The five p’s: proper planning prevents poor performance I’ve been building a car at Elwood Bodyworks for a couple of years. Bill Cherry’s my mentor. He lets me use his tools and constantly reminds me of the 5 P’s: Proper Planning Prevents Poor Performance. These are Bill’s tools.

Climatologists have confirmed it is now too late to avoid certain global warming and that a shift to a low or zero carbon economy is thus vital. This implies an urgent transition to renewable energy sources as well as radical adaptive measures, which collide against established industrial monopolies. This episode gathers several geoengineering patent applications, and through these documents presents the history of these emerging technologies and the private interests, actors, think tanks, and corporations behind them. Within the debate of climate change mitigation, geoengineering—the technological management of weather patterns and carbon capture processes—occupies an especially politicized place. It has slowly ...

Writing in 1969, architecture historian Reyner Banham complains about the silence on mechanical services in contemporary architecture discourse, most specifically machines for the making of interior weather. Banham’s book The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment is full of little arguments against the superiority of the visual, that is, the exterior aspect of a building rather than, for example, its fabricated interior weather. His work today comes across as an apology for technology before an era of environmental or social concerns stemming from it. The present publication for Taming the Horror Vacui takes a less polemic yet more critical tone to explore ...

The notion of artificial intelligence may seem distant and abstract, but AI is already pervasive in our daily lives. Anatomy of an AI System analyzes the vast networks that underpin the “birth, life, and death” of a single Amazon Echo smart speaker, painstakingly compiling and condensing this huge volume of information into a detailed high-resolution diagram. This data visualization provides insights into the massive quantity of resources involved in the production, distribution, and disposal of the speaker.

At this moment in the 21st century, we see a new form of extractivism that is well underway: one that reaches into the furthest corners of the biosphere and the deepest layers of human cognitive and affective being. Many of the assumptions of human life made by machine learning systems are narrow, normative and laden with error. Nonetheless, they are inscribing and building those assumptions into a new world, and will increasingly play a role in how opportunities, wealth, and knowledge are distributed. We offer up this exploded view map and essay as one way to begin seeing across a ...

The Anthropocene Issue is a special series of short videos shot during the “Anthropocene Curriculum,” campus held at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, from November 14 to 22, 2014. The program brought together more than a 100 people from various disciplines around a series of workshops, presentations, and talks. It included, among many others, specialists in climatology, geography, law, history of science and technology, architecture, and art to discuss the concept of the Anthropocene. This special series presents the week-long gathering with a set of close-ups, interviews, group discussions, and informal conversations with some of its participants, launched over two ...

Single pages from IKEA furniture-assembly instructions were mixed together and renumbered. The result is an instructions manual of about 700 pages. “BÆBEL’s name suggests both staggering ambition—and if you followed its instructions, and assembled all IKEA furniture into a single fixture, what could that be but a tower to god?—and its promise of universal comprehension: IKEA’s power is predicated on communicating across languages, which is why its manuals eschew words entirely for these severe and elegant images.” – Julia Pelta Feldman

The Stack we have means: borderlines are rewritten, dashed, curved, erased, automated; algorithms count as continental divides; the opposition of chthonic versus geometric territory is collapsed by computation; interfaces upon interfaces accumulate into networks, which accumulate into territories, which accumulate into geoscapes (territories comprising territories, made and so entered into, not entered into and so made); the embedded is mobilized and the liquid is tethered down into shelter and infrastructure; the flat, looping planes of jurisdiction multiply and overlap into towered, interwoven stacks; the opaque is transcribed and the transparent is staged, dramatized, and artificialized; irregular allegiances are formalized (the enclave and ...

How can architecture support ethical and environmental ways of being? Care is a way of being in the world that strives to make life more habitable for other people, animals, and the planet itself. What does caring for someone or something entail, and why is this ethical? What might care mean in the context of architecture?

The second in the Studies in the Design Laboratory epub series produced by the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and the CCA, this publication traces the development of complex computational geometry in the work of Ron Resch. Resch’s strikingly novel generative methods laid the seeds of computational origami, and during the early 1970’s he collaborated in the pioneering computer science department of the University of Utah, a hotbed of early computer graphics. Featuring interviews with Resch’s collaborators, excerpts from his remarkable films, and a consideration of the role of the architect in cross-disciplinary laboratories, this epub argues for Resch ...