08/05/2006 18:49:00 EST • tags: architecture, blather, design, economics, infrastructure, logistics, newyork, philosophy, software, train
The High Line was urban infrastructure and architecture, in harmony. It came about in accordance with the economic logic of the day, that which produced buildings whose programmatic ties to train-based logistics were physically manifest… the remnants of which can be seen along any of the rundown exurban areas Amtrak’s northeast corridor passes through, where sagging warehouses directly interface with little rusty side-branches of track that split off from the main route. There was no abstraction between commerce, logistics, infrastructure, and architecture… all such interactions were right there, in the open, and quite legible.
Figure 1. High Line train passing through what is now Westbeth Artists’ Community.
… When Bryan had talked about infrastructure in housing as an API, my first thought was something like
Ok yeah, but unless you are stamping like thousands of these things out, all with slightly different structural, logical, and perhaps programmatic requirements, the API idea kind of breaks down, cuz it’s overkill, I mean after all an API is something you use in order to approach a component-based system of structures in a black-box sort of way, whereas in architecture that makes little sense considering the amount of post-construction, errm, dynamism in the system.
… points which, I should mention, a) went unuttered outside of my own bedroom and b) were summarily addressed, more or less, immediately afterwards. But I am always wary when ideas from software engineering are brought into other disciplines, because really most everything in software is metaphor to begin with. That, coupled with the “fail better” mentality fostered by apple-Z and, more recently, the whole agile-development thing, seems like a philosophy that would complicate things faster than it could simplify them.
But fuck that, really, because “complex” and “simple” is probably the worst false dichotomy like ever. The manhattan grid, and later the 1916 zoning law, created (by dint of abstracting the ideas of “city block”, “avenue”, etcetera) a simple system in which people could build shit. This happened to coincide with the advent of individualism in the last century, and the dovetailing of said individualism with rabid hypercapitalism, and so volia, yes, the modular and slightly abstract system made a lot of sense. so people built shit.
The edge cases are the most interesting, tho… like when people want or need to programmatically exceed that system. The inevitable friction between the parties involved when such things are executed is, too, a consequence of the abstraction; if we’re still talking in terms of things like APIs, it’s kind of like “DLL hell” I would say. The almost balletic integration of the High Line with the buildings it serviced does, I will concede, have a nice parallel with the earlier days of computer engineering, before APIs were trans-national legal concerns, when code was written for love, and not much else.
Figure 2. The High Line, immediately prior to the commencement of reconstruction.
Most designers (including myself on most days) would like to ignore the cold, hard, logical fact of the economic context. It is always the thing in the background that drives all of these engineering decisions, whether you’re building an API for software or for plumbing. I mean, the Friends of the High Line are going to end up with a mighty fine bullet-point to lend to nearby luxury condo developers, despite their proclaimed 501(c)(3) status. It looks to be very pretty, yes. But I fear that the simultaneous decoupling of the place, from both its economic and physical contexts, will rob it of its power.
Is this sort of universal abstraction simply the spirit of the times, or is it a fluke of globalization? Who knows. I don’t. If you know, tell me. In the meantime I’ll be reading more Houellebecq, which is what started me thinking about all this nonsense in the first place. Yes.
-fish
