Spazio recommends: Beyond the City

Felipe Correa. Beyond the city: resource extraction urbanism in South America. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016.

In this engaging book, Felipe Correa studies – through five relevant case studies – the regional impact of the industry of resource extraction in Latin America.

Introduction

Shaping Resource Extraction

Chapter 1 _ A Regional Capital: Belo Horizonte

Chapter 2 _ A Mining Town Constellation: María Elena

Chapter 3 _ Petrol Encampments: Judibana and El Tablazo

Chapter 4 _ A New Industrial Frontier: Ciudad Guayana

Chapter 5 _ Pioneering Modernity: Vila Piloto

Epilogue

The Legacy of Resource Extraction Urbanism and the Future of the South American Hinterland

Correa shows how the modernist plan of Belo Horizonte was used as a device for reorganizing the productive hinterland of Minas Gerais in Brazil. He points to the role played by topography in the siting of major public buildings and civic open spaces, and addresses the importance of a constructed nature in the overall organization of the plan. He also recognizes that “it was only with the investment in rail infrastructure that the city gained geographic relevance in the region”, as the rail infrastructure facilitated the export of massive quantities of iron ore.

Nitrate extraction sites in the Atacama Desert

In the second chapter, the author studies the spatial requirements of nitrate extraction, processing, and export, which have defined a network of interdependent settlements in the Atacama Desert. “A private nitrate-extraction town was strategically located between a western port city that served as the nitrate gateway to the world and an Andean oasis that served as a source of food and water for the industrial town”. These oficinas salitrales – see María Elena – have drastically altered the pampa.

In the mid-1950s, American oil companies in Venezuela built new company towns following partially implemented plans by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM). They were conceived initially as citadels and later as integrated communities. The author presents drawings and photographs of Judibana, La Salina, and El Tablazo. “These full-service enclaves, organized primarily as buildings dispersed in the landscape, embodied a new lifestyle that exercised a significant social and cultural change in the region”.

Ciudad Guayana was designed at the Joint Center for Urban Studies, a multidisciplinary venture by Harvard University and MIT funded by the Ford Foundation to study postwar urbanization. It was the opportunity to test the notion of “growth pole” by giving a spatial dimension to an abstract economic model. It was conceived as a linear city that tied clearly zoned nodes with a continuous mobility infrastructure. “Ciudad Guayana was part of a much larger Cold War agenda that involved a growing interest, among non-governmental organizations like the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations as well as the US government, in advancing development through urbanization in many parts of Latin America”.

In the final chapter, Correa studies the cities built to house the temporary worker that built the chain of dams and hydroelectric power plants along the Paraná River basin in Brazil. VilaPiloto, Ilha Solteira, and Porto Primavera were the opportunity to conceive a new form of urban development. “What was traditionally a riparian environment with cities sprinkled along its edges is now transformed into a "metapolized" landscape that is neither urban nor rural in traditional terms […]”

Notes and bibliography are also of great interest.

Spazio recommends: Bulldozer

Francesca Russello Ammon. Bulldozer: Demolition and Clearance of the Postwar Landscape. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016.

In this exemplary study of the Bulldozer, Francesca Russello Ammon asked how the US came to embrace and implement widespread destruction as a means to achieving progress between 1945 and the mid-1970s, with demolitions reaching their zenith in the name of urban renewal in the 1960s.
Though the army formally established the Corps of Engineers in 1802, it was only during World War II that Naval Construction Battalions (Seabees) members utilized heavy equipment for the large-scale land-clearance practices required by the hundreds of new bases that were being built across the world. From 1942 through the end of the war, 85 percent of Caterpillar's production went to the government. The author showed how the implementation and representation of clearance elevated both the bulldozer and the men operating it into powerful American heroes.

Navy Seabees operating a Caterpillar, June 1945, The Life Photo Archive, photographs by J. R. Eyerman

When these men and methods came home after the war, "the domestic landscape became their new enemy, and profit - rather than victory - was the new goal".
Clearance of nature and large-scale earthmoving made way for new suburban development, while demolition of existing city buildings implemented state-sponsored slum-clearance programs and urban renewal. Though "on the ground demolition proved slow, dirty, difficult, and environmentally and socially damaging", it was initially accepted as progress. But the physical and social devastation upon the land turned the Bulldozer, once a symbol of progress, into a symbol of destruction. This transformation began in the 1960s, and it was complete by the mid-1970s. 

The author presented three case studies - namely the suburban land clearance in Orange County, California; the urban renewal demolition in New Haven, Connecticut; and the postwar highway boom - to show the physical capability of large-scale destruction and to introduce the opposition that soon followed.
"Although no clear moment marks the demise of the culture of clearance, America's withdrawal from Vietnam in 1973 marks a suitable endpoint. [...] Just as the earthmoving Seabees helped glamorize the bulldozer in the 1940s, military clearance in Vietnam helped tarnish it a few decades later. [...] The environmental damages were brutal, ranging from erosion to the long-term depletion of vegetation and wildlife". 

The last two chapter are devoted to children's book, model toys and the Earthworks by Land Artists. For further readings on the topic don't forget to check out the book's thorough notes.

Plunging into the archive: ten years of industrial design

The magazine Stile Industria was founded in 1954 by Alberto Rosselli on the conviction that architects and designers should be concerned with the form of all things industrial. It was the only Italian magazine dedicated solely to industrial design and it run for forty-one issue, almost ten year. At the time when Domus (Gio Ponti) was still publishing objects that were crafted by artisans in small numbers, Rosselli chose to discuss only mass production.

Next to chairs, tables, and kitchenware he presented toilets, cars, measuring instruments, and truck tires. He invited people like Max Bill, Gillo Dorfles, Angelo Tito Anselmi, Angelo Mangiarotti and Ettore Sottsass to write about how industries could condense beauty and function into objects capable of changing the way we live our everyday lives. He pushed to establish organizations like the ADI (Italian Association for Industrial Design), and was on the selection committee of the Compasso d'oro.

Stile industria introduced to the italian public the work done at the Institute of Design in Chicago, at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm, and at the Royal College of Art in London. Rosselli reported back from Aspen between 1956 and 1959, from the 1958 Work Exhibition in Brussels, and 1960 World Design Conference in Tokyo.

Nothing was too big or too small: prefabricated elements were given the same space as precision objects, graphic design and packaging. All content was carefully dissected on the double page so that the reader could grasp every detail. Thanks to Rosselli and Stile Industria we learned to look closer and differently to ten years of industrial production.

Albe Steiner, Bruno Munari, Pino Tovaglia, Giovanni Pintori, and Michele Provinciali among others designed the beautiful covers that for a decade promoted a cultural take on industrial objects. And even though it is a selection of a larger production, it is a significant one.

Many of the industries presented on Stile Industria did not preserve complete records of their work. Designers and architects sometimes kept the drawings and we can use their archives to piece together a fragmented overview of the industry. The magazine is a useful sample, a condenser of the many cultural inputs that surrounded this ten years of bustling production.

The magazine was too consistently sophisticated to be turned into a medium for selling publicity. According to the revealing text on Rosselli by Giovanni Klaus Koenig this was the main reason for the publisher to shut it down after ten year of loyal service. 

Architecture in the Age of Radio

I seek to develop my artefacts with ample anticipatory time margins so that they will be ready for use by society when society discovers - through evolutionary emergencies - a need for them. R. Buckminster Fuller

In Buckminster Fuller Inc. Architecture in the Age of Radio (Zurich: Lars Müller, 2015) Mark Wigley traced Fuller's work back to the discovery of radio waves. Fuller anticipated that broadcasting would become an imperative in the future and that radio would inspire and allow global mobility. The existence of radio waves would eventually call for a “radionic” house where the very solidity of physical rooms would be undone by the possibility of tuning in on simultaneous but unseen realities. According to Wigley, Fuller's ultimate target was to free people's mind to receive all possible forms of knowledge about the world and to transmit all possible ideas to the world. For this reason the house had to be detached from the city grid and turned into a two-way communication system.

The houses designed by Fuller were relatively light shelters. They revolved around bathroom units with tub, toilet and sink forming a single metallic (later plastic) fitting. Everything else in the interior was thought in plastic. Physically detached, the shelter was connected via wireless to the rest of the world. His hyperexpanded homes were not static points of withdrawal but the site of active engagement with the world, with radio, tv, and the computer as windows onto that which cannot be seen. But as Wigley pointed out, the traditional house is a very slowly evolving and understudied phenomenon. Fuller's mobile plastic buildings never achieved mass production as houses but were instead installed beyond the limits of conventional urbanization to house the continental radar defense system in 1955.

The geodesic dome as an image of the world was also used to gradually encode its surface with layers of information and produce a hyper-map, a comprehensive data display. Fuller anticipated that computers would augment the human brain while communication networks would produce a single planetary society. These “world men” would not be confused by information but would be able to conceptualize it into comprehensive pictures. 

Wigley described the Geoscope as the most sophisticated window possible, meant to “interface” the audience to incoming information by enveloping them in a “hypervisual” presentation. Human’s externalized tools have eventually become second nature, "as unconscious as the automated operation of internal organs".

The books is also a helpful contribution for those who are interested in piecing together Fuller's personal network. Lee de Forest, Serge Chermayeff, John McHale, Gene Youngblood, Charles and Ray Eames, Sigfried Giedion, Jacqueline Tyrwhitt, Costantinos Doxiadis, and Marshall McLuhan are just some of the people mentioned. 

Epiphany in Tokyo

Tokyo, 35°41'47.4"N 139°44'50.4"E - Photograph Mariana Siracusa

A candid conversation with R. Buckminster Fuller

Photograph by Fred Blocher for Kansas City Star, 1978

Self-Disciplines, excerpt from the 1972 Playboy Interview

1. Use myself as an experiment to see what, if anything, a healthy, young male human of average size, experience, and capability with an economically dependent wife and new born child, starting without capital or any kind of wealth, cash savings, credit or university degree could effectively do that could not be done by great nations or great private enterprise to lastingly improve the physical protection and support of all human lives.

2. Commit all of my productivity toward dealing only with the whole planet Earth and all its resources and cumulative know-how. Observation of my life to date shows that the larger the number for whom I work, the more positively effective I become. Thus, it is obvious that if I work always and only for all humanity, I will be optimally effective.

3. Seek to do my own thinking, confining it to only experientially gained information.

4. Seek to accomplish whatever is to be attained in such a manner that the advantage attained would never be secured at the cost of another or others.

5. Seek to cope with all humanly unfavourable conditions by searching for the family of relevant physical principles involved.

6. Reduce my inventions to physically working models and must never talk about the inventions until physically proved or disproved.

7. Seek to reform the environment, not the humans. I am determined never to try to persuade humanity to alter its customs and viewpoints.

8. Never promote or sell either my ideas or artefacts or pay others to do so. All support must be spontaneously engendered by evolution’s integrating of my inventions with the total evolution of human affairs.

9. Assume that nature has its own gestation rates, not only for the birth of each new biological component, but also for each inanimate technological artefact.

10. Seek to develop my artefacts with ample anticipatory time margins so that they will be ready for use by society when society discovers - through evolutionary emergencies - a need for them.

11. Seek to learn the most from my mistakes.

12. Seek to decrease time wasted in worried procrastination and to increase time invested in discovery of technological effectiveness.

13. Seek to document my development in the official records of humanity by applying for and being granted government patents.

14. Above all, seek to comprehend the principles of eternally regenerative universe and discover how humans function in these principles.

15. Seek to comprehend the full gamut of production tool capabilities, energy resources, and all relevant geological, meteorological, demographic, and economic data.

16. Seek to operate only on a do-it-yourself basis and only on the basis of intuition.

17. Plan for my design science strategies to advantage the new life to be born on Earth, life born unencumbered with the conditioned reflexes so prevalent today.

18. Commit whole-heartedly to the above and pay no attention to "earning a living" in humanity’s established economic system, yet find that my family’s and my needs are provided for by seemingly pure happenstance and always only in the nick of time.

R. Buckminster Fuller, Specialized in generality via the Buckminster Fuller Institute