Alan's blog

What did you do?
For my final project, I created a series of glasses that slightly alter the visual interface between us and what's around us. Through these modifications, I hope to show how simple, slight alterations to and replacements of vision can influence how we relate to the spaces and places around us.
Constant RearviewShoegazingStaring Contest aka The Narcissist
How does your project address what you wrote about?
What we see or don't see can drastically alter how we think about a space and how we act. Although we don't live in emerald cities, or have to navigate arctic tundras, our day to day behavior is heavily tied to our notions of seeing. Having a constant rear view while driving a car helps us navigate space in a way that would be difficult without that aid. Standing in front of a mirror makes us think about our own image when we might normally not. Staring at our feet evokes a sense of melancholy and introspection. These are all visual instances that we all encounter, but how would our behavior change if these instances were displaced, or if they were the norm?

What about other senses?

We experience the world with our bodies and our senses. This simple statement has vast implications, and forms the basis for Yi-Fu Tuan's writings in Space and Place. Any information that we collect from our surroundings, any experience we have, originates in sensation. We interact with one another using our senses, we experience art with our senses, and we know our external environments only through our senses.

If our experience of the world is so heavily vested in our senses, it follows then, that any of the slightest alterations to the operation or behavior of our senses would also drastically alter the way in which we perceive, know, and understand that world that surrounds us. Tuan acknowledges this truth when he notes that

"The Eskimo environment is bleak. Moss and lichen in summer give the land a uniform gray-brown cast; snow and ice in winter paint the scene in monotone. When fog or blizzard appears, land, water, and sky lose all differentiation. It is in this poor and poorly articulated environment that the Eskimos, to survive, have refined their perceptual and spatial skills. When all landmarks disappear in mist and driven snow, Eskimos can nevertheless find their way..."

Coney Island is a unique and vital part of how we think of New York City.
Business or Pleasure?
Colson Whitehead acknowledges this by attributing a section to it in The Colossus of New York, a collection of vignettes about the city.
Other than his personal musings on the collective experience of going to the beach and amusement park, I found the most valuable and provocative sections of Whitehead's writing to be his use of metaphor and abstraction. At the end of the Coney Island chapter, Whitehead writes:

"Citizens of this new vertiginous city. Up and down. Reel this way and the ocean is upon you in a wave, in beckoning gloom, reel the other way and slam into highrises, into broad brickfaces. A rollercoaster is your mind trying to reconcile two contradictory propositions. Earth and space, cement and air, city and sea. Life and death. Choose quickly. The city and the sea don't get along, never have. Two trash-talking combatants, two old bitter foes."

This passage sheds light on the relationship between Coney Island and Manhattan, and the mental state of New Yorkers who are torn between the two opposing forces. In his book Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan, Rem Koolhaas writes about Coney Island, "a resort implies the presence, not too far away, of a reservoir of people existing under conditions that require them to escape occasionally to recover their equilibrium."

This connection alludes to the interdependence between Coney Island and Manhattan. In a sense, neither would exist as efficiently without the other. Hardworking middle class Manhattanites, at least in the early days, required Coney Island as a destination for recreational escapism for the masses. In return, Coney Island's existence as a leisure center depends on the existence of a large New York City working force in need of recreation. Coney Island is a symbolic projection of Manhattan's dreams, wishes, and shortcomings. New Yorkers exist in the tension between the dichotomy of city and sea; Manhattan's Progress and Coney Island's Pleasure.

I was born in Coney Island Hospital, which was originally founded as a first aid center for beach goers in the late 1800s. The earliest, most innocent years of my life were spent living a mere 15 minutes from Astroland, the Cyclone, and Brighton Beach. As a child I would visit carnivals and the New York Aquarium in Coney Island. I have vivid memories of feeding seagulls on the boardwalk and riding waves in the Atlantic. Moving to Manhattan at age 8 was a physical split from Coney Island, but also a symbolic progression. What laid ahead was growth and concrete, what was left behind were memories and carefreeness.

Any physical location has stories to tell.

Every place consists not only of its immediate physical characteristics, but also, in a sense, of the events that have helped mold it. No matter where we go, something has already happened there, someone has been there before, someone has experienced something there before. These events make a place what it is before we get there, and our actions in that place shape it for its next set of visitors. Our bodies and brains, only capable of seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, touching, and moving through space, fail to capture the depth of information embedded in our surroundings.

How can we begin to unveil the rich layers of history, events, and experiences that we are blind to, but exist everywhere we go?

Ian Frazier's essay Bumpin'n shows how a device as simple as a guest book can begin to capture the layer of human experience embedded in a place. While the guest book does not represent the entirety of events and ideas that belong to a place, it begins to show us how rich this type of information can get.

Geo-tagging is a technology that, much like a guest book, helps capture content that is associated with a physical place. By adding geographic information like latitude and longitude to a photograph or blog post, electronic content be tied to a dot on the map instead of just floating in cyber-space.

While geo-tagging may be gaining popularity thanks in part to the growing amount of consumer electronics devices with built in global positioning chips, it has not always been the status-quo. An older method of leaving an electronic trail in a physical location that I am quite fond of is called the Yellow Arrow system.
Yellow Arrow: Location: 44th Street @ 7th Avenue, Manhattan, NY (US) TXT: Stand facing this arrow and you'll hear the best urban symphony of your life.
YellowArrow.net reads: "Yellow Arrow is a global public art project of local experiences. Combining stickers, mobile phones and an international community, Yellow Arrow transforms the urban landscape into a 'deep map' that expresses the personal histories and hidden secrets that live within our everyday spaces." Let's say you want to leave a comment in a specific place for the other people who come to that place to see. All you need is a Yellow Arrow sticker and a mobile phone. You stick the Arrow on what you want to comment on, and then you write your comment in a text massage on your phone, and send it to the Yellow Arrow number. The Yellow Arrow sticker has a unique ID number and a phone number that passers-by can send a text message to when they want to read that Arrow's content. Your content is then text messaged to whoever passes your sticker and wants to know what you wrote.

As a cross between a guest book and a geo-tag, the Yellow Arrow system is useful, fun, and implements technology in an interesting way that makes us consider the layers and layers of personal experience that exist in a place before we get there.

One of the most intriguing relationships developed in the narrative of City of Glass is that between the characters' mental states and their interactions with their environments.
For example, Peter Stillman Jr. was locked in a dark room for a long period in his early life, meaning that he had little interaction with or understanding of physical spaces. This is reflected in his mental development - he has difficulty learning how to speak and requires a lifetime of therapy.
Peter Stillman Sr. has a history of unconventional practices, both in his scholarship and in the raising of his son. He is undoubtedly a smart man, but perhaps started losing sanity after the death of his wife. When he is freed from prison, he starts walking in the paths of the shapes of the letters to spell out the name of one of his obsessions. This behavior, coupled with the conversations that he has with Daniel Quinn (in which he goes on odd tangents and exhibits his poor memory), build an idea of his character in the reader's mind. Auster couples the character's mental state with his outward behavior to build a singular personality. It makes sense that a deranged one-time professor would use his walks through a certain block radius to spell out that which occupies his mind while collecting urban detritus in a bag along the way. The way he interacts with the physical environment around him is directly tied to the mental processes occurring inside his mind.
Finally, Daniel Quinn wants to be alone. Early in the book, when he goes on walks, places meld into one and he feels like he is nowhere. The way he processes the stimuli around him is tied to his thoughts and desires. He wants to be alone, so he ignores everything, and feels like he is walking in a void. Later, when Quinn starts living in the alleyway, his relationship to his environment changes. He becomes super focused on the Stillman apartment, and is consumed by his thoughts about the case. During this period, nothing else matters to him except the bare basics of sleeping and eating, which get reduced to a minimum. Everything in his mind is focused on the case, and his physical behavior towards the outside world reflects this.
The characters in the novels may illustrate extreme examples, but I believe that the characteristics of our mental processes definitely affect the way in which we act towards and are influenced by the places and spaces around us.

Stage 5: Desolation. Click through to see the rest of The Course of Empire.The Course of Empire, a five-part painting series by the 19th century Hudson River School painter Thomas Cole, illustrates the duration of a civilization from one vantage point. The five paintings, respectively entitled The Savage State, The Pastoral State, The Consummation of Empire, The Destruction of Empire, and Desolation, show different chronological stages of a piece of land. It starts as stormy a shore with little sign of human life. There is a group of presumably native hunters, but nature dominates the landscape. The next painting shows a more established human settlement. There are signs of architecture, recreation, and farming. The Consummation illustrates a civilization at its height. There are fountains, ornate decorations, and other signs of wealth and prosperity. The next painting illustrates the destruction of the city in the time of war. The sky and sea are stormy, and people are fleeing and panicking on shore. The beautiful structures from the previous painting are shown in ruins. Finally, the Desolation painting gives a glimpse of the ruined and abandoned city as nature starts to take over the land once again.
Cole's paintings illustrate some of Yi Fu Tuan's ideas about Time and Place. The Course of Empire, beginning and ending with stages lacking much human involvement, suggests a cyclical or circular view of time, where a place can be dominated by nature, then man, then nature, and so on. As the audience of the paintings, we have the rare and valuable experience of viewing one place over a long term period of time. In a sense, we "get to know" this place through Cole's 5 snapshots of moments that are decades or centuries apart. Photographs and paintings have undoubtedly taught us to experience places through imagery, but without any historic context or nostalgic attachment. The Course of Empire, like 5 lone frames from very long set of time-lapse photographs, gives us the depth of time, allowing for extra understanding of a place beyond what is visually apparent.

the Blur Building, built and demolished in 2002, on Lake Neuchatel in Switzerland The Blur Building, designed by New York architectural firm DS+R is a cloud on Lake Neuchatel in Switzerland. The building, structurally consisting of a 300-foot wide platform with thousands of water-vapor-spraying nozzles, is essentially, as architect Liz Diller puts it, "an architecture of atmosphere." She elaborates: "entering Blur is like entering a habitable medium." Her use of the word "medium" recalls artistic forms such as poetry and painting -- these mediums have the ability to "delight and disturb the senses," and influence a viewer or inhabitant's inner state. Along these lines, Yi-Fu Tuan writes that place is "an object in which one can dwell," but unlike any other place, Blur gives the impression of a "formless, featureless, depthless, scaleless, massless, surfaceless, and dimensionless" space. By acting as a sensorial white-out, the building erases all the references that its inabitants are used to depending on for spatial orientation, other than the body's left and right, an gravity's up and down. Blur consumes the skin with water vapor, vision with a sea of white, and hearing with the gentle white-noise-like hiss of the spray nozzles. In its unvarying sameness, Blur diminishes its inhabitants' ability to depend on their experience in detecting changes in smell, touch, sight, and hearing to aid in their navigation of the space. Much like entering Tuan's "warm pale bath," Blur conveys to its inhabitants a "massive feeling." Diller says that, when in the building, "the world is put out of focus while our visual dependence is put into focus." Only when we cannot use our senses do we realize how we depend on them. The scale of the Blur Building also speaks of the influence it has over its occupants. In being the size of a football field, Blur allows its occupants enough space to not feel crowded, in order to facilitate the optimal white-out affect. The effect that the scale and sameness of the space has on its occupants may be perceptually and emotionally overwhelming, but any individual's reaction is dependent on his or her past experience. The Eskimos, who, for example, as described by Tuan, are used to a monotone environment, may have a very different reaction to the Blur Building than a European person. Here is a video of Liz Diller talking about the Blur Building and some other work: 

There is a room that is just like any other.  It has a ceiling and four walls and an entrance.  The faces of the walls are sheets of drywall that have been attached to the wooden two by fours that form the room's structure.  Every surface inside is painted white -- the white of the walls of a new apartment.  The space inside is small, but big enough to fit a mattress.  The room stands alone in a behemoth space.  Upon approaching the room, the exterior walls are visible, also painted white.  The roof is just over eight feet high.  There is a doorway with no door.  The room's interior emits a dim white glow that shines out through the doorway and draws a person in.  The person has a moment to observe the room.  Then the room starts to change.  The white glow becomes more intense and the space inside the room shrinks.  The wall opposite the doorway slowly moves towards the doorway.  The room's light brightens and its volume decreases gradually until both processes simultaneously reach a maximum point.  This leaves the person in a space that is much smaller and lighter than the one he or she entered.  There is a moment to observe. The person then empties the room, back into the larger outside space, as the room slowly dims and gets larger.

A still from Play Time
1: The Writer
In Taking on the Modern Movement, part 5 of Landscape in Sight, J.B. Jackson presents his ideas about modernist architecture and the international style through a series of short essays. In, these essays, Jackson conveys his point of view that modern architecture, which is essentially an intellectual style of art, is impractical for everyday human needs. Modernists "aim not to improve the lot of Man, but desire to create pure geometrical forms ... independent of the past, independent of the earth and life." The reality is that buildings "are required to sell goods, to establish social position, to inspire confidence, to impress or elevate or escite."
Jackson called for an architecture "responsive to the needs of the present," and modernism just wasn't cutting it.

2: The Architect
Le Corbusier thought that modernism would save the world, he really did. He strongly believed that his designs, and the designs of his peers, would allow for a more at-ease, happy, relaxed, and peaceful way of life. By stripping the environment of ornament and focusing on pure forms, the inhabitants of Modern spaces could, theoretically, occupy themselves with their well-being instead of being distracted by ornament or having to worry about any non-essentials.
One could argue that Corbusier's utopian vision was never realized due to the fact that as the proper international style became more popular, it was mostly replicated with poor materials, unqualified architects, and shoddy construction. The truth is that time has shown us that the restrictions, rationalism, and hard-edgedness of modernism is not very conducive to the general activities of everyday human life.

3: The Filmmaker
Film historian Philip Kemp once said that "if [Jacques Tati's 1967 film] Play Time has a plot, it's how the curve comes to reassert itself over the straight line." This film provides an account of daily life in a Modernist Paris. By focusing on the tension and awkwardness between human activity and the built environment, Tati successfully hints at how the uniformity and supposed logic of the International style can interfere with and confuse its inhabitants.

While Corbusier may like to think that everyone who comes in contact with a Modernist structure will instantly be as happy as Jackson's "Mrs. Panther," Tati shows us that the unpredictability, whimsy, and unboundedness of human nature is perhaps better suited to slightly different surroundings.

"the visible result of a confrontation between the aspirations of the occupying family and the realities of the environment" J.B. Jackson's obsession with the vernacular stems from his early readings of Dickens. The functional everyday aspects of the built environment, he argues, shed more light on the characteristics of a civilization than do highly planned and monumental structures. The way people interact with a space is the physical manifestation of their aspirations and desires.
Case in point: the garage. It is a structure with a very straightforward function, but has somehow managed to morph and adjust over time to fill the ever-changing desires of the people who use it. Architects attempt to fill these desires, but it is the client, the occupant whose decisions influence the form and function of a such a space. People want to seem wealthier than they are and have extra space, so the architect creates the 3 car garage.
This implies the significance of the life of buildings after they are built. An architect can create highly specialized functions for a space, but such design choices say little about how the space may eventually be adapted for uses more convenient to its inhabitants. The inhabitants become amateur designers themselves, arranging things to their own specifications. The subtleties of such arrangements can be read as implications about society's subconsciousness, manifested in physical form.