Kimberli Meyer, Zvi Hecker; Peter Noever, Ai Weiwei (eds). Hatje Cantz, 2011 (168 pp., US $40).
"Predictions and propositions for the future are always hindered by the blind spots of the present. Nevertheless, the consciousness of everyday life holds vast potential intelligence. To focus, observe, analyze, postulate, and act critically upon the surrounding world is to wield significant agency."
–Kimberli Meyer
I've frequently mused that manifestos are a lot like junk food, in that they taste good, but rarely are they good for you—especially if you are looking to use them towards productive ends. On the other hand, I went to graduate school with a fellow who ate nothing but the latter for every meal, and still survives to this day, having even managed to spawn a family. History has not generally been kind to the writers of architectural manifestos, and the debris of several failed attempts at repositioning the discipline still lie scattered amongst the foundations of the more pragmatic (and therefore built) successes, generally being written off in the history books with an undertone of folly. However, manifestos do serve architects well when they open the doors to new critical terrain, aiding them in the development of new ideas which have the potential to transform into phenomenal agents of design evolution.
–Peter Noever
This call to arms is what greets the reader on the inside dust jacket of Urban Future Manifestos, and distills the diverse and acute manifestos of the collected writers inside. Edited by Peter Noever and Kimberli Meyer for the MAK Center Los Angeles, the text represents a fertile argument for an alternative perspective to the current obsession by architects with urban form over civic substance, economics over material economy, and popularity over populism. That Noever and Meyer were able to cultivate such a diverse and articulate crowd from both established critics and research fellows at the MAK-sponsored Urban Future Initiative stands as proof that critical practice still has its roots planted in terra firma when concerned with the fate of the modern city.
–Lebbeus Woods, "The Global Field"
Described as a call upon leading creative thinkers "to address urgent questions about the future of the contemporary city", Urban Future Manifestos presents provocations by urban critics such as Michael Sorkin and Dana Cuff, critical practitioners like Lebbeus Woods and Zvi Hecker, artists James Turrell and Ai Weiwei, among others, and couples them with equally diligent and critical projects by UFI (Urban Future Initiative) Fellows, whose research of megacities around the world present alternatives to the global architecture "glam-culture" that currently permeates urban development, not just in those locales, but in Los Angeles itself. Out of the thirty-two manifestos and collected UFI studies that grace the book, the latter works represent serious scholarship and shore up the speculative qualities of the impassioned salvos that proceed them. These sobering examples of urban fieldwork are of equal weight to their more aggressive counterparts, in that they represent the next group of critics who will perhaps challenge the architectural establishment to answer for its complicit participation in the devaluation of the metropolitan experience, as visual style and the formal exuberance in the name of material novelty continues to be peddled over public space in the civic realm.
As with many utopian speculations, Urban Futures looks past the dysfunctional present and into an abyss where the future of the global metropolis seems to hinge on qualities which represent generic ideas that most of us take for granted as being core qualities of city life.
–Dana Cuff "Urban Infrastructure as Architecture"
What the book lacks is a definitive position regarding the future of urbanism. As with many utopian speculations, Urban Futures looks past the dysfunctional present and into an abyss where the future of the global metropolis seems to hinge on qualities which represent generic ideas that most of us take for granted as being core qualities of city life. While entertaining to read, the manifestos from established critics generally do not outline any concrete solutions, and one has to rely on the research done by the UFI Fellows to encounter outlines for possible urban strategies or outcomes. The key to their utopian read of the city is perhaps strongest in their outsider's interpretation of Los Angeles. Most of the Fellows are from other cities around the world and have transposed their own metropolitan biases and curatorial methodologies onto L.A. via the MAK's UFI.
–Ai Weiwei
One such hybrid reading is by Urban-Think Tank members Alfredo Brillembourg, Hbert Klumner, and Luis Efren Santana. Their analysis weaves rural concepts of informal inhabitation with the problems facing their inhabitants when they migrate from the countryside into the urban cores in order to find work. The group draws distinctions between the barrios of Caracas and the second or third-generation immigrant housing of East Los Angeles, where the bricolage of indigenous South American culture rubs up against the defined boundaries of L.A.'s arguably modernist zoning codes, creating what these three UFI Fellows refer to as "barbacoa" architecture. While conceptually enticing, their analysis feels strikingly similar to Colin Rowe's postmodern thesis Collage City, which promoted an operative method for architects searching for answers in the aftermath of the failures of Post-War modernist urban planning. Perhaps though, the infectious optimism of these and the other UFI Fellows are indeed possible answers to the question of how to escape the hopelessly reductive and frivolous period architecture finds itself in right now.
–Zvi Hecker "Urbanism is Architecture on a Public Scale"
The spatial contamination of L.A.'s metropolitan DNA by other cultures is a condition that has, since the city's 18th Century incarnation on the flood plain of the Los Angeles River by the Spanish, been a powerful catalyst for growth and change. Megacities around the world and the manifestos they inspire are no different, for the life-blood of any urban system is tied directly to the fresh arrival of immigrants and transitory inhabitants, who bring with them new cultural frameworks and imaginative methods for reimagining the static structures already set into the fabric of the traditional city. This requires a constant dialogue about what urbanism is, how it performs, how it is perceived by the citizenry, and how its genetic code can be mutated into novel, performative, and most importantly, democratic layers of continued future growth. Perhaps then, the MAK's Urban Future Manifestos model of combining optimistic speculation with hard field research proves that there is room left in the design disciplines for the manifesto, both as an agent of provocation as well as the pragmatic material for change towards the future survival of the urban realm and its global populace.
–John Southern