Excited that Beyond issue 2 is out. Alongside luminaries both literary and architectural including Douglas Coupland and Francois Roche, I have contributed a short story titled "Everything Dale Myres Could And Couldn't See". The story chronicles a digital animators increasing obsession with the assassination of JFK which leads to ever more byzantine recreations of Dealey Plaza and other sites noted for their conspiritorial nature - kind of Dan Brown via Nikolaus Pevsner if you will.

Here is an extract:

"Using Lightwave, Myres had been constructing a model of the assassination of President Kennedy. He began to collect data and documents, feeding the information into his model: the geography of Dealey Plaza, the positions of the waving crowds, the architecture of the Book Depository, the position and size of trees began to be mapped out.

Myers assembled a growing library of documents, maps, newspaper reports, eyewitness accounts and photographs, triangulating between them to pinpoint positions, double check measurements, map out the sequence of events.

As Myres worked through his project he felt a sense of abstract stillness leaking out from his screen. Myres' idea was that something of the clarity of his mathematically described environments might be able to be mapped onto the landscape of the real world. That somewhere where the direct relationship between action and reaction, between intention and effect were immediate might be able to inform to a place and a moment that seemed to represent the degree zero of the unresolved and unknowable. Through this, a non-negotiable truth might emerge.

During the nights after animating red and yellow M&Ms, he made notes charting the Zapruder assassination footage frame by frame:

"Frame 313 / 161.2 grain slug, traveling at 2,100 ft/sec. Hits R. occipital area of Kennedy's head, shattering occipital bone. Upper R side of head explodes, brains/bone in expanding pink cloud. Pieces of parietal and temporal sections skull remain attached by skin. Head lurches back to the left (8.0-8.4 seconds after the first shot). Body stiffens suddenly"

Myres scrutinized each moment, movement and every object. He would draw diagrams, list material properties, note proximities and relationships to other objects forming a master taxonomy of the things that had occupied Dealey Plaza on November 22nd 1963.

North Grassy Knoll:

3 x large traffic signposts

4 x sidewalk lamp posts

John Neely Bryan north pergola concrete structure including 2 enclosed shelters

Tool shed

1 x 3.3 foot (1 m) high concrete wall connected to each of the pergola shelters

10 x tall, wide, low-hanging live oak trees

5 foot (1.5 m) tall, wooden, cornered, stockade fenceline approx.169 feet (53.6 m) long

6 x street curb sewers openings, sewer manholes + interconnecting large pipes

Various 2 to 6 foot (0.6 to 1.8 m) tall bushes, trees, and hedges.

Myres digital simulation of the Plaza grew. To assist, he built physical models which he could begin to inhabit. A 1:20 version of the grassy knoll, a 1:1 section of the Book Depository. Masking tape mapped out Elm Street over the studio floor. A desk stood in for the Presidential limousine. Myres walked around. He stood in Zapruders position. He stepped back and right as though he were standing behind the stockade fence. He crouched, occupying the space where Kennedy's head took the first impact of the bullet.

The physical and digital models grew in complexity, grew in their refinement as Myres fed more information into them. As he modeled, it expanded. The Triple Underpass was marked out into the parking lot. Slowly, Myres felt like a truth was emerging from his simulated landscapes, that the spatial mapping of the mass of accruing data was congealing into something solid."

If you want more, you'll have to buy Beyond Beyond: No.2: Values and Symptoms.

Beyond is a great addition to the pantheon of architectural publishing. Edited by Pedro Gadanho it provides a space for architectural writing (and writing about architecture) outside of journalistic or academic confines. Instead by embracing the fictional and the narrative it begins to show alternative ways of writing, thinking and representing architectural ideas - which might be closer to 'truths' than the supposedly factual or the heavily footnoted.

Sub Plan is a research project developed by an AA summer school unit led by Finn Williams of Common Office, David Knight and graphic designers Europa. It's a guide to what's known in the UK as Permitted Development. Permitted development is a subset of planning legislation which attempts to define the point where you no longer require planning permission, defining the extent to which you can add and extend your home without engaging the planning process.

The book explores the narrow set of manoeuvres allowed by this specific piece of planning legislation. In doing this, it shows the relationship between planning law and the spaces that it precipitates. It asks obliquely, how our urban environments are formed not by the aesthetic visions of architects, but by the technical legal language of beaurocracy. The act itself has no illustrations yet its terse sentences have a tremendous impact on the nature of the city.

Williams writes:

"SUB-PLAN is an exploration of this legal no-man's-land; a guide that reveals ambiguous grey areas as openings for opportunist architecture. The study looks for semantic loop-holes and legislative cracks to develop examples of Permitted Development: architecture that limbo dances under the radar of regulations. SUB-PLAN highlights building possibilities hidden within a labyrinth of legal jargon and ambiguity. The guide inspires the householder to make the most of their new freedoms. How far can these new rules be exploited? And what might the urban environment look like if householders work collectively? SUB-PLAN investigates the moment when architecture appears to slip into insignificance - when it doesn't even need a planning application. Are the implications of minor development more significant than planners imagine? "

Set in the London Borough of Croydon - fast becoming the site for experimental London urbanism as evidenced by Williams' role as an urban planner there along with Vincent Lacovara from the AOC (see this recent article in the AJ) - we first we see the effects of Permitted Development as examples picked out of ordinary suburban streetscapes. It shows the agglomerative nature of suburban housing, the way Grecian porches clip on to the front of 1980s houses, how the spaces in between semi detached houses silt up with extensions, how dormer roofs break out of traditional pitches and how the backs of houses grow all kinds of extensions.

The book then lays out the visual interpretations of the acts terms attempting to extrapolate the logic of permitted development - mapping out the possibilities suggested in the text of the law. If the act describes what you are not allowed to do, Sub Plan explores what you might be able to do.

A second chapter then works through application of these logics, developing scenarios that challenge the acts definitions.

In its title, Sub Plan recalls the speculative 1960s Non Plan project, where Reyner Banham. Cedric Price, Paul Barker and Peter Hall explored a fictitious hybrid of libertarian planning and heritage narrative. Sub Plan, on the other hand, examines the potential space created by the real planning legislation.

You can order a copy of Sub Plan here

Back from Shenzhen, where amongst the super-speed urbanism is the model village Window of the World. Along side the kinds of thing you might expect (Big Ben, a giant sized miniature Eiffel Tower and so on) are some less likely candidates: Brazilias National Congress, Lenins Mausoleum, Niagra Falls and Mont Blanc. Oh, and Gaudis Park Guelle surrounded by a golf green for some reason.

So Switzerland has banned minarets. In a sense, that is no real surprise coming from the home of architectural minimalism. There is something about the idea of 'purity' or 'essence' propagated by the cult of minimalism seems to echo other kinds of 'purity' which have far more sinister undertones.

Minimalism is more than anything the art of exclusion. Its effort is to edit out all that is somehow impure, to resist the presence of foreign bodies from its domain. This ruthless edit is the source of minimalisms effect - what we might call the power of its whiteness

This kind of architecture places itself outside of politics, outside of society and outside of social concerns - as though it somehow transcends these earthly matters.

This form of abstraction (and there are many other kinds of abstraction in fields outside of architecture which don't deny more engaged forms of meaning) is of course, dangerous. Dangerous because it propagates an ideology while simultaneously denying that it does so. This slight of hand is most likely used where concentrations of wealth and privilege intersect, imparting an innocence to guilty situations. Poetry here (and again, there are many 'good' types of poetry outside of architecture) is - to coin a phrase - the last refuge of the scoundrel. That's to say the poetry of form and light and material acts as a kind of plausible deniability.

It's interesting to see the language of architecture caught up in this ideological crossfire. This episode underlines how architectures language is part of wider culture. That what it represents and how it represents it is deeply significant.

"Duplicate Array: Objects/Buildings/Plans presents a series of architecture, design and art projects by London based practice FAT ranging in scale from objects to buildings and masterplans. The projects explore an idea of architecture as narrative, media and communication engaging directly with the culture, communities and scenarios that surround them. Using tactics which include appropriation, irony and juxtaposition they set out an architectural agenda addressing issues of taste, ornament and meaning in contemporary culture."

More info here

This, I love. It's on Commercial Street, on the southern side of Bishopsgate Goods Yard. An assemblage of totally ordinary elements (billboard, hoarding, fencing) and totally ordinary programmes (newsagent, advertising site, mini cab office). But the realtionship between these elements makes it something amazing. A certain kind of symbiotic relationship which forms - out of all expectation - the kind of elegance you rarely find in big A architecture. One part becomes the structural support for another, something else becomes a revenue stream generated from a perimeter enclosure. Together, they develop highly pragmatic response to a left over piece of urbanism, maximising the potentials of use.

By coincidence, Bishopsgate Goods Yard was the site for a studio we at FAT ran at Yale which looked at the possibilities and potentials of symbiotic programmatic relationships. Sited between Brick Lane, Shoreditch and Broadgate there are multiple urban cultures, populations, and typologies. The students projects looked at how social housing and trading floors or curry houses and culture houses might produce an alternative to the Foster masterplan developed for the area.

This project by Gabi Ho & Christina Wu combined the typologies of historical Shoreditch with megaplanning of the Broadgate development.

"I learned to drive in order to read Los Angeles in the original' quipped Reyner Banham with deadly seriousness. For Banham, LA was a culmination of his own reading of Modernism - a trajectory of machines, of gadgets and gizmos that stretched from early 20th century Futurism to the Freeways of Southern California. In his reading - developed 'Architecture of the Four Ecologies' - LA was a non-plan kind of place, liberated from historical forms of urbanism by movement. Banhams techno-optimism seems quaint now, his faith in technology exposed by our own experience. 40 years later, with Americas car industry in free fall, its infrastructure collapsing and the fall out of a fossil fueled economy looming, our perspective is markedly different.

But its not just what Banhams book said, it's how he said it. His continuing significance is the way that he 'read' the city through an expanded view of what might think of as urbanism. Kazys Varnelis' book "The Infrastructural City' is - explicitly - a 21st century offspring of Banhams 'Architecture of the Four Ecologies'. What this collection tells us is that to 'read' Los Angeles now you'll need a whole lot more tricks than a clean license.

The Infrastructural City explores the landscape of Los Angeles, tracing infrastructural lines across the city with the interpretive gaze of a palm reader. These marks in the surface become a language through which we can read the past, present and future of the city.

Through a series of essays from the book describes LA as a landscape formed in the relationships between infrastructures, between urban hardware and software. Catagorised as Landscape, Fabric and Objects, we are taken though a variety of LA infrastructural scenarios. Barry Lehrman explores the unfolding and unexpected story of Owens Lake. In 'Flood Control Freakology', David Fletcher parses the complex relationship between the natural flow of the LA River and its hybridization with drainage infrastructure, fusing into a new kind of ecological condition. Matt Coolidge from the Center for Land Use Interpretation explains the relationship between geological deposits which become mined for construction aggregate and the strange possibilities of the holes in Irwindale (neatly precied by its last line: "for every pile there is a pit, for every pit there is a pile"). Varnelis contributes with an essay detailing the complexity of data flows through the city and the intersect between the technology of network communications and hard physical urban fact. Other contributions looks at the microrelationships in land ownership, the impact of distribution logistics, and movie industry prop houses as a way of reading the objects that populate the city. Equally fascinating are a set of aerial photographs that take us over the cities landscape like a low flying Ed Ruscha. Each essay reveals stories of social and political content of what would normally appear to be blank pragmatisms. In the interface between the global and highly local, a new kind of urbanism emerges.

Just as Denise Scott Brown took Robert Venturi to the extreme of Vegas in order to understand the generic issues of cars and the landscape, Varnelis take us to LA in order to understand the issues of the Networked urbanism as it applies everywhere. In extremis, we see infrastructure not simply as the servicing of urban fabric, but an active element in the making of contemporary urban-ness. Here, the gas pipe is as important as the piazza, drainage channels become a new kind of agora.

Ultimately, it argues that infrastructure, far from being an innocently engineered pragmatic solution is a form of complex social and political agency. 'Network Cities' tells LA as a kind of urbanism noir - as though that a slice through the surface of the city bleeds narratives of Raymond Chandler or James Ellroy. Where nothing is innocent and everything is involved in complex tradeoffs, labyrinthine procedures, betrayals and double-crosses, all wrapped up in hard-boiled pragmatism.

These investigations begin to reveal the unconscious hopes, fears, and primal desires of the city - the urban id repressed by urban planning ego.

Network Cities describes a post-Banham, post-Non Plan city where the fall out of infrastructure is a strange combination of urban disaster and optimism. An urbanism precipitated from dysfunctional relationships pursued to the point where symbiotic ecology emerges.

The Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles

More from Net Lab here