In the plains of Nepal’s Terai, the monsoon has historically shaped a fluid terrain of ebbing and flowing wetness. Until the mid-twentieth century, tall grasslands, dense forests, and meandering gravel channels characterized this northernmost reach of the Gangetic Plain. Thick layers of sediments deposited centuries ago dictate the movements of water through soil—water increasingly important to farmers who rely on tube well irrigation in declining dry season rainfall. As surface waters return to channels cut during previous monsoons, they cover ground now claimed for rice paddies and village settlement. Annual agricultural cycles and patterns of plant growth are intertwined with festival seasons and the multiyear calendars of electoral politics. These plural temporal formations are what Mark Rifkin calls temporalities: “patterns of consistency and transformation that emerge immanently out of the multifaceted and shifting sets of relationships that constitute those formations and out of the interactions among those formations.”1 The Terai is a landscape made of and by many temporalities across past, present, and future.
{"title":"A Landscape that has Never Existed: Temporalities of Control and Disaster-Making in the Terai","authors":"Dane Carlson, T. Tamang","doi":"10.1162/thld_a_00759","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/thld_a_00759","url":null,"abstract":"In the plains of Nepal’s Terai, the monsoon has historically shaped a fluid terrain of ebbing and flowing wetness. Until the mid-twentieth century, tall grasslands, dense forests, and meandering gravel channels characterized this northernmost reach of the Gangetic Plain. Thick layers of sediments deposited centuries ago dictate the movements of water through soil—water increasingly important to farmers who rely on tube well irrigation in declining dry season rainfall. As surface waters return to channels cut during previous monsoons, they cover ground now claimed for rice paddies and village settlement. Annual agricultural cycles and patterns of plant growth are intertwined with festival seasons and the multiyear calendars of electoral politics. These plural temporal formations are what Mark Rifkin calls temporalities: “patterns of consistency and transformation that emerge immanently out of the multifaceted and shifting sets of relationships that constitute those formations and out of the interactions among those formations.”1 The Terai is a landscape made of and by many temporalities across past, present, and future.","PeriodicalId":40067,"journal":{"name":"Thresholds","volume":"1 1","pages":"257-267"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48923601","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Mitchell Schwarzer’s 1998 essay highlights urban landscapes of the United Stated ruptured by development models prioritizing speed and newness. Schwarzer explains that capitalism’s aversion to history, and the ease with which the social and economic culture of the United States facilitates this flight from the past, results in an urban environment marked by historical dislocation. In revisiting the original text, Schwarzer reflects on the historical particularities of urban development in the United States while James Heard offers additional commentary tying historic preservation to the formalization of financial logic. Together, the pair ask a simple question: what does money have to do with architecture? MITCHELL SCHWARZER IN CONVERSATION WITH JAMES HEARD
{"title":"Thresholds Revisited: Ghost Wards: The Flight of Capital from History","authors":"M. Schwarzer, James Heard","doi":"10.1162/thld_a_00744","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/thld_a_00744","url":null,"abstract":"Mitchell Schwarzer’s 1998 essay highlights urban landscapes of the United Stated ruptured by development models prioritizing speed and newness. Schwarzer explains that capitalism’s aversion to history, and the ease with which the social and economic culture of the United States facilitates this flight from the past, results in an urban environment marked by historical dislocation. In revisiting the original text, Schwarzer reflects on the historical particularities of urban development in the United States while James Heard offers additional commentary tying historic preservation to the formalization of financial logic. Together, the pair ask a simple question: what does money have to do with architecture? MITCHELL SCHWARZER IN CONVERSATION WITH JAMES HEARD","PeriodicalId":40067,"journal":{"name":"Thresholds","volume":"1 1","pages":"49-66"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45846390","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
It is common for surveys on the history of telecommunications to focus on the beginning and end of the subject while glossing over the short-lived experiments in between. Just as the efforts of disparate ancient cultures (including those of Greece, China, and Sri Lanka) to transmit messages across great distances are the common subjects of anthropology, and as Samuel Morse’s struggles to patent the electric telegraph in 1836 have become a staple of media theory, in 1793 France Claude Chappe’s invention of the optical telegraph can be evaluated as a significant device that bridged the fields of communications and geography. The time between the late eighteenth and early nineteenthth century is a uniquely turbulent one in the social, infrastructural, and political history of France. France shifted from the feudalist system of the Ancien Régime to the various constitutional incarnations of the Revolution and the rise and fall of Napoleon in his tireless pursuit of Parisian centralization. One can therefore appreciate the development of the optical telegraph system using an infrastructure of telecommunications as an attempt to bring order to modern France during its formative period.
{"title":"Signal Change","authors":"Shane Reiner-Roth","doi":"10.1162/thld_a_00742","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/thld_a_00742","url":null,"abstract":"It is common for surveys on the history of telecommunications to focus on the beginning and end of the subject while glossing over the short-lived experiments in between. Just as the efforts of disparate ancient cultures (including those of Greece, China, and Sri Lanka) to transmit messages across great distances are the common subjects of anthropology, and as Samuel Morse’s struggles to patent the electric telegraph in 1836 have become a staple of media theory, in 1793 France Claude Chappe’s invention of the optical telegraph can be evaluated as a significant device that bridged the fields of communications and geography. The time between the late eighteenth and early nineteenthth century is a uniquely turbulent one in the social, infrastructural, and political history of France. France shifted from the feudalist system of the Ancien Régime to the various constitutional incarnations of the Revolution and the rise and fall of Napoleon in his tireless pursuit of Parisian centralization. One can therefore appreciate the development of the optical telegraph system using an infrastructure of telecommunications as an attempt to bring order to modern France during its formative period.","PeriodicalId":40067,"journal":{"name":"Thresholds","volume":"1 1","pages":"27-37"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42469038","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In the late eighteenth-century Humphry Repton coined the term “landscape gardener” and gradually became the first professional landscape architect.1 A considerable part of his success was based on his Red Books—landscape proposals of suggested improvements to the estates of the English landed elite.2 What most clearly distinguished Repton’s approach from those of his predecessors was his use of “the flap”—a graphic device used to showcase the before and after of the proposed transformation. A simple visual trick turned into a marketing tool, transformed otherwise conventional watercolor illustrations into seductive client presentations. By sleight of hand, anything undesirable suddenly vanished from view, and the designed landscape revealed itself, instantaneously giving way to an envisioned future. It wasn’t only the flap as a representational method that was inexhaustible—communicating liveliness, restlessness, and futurity—but, importantly, also its appeal. Even today, the Red Books are evoked as soon as the topic of representation in landscape architecture is touched upon, praised for their innovative depiction of time, movement, and landscape change.3 Repton’s illustrations were one of the first widely admired and repeatedly evoked examples of landscape architectural representation I was introduced to at the start of my bachelor studies. And yet, as far as the reason for their enduring influence goes, I have remained unconvinced; surely the power Repton’s use of the flap exerts upon the field must be attributed to something more than the mere presentation of the existing scene being replaced by the proposed improved one. Why, really, does the allure of the flap linger?
{"title":"The Allure of the Flap","authors":"B. Prezelj","doi":"10.1162/thld_a_00770","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/thld_a_00770","url":null,"abstract":"In the late eighteenth-century Humphry Repton coined the term “landscape gardener” and gradually became the first professional landscape architect.1 A considerable part of his success was based on his Red Books—landscape proposals of suggested improvements to the estates of the English landed elite.2 What most clearly distinguished Repton’s approach from those of his predecessors was his use of “the flap”—a graphic device used to showcase the before and after of the proposed transformation. A simple visual trick turned into a marketing tool, transformed otherwise conventional watercolor illustrations into seductive client presentations. By sleight of hand, anything undesirable suddenly vanished from view, and the designed landscape revealed itself, instantaneously giving way to an envisioned future. It wasn’t only the flap as a representational method that was inexhaustible—communicating liveliness, restlessness, and futurity—but, importantly, also its appeal. Even today, the Red Books are evoked as soon as the topic of representation in landscape architecture is touched upon, praised for their innovative depiction of time, movement, and landscape change.3 Repton’s illustrations were one of the first widely admired and repeatedly evoked examples of landscape architectural representation I was introduced to at the start of my bachelor studies. And yet, as far as the reason for their enduring influence goes, I have remained unconvinced; surely the power Repton’s use of the flap exerts upon the field must be attributed to something more than the mere presentation of the existing scene being replaced by the proposed improved one. Why, really, does the allure of the flap linger?","PeriodicalId":40067,"journal":{"name":"Thresholds","volume":"1 1","pages":"321-330"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41456545","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In 1771, the French writer, dramatist, and social commentator Louis-Sébastien Mercier published L’An 2440, rêve s’il en fut jamais (1771), an instant bestseller today regarded as one of the earliest science fiction novels. Mercier’s tome traces the journey of a Parisian man of letters after he accidentally wakes up nearly three-quarters of a millennium in the future. Just as George Orwell’s 1984 was a commentary on 1948, Mercier’s novel vaulted eighteenth-century readers into the ostensible year 2440 in order to defamiliarize “their” Paris enough to call into question Ancien Régime policies and institutions. Mercier’s collapse of a linear understanding of time is foreshadowed on the title page of the novel (Fig. 1), which partially excerpts a well-known line by the German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: “The present is pregnant with the future (Le Tems present est gros de l’Avenir).”
1771年，法国作家、剧作家和社会评论家Louis-Sébastien Mercier出版了《L’An 2440，rêve’il en fut jamais》（1771年），这本书立即成为当今最早的科幻小说之一。Mercier的这本大部头书追溯了一位巴黎文人在未来近四分之三的千年里意外醒来后的旅程。正如乔治·奥威尔的《1984》是对1948年的评论一样，梅西耶的小说将18世纪的读者带到了表面上的2440年，目的是将“他们的”巴黎陌生化，足以让人质疑安制度的政策和制度。Mercier对时间线性理解的崩溃在小说的标题页上埋下了伏笔（图1），其中部分摘录了德国哲学家和数学家Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz的一句著名台词：“现在孕育着未来（Le Tems present est gros de l’Avenir）。”
{"title":"Paris 2440/3020: Excavating Daniel Arsham’s Fictional Archaeology","authors":"J. Ahn","doi":"10.1162/thld_a_00754","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/thld_a_00754","url":null,"abstract":"In 1771, the French writer, dramatist, and social commentator Louis-Sébastien Mercier published L’An 2440, rêve s’il en fut jamais (1771), an instant bestseller today regarded as one of the earliest science fiction novels. Mercier’s tome traces the journey of a Parisian man of letters after he accidentally wakes up nearly three-quarters of a millennium in the future. Just as George Orwell’s 1984 was a commentary on 1948, Mercier’s novel vaulted eighteenth-century readers into the ostensible year 2440 in order to defamiliarize “their” Paris enough to call into question Ancien Régime policies and institutions. Mercier’s collapse of a linear understanding of time is foreshadowed on the title page of the novel (Fig. 1), which partially excerpts a well-known line by the German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: “The present is pregnant with the future (Le Tems present est gros de l’Avenir).”","PeriodicalId":40067,"journal":{"name":"Thresholds","volume":"1 1","pages":"143-159"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43917398","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
I consider [graphics and media] to be paramount. And not just because I’m a graphic designer. Because you’re competing for eyeballs. You know, everybody is basically saying the same thing: here’s a property. Here’s what we’ve got, what kind of commodity we’re bringing out of the ground or we’re looking for, or whatever. Everybody is saying the same thing. So the faster you can catch someone’s eyeballs with a decent display, and with clear and precise graphics, you’re already ahead of the game as far as telling your story. Because—you were there right?—there’s so many people around, there’s so many things happening, and booth displays. Sometimes you’re talking to someone trying to explain your story, and they’re off looking at someone else’s display because it caught their eye.1
{"title":"Conjuring the Planetary Mine: Counter-Mapping the Heart of Extractive Capital","authors":"C. Alton, E. R. Huntley, Zulaikha Ayub","doi":"10.1162/thld_a_00765","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/thld_a_00765","url":null,"abstract":"I consider [graphics and media] to be paramount. And not just because I’m a graphic designer. Because you’re competing for eyeballs. You know, everybody is basically saying the same thing: here’s a property. Here’s what we’ve got, what kind of commodity we’re bringing out of the ground or we’re looking for, or whatever. Everybody is saying the same thing. So the faster you can catch someone’s eyeballs with a decent display, and with clear and precise graphics, you’re already ahead of the game as far as telling your story. Because—you were there right?—there’s so many people around, there’s so many things happening, and booth displays. Sometimes you’re talking to someone trying to explain your story, and they’re off looking at someone else’s display because it caught their eye.1","PeriodicalId":40067,"journal":{"name":"Thresholds","volume":"12 5","pages":"239-255"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41276209","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Thresholds Revisited: Inertia of an Automated Utopia: Design Commodities and Authorial Agency 40 Years After “The Architecture Machine”","authors":"Daniel Cardoso Llach, Farzin Lofti-Jam","doi":"10.1162/thld_a_00762","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/thld_a_00762","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40067,"journal":{"name":"Thresholds","volume":"1 1","pages":"289-300"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43853973","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Throughout the European refugee crisis that began in 2012 and peaked in 2015, hundreds of thousands of individuals and families from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere were caught in existential transition, at once fleeing the unbearable conditions of their previous lives and facing the grave prospects of permanent exile from their countries. Experiences of displacement, legal precarities, and pressing economic and health concerns were just some of the circumstances asylum seekers experienced along their trajectories toward safety and bureaucratic legitimacy. Remarkably, at the height of an already chaotic situation, it came to light that several groups, determined to free themselves from such hardships, had accidentally acquired State in Time passports under the false premise that the documents issued as part of an art project conceived by Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK) in 1992 would ensure passage and safety within the EU.1
{"title":"Reimagining Future, Excavating Past: NSK’s State in Time and Liminality as a form of Political Resistance","authors":"Andrea Knezović","doi":"10.1162/thld_a_00752","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/thld_a_00752","url":null,"abstract":"Throughout the European refugee crisis that began in 2012 and peaked in 2015, hundreds of thousands of individuals and families from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere were caught in existential transition, at once fleeing the unbearable conditions of their previous lives and facing the grave prospects of permanent exile from their countries. Experiences of displacement, legal precarities, and pressing economic and health concerns were just some of the circumstances asylum seekers experienced along their trajectories toward safety and bureaucratic legitimacy. Remarkably, at the height of an already chaotic situation, it came to light that several groups, determined to free themselves from such hardships, had accidentally acquired State in Time passports under the false premise that the documents issued as part of an art project conceived by Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK) in 1992 would ensure passage and safety within the EU.1","PeriodicalId":40067,"journal":{"name":"Thresholds","volume":"1 1","pages":"125-140"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45411949","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Written in the wake of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, T.F. Tierney’s essay on the role of social media in ordering and accommodating new types of publics continues to be relevant. Revisited by both the author and MIT Master of Science in Architecture Studies candidate Mariam Elnozahy, this piece is supplemented with new references and commentary that parse the optimism once associated with the emergence of social media as a platform that could empower underrepresented peoples. With more recent developments in social media and surveillance technology now in mind, Tierney and Elnozahy together explore how speech continues to inform space-making in increasingly regulated environments. T.F. TIERNEY IN CONVERSATION WITH MARIAM ELNOZAHY
{"title":"Thresholds Revisited: Disentangling Public Space: Social Media and Internet Activism","authors":"T. Tierney, Mariam Elnozahy","doi":"10.1162/thld_a_00755","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/thld_a_00755","url":null,"abstract":"Written in the wake of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, T.F. Tierney’s essay on the role of social media in ordering and accommodating new types of publics continues to be relevant. Revisited by both the author and MIT Master of Science in Architecture Studies candidate Mariam Elnozahy, this piece is supplemented with new references and commentary that parse the optimism once associated with the emergence of social media as a platform that could empower underrepresented peoples. With more recent developments in social media and surveillance technology now in mind, Tierney and Elnozahy together explore how speech continues to inform space-making in increasingly regulated environments. T.F. TIERNEY IN CONVERSATION WITH MARIAM ELNOZAHY","PeriodicalId":40067,"journal":{"name":"Thresholds","volume":"1 1","pages":"67-80"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42177643","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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