Bot Slave

 After posting images of the Karl Marx Hof housing project in Vienna on Facebook, around November 10, today I received the following email from my dormant Pinterest account:

"New ideas for you in Karl marx"
"We found some Pins we think might be right up your alley"
With of course images of the venerable.

I couldn't help myself, I answered the email. And it answered back. The conversation went like this:
Me: "Stupid bot."
Bot: "Thanks for reaching out! A little robot is sending you this auto-reply since we don't check this account. For how-to information, our Help Center is a good place to start."

If you have a conversation with a bot, is it a conversation? I guess it depends on how many other bots are listening in, and what they do about it: NSA, FBI, Facebook thought police, etc. etc. Hello, everyone.

I spent the day filling out forms, official documents required every year for the Foundation Amelia Moreno. I'm feeling somewhat like a bot myself.

Have you noticed how much time you spend filling out forms under the supervision of a bot? The truth is, we are at the service of the bots. We are at their beck and call, we are their humble, obedient wait staff, and no indiscipline will be tolerated. Talk back to a bot and you will be hauled into line: fill out the form, stupid. Stick to the program.




 

You Have to Pay for the Public Life

Proposed Pier 55 Park, New York, by Thomas Heatherwick

"There’s a combination, it seems, of trees and water and fairytale stories told by a charming inventor, that persuades people to part with many millions – and allows conventional urban planning to be gleefully suspended."
Oliver Wainwright

The Guardian's Oliver Wainwright weighs in on Barry Diller's proposed US $130 million park and performance pier on the Hudson, designed by Thomas Heatherwick. It turns out that Heatherwick is behind another park on the water proposed for London, this time for a Garden Bridge across the Thames.

Proposed Garden Bridge, London, by Thomas Heatherwick

Oliver Wainwright
Thomas Heatherwick plans $170m hovering miracle island for New York
The Guardian
 Nov 18, 2014

London's garden bridge: the public park where groups and cyclists aren't welcome
The Guardian
 Nov 19, 2014

A more complete view on London from the BD Journal (registration required):
David Rogers
Garden Bridge says parties of 8 are 'protest risk'
BD Online
Nov 19, 2014

(See also Addendum at end of this entry).

London's Garden Bridge is sponsored by a non-profit trust and will be built with public and private funds. On plans to restrict access for cyclists, protesters and large groups, Wainwright charges:

"Such a measure suggests that the garden bridge, as its critics have suspected, is not in fact a bridge – in the sense of being a public right of way across the river – but another privately managed tourist attraction, on which £60m of public money is to be lavished."

Wainwright points out the Disneyfied quality of both projects:

"It is another vision that could come straight from the set of Avatar – fecund flowerbeds erupting from mushroom-shaped columns, their canopies joining to support parkland above the water." 

Is this another step in the tacky Hollywoodization of public space, its commodification and conversion into entertainment and cheap fantasy? The next step up from the theme restaurants and clubs of the 1990s, such as those in New York designed by Broadway set designer John Rockwell? Though actually, peering through the fog of the atmospheric renderings, I don't think these places look all that bad.

Charles Moore famously said of the original Disneyland, "You have to pay for the public life". Public spaces have gotten better in New York with private involvement, as in Central Park. Though sometimes the tradeoffs are steep, as in Bryant Park. The alternative seems to be abandon and neglect. Or of course grass-roots community gardens, another form of privatization.

Maybe Diller and the Garden Bridge Trust are just following the example of Gordon Matta-Clark, carving new public spaces out of abandoned city piers, chain saw in hand.

Gordon Matta-Clark's "indoor water park", Day's End. Intervention on an abandoned New York pier, 1975. Source: Light Industry

Addendum
November 30, 2014

Rowan Moore, writing in The Observer, has also condemned the Garden Bridge proposal in an article published on November 22nd:

"The bridge’s fans back it with good intentions. They want something beautiful. They believe that a great city shouldn’t stand still. They are right to explore ideas like this. But there comes a time to recognise that the thing they love is not what they thought it would be, that their nice idea just doesn’t work. It is not a tranquil walk in woodlands. It is not a genuinely public place. It is not free. It is not a well-conceived piece of transport infrastructure. It is a crowded and overstyled chunk of heavy engineering garnished with urban parsley."

 Rowan Moore
The Thames garden bridge is nothing but a wasteful blight
The Observer
November 22, 2014

 Can't resist: one of the reader comments in favor of the bridge:

"Quite. A well travelled person said to me when I was a teenager that England is the best country in the world. Since then I've been very lucky to have travelled as much as he had and I think he was right. London especially has so much diversity in its appeal that an original idea like this one should be celebrated and as you suggest, if you don't do it why do anything at all?" 

I'm glad this person took the trouble to confirm his prejudices; I see he has made good use of all his traveling about.

The Unsustainable Monarchy

 Presenting Royal Face as a Representation of State, in the tradition of portraits from the times of Velázquez and Goya.
Source: El Periódico del Golfo

Following up on my recent post, The Other Face of the Spanish Monarchy, about the tensions during the recent ceremonies proclaiming Felipe VI the new King of Spain, I translate almost in its entirety an analysis by Javier Pérez Royo of the fatal historic vulnerabilities of the Spanish monarchy. The opinion piece, titled Monarquía insostenible, appeared in El País on June 27. 2014:

The problem of the Monarchy is not the Republic. It comes from the Monarchy itself and from the political system derived from the Founding Laws of General Franco that made the Restoration possible.

The Spanish Monarchy lacks any legitimacy of its own. Its store of legitimacy was exhausted by Carlos IV, Fernando VII, Isabel II and Alfonso XIII [monarchs from the 17th - 20th centuries, three of whom were deposed]. As a result, it is a species threatened with extinction that, if it is to survive, must not make any mistakes. As long as members of the royal family did not commit any visible errors, the institution was not put into question. But when errors could not be hidden, all the alarms went off. And hence the abdication. The first threat to the Monarchy has not come from the Republic, but from within the royal household.

What throws the survival of the Monarchy into doubt is not so much its errors as tbe exhaustion of the political system used to carry out the Transition, which was designed to guarantee the Restoration. Its objective was the Restoration. The instrument for this was the transition from dictatorship to democracy. At the end of the 20th century, it couldn't have been done any other way. But the objective was the Restoration, to which end an instrument was designed: the type of democracy that would permit a Restoration without risk.

There is a continuity between the Spanish constitutions of 1845, 1876 and 1978. All three, which cover almost the entire history of constitutional government in Spain, were guided by a distrust in the protagonism of common citizens in the political management of the country. In all of them, the Monarchy was the expression of this lack of confidence....

This is the reason why Spain has not reformed its Constitution. In order to reform the Constitution, the principle of democratic legitimacy cannot be held back. If it is, the link between the legitimacy of the Monarchy's origins and the legitimacy of its exercise will erode to the point of disappearing, and the political system will collapse. That is what has happened here in the past and I'm afraid it will occur again.

And I don't think the new King can prevent it.... A parliamentary monarchy cannot survive if the political system over which its is erected is rotten and, as a consequence, loses its legitimacy. Juan Carlos I and Felipe VI don't have the same responsibility that Alfonso XIII had for the decomposition of the First Restoration, but their position is almost as unsustainable.

But in reply to this, it should be pointed out that there are no major revolutionary movements taking violent action in the streets as in the time of Alfonso XIII, and none of the massive popular demonstrations that pushed along the democratic process during the Transition. The Monarchy can coast on a great deal of inertia for a good while yet, as can the political system with its endemic corruption scandals. People complain, but the government has not served up cadavers and violent repression as during the time of Alfonso XIII. Police have started charging demonstrations and swinging clubs. I hear they are preparing water cannon. Rubber bullets are infrequent and I haven't seen any tear gas. And demonstrations are still tiny.

The Other Face of the Spanish Monarchy

On the Proclamation of Felipe VI as the new King of Spain: reading under the surface, the untold story behind the media coverage: along the parade route and in front of the royal palace, few people actually showed up. Even less than on a normal shopping day on the Gran Via, according to the newspaper Público.

Note also the strong military and security presence during the event. And the fact that among the titles of the king is that of head of the Spanish military - he is still Franco's heir after all. 

The only thing significantly missing was a Mass, thank God. 

Not only were pro-republic demonstrations prohibited, so was the display of republican flags and even badges and T-shirts. There were several arrests on these grounds.

Missing from the ceremony was Cristina, one of the new king's sisters, whose husband is on trial for corruption, and who may be up for indictment herself. Just to play it safe, both sisters have been removed from the webpage of the royal family and have lost their titles as Infantas.  "Everything is perfectly normal," said through clenched teeth. 

So the monarchy -and the political system it awkwardly supports- still gives an impression of vulnerability and insecurity, And reacts badly, with little tact, grace or generosity. Every day it looks less like a consensus and more like an imposition.

Together with the silencing of moves for Catalan and Basque independence. Lip-service to democracy, while the imperatives of state rule, with the cooperation of the mainstream press.

I heard live the ruling Catalan party's leader in Madrid, Josep Antoni Duran i Lleida,  explain in Congress why they were abstaining from the vote for the abdication. He said that, unlike in the negotiations to create the post-Franco government 40 years ago, they had been shut out of the democratic process and silenced in their efforts to bring the democratic consensus up to date. 

Meanwhile, as the conservative government of Madrid avidly looks for the bones of Cervantes in an old convent, the bones of thousands shot at roadsides and cemetery walls during the Civil War and buried in ditches remain unattended by the government of that same party, despite survivors' calls for justice, dignity, remembrance. Who can then yet speak of forgiveness or normalcy? It is a time for struggle and confrontation. 

See my update: The Unsustainable Monarchy

Strange Times for the COAC

Strange times for the COAC - the architects' professional association in Barcelona, the Col·legi d'Arquitectes de Catalunya. Its headquarters, located on a prominent plaza facing the Barcelona Cathedral, is now festooned with a large, publicly sponsored advertisement, entirely covering its facade, that seems to be promoting, in the guise of a historic anniversary, Catalan independence.

The marquee below the poster is by Picasso, another in-your-face gesture, this one from the Franco years, when the artist was an official no-no.

And the COAC's exhibit space, apparently too valuable to be dedicated to architecture exhibits these days, has been turned into an ersatz gift shop. 'All very tastefully, done,' I suppose they imagine. Why don't they just lease it to Foot Locker?

Photos by DC, March 14, 2014

Born to Run

I couldn't resist republishing this blog from Exabruptos, by my colleague-in-arms, John Sandwich:



Readers of Spanish, please don't miss Jacinto Antón's virtual tour of the new museum of Catalan hurt feelings in El País this Sunday, Born to Si, Si.

During the restoration of the Born, a19th century market, archeologists discovered the remains of an entire neighborhood demolished by Bourbon conquerors in the early 18th century, in reprisal for Barcelona's siding with the wrong monarchy in the War of Succession.

The project for a library in the building was cancelled, and now it has been opened as the Born Centro Cultural, "a sort of theme park glorifying that Barcelona razed by Phillip V's Bourbon troops in 1714," in the words of a more uncritical report published in El País on September 10th.

Antón explains:
"The Catalan sovereignty movement finally has a modern tool capable of transmitting its version of history and stir emotions in a mass audience...

"The fundamental experience pursued in the Born CC does not truly belong to the field of historic knowledge, but rather to that of emoción identitaria, the identification with a people and a destiny, with its projection into the future ('the Catalan people maintained the memory of their liberty forever after'). And everything with a modern, impeccable aesthetic and design, equal to that of any European museum."

September 11, 2014 will be the third centennial of this conquest, just in time for the referendum on Catalan independence that the government of Arturo Más is attempting to organize, as a diversion from his disastrous economic policy.

You know the old routine, things are going bad, find someone to blame.

Makes me think back on the emotionally manipulative exhibit displays at Washington's Holocaust Museum, opened in the 1990s. There the aim of moral education is theoretically more universal, but as my friend David Cohn wrote at the time, shouldn't we have more faith in reasonable argument, also on moral grounds? Emotional communication is for another sphere -- but exactly which one?

Meanwhile the grim historic facts about the repression of Catalan identity on the part of centralizing forces from Madrid are quite solid. Archeologists recovered 300 cannon balls from the ruins under the Born, for example; 60 are in the exhibition.

A few more pearls:
"El Born CC, que tiene parte de Yad Vashem —el museo de los mártires y el heroísmo del Holocausto, en Jerusalén— y parte de parque temático, con un puntito de Nou Camp (en los dioramas y reconstrucciones históricas las casacas de las tropas que defendieron la ciudad son mayoritariamente azul y grana y las de los atacantes borbónicos, blancas)..."

"...por todas partes en el Born CC el visitante encuentra alusiones a lo feliz, fantástica y próspera (incluso con helados) que era la vida hasta la Guerra de Sucesión —como si los catalanes fueran un pueblo de industriosos hobbits sobre los que se cernía la sombra del Mordor borbónico y su “barbarie absolutista— y mensajes más o menos subliminales tipo '1714-2014 Vivir libre', 'Feliz Tricentenario', 'Reborn'...."

Crisis Casualties: Foreclosed Homeowners

Anti-eviction march in Bilbao this weekend, from El País.  © Luis Tejido (EFE)

News and Opinion
Amid Spain's economic woes, the drama of mortgage foreclosures has captured public and political attention recently.

Since the crisis started, some 400,000 families have been evicted from their homes for defaulting on mortgages, according to estimates.  The rate is about 3% of all outstanding home debt -- not an alarming number in economic terms, but staggering in human cost.

Protest movements to halt evictions have been growing, and leftist parties such as Izquerida Unida have for years been calling for major reforms in the harsh eviction laws, which strongly favor banks  over homeowners.

This fall, the protesters received the support of an association of judges, who demanded that the government take action. Judges  aren't supposed to be in the business of recommending legislation,  but they have assumed a degree of moral responsibility and authority before the public that Spain's politicians have largely lost. 

Several dramatic suicides by people caught up in evictions attracted the attention of the press (middle class people, who can mobilize public concern to a degree that the merely poor and working class seldom do), and the government was forced to consider the question with some urgency, although the measures they've announced amount to very little.

In Spain, companies are prohibited from cutting off your water or electricity for failure to pay their bills -- these utilities are considered essential to the right to life and dignity and so forth. But a bank can throw you out of your house for default, even though the right to decent housing is written into the Spanish constitution.

What is more, the subjects of foreclosure have no voice in eviction hearings. And the seizure of the property in question does not necessarily satisfy the debt with the bank. The value of the property is officially appraised and whatever is not covered by its value, including accumulating interest, remains as a debt on the shoulders of the evicted former homeowner.  And banks routinely manipulate appraisals downwards in their benefit, according to newspaper articles on the issue.

Families in Spain had few alternatives to high mortgages with floating interest rates in the years of the boom. The rental market here is very limited, while speculation sent home prices soaring.. In an article on November 11, for example, The New York Times reported on one foreclosure victim, a construction worker who paid US $ 320,000 --a staggering sum here-- for a basement apartment in the working class neighborhood of Carabanchel, and lost it to foreclosure three years after he lost his job.

Despite the pressure, the conservative government has done very little to alleviate the predicament of  families facing foreclosure -- in part, according to El País, due to counter-pressures from banks and Brussels, worried about Spain's general credibility.

The government proposes to pass a two-year moratorium on foreclosures for only a small percent of victims who must meet a number of conditions in terms of income, family size and other factors to qualify as "the most vulnerable" to "social exclusion".  Interest on their debt will continue to accrue during the moratorium. And the government has promised to set up a fund of apartments to rent at subsidized prices to evicted families, drawing on Spain's stock of vacant units, although such a government program will probably take years to get going.

What I don't understand is why so much is mobilized to rescue banks, and nothing for the victims of their manipulations. Conservative politicians talk about foreclosure victims in moral terms, as welchers on a business deal  --private property always seems to be the most sacred right for conservatives-- but balk at holding banks to the same moral standard.

Wouldn't it be more logical if some of the money sunk into bailing out banks was used to lower mortgage debt and payments for foreclosure victims too? The same money would end up in the banks anyway. Spain' stock of vacant apartments, vagrants and squatters would not continue to grow, and a lot of human suffering would be avoided.

But to enact something so simple and logical, so full of common sense and humanity, would probably take nothing short of a revolution.

Other basic measures should be enacted:

• Fixed interest rate for life of mortgage.
• The house as sole guarantee for the loan.

And the market should consider:

• Conversion of empty units to rentals facilitating long-term occupancy.
• Sale of empty units at real present market value. Banks and owners still resist serious markdowns (except when they are taking over foreclosed properties).

In the NY Times story, the construction worker in Carabanchel won a temporary reprieve from his  bank after protesters, outnumbering the police on the scene:

"By the end of the morning, bank and court officials had agreed to postpone Mr. Hernández’s eviction for six weeks. He still faces a debt of more than $330,000, more than he paid for the apartment. In Spain, mortgage holders are personally liable for the full amount of their mortgages. Then penalty interest charges and tens of thousands of dollars in court fees are added at foreclosure. Bankruptcy is no answer, either — mortgage debt is excluded."

El Pais has a web page dedicated to their ongoing coverage of this issue, which can be found here.

Link here to the Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca  or Platform for Those Affected by Mortgages, the popular movement leading opposition to evictions.

A story in El País on November 24th traces the links between the anti-eviction movement and the 15-M movement:
La lucha antidesahucios, el primer logro del 15-M

Add to these victories against evictions the demonstrations that forced Madrid's regional government to go back on its plan to convert La Princesa, the noted research hospital, into a geriatrics facility (a plan also criticized by professional associations). And the adventure towards Catalan autonomy sponsored by regional president Artur Más was also inspired by a massive pro-separatist demonstration in Barcelona on September 11th. As in the years of the transition to democracy or the mass protests against Basque terrorism, well-organized public demonstrations are proving again to be a powerful tool for shaping policy in the Spanish democracy.

Is this necessarily positive? Or does it point as well to a fragile rigidity in Spain's democratic institutions, unable to adequately respond to crises, and to the weakness of its politicians, lacking in leadership and vision? As in Catalan separatism, the impulses of the mob are not always so hot. But so far, in their level of civic awareness and active solidarity, popular movements and voters are way ahead of Spain's political class.

Abusive Working Conditions

Archleaks España offers inside reports by anonymous submitters about working conditions in some of the best-known architecture studios in Spain. No one may be very surprised, but the jump from word-of-mouth into print of reports about quite a few abusive employers is an overdue call to attention.

Many good architects work on the fringe of economic possibility (and others have made millions). Many dedicate themselves to their work to the same extreme lengths they expect of their employees. But the over-reliance on underpaid (or even unpaid) students and interns must be seriously examined. And not just in Spain. The site also has versions in English (with many international firms) and Italian.

The page is in its starting stages, so I would encourage everyone to honestly share their experience.

However, a lot of the comments are quite abusive themselves, using the safety of anonymity for insults and exaggerated sarcasms. The site claims to be screened. but it could well do with a lot more. And it needs work on a very sloppy web presentation.

Thanks to Fredy Massad  for the "heads up" on this.