Cult Columbii Knowlton School of Architecture . 7930 Course SyllabusAugust 22 . 2012 Trott Visiting Professor Curtis Roth

Knowlton School of Architecture . 7930 Course Syllabus . Trott Visiting Professor Curtis Roth 2

On the Value of Laughing During Times Like These

“The joker’s immunity can be derived philosophically from his apparent access to another reality than that mediated by the relevant structure; such access is implied in the contrast of forms in which he deals. His jokes expose the inadequacy of realist structurings of experience and so release the pent-up power of the imagination.” (Douglas, 1975)

Catastrophe:

It’s all a continual crisis, no? Or so at least we’ve been (perpetually) told, from the warming atmosphere to the toxic underground and all of modernity’s disastrous missteps in-between, everything going wrong and unfortunately for us all at once. “So it goes”, but hasn’t it always? A longer brief might pause to question why the vast majority of recent landscape architectural essays, competition calls-for-entry or studio briefs (like this) begin by articulating the myriad ways in which we’re all just about to get collectively burned, Cntrl-C Cntrl-V, copy-pasting disasters as the only conceivable precondition for any type of worthwhile design activity anymore, as if landscape architecture can only exist on the brink of an always-almost-over-world. The shorter brief would wonder why the quite sudden realization within the collective design disciplines over the last two decades that our own landscapes, infrastructures and architectures are inextricably bound to this ever-increasing catalog of modernity’s invisibly externalized catastrophes now seems to strike us with such surprise. 1 Or in other words, shouldn’t we have known this all along?

To wit: ever notice that every great disaster film runs two differing crises concurrently? Where the global cataclysm of asteroid strikes or destabilizing magnetic fields serves as the backdrop to the crisis of the protagonist’s own failing marriage or dead-end career, and that the aversion of the end of the world simultaneously manages to resolve the hero’s own internal crises? Wouldn’t it be equally possible, after a century replete with worlds at war and the mutual assurance of our collective global destruction, to trace this now-seemingly-obvious realization back to another, far more disciplinary (i.e. internal) source? Not from the end of the world, but instead, perhaps merely the end of a particularly exhausting era of critical self-reflection, and the somewhat misanthropic hope that a proper end to it all just might be the beginning of a new form of landscape architecture?

And so far at least, the proponents of this roughly twenty-year-old-turn away from the critical project towards a renewed engagement with a continually-degrading reality seem to have collectively agreed that it’s done just that, as older notions of urban form are increasingly being supplanted by a reading of the city as a network of interconnected ecologies, and landscapes have reportedly replaced buildings as the primary organizational building block of urbanism. 2 And not a moment too soon, as (we’ve been continually told) that the world’s population is now more urban than not (add that to our growing list of crises). But as students, now in the middle of your graduate educations, finding yourselves properly equipped with the techniques and expertise of best managing the complex ecological responsibilities of contemporary landscape architecture on one hand, and possessing an informed awareness of the policies and practices of contemporary urban development on the other, what if we were to ask a slightly counter-intuitive question? Not,

“How might this responsibility to manage the growing inefficiencies of the contemporary city best be carried out?” nor “What, among many, are the most efficient and effective methods or techniques?” But in the recent words of design theorist John May, “What does it mean today, after the bankruptcy of progressive modernity, for the design fields to situate themselves along the precarious seam between environmental-scientific knowledge and neoliberal bureaucratic practices?” 3 Or perhaps more aptly the question’s implicit reverse: what would it mean to conceive of landscape architecture not as a pseudo-ecological janitor, cleaning up modernity’s ever-multiplying catastrophes, but as a discipline which can leverage its new-found agencies towards the enthusiastic conjuring of other (better?) possible worlds?

The Managerial Turn:

In a recent lecture at the Taubman College of Architecture entitled Plastic Politics, or Four and a Half Worlds are not Enough, design theorist Robert Somol confronts the decade old imperative of this ecological brand of realism by claiming that “the contemporary problems of design have been reduced to problems of accounting.” 4 Where the imperatives of contemporary landscape urbanism’s newly-coined agency have sought relevance through an engagement with a presumed notion of ‘the real’, it’s also forced the reduction of landscape architecture into the bureaucratic management of metrics, where policies of most efficient management have replaced design politics, i.e. policy-oriented questions of how to best manage a status-quo reality have replaced politically-oriented questions of what types of reality we want to fight to preserve, and what new realities do we want to attempt to engender with our design? It’s this shift from the politics of designing realities, to the policies of managing reality-as-given (arguably first intimated by Sanford Kwinter’s valuable 1992 essay Landscapes of Change: Boccioni’s ‘Stati d’animo’ as a General Theory of Models) 5 that design historian Reinhold Martin has described as the defining characteristic of contemporary design, or in his own words, “Design today is characterized precisely by the impossibility to even think a properly utopian thought.” 6 Where design ambitions to imagine alternate worlds have been replaced by a tacit allegiance to a collection of rather vague ambitions: that we ought to preserve or sustain something called the natural environment, that we need more efficient objects in order to minimize our environmental impact, and that the key to these objectives lies in the biophysical knowledge outlined by the ecological sciences and the eventual perfectibility of urban architectural technologies, that I want to argue is the lasting legacy of the ecological turn in contemporary landscape urbanisms. And while not against the possibilities and tremendous potential of landscape urbanism itself, it is against this now well-worn end-of-history model of thought that the studio will be staged.

Fig. 1: Resolved personal crises . Armageddon . 1998Fig. 2: Managed environmental crises . Fresh Kills Park . 2010

Knowlton School of Architecture . 7930 Course Syllabus . Trott Visiting Professor Curtis Roth 3

The Future (Again):

“Similarly, the need to engage directly with messy realities is indeed urgent. The question is which realities you choose to engage with, and to what end. In other words: what’s your project? This also means avoiding the elementary mistake of assuming that reality is entirely real - that is, pre-existent, fixed and therefore exempt from critical re-imagination.” (Martin, 2005)

But for all of the landscape urbanism practices currently advocating this end-of-history model through realist approaches to more efficiently managing a presumed reality, we can also point to certain trends emerging both in the academy and the professional realms which are attempting to reconstitute a design politics around the ecological project and a renewed engagement with the future of design’s past (or a rethinking of how contemporary design engages the landscape discourse’s own disciplinary history). While diverse in both politics and methodologies, each of these practices advocates a position that I’m referring to as generative doubt. Where doubt has historically been regarded as synonymous with disbelief, doubt as a productive architectural attitude might just need to be reunited with its original definition as a slightly-perverse form of belief itself, one which is contingent on the existence of multiple, ultimately irreconcilable, realities. To doubt paradoxically supplants our contemporary highly-educated disciplinary malaise, which manifests itself in the form of managerial policies, with the possibility of re-thinking other historical thoughts as a way of imagining a different future. If the first premise of the studio is to imagine a form of ecological urbanism which situates itself against the managerial model of efficient policies in favor of the political model of constructed futures, the second premise of the studio is that this will only emerge through finding a properly contemporary way of reengaging landscape architecture’s own disciplinary history.

On Comedy:

“I am really tired of tragedy and the critical project; 2000 years of tragedy are enough. We need to prefer life over death, and comedy over tragedy.” (Kipnis, 2006)

The managerial-turn finds architecture caught between a paradoxical desire to reanimate the diminishing agency of the discipline while deferring its unique capacities to imagine alternate worlds into a narrow negotiation between scientific environmental sciences and neoliberal bureaucratic processes. This simultaneous expansion of agency and deferral of ambition situate the move towards policy driven design within a far longer history of the design discourse’s performance through a fundamentally tragic idiom, where the discipline is placed in the impossible position of finding its effective agency only through the deferral of that which defines the discipline as a unique mode of thought, affirming its relevance through the perpetual self-destruction of its potential. While the continual deferral of architectural and landscape design’s agency into the realms of managerial negotiations has left the design disciplines with an almost insurmountable cynicism, this studio argues that it’s neither

through a retreat to a purely disciplinary space nor more effective forms of engagement with the world that landscape urbanism can productively think the thought of the future. Instead, it argues that it’s precisely through taking its perpetually compromised position seriously (and by that I mean comically) that landscape architecture can begin constituting a disciplinary culture around its long-lost political possibilities.

Since Plato first voiced his desire to expel comics from his own political fiction in The Republic, comedy has historically been regarded, at best, as a mere pleasurable diversion, and at worst, as a surreptitious tool of ideology acting upon a laughingly-inebriated public. But it should also be noted that comedy works through a collection of operations which can only be described as (to borrow a term from architectural discourse) projective. Comedy on the most fundamental level confronts our dependence on reality’s necessities with an absurd other realm, an anti-reality in which claims of seriousness can be effectively questioned. 7 The classicist I. A. Ruffell has long-argued comedy recognizes reality as something which is both socially and discursively constructed, and in that, reveals the possibilities of either changing or confirming society’s existing prejudices not through their rationalization in the form of philosophy, or their aestheticization in the form of poetry, but by situating cultural discourse in alternate worlds in order to tease out absurdities and point towards previously impossible trajectories. Despite its access to the possibility of alternate worlds, comedy is not, however, an all-out rejection of reality, but a means of operating in the mode of what Reinhold Martin refers to as Critical Realism, claiming “It is utopian not because it dreams impossible dreams, but because it recognizes “reality” itself as – precisely – an all-too-real dream enforced by those who prefer to accept a destructive and oppressive status quo.” 8

Comedy and the Collective:

“What the best comedy establishes is an ever-shifting terrain of negotiability between the individual and others, predicated ultimately on a recognition of present finitude rather than abstracted ideals.” (Demastes, 2008)

But beyond comedy’s ability to effectively conjure alternative forms of reality from the misread protocols of the status quo, perhaps the most powerful thing about the comedic mode of thought is the means by which laughter is capable of constituting collectives around shared forms of desire. The laugh-track of contemporary sitcoms speaks to our desire to laugh in groups; as such, comedy carries with it the largely unexplored potential not only to harness the power of counter-intuitive thinking, but to construct publics around the designed products of these lateral thoughts; not around the agreed upon facts of an often-oppressive status quo, but around the pleasurable experiences of other, not-yet possible realms, creating within the public imaginary a certain desire for things to work out differently. While the comedic effect works by making the familiar (our design methods, strategies and most importantly, our histories) strange again, it also has the powerful (but often-overlooked)

Fig. 3: Counter-intuitive remediation . B_mu Tower . R&Sie(n) . 2002Fig. 4: Hilarious landscapes . Christopher Savanelli & Ivan Ostapenko . UIC . 2011

Knowlton School of Architecture . 7930 Course Syllabus . Trott Visiting Professor Curtis Roth 4

effect of simulating collectives (or fans) around the belief that the tragic position of design policy is not an inevitability, allowing us to act as if other political trajectories were available, and in so doing, they just might be. In exploring the potential of the comic imagination to reimagine design’s potential futures, the studio will be reconstituted as a studio audience, a cult fan base for collectively reimagining landscape architecture’s now-forgotten political possibilities.

In order to isolate the comedic mode as the grounds for new forms of design thinking, the studio will apply this mode of thinking to two now-standard forms of investigation within traditional studio curriculum, research and analysis, and the situation of a contemporary project within the lineage of design history, or in more conventional terms the precedent. While offering forms of investigation the you are most likely by now, comfortable with, the task will be to harness the power of the comedic imagination to imagine counter-intuitive endings for these standardized forms of investigation. It’s these alternate endings that the final projects of the semester will be built from.

On Comedic Research and Analysis:

“Research in architecture has subscribed to a mandate of ever-increasing expansion; research has been understood to mean exhaustive proliferation. The accumulation of examples has become the end in itself…researchers collect information without bias, without direction, without aim, and this proliferation of material tends to offer no traction.” (Whiting, 2009)

While the managerial turn in landscape architecture attempted to breath dynamism into the discipline through an engagement with ground-level realities under the rubric of research (whether socio-political empiricism or bio-mathematical determinism), this pseudo-scientific methodology has degenerated into a perpetual (and so-far unsubstantiated) faith in the power of information to relevantly instrumentalize the discipline of landscape architecture, neglecting that, in the words of Robert Somol,

“the facts are always insignificant, and the data defective.” 9 Where the managerial hunger for information has biased design research towards the exhausting proliferation of accumulated information without bias nor aim, the comedic mode neither rejects the role of information nor subscribes to its false determinism, but acknowledges the inherent biases of research while getting its endings intentionally (and generatively) wrong.

“Comedy is a very special form of common sense; it consists in seeking to mold things on an idea of one’s own, instead of molding one’s ideas on things – in seeing before us what we are thinking of, instead of thinking of what we see.” (Bergson, 1900)

According to Henri Bergson’s 1900 treatise Laughter, an Essay on the Meaning the Comic, comedy exploits the space between the perceived and the actual through the possibility of perceiving situations in multiple simultaneous ways. What he referred to as the reciprocal interference of series, “belongs simultaneously to two altogether independent series of events and is capable of being interpreted in two entirely different meanings at the same time.” 10 It’s the exploitation of difference that allows the comedic mode access not to the realms of managing a compromised status quo, but towards the articulation of the realities of the imagination. The comedic mode of research operates with a counter-intuition, documenting while will-fully misreading, harnessing facts not towards a closer approximation of an ideal picture of reality, but by producing competing fictions capable of drawing out the tensions in presumed truths. The comedic mode takes aim at the tragic accumulation of insurmountable information by treating it (quite seriously) like a joke, where the insufficiency of facts now commonplace in design discourse are willfully misread as belonging to other possible worlds. You will be asked to research not in the mode of accumulation, but in the vein of projection, curating information towards particular ends as opposed to simply accumulating it in the hope that a particular end will emerge from a non-hierarchical soup of data.

On Hilarious Histories:

“Poaching is an impertinent raid on the literary preserve that takes away only those things that are useful or pleasurable to the reader. Far from being writers… readers are travelers, they move across lands belonging to someone else, like nomads poaching their way across fields they did not write, despoiling the wealth of Egypt to enjoy it themselves. Yet it also speaks from a position of collective identity, to forge an alliance with a community of others in defense of tastes which, as a result, cannot be read as totally aberrant or idiosyncratic.” (De Certeau, 1984)

Where the managerial return to reality in the form of the ecological project emerged largely as a rejection of the seemingly insurmountable weight of the discipline’s own history, and the impossibility of productive action at the close of the critical era in the late 1990s, the comedic mode of thought attempts to reimagine the possibilities of design’s future by establishing an alternative disposition to the discipline’s past. Where architecture in the tragic idiom constructs an inherently oppositional relationship to its own history, with each successive moment establishes itself on the corpses of past architectural thoughts, the comic mode establishes itself not in opposition to architecture’s now outdated histories but as a fan, reinvesting in the lost potential of potentially lost ideas. It’s through the model of the fan base that the relationship between architecture’s pasts and futures is upset, and a new type of disciplinary culture is engendered.

“If you say, ‘I like Phish’, that implies an entire lifestyle behind it, an entire politics. The aesthetic project in music is tied to a whole political project, a social project, and it engenders different groups of people to get together and argue over which song is better than another song by the same person. It engenders debate, criticism and irrational enthusiasm, and I hope for an architecture that can do this.” (Meredith, 2012)

The mode of the fan base establishes architectural discourse on different terms, no longer locked in the tragic attempt to surmount a singularly conceived historic trajectory; the comedic mode establishes architecture’s relationship to multiple histories through the collective enthusiasm of competing fan bases, cult collectives organized around heterogeneous readings of the discipline. The model of the cult fan base argues for

Fig. 5: Political landscapes . Protocol Architectures . Ed Keller . GSAPP . 2010Fig. 6: Biased research . Protocol Architectures . Ed Keller . GSAPP . 2010

Knowlton School of Architecture . 7930 Course Syllabus . Trott Visiting Professor Curtis Roth 5

Cited

1. May, John. Logic of the Managerial Surface, Praxis, Journal of Building + Writing, Issue 13. Eco-logics

2. Waldheim, Charles. Landscape as Urbanism,The Landscape Urbanism Reader, Princeton Architectural Press, 2006

3. Ibid. May, John (1)

4. Somol, R. E. Plastic Politics,Taubman College of Architecture Lecture Series, 2009

5. Ibid. Somol, R.E. (4)

6. Martin, Reinhold. Utopia’s Ghost,University of Minnesota Press, 2010

7. Ruffell, I. A. Politics and Anti-Realism in Athenian Old Comedy,Oxford Classical Monographs, 2011

8. Martin, Reinhold. Critical of What? Towards a Utopian Realism, Harvard Design Magazine, Issue 22 (Spring/Summer 2005)

9. Somol, R. E. The Projective LandscapeTU Delft, 2006

10. Bergson, Henri. Laughter, an Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, Wildside Press, 2008 (Originally published 1900)

multiple architectural ontologies, irreconcilable worlds around which discursive arguments are staged (not around best design policies, but arguments which are fundamentally only capable of transpiring around design politics). The studio will attempt to engender the atmosphere of a cult fan base, constructing idiosyncratic narratives from architecture’s multiple histories which attempt to poach disciplinary knowledge for stories (and futures) not yet told.

The Discipline:

“Inutility is a fact about academic work, and a defining, not a limiting fact. An unconcern with any usefulness to the world is the key to its distinctiveness, and this unconcern is displayed not in the spirit of renunciation, but in a spirit of independence and the marking of territory.” (Stanley Fish, 2008)

It’s around this notion of comedy that the studio will attempt to re-imagine the possibilities of reconstituting the discursive mechanisms of contemporary design discourses. The policy-oriented management of reality-as-given has prioritized an instrumentalization of the discipline through a mass-accumulation model of pseudo-research in the tragic pursuit of relevance, while evacuating the discipline of the possibilities of conjuring a productive relationship to its own histories. Where postures have taken the place of positions, this end-of-history moment has established the parameters of disciplinary statements around a collection of non-unified design imperatives, or in the words of Michael Meredith, “The imperatives are individual – get work, build it faster, get it published, repeat.” This studio argues that the prioritization of quantity has left an ideological vacuum within the discipline. Or put simply, there’s no longer anything to argue over. By reimagining both the methodologies of research and analysis, and the histories of landscape design as a comedic terrain, as something which constitutes our collective discipline not because of its utility to reality but precisely out of its distance from the status quo, the studio will attempt to simulate Henri Bergson’s 1900 assertion that we prefer to laugh in groups, and that within the group itself exists a kind of politics that can begin to once again productively engage the possibilities of re-imagining better futures both for the discipline of landscape architecture and the realities in which it is both imbedded and actively constructing.

Fig. 7: The Big Lebowski . 1998Fig. 8: LebowskiFest . Louisville KT . 2008

Knowlton School of Architecture . 7930 Course Syllabus . Trott Visiting Professor Curtis Roth 6

An Introduction to Doubt

“When they say ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about, that has no bearing on reality’, I think we need to take that seriously, and say, ‘You know what, you’re right. We have no idea what we’re talking about. We don’t know, and that’s not an accusation, it’s a job description if you’re a designer.’ Our talking makes it so. We don’t talk about realities that we know, instead, by saying it, we constitute realities.” (Somol, 2011)

Where landscape and architectural discourses have increasingly depreciated their historic agencies from the politics of design to the policies of management, this studio will learn to believe in the generative power of doubt. Against our all too rational faith in the existence of Columbus Ohio, we’ll leverage an enthusiastic suspicion of the status quo by laying the groundwork for seven parallel Columbii. These alternate cities, engendered by the excesses of the original, will confound the original’s logics with the productive power of disbelief. Far from a pessimistic rejection of design’s capacities, the studio will investigate the possibilities of doubt through the comedic mode, reimagining design’s methodologies and agencies through a comedic engagement with reality. The studio will explore the recasting of landscape architecture as a fundamentally comedic discipline, where the intelligent staging of counter-intuition opens up the possibility of imagining new worlds. We’re going to make jokes, and then take those jokes (painfully) seriously, reading them both as a way to engender our discussions with a now-lost enthusiasm in the possibility of impossible worlds, and as a means for recasting ourselves as cult-fans of design’s histories.

Where this managerial turn in landscape architecture has focused on suppressing those excessive features of a problematic reality (its trash, waste and leftovers), we’re going to adopt them as the foundational grounds (in sensual, cognitive and political terms) to so-far unimagined realities. We’ll collectively imagine alternate futures for seven extra Columbii (pl.) through the comedic reading of Columbus present and the hilarious reinvention of architecture’s pasts.

In attempting to transform landscape architecture’s agency from the contemporary cynicisms of its tragic mode, to the forgotten confidence of the comedic disposition, the studio will be intensely focused around the rigorous rethinking of design’s basic methodologies. Working in groups of two, the comedic operations from which the final projects will emerge will be derived from four cumulative assignments unfolding over the course of the semester, which displace comfortable expectations and upset disciplinary conventions. Following the first five weeks of preliminary sprints which isolate your alternate Columbii and the ecological, technological and economic protocols that govern its operation; the resuscitation of now-lost historic models for thinking counter-intuitively about your initial research findings; and the development of a rigorously comedic design methodology, you will embark for the remaining ten weeks on a concerted design investigation into your chosen sites. These will be comprehensive projects which attempt to articulate and refine your projected ambitions through design efforts which synthesize formal, aesthetic and performative concerns while imagining the latent programmatic, social and infrastructural possibilities of your designed realities, all situated within developing arguments on the relevance of your own heterogeneous Columbii for its parallel partner, the city of Columbus at large.

The traction for these final design investigations will be found through the productive interplay of the first three assignments, where the definition of seven parallel Columbii (one for each student partnership) through strategically biased research is intended to establish for each student

Cult Columbii . 7930 . Design 3 . Landscape Architecture . Knowlton School of Architecture

“It should not be forgotten that architecture has functioned historically not only as a record of change but also as an instigator of change, and any architecture dedicated to solving problems discovered within an existing organizational system is therefore partially complicit in sustaining the status quo of that system - or at the very least relegates itself to the weaker position of subverting existing standards instead of optimistically endorsing new ones. Architecture, then, when understood merely as a solution to observed problems, even problems mapped, analyzed and somewhat understood, abdicates its historic role as an agent for truly radical intervention and revolutionary political instrumentality.” (Gage, 2010)

team a projective site to operate within, the second and third assignments sketch out equally biased design histories, tactics and political dispositions capable of transforming the latent possibilities of those constructed sites. In order to maintain this productive tension between the projected world and a biased history, and prevent a return to more conventional landscape design tactics of uncritical remediation, you will be asked to fully adopt the role of the fan in constructing your design proposals.

While the model of the fan base (or more aptly the cult-fan base) is not only intended to engender the studio’s work with a productively limited collection of precedents and ideological positions (i.e. a disciplinary world) to be argued and debated over the course of the semester through the your design proposals, it also provides you with a collection of design methodologies which will be deployed in order to heighten the productive tension between your proposals and the initial assignments. In the vein of de Certeau, the studio recognizes the fan model as one which operates outside architecture’s oedipal (read: tragic) relationship to its own history, instead adopting tactics of re-appropriation, re-making, wrecking, mashing-up or plagiarizing as productive modes of practice which rub landscape design against its conventional grain, forcing proposals to emerge not from the effective management of metrics in service of uncritical ideals, but from the quite willful desire to reengage landscape architecture’s own disciplinary history in the hope of finding the ability to laugh (and maybe if we’re lucky, to believe again) in the possibilities of its long-lost futures.

On Mode:

“Humor in cult films is frequently based on the naiveté of the protagonists; they seem to have faith in the most obviously corrupt institutions.” (Crowder-Taraborrelli, 2011)

While the studio has been designed to facilitate some of the key structural operations necessary for the comedic affect to emerge through four successive acts, the success of this affect is far from guaranteed by the assignment structure alone. As such, the studio’s discussions, evaluations and ambitions will consistently be haunted by a much more difficult set of criteria related to the representational affects engendered by your work. It’s hoped that the products of the studio will make us laugh, more so, that they will make us think, but they may also give us goose bumps; and it will be through the self-critical navigation of these far more ambiguous representational terrains that you will be asked to consistently and self-consciously design the aesthetic affects embodied in your own emerging proposals, the narratives which deliver and legitimize your ideas and the tactics used to represent your designs. Challenging as this may be, the studio’s implicit argument and educational intent is to encourage you to engage the (im)possibility of formulating meaningful discourse around your own capacity to make statements not justifiable through metrics, facts or unexamined ideals, but literally argued through the products of design, and your inherent capacity to engender discourse and enthusiasm through your ability to engage audiences and imaginations.

Fig. 9: An Alternate View from Terne Bridge . Humphry Repton . 1798

Knowlton School of Architecture . 7930 Course Syllabus . Trott Visiting Professor Curtis Roth 7

Project 1 . The Comedic Double-Act

“It’s a crisis, relax.” Ian McEwan, Solar (Anchor, 2010)

In Charlie Chaplin’s 1915 short film, The Tramp, the well-meaning (though homeless and physically less-than-impressive) protagonist attempts to swoon the “girl of his dreams” on a rural California road. The good-intentioned Chaplin, overcome with nerves, and failing miserably at his specified task, absentmindedly swings a knapsack (filled earlier with a brick where a sandwich was unaffordable) behind his back, inadvertently knocking unconscious a successive string of approaching street robbers and saving his love interest while failing to win her heart through charm alone. In his naive oblivion, Chaplin, remarkably and quite impossibly, exists simultaneously twice-at-once, as an awkward romantic failure and a formidable street fighter. A decade earlier in his 1905 treatise on the joke, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, Sigmund Freud describes the source of the comedic as a reading of the world which is capable of producing hidden and entirely unexpected relations between otherwise dissimilar concrete realities. Far from a fantastic retreat from ground level conditions or everyday constraints, the studio will argue that it’s precisely through this counter-intuitive belief in so-far impossible realities, the Chaplin-esque ability to use directed analysis not towards the further refinement of the status quo, but towards instantiating the possibilities of another reality, that the generative value of the comic mode in landscape architecture resides.

The studio will begin with perhaps the oldest play in the book, the comedic double-act, the comic pairing in which humor is derived through the uneven relationship of two partners: the foil and his or her comic double. The foil in this context will take the form of directed research and analysis into the fringe components of contemporary Columbus, the excessive leftovers of its 19th and 20th century urbanization, externalized from everyday urban experience. The topic of excess itself is not foreign to current landscape discourses, the contemporary ecological-management modality that this studio stages itself against has arguably pre-occupied itself almost exclusively with the reincorporation of the excessive features of the modern city (i.e. the mass-accumulation of trash, waste (both human and non-human), or industrial run-off) back into the productive capacities of the status quo city. To take it a step further, it has been argued, by both architectural historians and contemporary cultural theorists alike, that the roughly two-hundred and fifty year history of modern urbanization can be read precisely as a process of externalizing the excesses which

accumulate as a fundamental feature of modern life. From Paris’ 18th century efforts to erase the presence of human waste from the city through their excavated sewer system, to New York’s 20th century island of garbage exile in the form of Fresh Kills Landfill, to their 21st century re-erasure of the by-then contaminated landscape through its sublimation under technologically enabled sealant surfaces and aesthetic dressing in the form of Field Operation’s Fresh Kills Park.

Where contemporary practices of ecological neutrality would attempt to re-incorporate these excessive landscapes of the Columbus urban region into better behaving fragments of the city’s conventional productive identity (whether through aesthetic or technological means), in adopting the comic mode of counter-intuition you will attempt to generatively misread these landscapes as the foils for staging alternate Columbii, parallel possibilities, excessive outcomes of the city itself re-read as radical alternatives to the status quo, not as alternate ideals, but as provisional presents, life-rafts from which you will stage possible alternatives to its conventional urban identity.

In order to ground the highly self-conscious nature of the studio’s methodological investigations, the introductory project will be devoted towards the production of a projective geographical archive from which your semester projects will ultimately be staged. The ambitions of this initial assignment are two-fold:

Firstly, working in groups of two, you will be asked to locate landscapes corresponding to specified conditions of excess within the Columbus metro area. These landscapes and the specific conditions uncovered during the initial investigations will ultimately form the foil, or in conventional language: the site, both in terms of geographic location and the informational protocols which will be engaged by your final proposals. The assignment is intended to encourage you to examine these locations through the lens of a particular set of ecological, urban and social processes relevant to your chosen location.

Fig. 10: The Tramp . Charlie Chaplin . 1915Fig. 11: Laurel and Hardy

Fig 11: Kirby Tire Recycling Center . Wyandot County

Knowlton School of Architecture . 7930 Course Syllabus . Trott Visiting Professor Curtis Roth 8

Secondly, student teams will augment their informational archive (comprised of investigations into the ecological, geological, social and political forces and protocols that have each played a role in the construction of your landscape) with the re-articulation or doubling of your site as a foil, by exploiting (to comedic ends) a particular aspect your findings. This aspect might reside in an unconventional sensorial effect produced by the accidental landscape, a peculiar historic or political sub-plot to your site’s formation, a bizarre protocol which governs its current performance, or the like.

The ambitions of this act of re-reading will be to not only require you to utilize and develop more conventional modes of analysis and investigation, but to make a concerted effort to use your research to tell unexpected stories. Directing your findings outside of the all-too-prevalent mode of research defined by the mass-accumulation of unbiased information, and pointing your efforts towards the articulation of consciously biased narratives which position the site within a focused collection of logics and issues that will form the comedic groundwork for “expecting the path to take you to A, and instead ending up (unexpectedly) at B.”

You will uncover these doubled landscapes in the urban expanse of Columbus Ohio as each partnership focuses on isolating a spatial product of a single excessive feature within a rigorously defined site in the Columbus Area:

Excess Stuff: Trash Excess Matter: Singular Accumulations (Tire Recycling, Construction Waste, Etc.)Excess Biological Matter: Waste (Human and Non-Human)Excess Animals: Invasive SpeciesExcess Inputs: Run-Off/ContaminationExcess Urbanism: Abandoned InfrastructuresExcess Space: Leftover Landscapes

This assignment’s deliverable will be comprised of A: The Foil: panels which present the analytical documentation of the student team’s selected sites with B: The Comic Double: an intentionally biased guidebook designed to productively misreading the landscape’s role within the Columbus metropolitan region. The nature of this narrative-based misreading of the site will structure the format of this document, a few examples of which may be: as a travel guide, a lost urban planning document or fictitious newspaper clippings and etc.

Project 1 . Schedule:

Wednesday 8.22: 7930 Design 3 Introduction and Project 1 Assignment, Design Team Formation

Friday 8.24: Desk Crits. Site Selection, 5 preliminary site options, 5 11x17 research panels

Monday 8.27: Desk Crits. Site Research Development

Wednesday 8.30: Pin-up Foils, 4 24”x36” Panels, Preliminary misreading

Friday 9.01: CR: Guide Book Presentation, Deskcrits: Preliminary Misreadings

Monday 9.04: No Classes (Columbus Day)

Wednesday 9.06: Present Assignment 1. Foil and Misread Guidebook

Fig. 12: Shell Guides’ Surrealist Tour of Wiltshire . 1935

Knowlton School of Architecture . 7930 Course Syllabus . Trott Visiting Professor Curtis Roth 9

Provisional Reading List:

General Studio Readings:

May, John. Logic of the Managerial Surface, Praxis, Journal of Building + Writing, Issue 13. Eco-logics

May, John. Infrastructuralism, Quadernes, Issue 262, Parainfrastructures

Vermeulen, Timotheus and van der Akker, Robbin. Notes on Metamodernism, Journal of Aesthetics and Culture, Vol. 2 2010

Hickey, Dave. Frivolity and Unction, Air Guitar, Essays on Art and Democracy, Art Issues Press, 1997

Bergson, Henri. Laughter, an Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, Wildside Press, 2008 (Originally published 1900)

Jarzombek, Mark. Architecture, A Failed DisciplineVolume #19, Summer 2009

Ballard. J. G., What I Believe

Online Lectures:

Franch I Gilabert, Eva. The Ecologies of Excess, Rice SoAhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KLaCxDrPfE

Somol, R. E. Plastic Politics, Taubman College of Architecturehttp://vimeo.com/31747156

Optional Reading

May, John. Extravaganzas

Project 1:

Franch I Gilabert, Eva. The Ecologies of Excess, Architectural Design (AD), Volume 80, Issue 6, Eco-Redux

Koolhaas, Rem. Europeans, Dali and Le Corbusier Conquer New YorkDelirious New York, Monacelli Press. 1978

Project 2:

Martin, Reinhold. Critical of What? Towards a Utopian Realism, Harvard Design Magazine, Issue 22 (Spring/Summer 2005)

Miljacki, Ana. Promiscuity as a Project? - “MOS definitely”, MIT Thresholds 37, 2010

Project 3:

Letham, Jonathan. The Ecstacy of Influence, A Plagiarism, Harper’s Magazine, February 2007

Jacob, Sam. Make it Real, Architecture as Enactment, Strelka Press, 2012

While these readings situate the conceptual arguments at play in each phase of the studio, it is expected that your projects will also be supplemented by the use of other readings as technical sources and representational references which correspond more directly to your emerging proposals.

It’s also my hope to entertain an occasional film screening in order to expose the studio to different representational modes in which the comedic effect may operate, i.e. slapstick, dark comedy, dry humor, and so forth, though this is still TBD.

Knowlton School of Architecture . 7930 Course Syllabus . Trott Visiting Professor Curtis Roth 10

Cult Columbii . 7930 . Design 3 . Landscape Architecture . Knowlton School of ArchitectureSemester Schedule

Week 1:

8 . 20

8 . 22 8 . 24

Week 2:

8 . 27

8 . 29

8 . 31

Week 3:

9 . 03

9 . 05

9 . 07

Week 4:

9 . 10

9 . 12

9 . 14

Week 5:

9 . 17

9 . 19

9 . 21

Week 6:

9 . 24

9 . 26

9 . 28

Week 7:

10 . 01

10 . 03

10 . 05

Week 8:

10 . 08

10 . 10

10 . 12

Monday

Wednesday

Friday

Monday

Wednesday

Friday

Monday

Wednesday

Friday

Monday

Wednesday

Friday

Monday

Wednesday

Friday

Monday

Wednesday

Friday

Monday

Wednesday

Friday

Monday

Wednesday

Friday

Studio Introduction . Project 1 Given

Project 1 Review . Project 2 Given

Labor Day

Project 2 Review . Project 3 Given

Project 3 Review . Project 4 Given

Columbus Day

Knowlton School of Architecture . 7930 Course Syllabus . Trott Visiting Professor Curtis Roth 11

Week 9:

10 . 15

10 . 17

10 . 19

Week 10:

10 . 22

10 . 24

10 . 26

Week 11:

10 . 29

10 . 31

11 . 02

Week 12:

11 . 05

11 . 07

11 . 09

Week 13:

11 . 12

11 . 14

11 . 16

Week 14:

11 . 19

11 . 21

11 . 23

Week 15:

11 . 26

11 . 28

11 . 30

Week 16:

12 . 03

12 . 05

12 . 07

Week 16:

TBD

Monday

Wednesday

Friday

Monday

Wednesday

Friday

Monday

Wednesday

Friday

Monday

Wednesday

Friday

Monday

Wednesday

Friday

Monday

Wednesday

Friday

Monday

Wednesday

Friday

Monday

Wednesday

Friday

TBD

Studio Midterm (Date TBD)

Thanksgiving Holiday

Studio Final (Date TBD)

PARTY!