050720 [10:00 - 18:45]

Live Stream: https://bit.ly/2VQoQWd

ARC 504 FINAL REVIEW

IN THE AGE OF COVID-19
Emerging Urban Technologies: The Posthuman City
Alejandro Zaera-Polo with Joon Ma
L

A discussion with:
Michelle Addington, Jeffrey Anderson, Daniel Barber, David Benjamin,
Elie Bou-Zeid, Benjamin Bratton, Mario Carpo, Cristina Diaz & Efren Gar-
cia-Grinda, Anna Dyson, Guillermo Fernandez-Abascal, Juan Herreros,
Nahyun Hwang, Andres Jaque, Jeffrey Kipnis, Tom Leader, Jesse LeCav-
alier, Maider Llaguno, Greg Lynn, Daniel Lopez-Perez, Clare Lyster, Mitch
McEwen, Forrest Meggers, Stephan Petermann, Mahadev Rahman, Mer-
edith Tenhoor, Thomas Weaver, Liam Young
 Program Schedule

Environments 10:00
10.00 Syphoning the Basin. Urban Air Filtering in L.A.
Art Uribe
10:45 Industrial Parkland in Portland. Heat Urban Mitigation and the New Green Industry Deal
Jane Ilyasova
11:30 Quenching Goat Canyon. A Wastewater Remediation Park System in the Tijuana River.
Juan Pablo Ponce de Leon

Materials 12:15
12.15 Home-Grown Industry. Industrial Hemp and Land Regeneration in the Roebling Site, New Jersey.
Cole Cataneo
1:00 Plastic Currents. Recycling Water-born Plastics in Ballona Creek, L.A.
Yidian Liu

Metabolisms 2:15
2:15 Assemble Here! Urban Manufacturing as Neighborhood Hub in Brooklyn.
Jonah Coe-Scharff
3:00 Camden Food Hub. Towards a New Normal
Kaitlin Faherty
3:45 Waste to Taste. Nearly-Expired Food Reuse and Recycling Hub for Costco
Victor Rivas Valencia

Logistics 4:30
4:30 Way to Go. Suburban Intermodal Transport Hub in West Trenton
Piao Liu
5:15 Automatic Fulfillment. The Robotic-Prophylactic Takeover of Amazon
Minglu Wei and Zaid Kashef Alghata
6:00 Safe Grounds. Anonymous Health Services
Simon Lesina-Debiasi
“Postmodernism, the school of “thought” that proclaimed “There are no truths, only interpretations” has
largely played itself out in absurdity, but it has left behind a generation of academics in the humanities dis-
abled by their distrust of the very idea of truth and their disrespect for evidence, settling for “conversa-
tions” in which nobody is wrong and nothing can be confirmed, only asserted with whatever style you can
muster.” (Daniel C. Dennet, Wieseltier v. Pinker in The New Republic (Edge.org, September 10, 2013)
http://edge.org/conversation/dennett-on-wieseltier-v-pinker-in-the-new-republic

"Technology means constant social revolution" Marshall Mc Luhan, The Mechanical Bride

Beyond becoming a global catastrophe, COVID-19 has been a major confirmation of

the hypothesis on which ARC504 has been working now for several years. It has
demonstrated the radical effects of non-human populations (viruses in this case) in the
design of cities, and the brutal relevance of scientific determinations on architecture
and urbanism: social distancing, (the return of proxemics!) confinement and ruthless
biopolitics, the physics of air-borne VOC’s… are nothing but an extreme verification of
our suspicions: that architectural and urban “cultures” are an irrelevant efflorescence of
the true forces of urban and architectural evolution.

In the face of the futile attempts to a disciplinary revival, the byzantine discussions
about style and language and the demagogic pretence of social constructivists and
other politically correct, human-driven activisms in architecture, (of class, gender, race
etc) which we have seen flourish in recent years, COVID-19 has brutally returned us to
much more fundamental questions. It has confirmed the polemical hypothesis which
lies at the core of the studio: that the most relevant questions for the design of buildings
and cities, now and in the near future, are not related to humans, but to non-human
agents (such as carbon emissions, environmental pollution, pervasive computation
and artificial sensing) and that architects have to immediately return to technical exper-
tise and scientific evidence as the very basis of our practice, in defiance to the stagger-
ing dilettantism that the disciplinary discourse has promoted in recent years (in blatant
resonance with the mistrust of facts and evidence that fuels the ideologies of climate
change deniers, intelligent design promoters, patriots and other post-truth thugs).
COVID-19 signals the return of “truth” and expertise after the catastrophic failures of
“interpretation” and “conversationalism.”

Within the favorable environment and intellectual excitement that COVID-19 has provid-
ed to us this year, ARC504 members have continued the development of this particular
form of architectural knowledge across a variety of fields that ranged from urban heat
island and air and soil pollution to food security, recycling and privacy, aiming to con-
struct the “design space” for their practices rather than mere designs. While not neces-
sarily working directly with the urban casuistics of COVID-19, participants have devel-
oped a range of possibilities for urban and architectural projects which revolve around
the idea of urban resilience in the face of crisis, urban, environmental, political or other-
wise.

For the purpose of its public discussion we have classified the projects into four cate-
gories/sessions: Environments, Materials, Metabolisms and Logistics with expert jurors
catering for each category. The review will take place online on May 7th, starting at
10.00 a.m. till 6:45pm and will be streamed live: https://bit.ly/2VQoQWd