity are not merely technical affairs, but an integral part of a national culture of defence." Modern methods of food preservation (canning and refrigeration) are analyzed and compared to contemporary nutritional politics and economies. The authors show how milk and dairy products "prove as thick as blood and oil in determining processes of territorialization, patterns of occupation, and flows of resources and populations through the emergent ecological and economic matrices of the modern food regime entwined with contemporary projections and counter-practices of power."

Finally, allow me to go back to the Introduction's first sentence. It is a disclaimer which I find quite problematic: "This book is not about war, nor a history of war." The note explains it a bit better. It is a book about the process and logistics of militarization and militarism. Infrastructure as the equipment and expression of power is its underlying foundation. "Without advocating or admonishing the practice of war or military operations, [...] this book avoids the common, mid- to late-century views that conflate and confuse the necessity of war for economic development, growth, and industrial progress, which have shaped further opposition across the divide between left wing and right wing views." As I said, the research the authors have presented is compelling but somehow I wish their take on it was more clear and explicit, not so neutral. Can we assume that the final pages, titled Residuum, are a first step in this direction?

Film

It’s a movie about the perceiving eye, about the perceived and the perceiver – two aspects of the same man. The perceiver desires like mad to perceive and the perceived tries desperately to hide. Then, in the end, one wins.

Samuel Beckett, in The New Yorker, 8th Aug 1964.

Film, written by Samuel Beckett, starring Buster Keaton, 1965

Wonderland Potosí

The mythical source of silver known as Sierra de la Plata [Silver Mountain] is somehow linked to the history of Cerro Potosí, or Cerro Rico (4,782 m). A city with the same name was founded by the Spaniards in 1545 to host the Spanish colonial mint and soon became the largest and wealthiest city of the Americas. It is the highest in the world permanently inhabited (4,090 m) and the capital of one of the richest areas in the world with gold, silver, copper, tin, bismuth, zinc, lead.

Cerro de Potosí, Pedro Cieza de Leon, La Chronica de Peru, 1553. John Carter Brown Library, 0840-010

Veduta della Città e della Montagna del Potosí, Giuseppe Maria Terreni, 1777. John Carter Brown Library, 35878-8

If we look closely at the early plates representing the area we can always see men climbing to the top and into the mountain, miners presumably. Centuries have passed since then and from this point of view not much has changed: thousands of men still walk up every morning.

19°36'27.8"S 65°44'22.6"W    

People still walk into the rabbit hole in search for precious metals. These dark plates from the Eighteenth Century perfectly illustrate the kind of environment that one may find inside.

El Secreto de la mina de Potosi se descubre à Villarroel, Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas, 1728. 

John Carter Brown Library, 07376-39

Mines de Potosí, Voyage de Marseille a Lima, et dans les autres lieux des Indes occidentales, 1720. JohnCarter Brown Library, 02437-1

What comes out are trucks of soil and rocks that are ready to be smelted, sorted and traded. But all that digging has created a sinkhole that started collapsing in 2011.

19°35'37.5"S 65°44'19.9"W

When zooming out for a moment we still see the same barren landscape that European explorers saw when they first arrived. It is traversed by roads and pipes, it is degraded and stained, but for many it is still symbolic of inexhaustible riches.

Plateau et cerro de Potosi, (Bolivia) relevés en 1835 par Mr. Alcide d'Orbigny. John Carter Brown Library, 02-15-078    

19°38'05.2"S 65°44'19.0"W