Not Built in a Day

Although Laura Kurgan was not directly one of my studio critics at GSAPP, I was able to work with her somewhat as part of the C-BIP Studio, where she, David Benjamin, and my assigned critic Scott Marble teamed up to co-teach a joint studio on parametric design and building systems.  I appreciated Laura as an attentive and careful critic, but I didn't get to learn much about her own work until reading her book, Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology and Politics (2013).  I attended a lecture that she gave introducing the book in 2013, then finally got around to reading it this past year. As the title of the book suggests, Laura's work focuses on mapping, especially on satellite and surveillance imagery as used in mapping, which allows for a "close up" image of the world taken "at a distance."  I thought her lecture was extremely interesting, which was the reason I bought and read the book.  Her work tries to deconstruct the process of satellite i...

The Bay Area's housing crisis has gained a status akin to the weather: We can't help but mention it whenever two or more Bay Area residents are gathered together, and we feel there's equally nothing we can do to change it.  But instead of the general praise given to the area's weather, there is general despair about the state of housing.  At least among the twenty-something set and construction industry professionals who make up my peers and colleagues, there are few answers and much criticism for the way we live here.  It's not dense enough, public transportation is a sham, and housing costs are outrageous.  Many of my peers agree that they would not live here at all except that their spouse/significant other works in the tech industry, without whose salary they could not afford to live here, but whose worth is so valued here that it makes little sense economically to live elsewhere.  Here in the Peninsula it's just as bad as in San Francisco ("the city...