Link to our Collaborative Reader
Editor’s Notes
First, let’s address Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space.
Per the original course description, it’s readily downloadable, and available at the library—in the original French, if you prefer.
My intention in prescribing Lefebvre’s treatise was to provide a common (and disciplinarily nonspecific) theoretical platform on which for us to build the space we’re producing. Per Derek Kerr, “the richness and stimulating nature of The Production of Space make it a must for all those who are interested in the form and the implications of the spatiality of contemporary capitalism.”
Per our first meeting, however, this reading has been cancelled! Not because we should cancel Lefebvre, but because we need a broader platform. (We also can’t afford the necessary time to do this text justice.)
Instead, I’ve asked each of you to provide one text of your choosing that informs your practice. It can be an article, an essay, a chapter, or a story. It can be something that has stuck with you or something you’ve just discovered. Send it to Liz, by yesterday. We’ll distribute this collectively compiled reader and schedule some time during our December trip to discuss each contribution. Remember, it’ll be dark early then!
Here are some further contributions from me, including my official contribution.
First, no less Marxist, no less potent, far more accessible, and specific to our broader SoCal context, Mike Davis’ City of Quartz. Required reading for all. RIP and so beautifully eulogized below.
LAT: Mike Davis, ‘City of Quartz’ author who chronicled the forces that shaped L.A., dies
LARB: Remembering Mike Davis
I’ll inevitably wax poetic about Mike Davis in class.
Next, let me share with you a stack of interlocking texts (and text-producing folks) that I return to again and again and that are certainly pertinent.
As one of the designers of the High Line, James Corner is probably America’s most famous landscape architect after Frederick Law Olmsted. Even if he loses you in the Deleuze, Corner’s The Agency of Mapping is an exceptional exploration of the power that mapping enables and the dangers of wielding this power ignorantly.
Corner’s fundamental point is that maps are just texts in another form, and we should read them no less closely and critically. In this spirit, let me also provide some visual examples from two proponents of critical mapping coupled with their own words.
First up, Solnit.
Here’s a review to whet your appetite. (In homage to social isolation, the excerpts I’ve selected include some mappings of alcohol and coffee. Plus some Muybridge, one of Solnit’s favorite subjects.)
Next up, Kurgan.
Kurgan’s Center for Spatial Research explores and exploits the ways in which new technologies permit us to experience, represent, and understand space.
Lastly, Charles and Ray Eames’ Powers of Ten, in case you haven’t seen it before.
However! None of these are my official contribution. My official contribution is something I’ve just discovered and am still reading. Cairns and Jacobs’ Buildings Must Die addresses some of the complicated questions that swirl around our proposed interventions to the shop building. I’ve excerpted Towards a General Economy of Architecture for you, which lays out their framework. Some more Deleuze, too, along with Bataille and Latour. “For them, architecture is not only designed relationally but, once built, continuously re-forms in relation to the passage of time, as well as the planned and unplanned renovations wrought by the human and non-human agents it coexists with. Seen in this way, a building is flow, not form; it is creative, not merely a creation.”