introduction

In its inaugural semester at Columbia, the Network Architecture Lab investigates the role of logistics in the Northeastern American megalopolis.

Our studio begins with the premise that if contemporary culture is defined by the network, that definition takes place not only in the immaterial but also in the physical.

For researchers in new media, the debate between the dominance of the real and the virtual is over, our interest instead being absorbed by the dialectical motion between the two. In place of dwelling on how the virtual will supplant the real (“this will kill that), we seek to analyze how the virtual and the real hybridize and deform under pressure from escalating technological developments.

The Economist Magazine recently suggested that although the Internet may be the most talked about network of our day, it is hardly separable from the "physical Internet," the world of logistics and its contemporary embodiment as supply-chain management. This global chain of just-in-time command and control ensures that products are assembled and sent to us to consume them with virtually no delay in inventory. For its part, the Internet has exacerbated the demand for such products by making possible greater efficiencies in supply-chain management, lowering costs while allowing greater customization.

By looking both at the assembly of individual objects and supply chains, we can address a series of crucial questions for the field. What implications do logistics have for architecture? If we are moving from objects to networks, what does this say about architectural and urban conditions? What role does architecture have in the regime of the rapidly moving, hastily assembled object?

Understanding this often-surreptitious transit of things allows us to respond to Bruno Latour's demand that we make things public, that we expose the lives of objects, all too often left out of politics.

In the course of our investigation we seek to understand our fatal love affair with the object, that is the resistence of objects to fully give themselves up to us and, conversely our willingness to supplicate ourselves in front of them. If just-in-time logistics promises immediate, custom-made satisfaction, it only makes our relationship to the object ever more fraught.

studio format

This studio has been run as an advanced research lab, a core subgroup of the Network Architecture Lab for fall 2006. As such, students are lab members for the duration of the semester and perhaps longer. Instead of being organized from the top-down, with an instructor doling out exercises for students, studio is itself organized on the model of a lab aiming toward a common goal. We worked individually, in groups, and as a unit to produce material for an upcoming ACTAR publication on cities while also addressing the electronic world of the Internet and the physical site of the end of semester installation. Our goal has been to produce finished work for four sites: print, web, multimedia installation and presentation. Throughout, students have been asked to use architecture as a mode of inquiry to investigate and represent the phenomenon in question.

making things visible (project one)

Studio began with students choosing an object to unpack by tracing its genealogy.

From a Powerbook to Beaded American Flag Purses to Botox, our goal was to realize a thought experiment devised by Jean-Jacques Rousseau at the very dawn of industrialization. In Émile, his book on the ideal education of a child, Rousseau wrote of "a problem which another child would never heed [that] would torment Émile half a year." Émile and his instructor go to an elegant dinner hosted by wealthy people where the two are dazzled by the many guests, servants, dishes, and elegant china. In Émile's ear the instructor whispers "How many hands do you suppose the things on this table passed through before they got here?"

The virus, or the Trojan horse, is successfully implanted in the child's mind and the result is a crisis:

With this first project, the NetLab built on the model of Natalie Jeremijenko's "How Stuff Is Made," an online visual encyclopedia of photoessays produced by engineering and design students to document how objects are manufactured, investigating both the labor conditions of that manufacture and its environmental impact.

Using research skills as well as specifically architectural tools such as the axonometric drawing, we aimed for an awareness of the object as it is embedded in the matrix of its production, a genealogical vision that would embody the history that Walter Benjamin reminds us is always there, no matter how suppressed:

As objects—and their constituent parts—become more and more part of a global network of supply and consumption, tracing the origins of an object will serve as an introduction to the network analysis during the second part of studio.

More than just uncovering the origins of an object, our goal is to engage it, to take part in Bruno Latour's call to "make things public," foregrounding the role of objects as autonomous agents in networks:

Things are controversial assemblages of entangled issues, and not simply objects sitting apart from our political passions. The entanglements of things and politics engage activists, artists, politicians, and intellectuals. To assemble this parliament, rhetoric is not enough and nor is eloquence; it requires the use of all the technologies—especially information technology—and the possibility for the arts to re-present anew what are the common stakes.

Just how urgent this task may be became evident with the International Telecommunications Union's publication of the Internet of Things in 2005, a study predicting the end of human dominance of the Internet as thing to thing communication obviates the need for us as intermediaries in the lives of objects.
This formerly "inanimate" Other can now communicate back (about its location, condition, needs), either willfully or not. Things, in this vision, are no longer merely objects, mere commodities, fetishes valued by humans. They exceed anything that Rousseau or Marx could have ever imagined, becoming active, sentient nodes of communication: dust is smart, glass is smart, phones are smart. Our age-old animist dreams of a world imbued with spirits lies around the corner.

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