nika on in a space ness
nika dubrovsky on in a space ness
via tweet [https://x.com/nikadubrovsky/status/1964777797542637568]:
When people design spaces—stages, squares, assemblies, or parliamentary halls—it is always a way of shaping our collective social imagination. Our citizenship is not so much the laws imposed upon us, but access to this very imagination. How can this be organized? See the Visual Assembly. “Assembly by Design” by Olga Touloumi
whoa.. hardcover is $140
book via google [https://www.amazon.com/Assembly-Design-United-Nations-Interior/dp/1517913322]:
How the United Nations headquarters became the architectural instrument and broadcast medium of global diplomacy
For almost seven years after World War II, a small group of architects took on an exciting task: to imagine the spaces of global governance for a new political organization called the United Nations (UN). To create the iconic headquarters of the UN in New York City, these architects experimented with room layouts, media technologies, and design in tribunal courtrooms, assembly halls, and council chambers. The result was the creation of a new type of public space, the global interior.
Assembly by Design shows how this space leveraged media to help the UN communicate with the world. With its media infrastructure, symbols, acoustic design, and architecture, the global interior defined political assembly both inside and outside the UN headquarters, serving as the architectural medium to organize multilateral encounters of international publics around the globe. Demonstrating how aesthetics have long held sway over political work, Olga Touloumi posits that the building framed diplomacy on the ground amid a changing political landscape that brought the United States to the forefront of international politics, destabilizing old and establishing new geopolitical alliances.
Uncovering previously closed institutional and family archives, Assembly by Design offers new information about the political and aesthetic decisions that turned the UN headquarters into a communications organism. It looks back at a moment of hope, when politicians, architects, and diplomats—believing that assembly was a matter of design—worked together to deliver platforms for global democracy and governance.
there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental exponential labeling) to facil the seeming chaos of a global detox leap/dance.. for (blank)’s sake..
olga via bard [https://www.bard.edu/faculty/olga-touloumi]:
Olga Touloumi is Assistant Professor of Architectural History at Bard College. Her research concerns the role of architecture and media in 20th-century forms of liberal internationalism. Her book project The Global Interior: Modern Architecture and Worldmaking in the United Nations concerns the design and building of 20th-century public platforms for multilateralism and international relations. Touloumi has coedited Sound Modernities: Architecture, Media, and Design, a special issue of The Journal of Architecture that investigates how acoustics and mass media, such as the radio and the telephone, transformed modern architectural culture during the 20th century; and Computer Architectures: Constructing the Common Ground, 1945-1980, a volume of essays about the exchanges between designers and technologists that shaped computational discourses and practices in European and North American institutions. Her essay “Development Media” is forthcoming with the Aggregate edited volume Systems and the South. She has presented her work internationally and her writing has appeared in numerous journals and edited volumes, among them the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Buildings & Landscapes, Journal of Architecture, and Harvard Design Magazine. She has been a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and her research has been awarded fellowships and research grants from the National Endowment of the Humanities, Bard College, Harvard University, the Alexander S. Onassis Foundation, the Canadian Center for Architecture, and the Propondis Foundation. Touloumi is the cofounder of the Feminist Art and Architectural Collaborative (FAAC) and board member of the Center for Critical Studies in Architecture. She holds a PhD from Harvard University and a master of science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before arriving at Bard, she taught architectural history at MIT and at Harvard University.
Interests:
Research Interests: Global history of modern architecture; sound studies; media studies; institutional internationalism and architecture; built environment in the Balkans; feminist pedagogies
visual assembly ness et al
city sketchup ness et al
in the city.. as the day ness
how we gather in a space is huge.. need to try spaces of permission where people have nothing to prove to facil curiosity over decision making.. because the finite set of choices of decision making is unmooring us.. keeping us from us..
ie: imagine if we listen to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & use that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness)
because..
the thing we’ve not yet tried/seen: the unconditional part of left to own devices ness
[‘in an undisturbed ecosystem ..the individual left to its own devices.. serves the whole’ –dana meadows]
there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental exponential labeling) to facil the seeming chaos of a global detox leap/dance.. for (blank)’s sake..
ie: whatever for a year.. a legit sabbatical ish transition
otherwise we’ll keep perpetuating the same song.. the whac-a-mole-ing ness of sea world.. of not-us ness
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be you. 