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Verb
Natures, edited by Albert Ferré,
Irene Hwang, Tomoko Sakamoto, Ramon Prat, Michael Kubo,
Mario Ballesteros & Anna Tetas
Desert
America , edited by Ramon Prat, Jaime
Salazar, Michael Kubo & Irene Hwang.
According to the publisher's
web site, "Verb™
is ACTAR’s main tool for the investigation of current
architectural production," consisting of boogazines,
monographs, and the yet-to-be-released minigraphs. The first
and last are reconsiderations of the typical architecture
books, be they monographs, case studies, or writings in
the realms of history and theory. A
boogazine is obviously a merging of a book and a magazine,
with the former's comprehensiveness, heft and price tag
and the latter's frequency of publication and visual and
editorial consistency. Verb Natures is the fifth
installment of the boogazine, "the end of a positive,
optimistic exploration that has sought to find potential
in new forces and technologies," that will "confront
the realities of what the technologies of globalization
have produced" in future issues.
The pages of the fifth issue, focusing
on the fusion of natural and artificial matter afforded
by digital and other new technologies, clearly exhibit various
explorations of architecture available by the computer,
from the formal and structural possibilities afforded by
parametric modeling to the modification of nature via genetic
engineering. What most, if not all, of the design and research
projects presented have in common is what is essential to
computers algorithms. Repetitive computations performed
by computers allow the complex designs of PTW's
watercube, Aranda/Lasch's
unbuilt "grotto" proposal for PS1, and others
here that are indicative of a move away from Rhino-generated
blogs towards designs that take construction into account.
These are projects that are being built or are meant to
exist in the physical realm, not just on a computer screen.
Given what fills these pages, the
boogazine's title (Natures) and the desire for a new definition
of the organic is a bit problematic. It is a technocratic
view that embraces the potentials of technology without
a thorough questioning of this basic, though unspoken, assertion.
In some cases, nature is seen as a resource; in other cases
it is something to be manipulated towards human ends or
containing lessons that can influence how we build architecture
or organize our cities. Perhaps this questioning of technological
uses and ends will follow in the next boogazine, though
reading and absorbing the text and images in this issue
gives one the impression that the use of the computer in
architectural practice is an ongoing pursuit that has still
only scratched the surface of possibility, but it is something
that must be tempered by a careful consideration of the
environment of which we are an integral and increasingly
important part.
The intersection of nature and technology
is also explored in Desert America, the latest
monograph in the Verb series. It is an exploration of the
amazing and surprising variety of ways that Americans use
the driest, hottest, and most expansive area of the 48 states,
from the obvious (Las Vegas, the Hoover Dam and other methods
of harnessing energy, astronomy, Burning Man, Phoenix's
sprawl) to the not-so obvious (the Salton Sea, anti-terrorism
training in Playa, New Mexico, military graveyards, and
Quartzsite). It is, as the title suggests, a narrative of
the various conditions of paradox found in the desert, what
many people perceive as an area free of life and unable
to support life but one teeming with the activities that
can't take place anywhere else. It is an alternative guidebook
to the place, with page after page of the strange human
presence in what's also seen as the last vestige of nature,
perhaps not unspoiled but not transformed as much as other
parts of the US. Lastly, it is a must for anybody who thinks
they really know the desert in all its intricacies, as there's
something new to be found in this coverage of the vast desert.
or 
for Verb 8
or
for Desert America |
