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With the senate about to pour more than a hundred billion dollars into highways, we here at New York Review of Architecture just so happen to have two pieces for you this morning on the highway’s primary beneficiary: the car. Our correspondents Anna Talley and Anna Gibertini talk about the Automania exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (July 4 - January 2), and we are featuring a piece from Issue #21 on driverless cars by Gina Ciancone, “The Road Not Taken.”
Further below, Nicholas Raap files a dispatch from our event with Andi Schmied, the news, and this week’s events.
- Nicolas Kemper
AUTOMANIA REVIEW WITH ANNA & ANNA
Anna Talley is a PhD candidate at the University of Edinburgh, where she studies how the graphic design of contemporary media influences its popular perception. In the summer of 2019, she was an intern in the Architecture and Design Department at MoMA and worked with museum curators to assemble print and photographic ephemera for Automania. What follows is a conversation between her and NYRA contributor Anna Gibertini.
Anna Gibertini: Hi Anna, I’ve just returned from MoMA, and I have some thoughts on Automania.
Anna Talley: Fire away!
AG: We’re living in a pivotal moment in the history of the automobile. Everything from the Biden administration’s plans to make half of all new cars on U.S. roads electric vehicles by 2030 to the roiling debate about self-driving car safety and Silicon Valley’s hand in future infrastructure planning to the transformation of our cars into safe havens of isolation during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is evidence that, as a country, we’re not ready to end our relationship with the automobile, despite what we know now about its ecological toxicity and inefficiency when compared to public transportation. The car was born in the United States and its evolution shows no signs of stopping.
None of this felt apparent at MoMA’s Automania. To be honest, I wasn’t even sure what I was supposed to glean from the show after I left. Even the title of the exhibition felt overwrought. Like, ok cars have been both fraught objects of utility and beauty for a little over a hundred years. Not a particularly compelling thesis.
AT: To be fair, this show was planned years in advance (it was supposed to debut in spring 2020), so some of this newer urgency surrounding the future of the automobile question might not be reflected in the curator’s selections. But I think I understand what you mean. I wonder: what did you glean as the thesis of the show as a viewer — to talk about the impact of the car on culture broadly, or to talk about the history of the car in the 20th century?
AG: According to the official text, Automania is an exploration of “the conflicted feelings—compulsion, fixation, desire, and rage—that developed in response to cars and car culture in the 20th century” as well as “their adverse impact on roads and streets, public health, and the planet’s ecosystems.” Two huge ideas slammed together into a confined, staid space with little to no wayfinding.
AT: The white box prevails!
AG: To be perfectly frank with you, I thought the inclusion of MoMA’s actual collection of cars was a distraction and an annoyance! You couldn’t even get a good look inside the cars (besides for the E-Type Roadster) or look under the hoods at all. Plus, besides the Jeep parked out in the sculpture garden, they were all European. They seemed to function more as objects of desire than anything truly thought provoking.
AT: That’s all fair. I think it’s a fine line to balance an exhibition’s conceptual content and form when you’re including large, popular, showy objects like vehicles. The last exhibition I saw before COVID was actually the V&A’s exhibition on automobiles, titled Cars: Accelerating the Modern World, which did a brilliant job at balancing the inclusion of a few vehicles with historical ephemera, newly commissioned pieces, and speculative designs around the future of cars. With both the MoMA and the V&A show, it’s the supporting material, such as posters and ephemera, that help tell the cultural history of the car, which is obviously quite rich. In both cases, the challenge is tackling such a large topic within a constrained amount of gallery space. The V&A’s show had a much larger remit looking into the 21st century and beyond, but they also had more floor space. I’d laud the MoMA curators for their exacting decisions in what material they ultimately decided to put on the walls, even if it doesn’t tell the full and complete story of the automobile in the last century.
AG: I’ll also say this: the whole time I was at Automania, I kept thinking about an essay I read in Places Journal about minimalist artist Tony Smith’s nighttime drives down the New Jersey turnpike before it officially opened. Those drives turned out to be seminal moments in his development as an artist, and he returns to their impact again and again in his work. MoMA has 11 pieces of his, and not one made an appearance. They would have felt right at home next to the Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso, and Warhol works, and would have made a much more compelling point about how artists have interpreted the impact of the vehicle on society. I think that was my major disappointment: I wanted a show about the depiction of cars in visual art, and instead MoMA presented a half-baked survey course on 20th century European automobile design history with some sprinkles of American art.
AT: How did you think the cars in the sculpture garden connected to the cars in the gallery space?
AG: I peered down at the cars in the garden from inside the museum and that was enough for me to get a sense of what they were all about. They functioned more as Instagram backdrops for selfies (same with the Airstream parked inside the gallery) than as objects of thoughtful consideration.
AT: I see. Ultimately, I think the sort of frustration you have as an exhibition viewer mirrors the frustration many of us have with the car itself. On the one hand, who doesn’t love feasting their eyes on a hot sports car? But, especially in the United States, it is impossible to live without cars-- our entire infrastructure is built around them. Most Americans (outside of places like New York that have mass transit) don’t have much of a choice except to drive, which can be a dangerous and costly endeavor. I think the idea of having electric vehicles is definitely an improvement to gas, but we should also be having the conversation about whether we want to have vehicles at all. The implications of such a discussion could mean overhauling the entire urban and national infrastructure. Perhaps by looking closely at the way cars have evolved and shaped society in the 20th century is a way forward to understanding where changes can be made in the future in regards to transportation--one which may not have cars at all.
AG: With those thoughts in mind, I may go wander around Automania again and see if my opinion changes. The V&A exhibition sounds way more interesting — maybe it will travel here or someone will approximate it at another museum.
AT: Thank you for your thoughts, Anna!
AG: No, thank you, Anna!
THE ROAD NOT TAKEN
by GINA CIANCONE
from Issue #21
Despite recent marketing campaigns and publicly proclaimed corporate benchmarks, the driverless car revolution has all but stalled. Experts in the field of automotive AI have turned to several adjacent industries in order to drive mass adoption of driverless vehicles. Corporate auto manufacturers have pondered that perhaps with better software, driverless cars will be more responsive, reliable, and cybersecure. Perhaps with stricter public regulations from urban planners and municipal governments, driverless cars will incrementally gain public confidence and trust in their safety. And perhaps with a diverse menu of vehicle offerings from automotive manufacturers, consumers can find the size, type, and price point of driverless car to fit their needs. But given that cars of any form continue to put demands on public space in cities, the solution to mass adoption might first be sought from an unlikely source: designers.
Let’s be clear: driverless cars are still cars. And as someone who works in the auto industry (albeit in creative direction for an Italian motorcycle company), I am predisposed to champion the merits of a form of mobility that can take us faster and farther. However, I’ve also done research on mass transit autonomous vehicles (AVs) in Taipei, Taiwan, and I’m aware that these so-called merits of the US auto industry come at a cost. Driverless cars do not solve our country’s gasoline addiction or our habituated reliance on four-wheeled vehicles to complete daily trips that could have been done on foot. Nor do they provide a radical departure from conventional transportation methods. Isn’t a Tesla just the modern version of a classic hot rod? Both function as style and status signifiers for their respective times. A driverless car is still adding more cars to the road; it’s not a bike, scooter, or hoverboard. And the private-vehicle model of driverless cars marketed in 2021 is a far cry from their more utopian potential as fleets of public or shared transit.
The bottom line is that cars of any variety still require large-scale infrastructure projects to use, and they require an insatiable demand for urban space. In their design, cars are 80 percent empty when driven by a single person. And in their use, private cars are estimated to be parked 95 percent of the time. That means that these vehicles sit unoccupied and unused in some of the world’s most expensive parcels of real estate. In the United States alone, there are estimated to be one billion parking spaces, and cities devote nearly 60 percent of their urban space for the storage and use of vehicles (via parking garages, on-street parking spaces, roads, and freeways).
Despite all this, the campaign for driverless and electric cars continues to push forward. According to automakers, driverless cars are greener (through both their fuel efficiency and material design, which has fewer parts and therefore uses less plastic), safer (90 percent of all auto accidents are due to human error), and increase productivity (travel time would be reduced by 40 percent). Car makers may be easing into fully autonomous vehicles incrementally by offering consumers electric options of longstanding favorites. Last year, Ford released its Mustang Mach-E to much fanfare. Strategically, priming consumers for fully autonomous cars requires getting them comfortable with electric vehicle technology. Yet once this is done and consumers are ready, will cities be equipped? Equipped with what?
In many ways, the architectural industry has leverage in influencing how autonomous vehicles will function. So far, AV testing is still in beta mode and focused on consumer perception and hardware/software capabilities. And because real-world testing is a multi-agent problem involving pedestrians, cyclists, busses, and conventional cars, incremental infrastructure is likely needed to slowly engage AVs within the complicated transit ecosystem of cities. Without architects, designers, and urbanists directing the needed spatial changes, autonomous vehicles might remain permanently parked. If consumers aren’t given adequate infrastructure to use AVs (for example: different types of road lanes, more accessible drop-off and loading areas, more protective and delineated road diets), they are inherently not given the incentive to purchase new vehicles. From a policy perspective, it also makes sense to engage with designers early on in order to build laws in accordance with AV-specific infrastructure adaptations.
To address this problem, some architectural firms have responded to the autonomous vehicle craze through research papers, articles, and self-solicited design proposals. Those with (minimal) skin in the game tend to be larger, more corporate-style firms, such as Arup, Gensler, HOK, Snohetta, and SWA Group, who draft studies reminiscent of extended thesis proposals; however, the fact that this research tends to be almost fully self-led undercuts its potential impact. The architectural and design industries have long worked in a conceptual vacuum that often renders their more utopian ideas impractical; the same argument could be made about the great AV moonshot. Now that promises have been made and benchmarks have been set, who will be the first to make the equally lofty, conceptual, and expensive designs of the automotive industry an executable reality? Only when architectural firms are able to collaboratively generate research, articles, or proposals hand-in-hand with other industry players will their work have the real impact it deserves, and that cities need.
To read Issue #21 in print, consider a subscription.
A dispatch!
From Hungary to Head Hi
7/27, NYRA Reviews a Book: Private Views
On a blustery Tuesday night, a cohort gathered at HEAD HI in Brooklyn for a conversation around the book Private Views: A High-Rise Panorama of Manhattan. In a zoom-real life mashup, the author ANDI SCHMIED joined from Hungary via zoom to talk with interlocutors LANE RICK of Office of Things and JACOB REIDEL of the GSD, who were in a sidewalk shed in front of the bookstore Head Hi in Brooklyn
This night opened with a video SCHMIED took inside 432 Park, one among the crop of supertalls and luxury pads she toured for the book, posing as the wife of a Hungarian billionaire. The agent swiftly guided SCHMIED through the rooms, extolling the finishes (Polish marble is apparently the best in today’s world), amenities, and perhaps most importantly, the view.
On the future of supertalls, REIDEL brought up 9 DeKalb, the first to rise in Brooklyn, which he reviewed in Coruscant Comes to Brooklyn, published in NYRA #20. Looking to sci-fi depictions of futuristic urban environments like the ecumenopolis of Coruscant in the Star Wars universe, he questioned whether there was anything wrong with tall buildings inherently: “I don’t have an issue with height in itself… if anything we should be building denser and taller as long as we manage it well,” remarking that in the future, the current peaks of our sky will “probably seem short.”
A question that lingered through much of the conversation was whether or not the buildings themselves could be separated from the financial system and mechanisms they were produced by, namely, a luxury housing market producing what amount to safety deposit boxes for a global billionaire class. An audience member wondered, “could these buildings exist in a more equal society?” SCHMIED was definitive, “No.”
IN THE NEWS
…Michael Kimmelman shares some strong words on public housing
A Rebirth in the Bronx: Is This How to Save Public Housing?
“Should the richest nation on earth build and run a great public housing system? Yes. And America should also establish a universal right to housing. But in the meantime hundreds of thousands of NYCHA tenants continue to wait for improvements.”
…the architecture meme-world concurs
…And Oliver Wainwright reviews a would-be Boullée in London
Does London really need a gigantic glowing orb the height of Big Ben?
“As planning applications go, it’s certainly got balls. Or, to be precise, one massive ball. A gigantic glowing orb, as wide as the London Eye and almost as tall as Big Ben, is planned to descend on Stratford, bulging on to the skyline like a great artificial sun, dazzling the East End with the power of 36m LEDs… ‘I’ve lived in east London all my life and never imagined something like this would be built here. Nobody expects a gigantic ball of light to arrive on their doorstep, no matter where they live.’”
DATELINE
The week ahead
Tuesday, 8/10
Listen Here: Histories of Acoustics and Communication with Joseph Clarke, Sabine von Fischer, John Durham Peters
2:00 PM | CCA Architecture Division
Thursday, 8/12
Introduction to Equity-Centered Community Design
12:00 PM| Creative Reaction Lab
Curatorial Loaf with Louise Désy
2:00 PM | CCA Architecture Division
Office Hours #33 with Bryan C. Lee Jr
6:30 PM | Office Hours
Film Screening: Such stuff as dreams are made on with Lotte Schreiber, Michael Rieper
8:30 PM | CCA Architecture Division
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
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Four desk editors run NYRA: Alex Klimoski, Phillip Denny, Carolyn Bailey, & Nicolas Kemper. They rotate duties each month.
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For their support we would like to thank the Graham Foundation and our issue sponsors, Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, and Thomas Phifer.
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