Tactile Spectrum
_______________Highway 59 Houston, Texas 2005
Design Team: David Newton + Judson Moore + Sky Lanigan
Concept
Think of the contemporary freeway system as a material system, conducting material, social, economic, and informational flows along its bifurcating corridors. Consider this system in terms of how it self-organizes, just as sand poses itself in a dune field under the lines of force exerted by desert thermals. Consider specifically one of these self-organized states, the crystallization of a traffic jam. For too long as designers, as architects, as urban planners, as infrastructural designers we have ignored, passed-over, labeled as error, and tried to futilely fight this emergent property of the freeway system. This quagmire between the top-down myopia of current planning strategies and the bottom-up emergent logics of the material freeway system requires designers to take on a new ethics of design, a new material ethics, where designers allow emergent material logics to inform their thinking, design process, and conceptualization of problems. This stated feedback requires a deep sympathy with such emergent logics, a sympathy that will inevitably change our thinking as designers and generate evermore novel and subtly interpenetrating connections between worlds. This project attempts such a practice by taking the traffic jam as its object and seeking to investigate the social logics/relations/diagrams this phenomena projects into our world and how we might let those emergent logics inform and generate new models of programmatic organization and new theories of form within the freeway field. The examination is two tiered: how might these implicit diagrams be materialized and mapped? And how might we operate on those diagrams towards new programmatic ends?
In order to find a way of working with the infrastructure of the freeway system in a way that engages contemporary reality, we must be willing to develop a realistic and holistic approach to its operation. The assumed program of the freeway is still and only that of speed, the cold-war rhetoric of rapid mass-mobility, which the metropolitan freeway has ceased to embody long ago. Worse than that, we still view this fictitious speed program as program alone, outside of time, outside of place. The reality that the extreme condition of Houston forces us to consider takes up these issues. Program: the freeway is not just about rapid transit anymore. Time: we spend more time in our cars than anywhere else outside of work and home. Place: the freeway complex occupies one-eighth of the Houston metropolitan area.
The typical reformer’s approach to this situation is to find ways to “get the freeways moving again.” This rhetoric is myopic and antiquated. Studies show that congestion persists in spite of our continual efforts to widen highways and create new ones. In the auto-based city, the traffic jam is a permanent condition. What if freeway paralysis is viewed not as an aberration from the working system, but as an integral element of that system? We could even say that within the urban freeway complex, rapid transit is the off-hour byproduct of rush-hour congestion.
Our challenge denaturalizes the traditional conception of a network system as point-nodes connected by vector-links. The regularity of the traffic jam and the development of the feeder roads as consumer strip centers allows us to see the vector-based freeway complex as destination, with address and hours of operation. Now the streets themselves are linear nodes, with their on/off ramps serving as linking connectivity. Our proposal takes this self-consciousness of freeway existence two steps further. We don’t need to breathe life into the freeway complex, we want to bring out the lives we already lead there.
The emergence of mobile wireless networking is already incubating new ways to exploit the contained energy of the traffic-jam. Seizing the 59 trench extension in downtown Houston as a timely opportunity, our project reconstructs the freeway infrastructure to engage and operate upon the social-political-economic diagrams implicit in the traffic jam and its emerging context within the proliferating electromagnetic landscape of the city. Our intervention will primarily address three significant technology platforms: top-down mobile internet with location-aware G.P.S. positioning; bottom-up Bluetooth-based local area networks; and passive RFID tags. Our scheme tracks these software/hardware packages as they are projectively deployed amidst the human particle field of the freeway traffic jam, in order to observe and manipulate their capacity to incite new social, commercial, and formal realities.
Our attack redefines this infrastructural thread as a place of cultural exchange a contemporary Agora-which frees the freeway from rhetoric of rapid mass mobility. Through techniques of conceptual, operational, and physical de-lamination and re-lamination, we pull the strands of the cold-war mentality apart and re-weave them with the strands of the new city-the electromagnetic city. By forcing reinforced concrete to open up to interaction with the ever- thickening landscape of radio waves and digital communication, our pointed intervention sketches critical negotiations required of a twenty-first century infrastructure. The materialization of the multi-use radio spectrum meets the fraying of the monumental concrete slab to develop new ecosystems for our mutating cyborg sociality.