Through examining where American Culture, broadly speaking, is produced and consumed as well as how it has been captured by narratives to enhance power structures that drive polarization, this book argues for the merits of a user-owned cultural network and how it might be created. Developing such a network at the intersection of the digital and physical would take attention away from digital platforms that drive polarization and create a route by which users of digital networks profit directly from owning those networks rather than being exploited by those networks. It would support a new space for cultural work for those who have more free time due to automation while also creating a more robust exchange between various types of cultural producers and consumers directly around cultural elements rather than around polarizing topics. The result will lead to a space, conversation, and set of cultural objects and experiences that are more focused on the physical, human, and spiritual challenges facing the country rather than on dwelling in digital spaces that have increasingly become echo chambers.

There has been a great deal of speculation about how the Covid-19 Pandemic will affect art and the art world. This question is, of course, somewhat insignificant as communities around the world continue to face a dire health crisis that leaves more people dead each day. Many businesses remain closed to help fight the spread of the disease while consumer behavior has been fundamentally altered in ways that may have long-lasting effects that will take years for businesses to adjust to. As a result, the economy remains deeply depressed, unemployment remains high, and many people struggle to meet financial obligations.

Hotels play a significant role in global real estate.  While occupying significantly less space than offices and somewhat less space than retail, hotels have continued to grow and new hotels have been built as global travel for business and pleasure continues to increase.  As this has occurred, hotels have had to renovate and build to suit the specific demands of different traveler types that have changed significantly over the last couple of decades.  While hotel rooms must still fulfill the same basic functions as they have for the last hundred years, they have followed trends in apartment buildings that have seen rooms shrink and demands for amenities grow.  New hotels tend to have more space for socializing.  The lobby, once a transient zone reserved for checking in and out, has become a place to hang out, work, and take a meeting.  A wider range of restaurants and bars are being offered and amenities such as game rooms, libraries, and fitness centers are becoming increasingly common.  At the same time, rooms are becoming more interesting and highly designed as hoteliers compete to attract an increasingly style-conscious generation of business and leisure travelers.

This book presents the architectural work of FGP Atelier Founder Francisco Gonzalez Pulido from the years leading up to the founding of FGP Atelier. I was involved editing the book and conducting the interview with Gonzalez Pulido that opens the book. I was also collaborated with FGP Atelier COO, Gergana Gonzalez Pulido, on the graphic design of the book.

Architecture and fashion – specifically, the fashion of how people are clad – have a long and complex relationship.  Each has influenced the other in a variety of manners ranging from the way in which a space serves as a stage on which new fashions can appear to how fashion is influenced by a design philosophy embodied in an architectural style.  The colors, patterns, forms, degrees of elaboration of clothing have influenced wall covering, drapery, and the overall style of rooms.  The habit of hosting large dinners and balls, parties and salons, has shaped the form that historic domiciles have taken.  The broader lifestyle of bedrooms, dressing rooms, morning rooms, game rooms, drawing rooms, receiving halls, kitchens, and servants’ rooms could all said to be closely linked to what is considered fashionable and the broader habits of a given society.  

The notion of a “site” has become something architects fixate upon.  We yearn for a potential client to identify a site in order to begin developing intriguing concepts to help win the job.  We analyze the ecology, orientation, mobility infrastructure, utilities, history, cultural traditions, habits, and broader urban context in which the site exists.  In doing so, we think about the program, allowable building density, building traditions, and overall goals of the client.  In some cases, we may consider the buildings that still exist on the site or that have existed on the site in the past.  Generally, the site that we are given is in a desirable location.  It is a place that a group has determined is of value.  This value is often directly tied to the program that the client hopes to bring to the site.  Further, this value is tied to the inhabitants who will animate the program when the building is complete.  The location must conform to their expectations, desires, need for security, proximity to other activities, and broader cultural tradition defining how they interact with each other and the city.  If these conditions can be fulfilled by a particular location, then it is determined that the site can support the often considerable investment required to create a new structure.

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This essay is not going to be about how to take comprehensive steps to help retail establishments address an impending crisis that not only threatens a range of brands and real estate concerns with bankruptcy, but the viability of the entire economy.  Retail Therapy by Mark Pilkington provides a powerful exploration of such concerns and is an advisable resource for anyone who is interested in addressing the underlying challenges facing retail.  This essay will instead look at how the crisis facing retail is playing out urbanistically, in terms of design, and spatially.  This will involve exploring the historic position within the city, the power that product, display, and store design has had to drive interest from consumers, and the recent trends leading up to the current crisis.  With this understanding in hand, we will then be able to begin to ask how design and city planning can contribute to a broader revitalization of retail.  This will allow us to go beyond asking how retail can be revitalized to asking how we can deal with the tremendous vacancies and threat to real estate value that a shift to online sales implies.  In the end, we hope to offer a set of scenarios for how traditional retail space on main streets and in malls might be used that extends from historic habits, while also being grounded in future trends of how we live and consume as well as our broader desire and goals for ourselves, local community, country, and world.

Architects have been consistently intrigued by the possibility of designing spaces to house artwork.  This is in large part because of the coevolution of art and architecture and, in particular, the overlap between the two fields during the Renaissance.  The invention of perspective drawing propelled innovation by artists and architects.  As this occurred, new architectural typologies were solidified – the urban palazzo and rural villa – that created new space for artworks to be created.  In particular, the vast white plaster walls of these structures created an opportunity for frescos while the halls and large rooms created space for new and ancient sculptures to be displayed.  As industries and trade evolved, oil paint and linen canvas began to present a viable options for the creation of pictures.  The result was a new capacity to move artworks from one location to another. In realizing this liberation of the fresco from the wall and coupled with the growing interest in the ancient world in collecting in general, the broader question of where to display and store artwork came to the fore.  Collectors created curiosity cabinets for small treasures, halls devoted to hanging artworks, and private galleries.  The latter evolved amidst royal patronage in countries throughout Europe.  These galleries were ultimately made public after the abolition or reorganization of the monarchy and its role in governing and society more broadly.  As this occurred, a wide range of royal and other elite individuals continued to collect artwork at an increasing rate.  This led to the establishment of a range of schools that evolved from the ateliers of artists and that were dedicated to cultivating artistic talent.  It also led to a more formalized market for art that now included galleries and art dealers as an intermediary between artist and collector.

Like almost every aspect of the United States economy – from education to health care to prisons and all forms of communication and even social interaction – the investment in new infrastructure, neighborhoods, and real estate more broadly has become increasingly driven by demands for ever higher profits.  While real estate developers have always been driven by making money on the space they create, there was a time during the last hundred years when the government invested more heavily in new infrastructure (such as the Interstate Highway System and many urban transportation systems that were built as well as the countless bridges, tunnels, and dams) and when more investment was being made in affordable and public housing through building new units and rent control.  This period was one of tremendous growth of suburbs throughout the country coupled with unprecedented economic prosperity and considerable population growth.  The era allowed many who grew up in crowded inner city conditions to find an escape in new spatious light filled homes with lawns and attached garages.  At the same time, the migration to the suburbs caused many neighborhoods in cities across the country to decline.  The process was further precipitated by racial politics that encouraged segregation and white residents to flee.  

Too often, the work that takes place to build and re-build our cities occurs in isolated parcels of varying scales driven by the ambitions of real estate developers to create new space through investment in order to ultimately make a profit.  Spending directly by city governments mostly takes the form of infrastructure maintenance or tax incentives to developers to build projects.  Rarely does a cohesive vision for city or regional planning emerge.  The result is often the perception of urban development driven by speculation leading to higher rents, taxes, and gentrification that can force existing residents out.  At the same time, it is important to realize that through new developments, the tax base can increase, developers can support the construction of new infrastructure, and can help active previously dormant sections of the city, bridge disconnected parts, and ignite new vibrant urban life. The conversation is particularly charged in the context of projects that have received national attention and considerable criticism such as Hudson Yards as well as a national affordable housing crisis that is making it difficult for many people to live near their jobs or in neighborhoods their families have called home for many decades.  Hudson Yards in particular has been criticized for creating a series of uninspired buildings surrounding an ultra-luxurious shopping mall.  Even The Vessel that could have been seen as a positive contribution to the cultural landscape of New York has been met with skepticism as a result of its extreme cost, void like form, and lack of a clearly positive impact in a city beset by extreme and increasing inequality.  The one exception to this criticism is The Shed that many view as a much needed space that fills rather than creates a void in the cultural landscape.  

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The general inability to offer broad strategies for solving the growing crisis of affordable housing in America is related to a propensity to look at one aspect of the problem rather than exploring the interconnected web of past and present variables that go into defining the complexities of the problem of creating and offering housing at a cost that is aligned with income, jobs, location, and generally what people can afford to pay for a dwelling unit as related to other costs of living.  We too often accept the parameters of the object that we want to create and the place in which we want to create it without fully understanding the multitude of forces that go into making that figure and the ground on which it sits.  The history and lessons of how housing has been subsidized via government backed mortgages, concentration of low-income families in high-rise buildings, and programs that offer tax incentives to developers are often overlooked in the context of specific new housing plans that seek to address a small portion of the demand and offer a specific return for a particular constituency. At the same time, the entangled history of housing and racial discrimination, zoning laws guiding development and neighborhoods that develop a particular character and type of resident, systems of value that drive what we want out of a housing unit, and the way in which we build community and transform our world through technics and work are often considered outside of the immediate task of developing a design that can be built at a low cost.  We should seek to fully analyze how the cost of other goods and services impacts what one can afford to pay for housing.  The cost and benefits of transportation, digital, and social networks should be considered.  We should also consider integrating new housing into employment channels.  Most importantly, we should think beyond the division between affordable and market rate housing in order to arrive at a situation where all housing is affordable and it is seen as a right not a privilege.

Digital screens have become a pervasive presence in our lives.  We carry them in our pockets, are guided through cities by those installed to help us navigate transportation services, and often begin and end our day receiving news and entertainment.   During the work day, they have become one of the primary points of engagement.  This is true not only in professional and service oriented occupations, but manufacturing, logistics, construction, and maintenance.  In the context of those engaged in the design, construction, and maintenance of the built environment, the screen has become the primary surface via which design occurs, contractors are increasingly constructing buildings with a paperless job-site, augmented reality on mobile tablets is being used to validate accuracy of construction, and tablets have become pervasive in operating and maintaining buildings once they are complete.  At the same time, screens are integrated into the finished product to support the end users.  On one hand, there are no significant challenges for the designer to address as this occurs.  Architects have no trouble integrating screens, building management systems, and new generations of IoT products.  Product designers have thrived in the context of a consumer culture that has enhanced the demand for their work.  BIM, 5D design and planning, and other digital technologies have been embraced by many of the most cutting edge architects as tools that can help them to streamline the design process and deliver more accurate drawings and finished building products that ultimately save their clients time and money.  In doing so, these designers see an easy symbiotic relationship between their work and the growing range of apps and technologies serving the built environment, energy, water, waste, and mobility sectors.  They see little conflict in venture-backed tech companies creating products that will deeply influence the urban form, how we live, and how we relate to our built environment.

A number of trends exist in architectural practice.  These range from the continuing process of globalization, the media attention placed on architects that encourages differentiation, and the continued dominance of the icons that result in the need to grapple with the productization of space, prefabrication, and affordability.  In discussing these concerns, architects, critics, and theorists often speak directly to the current problem and the way that the primary parties frame it.  They rarely look at the broader theoretical foundation on which the architect may have built their practice and how that theoretical foundation is playing out in the present work.  In the process, criticism and interpretation run the risk of remaining confined to a particular realm of the world, how we inhabit it, way of talking about building, and capacity to get something out of the space in which we live.  In this sense, conversations often reference a small subset of discourse without considering the expanded field that determines the conditions of that subset.  This conversation fails to take into account the series of translations that take place between different levels and spheres of discourse, material flows, political authorities, subjectivities, temporal structures, purposes, ends, and frameworks of judgement that together have profound consequences on how we conceptualize space, inhabit it, and encounter something called architecture along the way.

The consequence of this omission is that we often find ourselves confronted with an investment that has been made in something that the owners and builders consider to be architecture, but that those who will ultimately inhabit it do not like.  This is essentially a situation where a particular collection of subjects do not want to live their lives within the sway of a particular architect author.  While one could say that they should just escape to another locale, doing so runs the risk of negating a particular investment as well as opens the possibility of a broader disjunction that could exclude a vast range of people from a capacity to influence how the space they inhabit is designed.  Further, by cutting off people from determining what is architecture, it opens the possibility that the work of architects becomes increasingly focused on problems that are internal to architecture and divorced from the problems of people.  If the works of architecture are intended to serve some higher purpose and function in an elevated manner for the inhabitants, it also cuts people off from such contact and how that contact can function for us all.

The purpose of this essay is to explore a series of strategies for urban redevelopment under the term “Mediated Urbanism.”  The audience is both specific and broad.  In a narrow sense, the audience is those who are concerned with the future of the American City and who are committed to taking concrete steps towards its improvement.  These people are both those with the training to do so as well as those who control sufficient capital to directly invest in the work required to transform the city and create enhanced ecological sustainability, new initiatives driving economic growth, and a strong local culture organized around art, common space, and shared interest in maintaining a productive city.  Those who want to invest in the future of the city and those with the capital to do so, however, are dispersed across a wide range of disciplines and geographies.  Very often, the boundaries that result lead to obstacles to collaboration.  As a result, new approaches that, in particular, require collaboration across boundaries often have a limited chance of occurring.  Mediated Urbanism is a means of addressing this broad group and pulling them together around a shared ambition through the straightforward notion of collaborating on using “media” to transform the urban environment.  

It is vital to understand what the term “art” refers to in the world and for the people who produce and consume it.  This notion holds for many such terms that divide the horizon of our existence into different categories for which we have varying degrees of interest and concern.  It is particularly true for “art” because of the legacy of works that continue to draw interest, the joy that it results in, and the extent to which “art” stands out from the rest of the world.  Engaging in such a pursuit allows us to understand the physical material configurations that are associated with art, the relationship between those configurations and the broader world, and the network of judgment that arises in close proximity to evaluate, profit from, and take joy in the events that are unfolding around something called “art.”  It opens the possibility of tracking how this process has occurred at different points in order to arrive at a broader understanding of the term and how it is situated. In what follows, I will explore how the term “art” is situated, performs, and affects rather than what it means.  This is a result of little interest in challenging the sprawling set of experiences and objects, art histories and aesthetic systems that have arisen through attempts to do so.  I take the diffuse field of art production and consumption coupled with the myriad opinions and stances towards it as a given that summarizes the immense and varied capacity to create heightened experiences filled with information as a field of potential for future innovation, action, and progression.  This field cannot be said to have a sensible meaning when taken in its entirety.  It is defined by overlapping and conflicting energy and materiality.  These dynamic relationships trace how “art” is situated in the world and for the receiver through local instances where art is given meaning.  It is these specific moments of situatedness that I am interested in exploring at both the material level and the descriptive level of discourse.  Doing so will allow us to understand not only how art is situated in an everyday encounter, but how art is situated at the level of language.  It is such language that creates a prejudice or frame that limits how – and with what level of accuracy – we describe phenomena and ultimately what new actions and capacities result.

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This essay investigates how art, architecture, and design might be situated in the world in order to restore a functional and communal relationship – and by extension economy – to art, architecture, and design.  In order to do so, I begin by characterizing an impediment to such situatedness of art, architecture, and design as resulting from an increasingly divided world.  This divided world is characterized by new modes of representation, varieties of actors, and entities being representation.  From this follows a discussion of how “representation” is defined as well as the benefits and hazards of relying on a single system versus multiple systems of representation caste by different spheres of influence.  In characterizing representation, I discuss the exchange between presentation and re-presentation, production and re-production, base and superstructure as defining different levels of experience.  I suggest that art, architecture, and design no longer occupy a fixed level or relation to these terms, but offer a range of levels that different groups of people can relate to and use to define themselves by.  This process of identification is an alternative to identification based on class.  In occupying multiple levels, art, architecture, and design are created through a process of elevation that allows them to make contact with and ultimately define how each manifestation will operate on different levels.  I discuss how elevation to a higher level occurs for each by un-packing how presentation and re-presentation, production and re-production operate.  Although the potential exists to address multiple levels with the same work, it is often the case that works of art, architecture, and design are oriented based on economically and socially defined class structures.  In this sense, the potential for these works to support direct identification is limited to begin with by class structures that limit information and access in order to make the work appear to not support such a potential.  This tendency is broken when men and women create new value and enter the intimate world of art as artists, critics, or new collectors – transcending the class and space from which they came as a result.  The highest end work is often hidden within the studio, gallery, or private enclosure.  In this context, I call for this high-end work to be resituated in the city and in direct confrontation with other work derived from other spheres of influence.  Different spheres would come into contact with each other.  The co-presence of spheres would challenge rigid hierarchies of culture and offer room to find comfort with different levels of culture as embodied in art, architecture, and design.  As a result, the relationship between levels of relation to representation and presentation, production and reproduction becomes more important than how any one level appears. The possibility of operating simultaneously in different spheres – adding or subtracting from one or another in the process – opens the possibility of a complex accounting procedure and exchange system.  In so doing, the makers of art, architecture, and design might work together in order to create a communal space and framework of value that currently does not exist.

The Dis-Enclosure of Art investigates the moment when an object is encountered by a person and how and why this person might consider what they encounter to be “art.”  This question is asked within the context of an attempt to interrogate the advantages and disadvantages of the spatial and disciplinary boundaries that enclose art.  The purpose of this work is not only to understand why some things are considered art while others are not, but to understand how this encounter with art has evolved over history.  Moreover, it is to build on this understanding of the historical variations in how the concept of art as well as the art object equates with the world and is constructed through chains of interactions and relations in order to see how the various components affect the world, art, and society in different manners.  Over the course of Dis-Enclosure, I offer an understanding of how art is differentiated and creates difference – often with a profound affect on how people live.  In doing so, we might understand a broader trend of how art operates and how people operate art towards one end or another.  The purpose of understanding an evolutionary trend of art is not so much to provide grounds on which predictions for the future or criticism of the current field of production might rest.  Instead, this search is undertaken in order to attain a better sense of how different modes and periods of art making are related to each other.  Through comparing motivations and strategies for dealing with the situation in which an artist and art operates, it is possible to discover a deeper level of meaning.  By uncovering a frame for such activities of the artist, art, and historical method of understanding it that stretch beyond any period, it is possible to make sense of actions and entities that appear to lack meaning or context.  Through using a frame capable of framing both the world and art, it is possible to understand how art relates to the world in a similar manner over time, across space, and between discourses.  Such a frame would be a balanced equation describing the economy of art on both quantitative and qualitative terms.  The concept of “dis-enclosure” as developed by Jean-Luc Nancy is a closely related frame.  The Dis-Enclosure of Art extends Nancy’s work beyond the realm of Christianity and into the realm of art.  It traces how the forces that led to and resulted from what Nancy calls “the dis-enclosure of Christianity” affect art.  It looks at moments when the forces of art affect the dis-enclosure of Christianity.  The consequence is to understand a trend of dis-enclosure in the realm of art and how this occurrence affects art, its creator, and the world at large.  By understanding this relationship, those related to art might be better equipped to offer freedom and liberation from suffering.  I investigate these concerns in the following sections: I. Introduction, II. The Equation and the World, III. Art off the Wall, IV. Introduction to the Critique of the Wall, V. Critique of the Wall, VI. Quantity and the Wall, VII. Drawing the Line, VIII. Crisis of Sense and Its Reason, IX. Dis-Enclosure, X. Bearing on Capital, XI. Bearing on Art, XII. Bearing and the Event, XIII. Introduction to Sense, Sensors, and Sensation, XIV. Sensors, Sense, and Sensation, XV. Adding the Subject, XVI. Subtracting the Subject, XVII. Virtual and Real as a Negotiation of Production and Reproduction, XVIII. Aesthetics and Politics Integrated via Presentation and Re-Presentation of the Image, XIX. Dis-Enclosure Reconsidered, XX. From the Work of Art to the Art of Work, XXI. Equations In-Between, XXII. Passing Exception, XXIII. Coordinating Organizations, XXIV. Rendering, and XXV. Organizing Codes.

“Modalities of Work” is the most overtly philosophical text that I have written.  Although drawing heavily on the work of Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zizek, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri, this work exists entirely without quotation.  It is concerned with ideas as such and the definitions that are required.  The primary goal of this essay is to locate art through experience.  I begin this investigation by looking at how art occurs in different media situated throughout the city and, in particular, through how “art” is situated in museums.  This is followed by an historical discussion of the evolution of the museum in New York.  I investigate how a hierarchy is created through how the museum sits spatially.  This hierarchy is extended to the interior of the museum.  In order to “understand” this hierarchy and the works that are organized, I investigate different systems of thought and use them to see each work in a museum. Art “works” through this system by provoking judgment that results in language through discourse.  Work is understood as media in advertisements and catalogues and as a number indicating a price or value.  This value can be seen in the connection of the entity to an economy, allowing it to play a role in a broader realm through its exceptional status and giving it a role in rites and rituals.  In this sense, I move from locating art to asking what system governs its location.  The image that allows for the work of art to be exchanged within a broader economy is made of various parameters.  These parameters – duration of time spent with the canvas, availability of certain materials, cost of rent for a studio, relationship to other artists, interaction with collectors, dexterity of the artist’s body, afflictions that the artist lives with, etc… – extend independently as forces in the world.  It is possible to see past a definition of art that requires it to become whole before it can be evaluated via the theological, teleological, tautological, or ontological and to works of art defined by the relation of forces.  The relationship between these forces is ultimately structured by a process of information that defines the rendering and resolution of these forces.

This essay is concerned with the relationship between the medium in which art occurs and the content of the work.  In addition, 40 Meters High examines the relationship between the work and the context in which it is presented.  I begin by considering the work of an artist making what appears to be paintings while actively stating that he works beyond paint through a series of moments and tactics that support the painters argument.  From these examples, I arrive at a worldview defined by dreams, liberation, and freedom.  The location and presence of Miro’s signature within the field of the canvas traces changing forms and figures with which he might have identified and enhances a territorial, cartographic, and subjectively inhabited understanding of the surface of his work.  This worldview and the possibility that paintings might be read as maps of a city or world becomes the departure point for asking how the museums functions both in the context of the works presented, more broadly as an apparatus for viewing art, and as a site within the city.  I consider these questions both directly in terms of Miro and the Pompidou and more generally.  Through this analysis, I discuss how context affects judgment.  Ultimately, I characterize the role of the museum in the contemporary city – agreeing with Lewis Mumford’s claim that the city has become a museum.  Through a careful unpacking of the distinction between home and museum through an analysis of the evolution of museum out of the palace, I suggest that the museum is one specific type of exhibit among many that teaches us specific things about how we might live and relate to each other.