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University of Cincinnati UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI Date:___________________ I, _________________________________________________________, hereby submit this work as part of the requirements for the degree of: in: It is entitled: This work and its defense approved by: Chair: _______________________________ _______________________________ _______________________________ _______________________________ _______________________________ Soft Edge Architectural Thresholds in the Urban Landscape of San Diego Jessica K. Lane Thesis, Master of Architecture . University of Cincinnati . May 30, 2008 Contents 01 Abstract 02 Introduction 02/01 thin skin/thickened surface 02/02 background 02/03 position 02/04 tactics 02/05 evaluation 03 Landscape 03/01 location 03/02 alternative place names 03/03 borderlands and the non-integrating gap 03/04 post-industrial voids 03/05 figure/ground 03/06 bodies of water, knowledge 02 03 04 urban design 04/01 flow of traffic 04/02 bloodletting 04/03 foreign bodies 04/04 slow scale 05 architecture 05/01 curtain wall 05/02 homestead 05/03 containment 06 Skin 07 Foundation & Roof 08 Conclusion 09 Bibliography 10 Appendix 10/01 glossary 04 05 Abstract The recent intensity of urban development in San Diego is prefigured by its frontier mentality of compounded edge conditions. Regional geography, international politics, economics and history reinforce a pattern of local containment superimposed with the smooth space of militarized, infrastructural and technological corridors that collapse dis- tance. The frontier is multiple: “borderlands” of shifting margins where ephemeral lines of exchange physically divide and polarize terrain and bodies. This thesis will explore borderlands as scalar phenomena mate- rialized architecturally; infrastructure spanning from microscopic tech- nology to tools of globalization is actively interfaced at the scale of the body by architecture that permits or denies access. In this context, bor- derlands are places of possibility, where architecture’s human scale can re-territorialize communication and exchange trajectories by tapping into and supporting conditions of intersection. If architecture as the “third skin” of the body has been a point of departure for investigating function and materiality, it still has not mitigated the “surface;” place- lessness and sensory deprivation pervasive in southern California’s built landscape. Using tactics of softness and flexibility, architecture in these selectively porous nodes can re-infiltrate and re-connect urban marginal space with the flow of resources and collective life of the city. 06 07 Introduction 02/01 thin skin/thickened surface Michel Foucault’s view that “[architects are] not the technicians or engineers of the three great variables – territory, communication, and speed” seems to contradict theorists like Henri Lefebvre and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, for whom architecture is continuous with other human methods of producing and changing space. Human society manifests itself in its organization of space – Foucault’s techne1 – the capacity of geographic occupation generally, but architecture specifically – to be used as a technique to enact or subvert political, cultural and economic pressure on the territory and the populace. Particularly in light of architecture’s historic connection with military strategy and fortification, urban habitation/colonization and land use constitute thick thresholds in the form of corridors, grids, or dead ends. In contrast to Rem Koolhaas’ view that the suburban “Generic City” is just “what happens naturally,” and that planning makes no difference; urban areas, architecture defines territory, communication and speed by default. In their pre-eminence, buildings, the homogeneous matrix of capitalistic space, successfully combine the object of control by power with the object of commercial exchange. The building effects a brutal condensation of social relationships…It embraces, and in so doing reduces, the whole paradigm of space: space as domination/ appropriation (where it emphasizes technological domination); space as work and product (where it emphasizes product); and space as immediacy and mediation (where it emphasizes mediations and 1 Techne, for Foucault, is a critical tool, a rational approach for considering ideology, methods and forms of architecture. It has to do with the techniques of architecture as a system that negotiates between the concrete and practical concepts of the state and the inexact results practiced by the general populace. Michel Foucault, “Space, Knowledge and Power: an interview with Paul Rob- inow,” Rethinking architecture: a reader in cultural theory, ed. Neil Leach (London: Routledge, 1997), 367. 08 09 mediators, from a technical materiel to the financial ‘promoters’ of construction projects).2 Allowing Lefebvre to respond to Foucault; while architecture may never “engineer” territory, speed, or communication, it channels these things, its role is transitioning from that of surface – a visual sign, shaper of city “ground,” and spatial divider – to increasingly that of the skin – a thickened interface between the infrastructural flows of the city/global networks and the body. In Southern California, Modern architects viewed such variables as communication and speed as the fundamental components of a continuous network over the land. In an effort to correct architecture’s disconnect with technology and engineering, architecture sought to integrate infrastructural amenities, while separating from the urban fabric to become objects placed sculpturally in the landscape. San Diego, like other borderlands, is a compendium of superimposed edge conditions: geographic, political, economic, and cultural; it has tended to make its own rules. The development of San Diego succeeded in combining the ‘connected expansiveness’ of the international frontier with the containment of the political and economic border that helped maintain a favorable power imbalance. Again, to quote Lefebvre, “The illusion of a transparent, ‘pure’ and neutral space – which, though philosophical in origin, has permeated Western culture – is being dispelled only very slowly.”3 The emphatic declaration of the marginality of the borderland itself indicates the reciprocal concentration of power in San Diego; today, the city exists as a globalized center precisely as a result of combined consolidation (of power and resources) and dispersal - shedding industries and services that are now more profitably located elsewhere. In the last decade, urban San Diego has enjoyed an unprecedented on county traffic congestion. This rapid growth has also seen the construction and investment boom, fueled by the perception of disappearance of open land in the county; with strict zoning and little incentive to preserve habitat or open land, the natural beauty that prosperity4 and the attractiveness of its dramatic natural beauty and laid-back lifestyle. Following the established pattern of sprawling is one of the area’s most unique features disappears at exactly the development overcome by heavy-handed infrastructure, explosive rate that people seek it. Unsurprisingly, developer-friendly policy economic and population growth entrench the systematic disparity has quickly adapted, shifting back towards the urban region where of access to resources as wealthy suburbs draw services from their own developers have focused efforts on extensive urban revitalization tax bases and poorer districts are left with fewer resources. The city’s projects, especially the $411 million Padres ballpark and East Village overextended infrastructure strains to provide municipal services like complex. In a pattern of gentrification familiar to many American fire protection, schools, water and electricity over the great net of the cities, low-income residents are shunted to suburbs distant from municipal area. Despite continuous investment, growth continues to city resources while the city imports suburban extremes of privacy, outstrip the capacity of the city infrastructure to service it; constant security, leisure and commodity. A nationwide survey conducted in road-widening and freeway extensions have little lasting impact 2006 showed that, for the first time in history, “the suburban poor outnumbered their city counterparts by at least 1 million.”5 This reversal of postwar white flight reflects a socio-economic shift that 2 Henri Lefebvre, “The Production of Space” In Rethinking Architecture: A is potentially more detrimental to San Diego than the 1950’s move Reader in Cultural Theory, ed. Neil Leach, 2005th ed. (New York: Routledge, to the suburbs; as low-income families are priced out of dense urban 2005), 227. 3 Ibid, 293 areas, the thinness of suburban infrastructure means that they no 4 San Diego is one of the wealthiest cities in the nation. Rancho Santa Fe, for example, is the wealthiest community with more than 1000 households. San Diego shared second place with San Francisco for the wealthiest urban 5 Alan Berube, co-author of the report for the Brookings Institution, a Wash- center in the nation, according to the 2007 Census. ington-based think tank. 10 11 thresholds that spatially enact passage or blockage; it is indicative of a large-scale pattern that owes its force to a system of redundant and overlapping borderlands that operate many scales. The difference between the two-dimensional and absolute boundary of surface and the thick functionality of skin constitutes a borderland, a region of negotiation, for example, between smooth and striated space.
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