Solely Supported

Tubes by Andrew Blum is out now. Unfortunately, I just missed his visit to Powell's. Here's an excerpt from the book's prologue:

“For all the talk of the placelessness of our digital age, the Internet is as fixed in real, physical places as any railroad or telephone system ever was. In basest terms, it is made of pulses of light. Those pulses might seem miraculous, but they’re not magic. They are produced by powerful lasers contained in steel boxes housed mainly in unmarked buildings. The lasers exist. The boxes exist. The buildings exist. The Internet has a physical reality, an essential infrastructure, a ‘hard bottom,’ as Henry David Thoreau said of Walden Pond. In undertaking this journey, I’ve tried to wash away the technological alluvium of contemporary life in order to see—fresh in the sunlight—the physical essence of our digital world.”

"What might happen in a space inside out? With the improvisational nature of his work John Cassavetes 'entrusted his actors not just to portray characters but to become them, often to the extent of reacting to one another spontaneously and improvising dialogue.' At this point Cassavetes, camera on his shoulder, began to improvise as well. Who was directing whom at this point? Where did the dialogue begin - what does the scene include or preclude? Try to establish the hierarchy in a scene from the film 'Faces' that involves Cassavetes moving - the arced tangent of his shoulder and the geometry of his contorted body as it twists to catch an evolutionary script that has suddenly changed direction as Gena Rowlands and John Marley unfold into their characters. My point is not to offer film theory as an antecedent to architectural design, or even to offer improvisation as a method of architectural design, but to suggest that the apparent hegemony of the visual, and the Cartesian dialectics of observer and observed, is in some way ingeniously overcome when one pushes its techniques to their limits. This overcoming of elastic limits might stand in for a lineage of architectural attempts at the authorless: the unanticipated, the autonomous...the unbounded, the inbetween, the formless. But what isn't released in this dialectic of intuited limits is the plastic and more importantly the still discrete nature of architectural practice. The point at which a certain level of strife pushes something past the final point of stability is offered within the parameters of the finite. While one could hope that the truly new would emerge at this point, one could presumably at least count on the unpredicted."

Outdoor escalators installed in one of Medellin's poorest districts.