LGA-CMH-MKE-OMA-LGA

LGA-CMH-MKE-OMA-LGA
Excuse the silence for the next few days. Both work and pleasure take me to middle America, where Butter Cows live and corn is aplenty.

Architecture of the Olympic Games

The National Stadium (The Bird's Nest) designed by Herzog & De Meuron, Beijing, China, 2007The National Stadium (The Bird’s Nest) designed by Herzog & De Meuron, Beijing, China, 2007, originally uploaded by Dante Busquets

Building Design has a great rundown of the different Olympic facilities. Check out, Beijing: the architecture of the Games, and head over to Flickr where there are already loads of pictures:

Albert Speer and Beijing

So it looks like the New York Times has finally realized that Albert Speer Jr Designed the Beijing Olympics Urban Plan:

On the other hand we have people drawing dark conclusions about the realization that Albert Speer Jr. designed the grand boulevard that leads to the Bird’s Nest Stadium. (The basic information about the 74-year-old son of Hitler’s architect is found here, as well as in The L.A. Times and The Economist, but is put in a more sinister light in this article by New School professor Nina Khrushcheva. The sins of the father do not carry unto the son, so if the child of the 1930s British fascist leader can run Formula 1 racing, albeit with the occasional German-themed bondage-and-discipline session, then certainly Albert Speer Jr. has every right to do design work. And, it must be pointed out, Khrushcheva is the granddaughter of former Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev.)

Give. Me. A. Break.
First, Let’s take a look at a map of Beijing, noting that the red items mark buildings which are between 50 and 750 years old and the blue denote the Olympic Green and National buildings:


Chicago and New York are always cited as classic gridiron cities, but Beijing was gridiron before the English could say grid. Beijing is organized along two primary axis: north-south and east-west. Even today, major areas of development in Beijing follow these two axis.
The emperor’s most favored buildings aligned on the north-south axis including what is now called the Forbidden City, Tianamen Square (enlarged by the PRC in the 1950’s), Jingshan Park (Jingshan Gongyuan) the Imperial garden, and the Drum and Bell Towers (Gulou and Zhonglou) which announced the time using the eponymous tools. The east-west axis contained the Temple of the Sun and the Temple of the Moon which altars stood for imperial sacrifices.
Quite simply every single important building in Beijing is contained in the north-south axis. The major impetus for the People’s Republic of China in extending the Central Axis and placing the Olympic National buildings along this axis is to extend history’s continuum, claiming the Olympics as a logical extension of China’s greatness. Positioning the Olympic Green along this axis is a design decision that frankly would be foolish not to do.
As Michael Hammond noted in 2003:

The national and international press have been in a frenzy this week over the new north-south axis reshaping central Beijing. Much play has been made of its inherent Imperial connotations, and the involvement of German architect Albert Speer, son of Hitler’s architect and close confidant of the same name.
…
The historical roots and layout of Beijing are clearly a natural and obvious basis for the development the ancient city grid within its new urban masterplan, however what seems to be an enigma, given the connections, is the Chinese Government’s selection of architect. Were they deliberately courting controversy? In an amazing statement, Shao Zi Qian said, “We know about Mr Speer’s Nazi family but don’t see its relevance to what is happening in Beijing.”

No doubt it is ironic that two Speers designed massive infrastructure for Olympic games, but just because it is easy to write a lazy article, doesn’t mean you should.

Lecture: Lize Mogel and Alexis Bhagat – An Atlas of Radical Cartography

An Atlas of Radical Cartography Cover
Today I was fortunate to attend the fourth 10 Minute lectures, held in DUMBO at the Melville House Bookstore. This lecture series previously featured Lewis Lapham, Forrest Hylton, and Rene Ortiz, and like Pecha Kucha the brevity makes for a pleasantly dense presentation.
Today’s lecture was presented by Lize Mogel and Alexis Bhagat Editors of both the website and book, An Atlas of Radical Cartography; a collection of maps and essays about global issues ranging from garbage to globalization, statelessness to visibility and deportation to migration. Their main contention is that all maps and the process of map making is inherently political, with the book’s contributors shedding the allegedly false sheen of objectivity. The book was previously reviewed by We Make Money Not Art. An Atlas of Radical Cartography shouldn’t be confused with Bill Rankin’s Radical Cartography, an equally worthwhile website.
Mogel & Bhagat gave three simple definitions to open the lecture:

  • Cartography
    The art or science of map making
  • Critical Cartography
    Posits that geographic knowledge is a basis for power and is inherently political
  • Counter-Cartography
    Cartography which counters the official cartography i.e. – why are maps oriented South? (ed – a cousin of Sousveillance)

New York City Garbage Machine, by the Center for Urban Pedagogy
New York City Garbage Machine, by the Center for Urban Pedagogy
Lecture Notes

  • Showcased two different maps: The Routes of Least Surveillance, a map showcasing all of the CCTV cameras in New York City and plotting the unsurveyed route, and the NYC Garbage Machine, which illustrates the path of garbage bureaucracy which moves and profits from it.
  • The authors repeated many times how maps and cartography itself was a political construct and contained bias. Every act of gathering data, editing, graphically presenting the data are filled with human choices and political decisions.
  • The authors were amazed by the increasing map literacy, anecdotally noting that map literacy improves year by year. Kids in Idaho when asked to draw their surroundings, drew their neighborhood in plan and were very comfortable with the concept of map views. The authors note they would have drawn their surroundings in perspective.
  • Limitations of the paper media – maps by their very nature are historical artifacts.
  • Crisis in cartography due to the compressed timescale of creating maps; where some cartographers spent years creating and curating a handful of maps, there is a real push for quick updating maps.
  • Culture is thinking in terms of networks starting with location aware devices such as sat-nav guides or gps phone handsets leading into the shift in thinking of relationships as a series of networks.
  • Current cartography as embracing the ideas of the Situationists and psycogeography. Art and design is responding to the tools at their disposal. Artists in the 1970’s were influenced heavily by office worker’s tools creating typewriter based art. Similar effects are being felt today as GIS and GPS tools are ubiquitous and easier to use.
  • Digitization of culture
  • Divide between cartographers and laity in terms of both economics, knowledge, and traditions. It is hard to compile large correct datasets if you are not paid to do that like the government is.
  • Groundtruthing – looking at the facts on the ground to verify that the constructed map is accurate.
  • Interesting trends in cartography: Conflux, Glowlab, and Invisible 5 (a self-guided critical audio tour along Interstate 5 between San Francisco and Los Angeles).

The next 10m Lecture is September 18 featuring Jeff Sharlet Author of The Family: Fundamentalism’s Avant-Garde.