Global Topologies - Data Science Institute

Global Topologies
Globalization and Security
GSAPP
Columbia University
F05
Advanced Studio
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Mario Gooden, Adjunct Associate Professor with Jamie Palazzolo
[email protected]
The Cultural Landscape
uses geographic concepts to
emphasize where people
and human activities are
located, why they are located in particular locations,
and what significance these
observed arrangements
represent. That significance
reveals relationships of
power defined by parameters of technology, race,
class, gender and sexuality.
That these set of relations
can be understood as space
is to theorize that space is
"heterogeneous" and that
"we live inside a set of relations that delineate sites,
which are irreducible to one
another, and absolutely not
superimposable on one
another.... one might attempt
to describe these different
sites by looking for the set of
relations by which a given
site can be defined."
In the aftermath of September 11, security and the ongoing threat of
terrorism have entered into the restructuring of cultural values, everyday life, and the cultural landscape. Many changes have taken
place in the United States and in various countries around the world
as the intensity of the potential threat was brought into sharper focus
as a result of the September 11th attacks. Changes include new airline screening policies; tightened patrolling of the nation’s borders
and ports; the fortification of government facilities; ongoing police and
national guard presence at potential “high value” targets; the enactment of new laws and regulations, and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security to oversee and direct these new measures. While public concern and questions have arisen over issues of
safety, civil liberties, and national identity, much larger questions regarding the relationships (and or cause and affect) between the politics of representation and globalization on the one hand and security
and terror have gone unasked.
In The Violence of the Global, Jean Baudrillard examines the relationship between universalization, globalization and the singularity of
terrorism. He states that terrorism is not the product of a traditional
history of anarchism, nihilism, or fanaticism but It is instead the contemporary partner of globalization.
While universalization has to do with human rights, liberty, culture,
and democracy, globalization, by contrast, is about technology, the
market, tourism, and information, which at this point appear to be
irreversible. “In the Enlightenment, universalization was viewed as
unlimited growth and forward progress. Today, by contrast, universalization exists by default and is expressed as a forward escape,
which aims to reach the most minimally common
value…Universalization is vanishing because of globalization. The
globalization of exchanges puts an end to the universalization of values. This marks the triumph of a uniform thought over a universal
one. What is globalized is first and foremost the market, the profusion
of exchanges and of all sorts of products, the perpetual flow of
money. Culturally, globalization gives way to a promiscuity of signs
and values, to a form of pornography in fact.”1
Hence, as globalization, security, and terror reshape the cultural
landscape what are its affects upon the issues of space and "new"
ways of seeing power/knowledge structures, hierarchies, boundaries,
and borders in our political and socio-economic world?
The singularity of terrorism avenges the singularities of those cultures
that paid the price of the
imposition of a unique
global power with their
own extinction.
---Jean Baudrillard
Global Topologies
Globalization and Security
GSAPP
Columbia University
F05
Advanced Studio
Mario Gooden, Adjunct Associate Professor with Jamie Palazzolo
[email protected]
Furthermore, suffice it to say that if making architecture
involves the design and construction of inhabitable space
in which people exist in relationship to one another then
… What is the role for architecture in this cultural
landscape? How can architecture be instrumentalized to
ask the high order questions and to interrogate the discourse between globalization and security and their new
spatial conditions?
Presently, the responses to the issue of security are to
design fortified bases for high rise buildings able to withstand truck bomb blasts; to install metal detectors, x-ray
machines, and privacy partitions at airports; to design
bullet proof security vestibules in the lobbies of government facilities; and to erect jersey barriers around potential targets and at the entry to sensitive sites such as
transportation tunnels, financial centers, and some transportation hubs. These solutions might hardly be called
architectural.
Yet for all the focus on static sites, fluid sites such as
ports and marine terminals have not received thoughtful
consideration. In fact, The Department of Homeland Security’s fact sheet describing security measures for ports
merely restates the ongoing mission of the U.S. Coast
Guard.
Break-bulk: Cargo that is
packaged or bundled, not
containerized, such as bananas or coffee.
Historic map of 1879. Hamilton Avenue
is the main street seen here terminating at the Waterfront.
As the world economy has grown more integrated, international trade has become one of the most powerful driving forces of the American economy. With
most of that trade moving by ship, the maritime industry provides a vitally important link between the U.S. and a rapidly expanding global economy. New
York is home to the largest container port on the East Coast. The Port of New
York/ New Jersey handled 3 million cargo containers weighing 18.8 million
tons in 2000 and the port is home to nearly 10,000 ships per year.
Situated along the Buttermilk Channel at the terminal of Hamilton Avenue, the
history of the industrial waterfront in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn dates
back to the 1700’s. Presently the Red Hook Marine Terminal operated by
American Sevedoring for the Port Authority of New York of 100 acres with four
active container cranes, over a million square feet of warehouse space and
two major bulk-handling yards. The terminal serves as an entry port for specialized commodities such as coffee and cocoa from Central and South
America.
0.1
Global Topologies
Globalization and Security
GSAPP
Columbia University
Advanced Studio
F05
0.1
Mario Gooden, Adjunct Associate Professor with Jamie Palazzolo
[email protected]
Standing outside the entry to the Red Hook Marine Terminal in June of 2002, senator
Charles Schumer declared that New York is dangerously unprepared for a nuclear terrorist threat from a device or weapon loaded onto a ship or truck and while in the Wake
of September 11 the U.S. Coast Guard has increased its inspection of ships entering
New York Harbor only some ships are inspected.
The redevelopment of the Red Hook Marine Terminal at piers 7 thru 12 in Brooklyn to
serve as a combination container / cruise terminal confronts the topology in which globalization and security are in constant flux among the imports and exports of break-bulk
cargo and the arrival and departure exchanges of tourist passing through custom’s
gateways at the water’s edge. Additionally, the redevelopment of the port must accommodate the revitalization of the waterfront with greater public access as part of the
Brooklyn Waterfront Trail.
Hence, the context for this studio’s investigations is
situated in cultural contexts [fluid   global] and a
physical context [The new Red Hook Marine Container
/ Cruise Terminal]. Under the forces of 21st century
globalization, these sites offer opportunities for strategic
assessment, calibration of gradients of public and secure uses, and deployment of specific spatial, architectural, and urbanistic implications and possibilities.
Studio Purpose
How can architecture be critically deployed as an instrument in the network of commercial exchanges, human flows, tourism, public space, and port security? How can
architecture spatialize this cultural context and confront the restructuring of social and
cultural values brought on by the evermore present need for security?
For globalizations most profound affects are not economic but cultural. Globalization is reordering societies
all over the planet. “The battleground of the twenty-first
century will pit fundamentalism against cosmopolitan
tolerance. In a globalizing world, where information and
images are routinely transmitted across the globe, we
are all regularly in contact with others who think differently, and live differently, from ourselves. Cosmopolitans welcome and embrace this cultural complexity.
Fundamentalists find it disturbing and dangerous.
Whether in the areas of religion, ethnic identity, or nationalism, they take refuge in a renewed and purified
tradition--and, quite often, violence.”2
According to Anthony Giddens, …
globalization is essentially a dialectical phenomenon; it produces
opposites. We know that globalization doesn’t produce a unified or
conflict-free world; it produces a
world of many divisions. Globalization produces fundamentalism.
Fundamentalism is the other side
of the cosmopolitanism of global
communications. It’s not accidental
that fundamentalists make use of
the mass communications and
modern forms of identity, which
they also pretend to condemn.
Global Topologies
Globalization and Security
GSAPP
Columbia University
F05
Advanced Studio
Mario Gooden, Adjunct Associate Professor with Jamie Palazzolo
[email protected]
Mapping is a means of
envisioning cultural space
in such a way that individual subjects might develop
some meaningful sense of
location within a foreign
terrain that was once familiar but has now been
rendered virtually incomprehensible by the forces
of postmodernism (the
arrival of information technologies allegedly having
demolished traditional
categories of time and
space).”i3
Studio Design
The overall approach will be experimental with regard
to both program and design methodology. The studio
will be divided into two sections, which will operate at
multiple scales.
The first section will explore the relationships between
the global and the local through a mapping of exchanges and flows to understand the sets of relationships within the contexts [cultural <--> physical]. The
mapping will reveal conditional relationships and operational characteristics of the fluid economies of the
contexts.
The second section will be an investigation and design
intervention at the Red Hook Marine Terminal for its
redevelopment as a combined container / cruise terminal. In January 2005, New York Mayor Michael
Bloomberg and New York Governor George Pataki
announced the signing of a long-term lease agreement
that will allow the creation of a modern cruise terminal
on the Brooklyn waterfront. The lease agreement
reached between the Port Authority of New York and
New Jersey and the City's Economic Development
Corporation (EDC), enables the EDC to take control of
Piers 11 and 12 and proceed with the design and construction of the $30 million facility. The new cruise facility will be the Northeastern port of call for Norwegian
and Carnival Cruise Lines.
The studio project will entail the examination of the arrival and departure
sequence at the landside entry to the container terminal; the design a new
set of architectural interventions for terminal gate operations, terminal management offices, government inspection facilities, banking & insurance facilities; and a strategic intervention in the relationship between the container
terminal and cruise terminal operations in order to allow for public access to
the waterfront.
The intention of the studio is to instrumentalize architecture within the confluence of flows between commercial exchanges, tourism, and public space
in this cultural landscape reshaped by security and the threat of terror.
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