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Exciting news, everyone!  Today in my dreadful morning class I came up with a great idea, for thesis.

It sort of relates to my original idea, but I was never sold on the urban housing angle in that.  Instead, I want to design the opposite of monuments.  That is, instead of things that are of the past, things that are for the future.

A simple example:  imagine an aqueduct built in some cold frozen part of Canada.  It doesn’t work right now.  But in X-hundred years, given predicted global climate change, water will flow, and the aqueduct can be put to use by future generations.

The idea is that things may change/deteriorate such that future generations do not have the capacity to construct such a thing, but would benefit from clean water.  So we build them now, knowing they’ll be needed in the future.

The most apt precedent I can think of is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.  Related, methods of disposing of nuclear waste in “This is Not a Place of Honor,” The Long Now, ruin value theory, The World Without Us, and how Roman infrastructure was used during the Dark Ages.

In my next essay, draft due Tuesday, I need to “get real” with my thesis project.  As in, propose an actual site, and a building program.  Luckily this is the 1st of many drafts; it’s not finalized for another year.

My reading and writing thus far has focused on Utopianism and housing.  (see Six Sentences exercise)  In talks with Prof H, we’ve established that “housing” isn’t the right word (nobody wants to live in “housing,” they want to live in homes/communities/neighborhoods) but generally speaking, focused on where people live/dwell.

An aspect I want to include is a non-traditional site.  At the moment, I’m looking at Post-Flood cities.  I wanted to do something with Chicago, but alas it won’t flood via Global Warming.  I might have to settle for NYC.

Regarding a building program, I was thinking perhaps something to do with Millennials, some sort of bohemian ghetto of kids who graduated from college to find a world without job opportunities, but I fear that might be too now/kitschy/news-article-generalization-without-basis-in-fact.  And, maybe I should be addressing something more critical than unemployed middle-class white 20-somethings.

I’ve had this vague idea floating around, since reading Planet of Slums, of an adaptable infrastructure system to be dropped into megaslums.  Something that is a road, a water pipeline, an electricity generator, and a framework for living modules, in units that can be snapped together.  Maybe I can do something with this, in a developing nation with coastal slums.

I don’t know what I’m doing!

Curious.  Happened upon some old (3-5 years ago) thesis documents while doing some research…  they aren’t very impressive.  Maybe I’m just looking at bad examples, but it feels like I could do the entire project, if this is the end product, in a week or two.  Yet it’s going to take all of next year?  I guess mine will just be better than these…

4:29 AM.   “I don’t need books.  I AM BOOKS!”   (src)

The book is 8” by 8”, hardbound.  In the vein of Koolhaas and Mau, it is “designed.”  It has ancestors in BLDGBLOG, XKCD, and yes, Hipster Runoff.  It is researched, it is thorough, it is footnoted.  It concerns architecture, culture, futures.  It is the history of the world, part two.  It is Archigram, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Constant Nieuwenhuys, Karl Marx, Mike Davis, and Thomas Pynchon.  It references Michel Foucault and Blade Runner in the same sentence. It is sited on the moon, beneath the sea, in tunnels, and within ruins.  It has a prime number of pages.

What I need is a patron.

Endnotes must die.  Footnotes forever.