Ayad Rahmani

This paper will look at the historical and contemporary narratives behind urban farming. It will start with the transcendentalists (for this short paper limited to Thoreau) and their manner of seeing in the return to the land the capacity for social reform, and end with an examination of the ideas that have not only blurred the distinction between the urban and the rural, but that in doing so have spawned a new awareness and appreciation in local culture, including local food and slow food movements. Today community gardens across the United States are busy forging relations with nearby outfits, including restaurants and schools, serving as stewards of social, economic and intellectual growth.

This paper will look at the historical and contemporary narratives behind urban farming. It will start with the transcendentalists (for this short paper limited to Thoreau) and their manner of seeing in the return to the land the capacity for social reform, and end with an examination of the ideas that have not only blurred the distinction between the urban and the rural, but that in doing so have spawned a new awareness and appreciation in local culture, including local food and slow food movements. Today community gardens across the United States are busy forging relations with nearby outfits, including restaurants and schools, serving as stewards of social, economic and intellectual growth.

Kafka’s people are no people at all but ciphers moving about from place to place. They carry information whose message and meaning they do not know. They come in pairs, zeros and ones, a binary logic whose outward communication may resemble human language but which in reality cannot be understood on those terms. They couple and decouple and form codes whose purpose is to counter modernity’s sinister campaign to destroy the individual. If they do speak they do so only as decoys appearing to appear human but only to evade it. Homes are important to their permutations, as switch boards or relay boxes, making possible combinatory connections critical to the continuation and survival of the code. This paper will looks at Kafka’s work to examine the nature and reason of codes: how we might understand their non spatial logic by spatializing their internal dynamics.

In the wake of the removal of the Frank Lloyd Wright school of Architecture from the Taliesin sites, East and West, it was time to look back at the school and examine its contributions to architecture, education and to ways with which we can deal with situations as the current pandemic crisis of 2020 and 2021. This paper speaks to some of the methods that Wright adopted to infuse architectural education with lessons in empathy, social and economic equity.

Last year I had the good fortune to follow a Fellow hired by our school to teach and conduct research in the area of computational design and materiality. Night and day he worked like a dog producing many things, mostly objects whose shape stemmed from the logic of aggregation, of taking one small designed part and multiplying many times over until a structurally self-sustaining parametric is reached. Some objects were small, others big, but otherwise indifferent to scale as the parts were manufactured to be small or big and multiplied as many times as you wish or as the room in which they were housed demanded. The results were visually and structurally exciting and while varied one aspect they shared was the ethic and aesthetic of the” twist”. Objects would start square enough but no sooner that they did than they would begin to twist and turn like a ballerina pirouetting in the air. Or like the Venus of Milo, that magnificent statue of the 1st century BC, now at the Louvre, turning just so to wring out in stone a beauty that would have simply remained dormant otherwise. A twist more maddeningly gracious and seductive there isn’t. The work also resembled that of Felix Candela who in the fifties experimented with hyperbolic paraboloid structures not simply for the sake of achieving the next beautiful form or structural expression but for that of conquering the greatest spans with the least material expenditure possible, and this to respond to a culture and society in which funds and resources were limited. But there were other twists stemming from the Fellow’s sleave, all at pains questioning old forms of optimization and dialing in new ones. Even brick which according to Louis Kahn had all along wanted to be an arch now began to aggregate in a way that resembles less a plane and more a drape, sensuous enough to resemble a lady’s nightgown.
Twists of this sort have become ubiquitous lately. Note the residential tower in Malmo, Sweden, by Calatrava. Dubbed the “Turning Torso” it torques upward with supreme grace and muscle reminiscent of that other torso from ancient times, the “Archaic Torso of Apollo” which Rilke wrote about in a poem by that name and in which he did not so much tell us about what he saw as about what the statue saw in him: a less than adequate human being who must change his life. Could recent twists be similarly impelled to admonish us to change our lives, if so what could that change look like, and to what end? When Roebling twisted strands of cables around themselves his aim was to look for structural strength and efficiency, starting with small scale ropes but then scaling up his ambition to solve the greatest span man had seen up to that point, the Brooklyn Bridge. In the process he not only brought change upon himself as an engineer but also asked many others to change with him, architects, legal scholars, politicians and many more. Do recent twists look back at us and ask us to change our thinking, our moral and aesthetic parameters? Again, if so why and to what end? 
That is the basic premise of the paper. Could the new twist in architecture be emanating from a logic and a concern not unlike that of Roebling’s or could it indeed be sprouting from a whole new existential position instead, one in which, given recent digital technologies and even questions of sustainability, buildings today have inevitably come to divorce themselves from questions of morality and context and stand out as entities unto themselves. In honing in on a commentary the paper will weave a narrative between old and new forms of twists, examining among other things theoretical connections between Hellenic Statues of gods and goddesses and recent torques in buildings: could the slow but methodical transformation of the body from Greek frontal poses to Hellenic spiraling ones teach us something about similar recent changes in architectural form and materiality?