The New World

30 Spaces for the 21st Century

By Rem Koolhaas (Guest Editor)

Kenn Brown

Rem Koolhaas cofounded the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) in

1975. He is also the founder of AMO, an architectural think tank and
consulting firm. His projects include the Kunsthal in Rotterdam, the
Guggenheim in Las Vegas, and the Prada store in New York. He has won
several international awards, including the Pritzker Architecture Prize in
2000. Koolhaas is Professor in Practice of Architecture and Urban Design
at Harvard Design School, and author of S,M,L,XL (1995) with Bruce Mau
and Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (1978). He
was the subject of the retrospective exhibition, Rem Koolhaas and the
Place of Public Architecture, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in
1995.

Our old ideas about space have exploded. The past three decades have
produced more change in more cultures than any other time in history.
Radically accelerated growth, deregulation, and globalization have redrawn
our familiar maps and reset the parameters: Borders are inscribed and
permeated, control zones imposed and violated, jurisdictions declared and
ignored, markets pumped up and punctured. And at the same time, entirely
new spatial conditions, demanding new definitions, have emerged.
Where space was considered permanent, it now feels transitory - on its way
to becoming. The words and ideas of architecture, once the official
Doug Aitken
language of space, no longer seem capable of describing this proliferation
of new conditions. But even as its utility is questioned in the real world, architectural language
survives, its repertoire of concepts and metaphors resurrected to create clarity and definition in new,
unfamiliar domains (think chat rooms, Web sites, and firewalls). Words that die in the real are reborn
in the virtual.
So, for this special issue of Wired, we at AMO have invited a cadre of
writers, researchers, critics, and artists to report on the world as they see it.
What follows are 30 spaces that fall into three rough clusters: waning
spaces once celebrated, now hemorrhaging aura; contested spaces,
continuously refined by the battles for their dominion; and new spaces, only
recently understood as space at all. Together they form the beginning of an
inventory, a fragment of an image, a pixelated map of an emerging world.

Doug Aitken

and Markus Schaefer

Concept and editorial direction: AMO: Rem Koolhaas, Lucia Allais, and
Michael Rock, with Jeffrey Inaba, Brendan McGetrick, Hans Ulrich Obrist,

Combine and Conquer

EURO SPACE: A State of Mind
By Mark Leonard

The European Union's obsession with legislation is usually taken as a sign of

weakness - a foil to the pyrotechnic might of the US military machine. But take a
closer look: The bureaucrats in Brussels have been busy creating a new political
space that has the power to make the 21st century the European century. The EU's
geographical expansion to 25 countries, which will grow to include a dozen smaller
ones and maybe even Russia, is nothing compared with its increasing legal and
moral reach. The 80,000 pages of laws the EU has developed since the common
market was formed in 1957 - influencing everything from genetic labeling to human
rights - have made Europe the world's first viral political space, spreading its
authority in three innovative ways.
First, it spreads by stealth. Although the EU
legislates up to half of its member states' laws,
most of their trade, and many policy decisions from agriculture to economics - it's practically
invisible. Take Britain. There are no European
courts, legislative chambers, or business
regulations on display in London. Instead, just
as a virus takes over a healthy cell, the EU
operates through the shell of traditional political
structures. The British House of Commons,
AMO
British Law Courts, and British civil servants are
still there, but they have all become covert agents of the EU. This is no accident. By
creating common standards that are implemented through national institutions,
Europe can take over the world without becoming a target for hostility. While every
US company, embassy, and military base is a terrorist target, Europe's invisibility
allows it to spread its influence without provocation. Put bluntly, even if there were
people angry enough to want to fly planes into European buildings, there is no
World Trade Center to target.

PLUS
The New World
Euro Space
Nano Space
Space Space
Relationship Space
Dump Space
Atlas Space
Voice Space
Office Space
Home Space
Bush Space
Protest Space
Boom Space
Body Space
Research Space
Tight Space
Art Space
Sex Space
Border Space
Crowd Space

Second, the EU thrives on diversity. The former US Secretary of State Henry

Future Space
Kissinger once complained that Europe doesn't have a single telephone number.
When there's a crisis, Americans don't know who to turn to as the authentic voice of Secure Space
opinion. This is because Europe possesses many centers of power. Even the splits
Color Space
between new and old, and the accidental good cop/bad cop routine played by
Britain and France, can be seen as a sign of the EU's strength. The ultimate failure Blog Space
of diplomacy leading up to the war on Iraq shows that the EU is less powerful when
Waning Space
it doesn't share a common vision of the world, but even so, the multi-headed nature
Robo Space
of the union did force the US to take its case to the UN. The best way to
understand how Europe functions is to look at a globally networked business like
DNA Space
Visa. By sharing control widely, and by making it impossible for any single faction
Ad Space
or institution to dominate, a networked business can combine its global presence
with innovation and diversity to gain the kind of edge normally reserved for smaller Golf Space
entities. Visa, though it represents the largest single block of consumer spending
Limbo Space
power in the world ($362.4 trillion annually), is a skeletal organization with just a
few thousand employees. The fact that Europe does not have one leader - but
Public Space
rather a network of centers of power united by common policies and goals - means
that it can expand to accommodate ever-greater numbers of countries without collapsing, and continue
to provide its members with the benefits of being the largest market in the world.
Third, Europe "syndicates" its legislation and values, often by threatening others with economic
isolation. Many governments outside the continent have adopted Europe's regulations to get access to
its market. Even US companies have been forced to follow European regulations in at least three
spheres: M&A, GM foods, and data privacy. But this model of passive aggression has had its most
dramatic effect in the EU's backyard. Consider some of the dangers faced by both Europe and the US:

drug trafficking, large flows of migrants across hard-to-police borders, transnational criminal networks.
Europe encourages political and economic reform by holding out the possibility of integration into the
EU, and this strategy has had more success than the swift military interventions of the Monroe
Doctrine. While the EU is deeply involved in Serbia's reconstruction and supports its desire to be
"rehabilitated" as a European state, the US offers Colombia no such hope of integration through
multilateral institutions or structural funds, only the temporary "assistance" of American military training
missions and aid, and the raw freedom of the US market.
This new type of power means that Europe effects change from the inside out. By contrast, when the
US engages other countries, it does so through the prism of geopolitics. Talks with Russia focus on
nuclear weapons, NATO expansion, and civilian control of the military. Talks with Colombia look at the
flow of drugs across its borders. Europeans start from the other end of the spectrum: What values
underpin the state? What are its constitutional and regulatory frameworks? Turkey renounced the
death penalty to further its chance of admission into the EU; Britain rescinded its ban on gays in the
military; and Italy reformed its profligate economic ways to meet EU standards. Europe's obsession
with legal frameworks means that it can completely transform the countries it comes into contact with,
instead of just skimming the surface. The US might have changed the regime in Afghanistan, but
Europe is changing all of Polish society, from its economic policies and property laws to its treatment
of minorities and what gets served on the nation's tables.
The overblown rhetoric directed at the "American Empire" misses the fact that the US reach is shallow
and narrow. The lonely superpower can bribe, bully, or impose its will almost anywhere in the world but when its back is turned, its potency wanes. The strength of the EU, conversely, is broad and deep:
Once sucked into its sphere of influence, countries are changed forever. Europe is a state of mind that
cannot be contained by traditional boundaries.

Mark Leonard ([email protected]) is director of the Foreign Policy Centre and author of Network
Europe.

Microcosmos
NANO SPACE: The New Space Race is the Battle For More and More Control Over Less and
Less.
By Larry Smarr

I have seen the future, and it is small. Steady advances in miniaturization are leading technologists
beyond the scale where Newton's laws govern the world and into the realm I term the nano arena.
Within the unimaginably tiny space of 100 by 100 nanometers - one millionth the area of the period at
the end of this sentence - we're about to witness an amazing collision of physics, biology, and
information technology. Developments in nano space will define this century just as electronics defined
the last.

IBM Almaden Research Center

Outside the arena, electrons behave like billiard balls.

Squeeze them into narrower confines, though, and
they behave like waves rather than particles, and
counterintuitive quantum phenomena like tunneling,
spin, and entanglement take effect. In conventional
devices such as microprocessors, this is a problem;
electrons won't stay on their copper paths,
spontaneously disappearing and reappearing
elsewhere. But some engineers now realize that if
they design with quantum effects in mind, they can
build incredibly small electronic devices. And if
scientists can manipulate individual light quanta
within the arena - a field known as nanophotonics these devices can communicate.

Consider IBM's quantum corral, an elliptical

arrangement of iron atoms on a copper base 14 nm across. The corral, invented in 1993, could
conceivably store information by holding atoms that signify 1s and 0s.
IBM's minuscule invention is only a little smaller than a more common information-bearing
nanostructure: rhinovirus, the cause of the common cold. Rhinovirus' 20-sided shell of interlocking
proteins protects an RNA strand of roughly 7,000 nucleotides. That is, this replicating nanomachine
essentially carries 7 Kbytes of executable code.
The quantum corral stores data. Rhinovirus executes a program. Design a nanophotonic interface
between them and, in principle, you've got a computer only 100 times bigger than a silicon atom!
Today, the corral is considered an engineered device, while rhinovirus is viewed as a biological entity.
Within the nano arena, though, the distinction is meaningless. Both are nanomachines, one built on a
substrate of metal, the other on a substrate of organic molecules. Bridging the gap will spark an
explosion of playful development as nanoscale devices are snapped together as if they were Lego
blocks. At first, technologists will replicate familiar devices like motors and switches, but soon they'll
set out in entirely new directions. Nanocomputers will be cheap and plentiful, making it possible to
embed the world with intelligence. Everything will have information-processing capability - every brick,
bicycle, and body.
Scientists and engineers who come of age working in the nano arena won't cloister themselves in
disciplinary guilds. They'll be equally adept with the tools of the bio lab, the chip fab, and the physics
department. They'll be masters of bioinfonanotech.

Larry Smarr, a professor in UC San Diego's Department of Computer Science and Engineering,
directs the California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology.

Mission to Mars, Utah

SPACE SPACE: Isolation as Lifestyle
By Hans Ulrich Obrist and Rem Koolhaas

William J. Clancey has been to Mars - or the closest thing to it. Chief scientist for human-centered
computing at the NASA Ames Research Center, Clancey has led simulation experiments in the Arctic
and the Utah desert where scientists and volunteers live for weeks at a time as if they were on the

red planet. Affiliated with the Mars Society, Clancey's studies show how humans negotiate small
spaces - how we create routines and behaviors to capitalize on limited resources.
Wired: How and where did these simulated expeditions come about?
CLANCY: Over the years there have been experiments by the Russians, by NASA, and by private
organizations. The Mars Society started in 2001 in the Arctic, when we built the Flashline Mars Arctic
Research Station. Flashline was the dotcom that donated almost $200,000 to help us build the facility.
The second one, called the Mars Desert Research Station, was built in the Utah desert. A third is
being constructed by the European Mars Society and will be shipped to Iceland this summer. And a
fourth is being created by the Australian Mars Society; it is intended to be located in the desert of
southern Australia. The structures are all about the same size; 8 meters in diameter. The ones that are
in the Arctic have two floors: an upper deck with eating, sleeping and working areas, and a lower deck
with the laboratory, toilets, and other facilities.

Mars Society

What are you looking for in your simulations? Are you looking for how comfortable people are,
how stable they are?
Well, there's a distinction between a spacecraft - a vehicle or capsule barely large enough for people
to move around in - and something that we think of as a building, like a space station. The current
space station is the size of a three-bedroom home. But living in space for many years changes the
way people use their space, their personal space. In the research stations that the Mars Society has
constructed, we have this idea of the stateroom, a place - with a door, a table, and personal storage where you can get away from people. We found that, after just two weeks, people who have a
computer connection prefer to go into their stateroom for many hours of the day, very often with the
door closed. It was not that they had a problem with other people. It just seems that for this kind of
work, we like to have no distractions.
You've said that traveling to Mars will make future space travel "less scripted." What do you
mean by that?
I mean that what astronauts would be doing wouldn't be planned in as much detail and so far in
advance, and they would not be monitored minute by minute, hour by hour. The main reason is that,
with the distance of a mission to Mars, the time delay with Earth is so long (up to 20 minutes) that it
prevents conversation, and people are required to use email. Also, the Apollo missions lasted only a
few days, which you can actually plan down to the minute. But a mission of several years is too long to
be planned down to the minute - too much can happen. Another factor is the size of the crew. When
you have six people living alone and making decisions, they will develop their own type of autonomy.
They have to be capable of acting on their own, not calling back every time there is a problem.
So the subjects are essentially pretending to go to Mars by living in the desert. What is your role
as a monitor?
In April of 2002, I was most interested in having a "closed simulation": a really tight study of how we

used the habitat - how we planned out time and adjusted our plans. So we needed to be really
isolated, only speak to ourselves, without visitors, and use mail to communicate with the outside. This
year, we will be testing a wireless computing and communications system to help people navigate and
schedule their time, and keep records of what they are doing. We'll have as many as 15 people, not all
living in the habitat, but mostly in the hotel near by, about five miles away.
What is your vision for the next 50 years?
We are certainly capable, in 50 years, of having an Antarctica-style permanent science colony on the
moon, and of having a space station located between the moon and Earth. And it is hard for me to
believe that, in 50 years, we will not have made our first mission to Mars. There is good reason to
believe that eventually there will be a more or less permanent base there.

Hans Ulrich Obrist is curator of the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.

Six Degrees of Interconnection

RELATIONSHIP SPACE: Meet Your Network Neighbors
By Duncan Watts

When we talk about distance, we almost always mean the space between objects or locations in the
physical world. And for good reason: Most of the time, that's the sort of distance that makes sense.
But after a century-long revolution in communications and transportation, physical space can be
limiting or even misleading. Sociologists have long thought in terms of social space, the gap between
individuals' wealth, education, ethnicity, or religion. More recently, however, social scientists and
mathematicians have begun to examine another kind of distance, one increasingly important to our
understanding of the world: network space.

namebase.org

A fascinating (and deceptively simple) example of network space is the small-world phenomenon, the
idea that anyone on the planet can be connected to anyone else through just six degrees of
separation. Although the notion had been floating around in popular culture for much of the 20th
century, it was only tested in the late-'60s in an experiment conducted by social psychologist Stanley
Milgram. Milgram gave letters to about 300 people in Boston and Omaha with instructions that the
envelopes ultimately reach a single "target," a Boston stockbroker. The letters could be sent only to a
personal friend of the current holder, who then received the same instructions. To the surprise of

many, more than 60 of the letters reached their goal, changing hands, on average, only six times.
Milgram's conclusion was that people who seem very distant in physical or social space may actually
be closer than we imagine.
To account for this, we need to start thinking of individuals as nodes embedded in a complex web of
social, economic, and institutional ties. In network space, two nodes can be closely connected
regardless of their physical or social proximity. Physical and social influences don't go away, of course
- often we know people because they live near us or share important characteristics such as education
or profession - but the relationship of these factors with network space has remained a mystery for
decades. Milgram, for example, was never able to explain why his experiment worked. Network data is
difficult to collect, and analysis of complex networks is nearly impossible without powerful computers.
In the past five years, we've begun to understand how network space plays out both within and
beyond the social world. The small-world phenomenon, it turns out, also shows up among power grids,
neural networks, biochemical reactions, interlocking corporate boards of directors, collaborative
networks of scientists, and even movie stars. Which is why Kevin Bacon appears to be the center of
the cinematic universe. (It's just happenstance - any Hollywood actor would work just as well.)
In terms of our perception of the world, though, six degrees from someone is still a long way. We care
a great deal about our friends (one degree), a bit about friends of friends we haven't met (two
degrees). But a friend of a friend of a friend? Someone three degrees away is, for all practical
purposes, a stranger, no more relevant to us than someone off the street.
But what happens to them can matter a lot. The explosion of HIV into a global pandemic, for example,
was driven in part by the widely held perception that it was confined to gay men and intravenous drug
users. If you didn't know anyone "like that," you didn't have anything to worry about. But it turns out
that what happens beyond our limited network horizon can still hurt us. Or help us: We can't just call
up a friend of a friend of a friend and request a job, but we can ask that person for help by making the
right connections. In fact, we do this all the time, tracking down people by email, over the phone, or at
cocktail parties by "networking."
Now that we're starting to understand network space, the implications of it are vast. Whether we're
considering contagious diseases, cultural fads, or trends in the stock market, we need to start thinking
in terms of networks. Sometimes they help us, and sometimes they hurt us - being connected can be
good or bad. But either way, networks are always there. And when not just you but anyone can be
connected to anyone else on earth in just six steps, what goes around comes around - faster than you
think.

Duncan Watts, the author of Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age, is associate professor of
sociology at Columbia University and an external faculty member of the Santa Fe Institute.

Wasteland
DUMP SPACE: Freedom From Order
By Rem Koolhaas

Flying over Lagos, Nigeria, we discovered a huge urban dump. It was smoldering. Like a reverse
Niagara, a wall of smoke rose to the sky. From the helicopter, you could smell it. The dump should
have been awful, yet on its surface lived a community: improvised hovels, likely constructed from the
contents of the dump. This was the dump as housing, as territory, as livelihood.

The dump is the lowest form of spatial organization. Pure

accumulation, it is formless, has an uncertain perimeter and
location. The surface of the dump reveals only part of its
contents; the dump is fundamentally inconsistent and
unpredictable. But it has potential; it attracts scavengers.
Things and people that are dumped have somehow lost their
previous usefulness - once they were something, now they are
waste. They don't work; they are empty; they are beyond
resuscitation (or love or respect), no matter how modest.
Fresh foods and things that still work are stored with care, kept in
special climatic conditions, assembled with a degree of formal
precision - with premeditation and organization - in piles,
mountains, racks, shelves. Only the worthless is dumped. The
worthless no longer has any right to geometry, to order. To be
dumped is to be condemned to the world of disorder.
AMO

But in an overorganized world - a groaning, decrepit universe of

systems - the shapeless and the worthless have a new value, a new allure. The dump is free from
constraints, from selection, from the tyranny of style.

New Frontiers
The Geography of Change
By AMO

At the start of the 20th century, 10 percent of the earth's population lived in cities. By the end of this
decade, 50 percent will be urban dwellers. By 2015, there will be 58 metro areas with more than 5
million inhabitants each. Of these enclaves, 48 will be located outside the developed world. The lowerprofile cities - those like Bombay, Lagos, and Dhaka - are flourishing the most, while traditional megametropolises, such as London, Osaka, and Detroit, are stagnating.
The world's population booms and busts every 60 minutes. Here's a look at the net population change
per hour - from migrations, births, and deaths - for the fastest-growing and fastest-declining cities.

AMO

NEW CONTENDERS
The United States, Europe, Japan, Canada, and
Australia now form an inner circle of affluence and
power. Due to their already high level of prosperity,
these countries are finding it difficult to improve their
clout and wealth. Meanwhile, less mighty but more
populous contenders like China and India are closing
the gap.

AMO

NEW ISLANDS
For decades, multinationals and smaller-scale
scoundrels alike have turned to regulation-light island
nations to set up tax havens. Extend the metaphor
and you find new chains of so-called islands emerging
to evade the long reach of government intrusion. Even
as globalization fosters uniformity, these "developing"
nations exploit differences.

AMO

NEW POLITICS
Political change is fueled by fresh ideas. From the US
Progressive movement of the 1900s to the Prague
Spring to last decade's Gingrich revolution, new ways
of thinking give birth to bold policies. These days, the
freshest political ideas are coming from two very
different sources: the activist left and the
establishment right.
The left is fueled by a loose network of activist groups.
Their preferred method: massive demonstrations,
organized largely through the Net. On February 15,
groups like Attac, People's Global Action, and United
for Peace and Justice orchestrated F15, the first ever
global protest against war in Iraq.

AMO
Think tanks are a hotbed of activity on the right.

America, Europe, and Asia.

On the right, think tanks are a hotbed of activity. A

new conservatism is flowing from a network of policy
shops, where the free exchange of both business
cards and ideas is transforming governments in

NEW GLOBALISTS
The world's 30 largest multinationals (based on
revenue) all hail from one of three places: the United
States, Europe, or Japan. Only one - the US Postal
Service - lacks a global presence, while the 30 biggest
companies outside these areas (historically known as
the Group of 7 nations) tend to serve local or regional
markets closer to home. Nearly half of these
multinationals outside of the G7 are mining their
country's natural resources.
Last year, China showed the greatest growth on the
list, with 10 companies, ranging from telcos to banks a jump from only three firms in 1995, according to the
Fortune Global 500. Each of these outfits is stateowned and dependent on the internal China market.
But other companies on the list of emerging
multinationals have found a way to go global - even
AMO
firms that began by serving markets in their own
respective countries. Take, for instance, some of the top companies in South Korea: LG International,
Hyundai Corp., and Samsung Corp. All three are industrial conglomerates that started out as
import/export trading divisions for their products but have since branched out. LG International
processes and sells food and clothing; Samsung does construction; Hyundai is involved with the steel
industry.
These maps chart 60 headquarters, roughly scaled to company revenues, and mark the various
worldwide offices (Note: these maps are cropped and resized for online publication).
Pick up a newsstand copy of Wired magazine 11.06 for complete graphics of the numbers and
trends shaping the Geography of Change.

Atlas design and conception: AMO: Markus Schaefer, Reinier de Graaf, Theo Deutinger, Nanne de
Ru

Now Hear This

VOICE SPACE: When Space Starts Speaking. We Listen.
By Paul Elliman

Our cities can finally talk to us. Using just a few words at a time, they speak from the walls and ceilings
of buildings, from elevator cars, supermarket checkouts, and subway trains - offering directional
advice, even warnings. It may not amount to a full dialog, but through a range of technology, involving
recordings as well as complex language-modeling programs, our movement can now be guided by the
voices of audio signage.
These spoken forms of public information occupy their own place in the city, an acousmatic space.
The term comes from film, describing characters that speak but remain concealed; "mysterious
characters," as French critic Michel Chion describes it, "hidden behind curtains, in rooms or hideouts
robots, computers, ghosts." But these sounds, this space, has transcended the cinema and made its
way into everyday life - even if audio signage retains a theatrical quality, as if this were necessary to
the messages it imparts. In a survey carried out by London Underground, the favorite choice for a
"redesign" of its public address system was a voice-impersonation of Marilyn Monroe.

Corbis Sygma

The voices of audio signage fall between the scripted characters of both typography and cinema. Like
typefaces, they convey distinctive identities. But we also recognize in their tones the lush advertising
sirens of Blade Runner and Minority Report, or the authoritarian chill in the speech of the Wizard of
Oz. Certain voices may turn out to have even closer associations with power and authority than meets
the ear. New York subway-car announcements feature presenters from Bloomberg radio, the station
owned by the mayor, Michael Bloomberg.
Airports and railway stations were some of the first places to adopt talking signs. Since the 1970s,
"Mind the gap" - advice from former radio presenter Peter Lodge to take care when stepping from the
platform into a train - has been a sonic landmark for anyone visiting London. But audio signage has
moved beyond simple one-line directives to more complex systems. On the Madrid subway, the
recorded voices of a man and a woman perform a sequence of short duets just before each station.
The man opens with "Prxima estacin" and is closely followed by the woman, who identifies the stop:
"Plaza de Castilla." With the persistence of a running commentary, the friendly female voice of the
Shanghai subway follows you from train to platform, to ticket hall, to street, pointing out safety features
and directions, suggesting bars, restaurants, and department stores.
Beyond the messages' vocal friendliness or familiarity, a more significant feature of acousmatic space
is that the spoken words seem to come from nowhere, their infrastructural origins carefully concealed.
Rather than being talking ghosts in the machine, these characters are a sequence of repeated speech
patterns. The voice, once thought of as uniquely human, is a new benchmark in our relationship with
technology - talking and walking us though the acousmatic spaces of the city. In an elevator on the
26th floor: "The doors are now closing." In the carriage of a subway car: "Change here for connecting
lines to 4, 5, and 6 trains." Moving though an automated checkout in a supermarket: "Thank you, have
a great day."

Paul Elliman is a London-based designer and assistant professor at the Yale School of Art.

Migrant Labor
OFFICE SPACE: Where do You Want to Work Today?
By Rem Koolhaas (Guest Editor)

George T. Shaheen

Ever since designers reinvented the workplace as a landscape of movable parts, flexibility has been
the mantra of corporate offices. With modular cubicles, furniture on wheels, and wireless technologies,
the office would become a generously hospitable environment that could be endlessly reconfigured.
But the promise of vacancy-on-demand is now being fulfilled less by a flexible workspace than by a
nomadic staff. Photographer Jacqueline Hassink explored this theme in Mindscapes, her exhibit on
public and private office space.
At Accenture's Chicago office, the lobby looks like a living room, a cluster of workstations like a caf.
Many employees change desks every day, with only impersonal cabinets as a permanent base.
"There's hardly any private space anymore," Hassink says. Without the sheen of futurism, the
communal cool of flexibility is making way for the anonymity of generic space.

Jacqueline Hassink

Martha Stewart is Editing Your Life (That Includes

You, Bill Gates)
HOME SPACE: Your Home, The New Public Plaza
By Beatriz Colomina and Rem Koolhaas

You once said in an article that your home in Westport, Connecticut, was "underutilized," and you
described Westport itself as a fairly grim example of isolation. You suggested there are fewer ties
between people, and their patterns have been eroded by the introduction of generic shops, all of

which is making the suburban experience thinner and thinner. Do you think your audience views you,
to some extent, as a virtual antidote to their isolation?
STEWART: There is isolation between houses in the suburbs. The
homes I like the best are totally occupied, busy, and useful, whether
it's a tiny little house or a great big one. Rarely do you find a great big
house that's used in a good way. So I prefer smaller spaces that are
full of books, full of things that people are doing. My favorite room is
my sister's kitchen, with three computers on the table, the sewing
machine, all the thread, the patterns, the animals, pots on the stove.
It's that lively hub that really attracts me. All I really want is a threeroom house. The home I have designed at my new farm in Bedford,
New York, is a three-room house: bedroom on top, living room in the
middle, and kitchen on the ground. My new apartment in Manhattan is
two rooms - two floors, really - but two rooms. The Bunschaft house [in
East Hampton] that I bought interested me because it was three
rooms. That's all I want. It fits me, fits my lifestyle.
Rem Koolhaas

But you have already mentioned eight rooms. Each house is small,
but they add up to eight rooms.
Ah, but my houses, Rem, are my laboratories, so I have to have them. They are all different styles, so
I can experiment: How do you cope with the modern way of living in an 1800 house, a 1925 house, a
1960 house, and a 2001 house? Bill Gates' house, for example, is totally out of date now. He built it
right before wireless happened. The big tunnels for all his wires - he doesn't need any of that stuff
anymore.
So it's aging faster than homes that are more traditional?
Right.
Why do you think so many people want to learn from you?
Well, we have been editing, and editing, and editing - rooms, and living spaces. I can go in a room and
just take out, take away.
But you described your favorite room as a prototype of completely unedited living. So this is my real
question: Living, traditionally, was unedited. Yet you're a huge editor, and you're hugely successful.
I think people realize that in that edited space can be life. Nobody complains that our sets look empty
and devoid, because we build them as real rooms. The sets for my television show work - they are
enlarged copies of my real spaces.
What do you think your audience does with your advice? Do they turn their houses into Martha
Stewart houses?
No! I don't go into people's houses and see me everywhere, not at all. They get ideas from our
magazines, our publications, and our TV show. That's how they get inspired.
What would you say has changed in the experience of the home in the past 20 years?
The biggest challenge has been incorporating technology. It's hard, in an old home, to become wired.
The complicated nature of the building makes it very hard to get wires out of view.
Is there anything that you think ought to be invented to make all of us happier?
I have a dream - a computer screen that can be anywhere. It would be voice-activated - I'd like to be
able to talk to my screen, on my refrigerator or on my wall. I'm busy, I'm always running around, so I
want instant on/off. I know it can be done. The homemaker doesn't want to wait. She wants to make
time to do other things.
Have you talked to anybody about this?
I've talked to Steve Jobs, and to Bill Gates' crew, about a technology for the homemaker, but they're
not interested. So I'm developing my own software, a home organizer. It tells you what kind of curtain
you could make and gives you a pattern and the yardage. It gives you proportions with which you can
design your room. It also tells you how much water your house used last August - no need to go back
to the paper file. I want my utility company, my insurance company, to send me everything via
computer. I call it living by synopsis. It's very simple, but I think it will be very big. I've been thinking

about this for five years, and we now have an outline for it. I presented it to John Doerr's guys [at the
VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers], and they said, well, that's rather ambitious. It's not
ambitious, it just takes a long time.
Not only did you build an empire based on your taste, but now Martha Stewart is moving into new
territories - Japan, and possibly China. Is there anything that you would not want to export?
No.
Is taste exportable?
Look, the world has become a smaller place. Access to the Internet has enabled every single culture
to relate to every other culture. I have China, the largest country in the world, yet to conquer - and I
don't mean conquer egomaniacally. I would love them to know about transferware [a type of
decorated pottery] because, in fact, they developed it.
But let's make the question a bit more political. The unhindered progress of American civilization in
many different countries is beginning to register some resistance. Do you feel that?
They hate us. But mostly for our politics, not for our lifestyle. They don't hate the way we cook; they
hate the way we behave. So I can't take any responsibility for any of that. All I can do is help
everybody, everywhere, live a little better.

Beatriz Colomina is an architectural historian and director of the PhD program at Princeton
University's School of Architecture.

Trailblazer
BUSH SPACE: Looking Up and Down at the Same Time
By Sanford Kwinter

Rolex Awards / Eric Vandeville

In the far reaches of the Kalahari Desert, in southern Africa, researcher Louis Liebenberg is deploying
what may be the first illiterate computers integrated into a hunter-gatherer society, a group known as
the San Bushmen. The desert natives, now thought to be the first people, are famous for their
mysterious capacity to decipher animal tracks, or spoor, in the natural environment. The plethora of

specific data that a Bushman can extract from even a partial spoor has astonished scientists for
decades: This unusual ability is subtle and multispectral; it's steeped in an experience of nature that
recognizes no division of life into distinct categories.
Liebenberg's handheld device allows a Bushman to enter spoor readings and other observations, hit a
button, and register, via satellite, the place and time of the observation. The information is transferred
to a central database, where it is correlated to produce a dynamic map of the location, and then used
to study ecological relationships, animal behavior patterns, and even poaching activity (a Bushman
can tell from a track whether an animal is fleeing a human or natural predator). The info is also used to
inform guides about activities of scientific, documentary, or tourist significance, as well as for a wide
variety of conservation applications.
Tracking is one of the longest continuous traditions of systematic knowledge in existence today. But
it's vanishing with alarming speed in the wake of such modernizations as the GPS transmitter, the allterrain vehicle, state-administered animal husbandry, tourism, and so on. Liebenberg's work
seamlessly connects the earth's oldest form of knowledge to its most modern, sophisticated, and
automatic counterpart. It represents an extraordinary moment in technology transfer. Indeed,
Liebenberg has produced something akin to a Stone Age computer by hacking into a bygone world.

Sanford Kwinter, author of the forthcoming Far From Equilibrium, is a New York-based writer who
teaches design at Rice University.

Quiet Riot
PROTEST SPACE: When Speech is Zoned, is it Free?
By Sarah Whiting

The public image projected during the G8 summit in July 2001 could not have been more imperial.
Thirteen-foot barbed steel fences demarcated two restricted zones within the historic center of Genoa,
Italy: Red, for residents and delegates, and Yellow, under police control, for demonstrators. Voided of
local activity, the city gained an urbanism of eerie luxury; emptiness blanketed the normally Fiat-filled
streets surrounding the Palazzo Ducale. The silence caused some journalists to compare the
metropolis to medieval towns hit by the bubonic plague. They were wrong. The minicity that emerged
in Genoa belonged entirely to the 21st century. The streets were cannily rezoned, with physical space
neatly containing and curtailing speech and action. Organized protest had met the security state's
science of crowd control: free speech zoning.

Armin Linke

Urban zoning originated in 19th-century Europe as a tool for regulating land and building uses. The
movement grew out of concerns over the way cities were being transformed by industrialization. In the
US, New York's 1916 Zoning Ordinance codified the size and location of skyscrapers to allow light to
reach the streets below. But by the time of Genoa 85 years later, regulations had shifted from height
and land use to limits on population density and access. From a tool of permanence and planning,
zoning became an instrument of transience and politics.
Today, our public sphere - spaces where people can freely exchange opinions, including physical
locales like cafs as well as figurative ones like newspapers - appears to be imploding. What we call
public is being radically compressed into, at best, mere megabytes. Genoa will forever be
remembered as the summit whose carefully calibrated precincts were pierced by the haunting death of
23-year-old protester Carlo Giuliani. The Red Zone's meetings were far less attractive to cameras than
the colorful cacophony surrounding them, and many of the 430 people injured in the Yellow Zone
shared media airspace with G8 heads of state.
If Genoa partitioned free speech, subsequent G8 conferences have pushed it even further from the
action. The 2002 meeting was held in Kananaskis, Alberta - a region so remote that even delegates
had difficulty reaching it. And the 2003 venue of Evian, a French spa town squeezed between a
mountain and a lake, explicitly excluded protesters from Evian itself - forcing them onto Web sites,
where they plotted a blockade of the town's access roads.

Armin Linke

Such Web activism has blurred the distinction between organized and spontaneous speech. Webfueled protests, such as those this spring against the war in Iraq, offer the perfect Alice-in-Wonderland
escape hatch from Genoa-like controls. For all its benefits, the Web remains a virtual space. To the
extent it enables speech to break free of containment, it is a welcome tool. But it isn't altogether the
solution. Our Free Speech Zone needs a new shape, one with less mapping and more latitude. If it's
dull nostalgia to dream of caf politics, it's deliberate neglect to stand by while dialog and debate are
zoned out of our democracies.

Sarah Whiting is an assistant professor at Harvard's Graduate School of Design and is a design
principal at the architectural firm WW.

Life in the Bust Belt

BOOM SPACE: What's Left After the Thrill is Gone?
By Po Bronson

Each night it's a different hotel or country club, a different speaker. The script is always the same:
Hang in there. Cycles are inevitable. The Valley will recover. It always has.
Tonight, the location is the Menlo Circus Club, which is not in Menlo Park but in Atherton, the toniest of
the Valley's bedroom communities. Those wearing name tags are alumni of UC Berkeley's Haas
School of Business. The speaker who takes the podium is the economist and former politician Tom
Campbell, elected five times to Congress as the representative of Silicon Valley. He is now the dean of
the Haas School.

Eddie Opara (2x4)

Campbell's no fool. It's hard to find the shine today on what just yesterday was the shining new
metropolis, our New Jerusalem. "I'm supposed to be happy and upbeat," he laughs, knowing he's got
only crumbs to be upbeat about. "The recovery has been soft because the recession was soft."
Unemployment isn't really so bad: 6.8 percent. Under the spell of his commanding confidence, the
name tags forget that regional unemployment would double if one counted the legions who have either
stopped looking for work or packed up and left the Valley in U-Hauls over the past two years.
"We need the Next New Thing," he admits. He believes biotech will drive the Valley's economy. Page
Mill Road is now lined with biotech and medical-device companies. Campbell is calm and assured and for a moment, the audience forgets that most of them can't get a job in biotech, because their
degree is a master's in business, not a PhD in immunology.
When pressed, Campbell insists his optimism is a matter of faith in the underlying value system that
hatched the Valley's many booms: "We believe in widely disseminated information," he says. "We
believe in liberty. We're comparatively non-prejudicial - in the Valley, it's what you've done, not who
you are. It's what you believe, not who your family is. We believe in the ability of the individual in a
country that allows us to be free." In other words, give individuals with vision access to lots of capital,
loosen the reins of bureaucracy, and they cannot help but build the future.
Of course, Campbell's right. The Valley simply overbuilt. It absorbed the hit, scaled back, and now
quietly marches on. Cisco and eBay and Yahoo! and Oracle will continue to grow. Unemployment will
drop a point or two. The freeways will be jammed soon enough. There'll be passengers on the direct
flight from San Jose to Austin. Some startups will even get funded, and there'll be an IPO or two.
But what then?
What will life in the Valley be like then?
What is the paradigm for Valley 3.0?
When the tech economy recovers, will the area regain its stature in the national consciousness? Will it
rank again with Washington, Hollywood, and Wall Street as one of the great power centers of the
world? Will it once again be considered an exporter of the future - not just in terms of technology of the
future, but of pop culture and business strategy?

I don't think so. As a regional economy, Silicon Valley will steam ahead splendidly; as an icon,
however, it's over.

Eddie Opara (2x4)

There has always been a Valley, but it only became an icon with the PC revolution and the arrival of
Apple as a glamour company. Then the Internet exploded, and the Valley itself became glamorous
and meaningful. The paradigm was creative destruction, or cannibalistic capitalism. To survive here,
everyone needed to be mentally prepared to jump ship at a moment's notice. The basic building block
of the economy was the entrepreneur, and every individual needed to think more like an entrepreneur
and less like an employee. Jazzed by this new ethic, laid-back Generation X turned into the selfdeterminist Generation Equity. Average job tenure in 1999 was 15 months. We assumed that Moore's
law applied to far more than chips. It applied to everything - bandwidth, user bases, even the Nasdaq
doubled every 18 months. The result was beyond just an exciting new technology - it was a new
culture that both captured the world's imagination and had it running scared. Rich people in New York
felt poor. Smart people in Redmond felt stupid. Producers in Hollywood spoke a whole new lingo.
Every Fortune 500 company felt vulnerable to itty-bitty startups. Silicon Valley was an argument in the
form of a place. It argued for a new way to live, a new relationship between owners and employees, a
new bond between work and play.
I told the Valley's story in those years, and ever since, people have felt comfortable telling me their
thoughts about work. I'm seeing a very different type of culture emerging in Silicon Valley today. The
new model is far more reminiscent of Valley 1.0 (the PC revolution of the '80s) than Valley 2.0 (the
Internet revolution).
For the most part, workers are happy to have a life back. "It's just a paycheck now," said one woman I
rode Caltrain with. "I'm all right with that." At San Jose's Tech Museum of Innovation, I got into a
conversation with a former headhunter, now doing HR. "The subsector of the industry that profited
from chaos isn't counting on a recovery. Ever." She used to eat at trendy restaurants; now the
highlights of her week are a regular dinner with friends (alternating among their apartments) and the
volunteer tutoring she does at an elementary school. She says, "The question 'What do you do?' now
refers more to 'How do you pay the bills?' than 'What is your purpose?'"
As for the famous passion that used to motivate so many worker bees, a guy in the weight room at the
Pacific Athletic Club in Redwood Shores said it best: "How many people can honestly say that they
are really passionate about selling 'ERP software solutions to Fortune 100 enterprises'?" People are
working, and working fairly hard, but most would rather be doing something else, if they weren't afraid
of living on half the income. One Web developer told me, "I keep my dreams close, but as fantasies,
not as ventures I'd ever pursue." There's a powerful desire to help others. A project manager says, "I
dream about actually feeling connected to the community and to people around me - and being able to
contribute to the greater good."
This attitude - Johnny Paycheck Smells the Roses - is prevalent not just among the worker bees. I
interviewed a CEO who was resigning to become a venture capitalist, primarily so she wouldn't have
to work such long hours. A VC I once wrote about now holds forth about his newborn son far more

than about his portfolio of investments. Yet another has invested a lot of time improving his
relationship with his two daughters - and very little time investing money.
Perhaps most telling is a newfound and poignant reluctance when it comes to startups. Says one San
Francisco entrepreneur who founded three companies, "I never want to start another company again. I
saw an ugliness in human character that destroyed my faith in the common man." And netted him $9
million. Most people's gains were far more modest, like this Netscape alumnus: "I made enough to pay
off my student loans and buy a decent car. Was it worth it? Sure. Would I do it again? No way. I'm
happier with a paycheck and knowing I'll be able to show up for my guitar lessons on Tuesday and
Thursday nights." The other evening I met a woman at a Ben Kweller concert. She turned down job
offers from two startups to stay at her "boring, no-upside" job at CBS MarketWatch. "I've been laid off
too many times," she said. "I don't want to go through it again for a while."
I don't think this new attitude is temporary. I see a great deal of nesting going on. Despite the crash
and the resulting disruption, more marriage licenses were granted in 2001 in San Francisco than any
year prior. In Santa Clara County, more babies were born in 2002 than in any year of the boom, and
house purchases have bounced back to near-record levels, despite the massive evaporation of
wealth. The culture of shifting alliances and temporary agreements is out; permanence and settling
down is in.
I doubt startups will ever become commonplace again. Most new products will be funded and
developed through intrapreneur programs at well-established companies. Venture-funded startups will
be reserved for only the rare great ideas. They'll be highly watched anomalies, a spectator sport for
the average Highway 101 commuter.
The hype machine keeps puffing, but the truth is that the pace of change in Silicon Valley is no longer
special or extraordinary. In the past few years, Hollywood has been transformed by reality television,
which has created new fortunes and new stars. Washington has swapped out an administration of
24,000 Democrats and replaced it with 24,000 Republicans. Wall Street has been altered by new rules
governing conflicts of interest. The music and book industries have far more new products running
through their pipelines than the tech industry.
So while some might find Mr. Paycheck's workaday attitude disappointing, I think it's appropriate for a
computer industry that's slowed down. Silicon Valley 3.0 needs people who are good at working a
single problem for several years. The kind of people who don't find themselves saying, after only six
months, "Enterprise server software has gotten old." People who don't mind that it takes two years to
be promoted from Web engineer to bottom-rung manager.
Which is to say, what it doesn't need is people addicted to excitement -experience junkies, boom
wranglers, and other hunters of the vertical learning curve. If you need glamour and buzz, grab the
next plane to somewhere else.
Debating the future has always been great conversational sport in the Valley. Lately, many
prognosticators have warned that if the Valley doesn't return to its radical cannibal ways, we'll wake up
one day and be living in a new Detroit. I'm suggesting that if you look around with fresh eyes, you'll
see that we already do.
Automobiles are arguably the most disruptive technology of the past hundred years. They've changed
the way we live. Changed how our cities are organized. Changed the climate of the entire planet. The
fuel required for them shapes global politics. Detroit will keep on innovating at a manageable pace,
putting out fresh models every year and new makes every few years.
But when you go to Detroit, you don't find a trend-bucking social culture. You find a conservative
working-class society. So even though the Motor City's number-one export is still changing the world
drastically (just wait till the middle classes of India and China start to buy cars), nobody looks to Detroit
for answers on how to live, how to structure companies, how to define the relationship between work
and play. In fact, with its sprawling suburbs and huge unions, Detroit has long been a counterexample
for how to organize a society.

Silicon Valley will continue to export computer technology, much of which will continue to reshape the
world. But the Valley itself won't be a role model for anything. While the rest of the world will use our
technology, they won't want to live like us; they won't care what we talk about, they won't worship our
CEOs as leaders, or get excited about the newest startup. Silicon Valley 3.0 will be an industrial force,
minus the magic that spawns imitation - a success again, but not the One True Way.
All of this is OK. The limelight's not necessary. The economic growth of the next decade won't come
disproportionately from those who are motivated by equity. It won't require hype and glory. It'll come
the old-fashioned way - from scientists and engineers who continually extend what we know, until
eventually the impossible becomes possible through their cumulative effort. They're as likely to work at
universities as at startups, funded by government grants rather than venture capital. They won't need
the promise of riches to conquer the unknown. They'll do it anyway. It's in their nature.
It's what they're trained to do.
It's their job.

Contributing writer Po Bronson ([email protected]), author of What Should I Do With My

Life?, wrote about the scientific study of prayer in Wired 10.12.

Inside Out
BODY SPACE: Fashion Continues to Outline the Female Body
By Miuccia Prada

Every piece of clothing shapes your body but also the space
around you, the emptiness around you. This raincoat, from our
2002 winter collection, plays off that divide. It's transparent, but
when it gets wet - from rain or perspiration - it becomes opaque.
So you have the space of the body and then also this other space
outside the clothes: It changes the relationship between what's
inside and outside. I tried it on - it happens in a very nice way.

Miuccia Prada directs the creative aspects of Prada. She

entered the family business in 1978.

Prada

The World Wide Lab

RESEARCH SPACE: Experimentation Without Representation is Tyranny.

By Bruno Latour

The 20th century was the golden age of the laboratory. Answers to the great research questions were
sought within cloistered chambers, where small groups of specialized experts scaled down (or up)
phenomena in blissful isolation. Call it the era of trickle-down science: Knowledge emerged from a
confined center of rational enlightenment, then slowly diffused out to the rest of society. The public
could keep pace with the results of the laboratory sciences or remain indifferent to them, but it
certainly couldn't add to or dispute them, much less contribute to their elaboration. Science was what
was made inside the walls where white coats were at work. Outside the laboratory's borders began the
realm of mere experience - not experiment.
Today, all this is changing. Indeed, it would be an understatement to say that soon nothing, absolutely
nothing, will be left of this top-down model of scientific influence.
First, the laboratory has extended its walls to the whole planet. Instruments are everywhere. Houses,
factories, and hospitals have become lab outposts. Think, for instance, of global positioning systems:
Thanks to satellite networks, geologists and biologists can now take measurements outside their
laboratories with the same degree of precision they achieve inside. Meanwhile, a worldwide network of
environmental sensors monitors the planet in real time. Research satellites observe it from above, as if
the Earth were under a microscope. And geneticists examine entire populations as often as
individuals. The difference between natural history - outdoor science - and lab science has slowly
eroded.
Second, you no longer need a white coat or a PhD to research specific questions. Take the
Association Franaise contre les Myopathies, a French patient advocacy group that focuses on
ignored genetic diseases. The AFM has not waited for the results of molecular biology to trickle down
to patients in wheelchairs. It has hired researchers, pushed for controversial procedures like genetic
therapy, and built an entire industry, producing at once a new social identity and a new research
agenda. In the US, the audacity to challenge the experts, to storm the labs, started with AIDS activists
and breast cancer groups; now it has spread to interested parties of all sorts, from patients who
organize their own clinical trials to environmentalists who do their own fieldwork. A crucial part of doing
science is formulating the questions to be solved; it's clear that scientists are no longer alone in this
endeavor.
Third, there is the question of scale. The size and complexity of scientific phenomena under scrutiny
has grown to the point that scaling them down to fit in a laboratory is becoming increasingly difficult.
Think of global warming: To be sure, labs are running complex models on huge computers. But how
do you simulate a phenomenon that is happening on us, with us, through the action of each of us as
much as those of entire oceans and the high atmosphere? If the working hypothesis for global
warming is that it's a product of anthropic activity, isn't the only way to test this hypothesis to stop our
noxious emissions and see - later and collectively - what has happened?
The sharp divide between a scientific inside, where experts are formulating theories, and a political
outside, where nonexperts are getting by with human values, is evaporating. And the more it does, the
more the fate of humans is linked to that of things, the more a scientific statement ("The Earth is
warming") resembles a political one ("The Earth is warming!"). The matters of fact of science become
matters of concern of politics.
As a result, contemporary scientific controversies are emerging in what have been called hybrid
forums. We used to have two types of representations and two types of forums: one, science,
representing nature - here "representation" means accuracy, precision, and reference - and another,
politics, representing society - and here "representation" means faithfulness, election, obedience. A
simple way to characterize our times is to say that the two meanings of representation have now
merged into one, around the key figure of the spokesperson.
In the global warming controversy, some of those spokespeople represent the high atmosphere,
others oil and gas lobbies, others nongovernmental organizations. Still others represent, in the
classical sense, their electors (with President Bush representing at once his electors and the energy
lobbies!). The stark difference, which seemed so important, between those who represented things
and those who represented people, has vanished. What counts is that all spokespeople are in the

same room, engaged in the same collective experiment, talking at once about imbroglios of people
and things.

Bruno Latour is a professor at the Center for the Sociology of Innovation in the Ecole des Mines de
Paris. An English translation of his Politics of Nature will be published by Harvard University Press
next year.

Waiting To Exhale
TIGHT SPACE: Space is Most Precious When There's Not Enough of it.
By Brendan I. Koerner

For paranoid types spooked by sarin, VX, and other nasty

airborne gases rumored to be part of the al Qaeda arsenal,
masks are survival kit must-haves, alongside canned peaches
and duct tape. But even the snazziest mask won't be of much
help if cast aside midattack, as countless soldiers have done
since the debut of mustard gas during World War I. As it turns
out, a surprising number of us would rather risk incinerated lungs
than wear protective headgear that makes us feel locked inside a
rubber prison.
Irrational, perhaps, but not to a soldier in the throes of gas mask
phobia. According to the US Army, some GIs are "unable to
tolerate wearing a gas mask for a few minutes, even in a peaceful garrison setting." The symptoms
are panic-attack classics: shortened breath, blurred vision, severe disorientation. And though the
chemical-attack sirens may blare, victims tend to fling their masks to the ground, opting for a violent
death rather than spend one more second on the inside looking out.
Organizations that require protective gear - military units, hazmat disposal teams -try to weed out
the sensitive; to earn their suspenders, prospective firefighters are asked to search a confined area
wearing a blackout mask, a 40-pound vest, and 4-pound ankle weights. But what if the sickness lurks
deep within a recruit's psyche, waiting to kick in at the worst possible moment?
Thus the crusade for a kinder, gentler gas mask - one that will feel more like a pair of bifocals than a
piece of S/M fetish gear. Tiny eyepieces positioned well away from the face - which tend to make
some users feel they're sealed up in coffins - are being replaced by a single translucent PVC lens,
giving masks the mono-opticon look of visored X-Men superhero Cyclops. Specially crafted CAD
software helps designers factor in ergonomic data like nose slope and brow height.
Another problem for phobics: Traditional gas masks make breathing difficult. Inhaling through a
standard mask filter is like slurping molasses through a straw. State-of-the-art filters, woven from
svelte microfibers, require much less effort.
Comfort can't be everything, alas. Gas mask manufacturers have experimented with silicon-based
formulas. They're lighter than rubber and less apt to cause profuse sweating - but their permeability
makes it less effective against potent nerve agents. Silicon's OK for survivalists, but the military sticks
largely with rubber - and prays for a minimum of freak-outs.

Contributing editor Brendan I. Koerner ([email protected]) wrote about the MIT Media Lab in
Wired 11.05.

Live Free or Die

ART SPACE: Building Bastions of Creative Freedom
By Hans Ulrich Obrist

There used to be an association between art and the ivory tower. Generic gallery space - the White
Cube - seemed to give art a pristine and autonomous refuge from the clutter of commercialism. By the
'90s, as the art world became part of the global economy, that cube became ubiquitous. This
uniformity gave rise to a paradox: If art is supposed to be the language of individuality - of difference,
even of freedom - why is it always displayed in a homogenous box, the world over?
Over the past 15 years, many artists attempted to
break out of the White Cube. They began to exhibit in
the world: apartments, hotels, restaurants, private
homes, public buildings, city squares, and metro
stations. Some opened their own galleries. City
Racing in London and Glassbox in Paris established
the artist-run space as synonymous with a new
liberty, a critical stance against the limited way in
which art is traditionally made and shown.
Others went further, abolishing the gallery altogether,
and conceiving a system in which artwork and
AVL/ARS 2003
artmaking were one. In Thailand, Rirkrit Tiravanija's
The Land is a collaborative, self-sustaining development in the village of Sanpatong. Prominent artists
such as Arthur Meyere and the Danish group Superflex have contributed to it by designing toilet
systems, solar power generators, and a methane production apparatus.
In the most radical instances, artists established entire territories. Carl Michael von Hausswolff and
Leif Elggren have identified a parasitic country that is the conceptual aggregation of the world's noman's-lands and border crossings. The inhabitants of Elgaland-Vargaland form a post-national
scattered community that includes ambassadors and embassies designated by expensive plaques,
and has its own language, official papers, and insignia. Its passport was so well made that it worked
for crossing European borders - before 9/11, anyway.
In 2001, Joep van Lieshout turned his Atelier van
Lieshout - a design company that specialized in
made-to-order furniture - into AVL-ville, a "state" with
its own currency, laws, restaurant, workforce,
abattoir, sausage factory, and ecological toilets. AVL
is clearly the work of a single visionary exercising
pervasive control over his state. The project
aggressively asserts its autonomy, from its emphasis
on borders and boundaries to its fascination with
military paraphernalia and its apparent regimentation
of daily life. As the diagram here suggests, AVL's
artwork takes as its raw materials a series of
AVL/ARS 2003
interlocking systems of power, exchange,
adjudication, and commerce. The work itself both resembles and reflects the obsessions of the
surrounding nations, hence the obsession with defense and the establishment of social systems.
Whether playful, libertarian, or overtly flirtatious with danger, all of these examples confront us with a
beyond-the-White-Cube dilemma: Art space may be the last refuge for the authoritarian imagination.

Hans Ulrich Obrist is curator of the Muse d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. He also interviewed
William J. Clancey in this issue.

Almost Paradise
SEX SPACE: When the Exotic Imitates the Everyday, What's Left to Fantasize About?
By Rem Koolhaas (Guest Editor)

Tokyo has always been known for its "love hotels," elaborately designed spaces where denizens of
one of the most densely populated cities on earth can steal a few moments' intimacy. Now some of the
city's brothels are just as carefully appointed. Known as imekura, short for "image club," these
imitations of quotidian spaces offer a fantasy that comes complete with a woman who plays the part whether that's a secretary in an office or a commuter on a subway. As Kyoichi Tsuzuki's photographs
show, they're mundane rooms transformed into fantasy chambers - and vice versa. In a city where
anything seems architecturally possible, the ultimate erotic fantasy is that of everyday existence.

Kyoichi Tsuzuki

The New Border Wars

BORDER SPACE: Lines in the Sand
By Jeff Howe

The border between two lands is more than a line; it reinforces the hopes and fears of the nations that
share it. After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, a vision of a borderless world emerged: one less afraid, that
would rely on technology, not fences, to assert sovereignty. It didn't happen. Instead, there's been a
profusion of physical boundaries. The six maps here illustrate the methods - both old-fashioned and
high tech - nations use to build walls in an anxious world.
1. The Colonial Border: the Strait of Gibraltar
The southernmost cities of Spain actually lie in North Africa, the last vestiges of a colonial age in which
Morocco was a province of France and Spain. The port of Ceuta sits a mere 8 miles from the
European mainland across the Strait of Gibraltar; Melilla is some 150 miles east. In 1995, Spain and
six other European nations agreed to erase internal borders. Within months, illegal immigrants began
seeping into Spain's North African outposts. To stem the flow, Spain and the EU funded the
construction of walls around both cities. Melilla's wall, completed in 1998, sealed its 6-mile border with
parallel 10-foot fences topped with barbed wire. Ninety miles of underground cable connect spotlights,

noise and movement sensors, and video cameras to a central control booth. A similar system in Ceuta
was completed in 2001.
2. The Cold War Border: the Korean DMZ
Created along the 38th Parallel in 1953 when South Korea, North Korea, the US and UN officials
signed the cease-fire agreement that halted the Korean War, the Demilitarized Zone is anything but.
Two and a half miles wide and 156 miles long, the DMZ is mostly barren land harboring some 1 million
land mines; it's bound by concrete antitank walls and crowned with concertina wire. President Clinton
called it "the scariest place in the world." The US provides South Korea with sophisticated intelligencegathering technology, such as heat-seeking scopes used at guard posts and recon from satellites and
aerial surveillance.
3. The Pointless Border: the Ferghana Valley
The historical heart of Central Asia - it was part of the Silk Road - the Ferghana Valley is a fertile plain
shared by Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. After a civil war in Tajikistan and the discovery that
the Ferghana's precipitous canyons sheltered Taliban-aligned Islamic fundamentalists, Uzbekistan
lined its frontiers with thousands of land mines and heavily armed guards, an effort that has
succeeded mostly in killing scores of innocent villagers. International opinion holds that what little hope
exists for the ravaged economies of these republics lies in cooperative economic policies and free
trade. Uzbekistan's response has been to add more mines and guns along the border.
4. The Homeland Border: US and Mexico
The two primary objectives at the 1,989-mile US-Mexico border are largely at odds: expediting some
$636 million in legal cargo per day and stanching the flow of illegal goods and immigrants. Since 9/11,
Customs and Border Protection has employed a variety of Bond-like technologies. Detection devices
include handheld radiation pagers, the $1.3 million Vacis gamma-ray machine, and MobileSearch
radiation portals for vehicles (Wired 10.11). To speed legitimate traffic, CBP has launched the Sentri
system: Frequent border crossers in El Paso, Texas, and in Otay Mesa and San Ysidro, California,
affix transponders to their cars that beam digital photo IDs to inspectors who confirm the identity of
drivers before waving them through.
5. The Contested Border: Kashmir
India and Pakistan have been fighting over Kashmir since 1947. The last full-scale conflict ended in
1971, when the current 450-mile "line of control" was established. In the Karakoram Pass, in northern
Kashmir, some 10,000 soldiers face off across a front line that ranges from 9,000 to 22,000 feet in
elevation, making this the highest-altitude conflict ever. And one of the most pointless: The area is
poor in natural resources and tactically insignificant. International observers say continued enmity
between the countries amounts to a grudge match. That doesn't mean it's without portent. In 1999,
Pakistani-sponsored mujahideen seized a ridge and nearly sparked a nuclear war. Several thousand
soldiers have died over the past two decades, mostly from high-altitude sickness, avalanches, or falls.
6. The Containment Border: the Gaza Strip and the West Bank
Israel's policy toward the occupied territories is one of strict containment. It controls access to the
Gaza Strip through checkpoints along the lattice of roads, walls, and fences throughout the area.
Along the West Bank, Israel is constructing what it calls a security fence - though the description is a
gross understatement. If fully built, the enclosure will consist of a network of barriers, including 10-foot
walls topped with barbed wire and guard towers and employing motion detectors and video cameras.
An 80-mile section is due to be completed in July. Plans call for the 230-mile barrier to follow the socalled green line marking Israel's border with the West Bank. In reality, the wall already juts well into
the area in order to keep Jewish settlements within Israeli territory.
The West Bank itself is fragmented into discrete sections of Israeli and Palestinian control connected
by tunnels and bridges and defined with barriers. In his essay "The Politics of Verticality," architect
Eyal Weizman notes that this is one of the few borders to fully embrace the vertical dimension: Israel,
for instance, asserts its control of both the aquifer below the occupied territories and the airspace
above them. The most extreme example of vertical borders was Clinton's 2000 Camp David proposal
that the Temple Mount be divided horizontally, giving Palestinians sovereignty over the mosque on the
top half and Israel sovereignty beneath the pavement, which includes the Wailing Wall.

Contributing editor Jeff Howe ([email protected]) wrote about the music labels' battle against
file-sharing in Wired 11.02.

The [?]-Man March

CROWD SPACE: Bodies Count
By Farouk El-Baz

When crowds gather to make political statements, it matters how many people turn out. Crowd size
matters to organizers, who invariably say they made their point. It matters to police departments, who
insist they fielded the right number of officers. It matters to the media, who often claim they've reported
the facts. And it matters to elected officials, who often like to act as if the whole thing never happened.
All of which is why February's antiwar demonstrations came under such close scrutiny. Consider what
happened in San Francisco. Organizers, whose tallies usually are made by observers at ground level,
initially estimated turnout at 250,000 (later revised to 200,000). Police, who tend to eyeball their figures
from the air based on known counts such as stadium capacities, also claimed 200,000. But an aerial
photo survey commissioned by the San Francisco Chronicle calculated just 65,000 at the peak time of
1:45 pm.
Photographic analysis of the kind undertaken by the Chronicle can provide a verifiable estimate, but it
must be done correctly. Here's how:
Fly over the crowd at peak times using a fixed-wing aircraft. (Shaky helicopter platforms blur photos,
increasing the effort required to analyze them.) Altitude should be 2,000 feet or less.
Photograph the area in strips using a digital camera, with 60 percent overlap between successive
pictures to allow stereoscopic viewing (helpful for making ambiguous pictures clearer). Image
resolution should be about 1 foot per pixel.
Load the photos in an image-processing program and co-register them with a 1-meter-resolution US
Geological Survey orthophotomap - a perspective-corrected collage of aerial shots of the area with a
uniform scale.
Superimpose a grid on the image and classify its units by the apparent density of people per unit.
Place a cross or dot on each individual head or shadow point.
Count or, if necessary, estimate the number of people in each grid unit, then tally the numbers.
Calculate error - basically the number of grid units divided by the degree of uncertainty about how
many people they contain.
By these criteria, the Chronicle's survey fell short. For one thing, it was based on analog photos, which
lose resolution when digitized. It also failed to co-register the images with an orthophotomap, and the
grid unit size was larger than 1 meter, too big for careful counting.
Still, the newspaper's effort was a step in the right direction. Where political interests are at stake, the
job of counting masses of people falls naturally to the media. It doesn't cost much - $2,000 to $5,000
per event, depending on location and crowd size. A joint effort by news outlets and independent

supervisors, especially in politically sensitive cases, would bring crowd counts out of the murky realm
of guesswork and into the bright light of verifiable fact.

Farouk El-Baz directs Boston University's Center for Remote Sensing. He resolved the controversy
over how many attended 1995's Million Man March.

The New Middle Kingdom

FUTURE SPACE: Where the Next World Will Happen
By Rem Koolhaas (Guest Editor)

At the 2010 World's Fair in Shanghai, China will show its modernized face to an international
audience. It may look something like this picture, an aspirational design for the fair submitted by the
Architecture-Studio of France. Along with the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, the fair represents a
major opportunity for foreign companies to increase their presence in China, especially if they can tap
into the country's media infrastructure. Born of the politburo propaganda machine, the state network
includes national, regional, and local TV and radio stations, newspapers, magazines, and bookstores.
And yet despite its size and reach, China's media is a closed system - state-controlled and selfsufficient. The question the Olympics and World's Fair presents, then, isn't whether foreign companies
will be able to tap the Chinese market. It's whether the Chinese market wants to tap them.

China Turns On
Population: 1.3 billion
GDP: $6 trillion
Increase in GDP (2000-2001): 23.6%
Labor force: 706 million
Total unemployment: 3.1%
Literacy rate (ages 15-24): 98.2%
Television sets: 400 million
TV viewers: 1.1 billion
Newspapers sold daily: 117.8 million (62 million more than in the US)
Books sold per year: 15.6 billion
Bookstores: 77,000 (65,000 more than in the US)
Annual spending on books, magazines, and newspapers: $8 billion
Total magazine circulation: 475.8 million

The Enemy Within

SECURE SPACE: Walls Don't Work in Cyberspace
By Bruce Schneier

Internet security is usually described as a fortress, with the good guys inside the wall and the bad guys
outside. Network owners buy products to shore up the barrier, on the logic that a stronger wall will give
them better security. Flaws in the network are holes in the barricade, patches the mortar that closes
them.
This metaphor might have been appropriate 10 years ago, when the Internet was made up of
disparate networks that occasionally communicated, but it's outdated today. There are too many of us,
doing too many things, interacting in too many ways. The Internet is more like a town.
In a town, security space is fluid. Barriers exist, yet they're only part of the solution. Sometimes the
bad guys are already inside, while the good guys are outside, needing a legitimate way in. As in a
town, Internet users interact with a number of people. We forge friendships of all sorts, long-lasting as
well as fleeting. We create our own spaces, both permanent and temporary. Good guys and bad guys
intermingle. The same door that opens for customers allows in shoplifters; from the outside, there's no
way to tell one from the other.
Because the Net is so often compared to a fortress, most Internet security relies on prevention. That's
not bad, but it's incomplete. Prevention is the least effective solution, because it's static and passive.
In a town, security is a combination of prevention, detection, and response. There are walls - and also
alarms and police. A town has a complex social structure that keeps its inhabitants safe. The Internet
needs a similar social network atop its digital network.
Detection and response are far more effective - and cost-effective - than increased prevention. No
bank ever says: "We have an impenetrable vault, so we don't need an alarm system." No museum
ever takes such pride in its door and window locks that it fires the night watchman. No home-security
expert would ever recommend making your walls thicker.
I'd like to see security products and services that treat the Internet as a town instead of a fortress,
monitoring those on the inside as well as keeping others out. For example, my security company,
Counterpane, recently detected a pattern of suspicious activity in the system of a large airline that led
us to believe an employee was trying to break into the human resources server. We alerted the IT
department and traced the attack to a reservations office in Mexico City. The employee was caught in
the act and terminated.
I'd also like to see Internet users develop relationships with each other based on trust. The street you
live on matters more than the lock on your front door. Knowing your neighbors is more important than
knowing karate. And in both the real and virtual world, nothing improves security more than
gentrification.

Security expert Bruce Schneier ([email protected]) is the author of Beyond Fear: Thinking
Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World, to be published by Copernicus Books in September.

The Battle For Blue

COLOR SPACE: The Coolest Shades in Corporate America

By Michael Rock

Companies spend millions trying to differentiate from others. Yet a quick look at the logos of major
corporations reveals that in color as in real estate, it's all about location, location, location. The result is
an ever more frantic competition for the best neighborhood. Here's a look at the new blue bloods.

Mind Share
BLOG SPACE: Public Storage For Wisdom, Ignorance, and Everything in Between
By Steven Johnson

We've lived so long under the notion of the Web as a space of connected documents, it seems almost
unthinkable that it could be organized any other way. But it could just as easily be assembled around a
different axis: not pages but minds.
The explosive growth of blogging is creating the opportunity to do just that. Hundreds of thousands of
individuals now maintain their own weblogs, updating them regularly with links, commentary, and
personal anecdotes. There are some wonderful group weblogs, to be sure, but the general principle of
blogspace is one per person. Following a well-maintained, up-to-date personal blog is - short of
shacking up with someone - the most efficient method yet invented to keep track of what's going on in
another person's head over extended periods: what they're working on, linking to, obsessing about,
listening to, reading. On a day-to-day basis, I am more intimately aware of the latest happenings in the
world of my 10 favorite bloggers than I am of what's going on with my closest friends. And of those 10
bloggers, I've met only two or three in person. As one of them, Rael Dornfest, likes to say: "Following
someone's blog is like doing a TiVo season pass for a person."
Of course, changing the organization of the Web makes it possible - even imperative - to build all sorts
of new architecture inside that space. Blogs themselves are a kind of secondary effect of the Web's
original hypertextual space. If you create an environment of linked documents, then a whole new type
of document becomes possible: one that does nothing but link.
What happens when you start seeing the Web as a matrix of minds, not documents? Networks based
on trust become an essential tool. You start evaluating the relevance of data based not on search
query results but on personal testimonies. ("This page is useful because six minds I admire have
found it useful.") You can research ideas or breaking news by querying the 10 people whose opinions
on the topic you most value - what Cory Doctorow calls an "outboard brain." A tool recently created by
Dave Sifry of the blog analysis site Technorati lets you take any URL and automatically generate a list
of bloggers who have commented on it. Almost anything you stumble across can be filtered through
the perspective of other bloggers.
Your mind becomes a part of the space as well. Your own personal site becomes an extension of your
memory, as in Vannevar Bush's vision of the Memex, but your memories also become part of the
Web's collective intelligence. (See the brilliant site Random Access Memory, which organizes
thousands of specific remembrances contributed freely by individuals.) And a Web oriented around
connected minds makes it easier for those minds to find one another in real life: Witness the recent
success of online personals and Meetup.com.
Ever since the Web entered the popular consciousness, observers have noted that it puts information
at your fingertips but tends to keep wisdom out of reach. In a space organized around connected
minds, however, the search for wisdom becomes more promising. The Web remains a space of
functionally infinite data, but that space is increasingly mapped by human minds, linked in ways we're
only beginning to imagine. If it's wisdom you're looking for, you couldn't hope for a better guide.

Steven Johnson (www.stevenberlinjohnson.com) is the author of Emergence: The Connected Lives

of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software.

Delirious No More
WANING SPACE: I __ NY
By Rem Koolhaas

1850-1933
New York is built, from 1850 to 1933, in a single spurt of imagination and energy. The first prototype of
the modern metropolis, Manhattan is turned into a laboratory to test the potential of modern life in a
radical, collective experiment. A free-form coalition of developers, visionaries, writers, architects, and
journalists intersects with popular expectations to make the city an extreme and exhilarating
democratic machine, one that is able to process all newcomers into New Yorkers.
Its genius is to create a universe parallel to sober and abstract European modernism -to imagine life
in the metropolis as a deeply irrational experience that uses sparkling-new technologies to exacerbate
desire.
From 1913 to 1932, the speed of building is convulsive: Woolworth, Chrysler, Empire State, and finally
Rockefeller Center. New York's instruments are not necessarily architectural masterpieces, but
apparatuses for reinventing city life. They create both a density that astronomically expands the
repertoire of programs, events, and overlappings and a smoothness that urban life has never before
known.
The Depression slows this regime of architectural delirium. In 1933, King Kong's agony on top of the
Empire State Building is a provisional climax: New York's revolutionary moment is over by the time of
the talkies.
1950s-'60s
After World War II, buildings become "important." Each is the work of an individual architect rather
than a collective. In the next 20 years, only a handful are realized: Lever ('52), UN ('53), Seagram
('58), Pan Am ('63). At the same time, Robert Moses' highways, bridges, and tunnels allow the
populations accumulated by previous generations to escape to the burbs. He also organizes the 1964
World's Fair. The results appear lackluster, like a fair that could have been held anywhere.
1970s
In 1972 (president: Nixon; mayor: Lindsay), the World Trade Center is finished. No one likes it. The
towers are abstract and structurally daring; their interiors entirely column-free, 10 million square feet of
real estate carried on two cores and two envelopes. The towers dominate Manhattan's skyline but
don't participate in it - twinning is their only genius.
1972 is a turning point: The towers are delivered at the exact moment New York's passion for the new
is spent. Along with the Concorde, they are modernism's apotheosis and its letdown at the same time unreal perfection that can never be equaled.
New York is not doing well. It is old now. It has a long past; it doesn't want to be a machine anymore. It
worries about context and humanism. Hung over from the '60s - Malcolm X killed in '65, Andy Warhol
shot in '68 - the city is basking in an aura of danger. It can no longer be governed; only the forbidden is
well organized. Its repertoire is reduced to extremes. New York becomes a hunting ground. Separate

crises - financial, social, drugs - merge into a cocktail that only hedonists enjoy. In 1973, Governor
Rockefeller introduces draconian drug laws. McDonald's opens its first Manhattan franchise. In 1974:
the first Gap. Plato's Retreat opens in '75; Studio 54 follows in '77 and acts as Manhattan's epicenter the splendors and miseries of a metropolis compressed to the scale of a disco. Also, the city almost
goes bankrupt.
1977 (presidents: Ford/Carter; mayor: Beame) is New York's annus horribilis: the blackout, the Son of
Sam summer, a helicopter rotor blade crashes into the streets from the top of the Pan Am. But it is
also the year of its definitive comeback: A blast of self-love pulls the city out of its doldrums. New York
is rescued by a double whammy of denial, a heroic non sequitur: the "I NY" campaign (created by
Wells Rich Greene with Milton Glaser) and Liza Minnelli's "New York, New York" (composed by
Kander and Ebb). The campaign mobilizes disbelief to fight disbelief; the song overpowers urban
anxiety through loudness, introduces the high kick as a euphoric goose step.
"I NY" is a prison. Its logo, like a brand, diminishes the virtual space of the city. New York's
shrinkage is reinforced by the regime of Ed Koch, the new mayor. His "How'm I doin'?" reflects a city
that obsessively measures its own pulse. Danger becomes vibrancy. A global city turns "world class."
In this state of narcissism, Manhattan's architects and developers begin to clone and rip off the most
obvious features of the city's pre-WWII architecture. Boxes sprout spires; art deco becomes the new
new. A tectonic pornography - over-dimensioned displays of excitement, each relentlessly pursuing its
own release, an architecture of money shots.
An ecology of lawyers, dealmakers, zoning experts, and enablers grotesquely inflate the arcane
complexities of "getting things done" and intimidate any outsider into helpless surrender to their
intricate cynicism. "Union or nonunion?" That is the question. A Mafioso Hamlet.
1980s-'90s
The popular press and the US government turn against the United Nations -depicted as an
accumulation of shady foreign diplomats running up millions in unpaid parking tickets, molesting call
girls with impunity, protesting innocence behind dark glasses. In 1984, like a slumlord, Washington
stops paying the UN's maintenance fees; the cornerstone of New York cosmopolitanism becomes a
political punching bag.
In a neat lockstep with Reaganomics, what is not brutalized from the outside is eroded from the inside.
The art system, with its voracious appetite for authenticity (and, later, "edginess") consumes whole
districts, leaving acres of gallery space that can effortlessly morph into shopping districts or university
precincts.
What determines art's size? If the average painting was 6 square feet in 1940, by the '80s it has
expanded to 40. Sculptures inflate at the same rate. Installations are measured in rooms, even entire
buildings. What already exists is more sexy than what is recently made. The greater the (New York)
architect, the smaller the conversion. Architects' fragile egos are boosted by a corpocultural axis that
intimately unites the art world's sincerity with the corporate world's integrity in a very contemporary
marriage.
In 1982, the world's first billboard-sized crotch shot triggers the emasculation of Times Square: white
briefs against filth. The idea of the first cleanup is hatched. The 42nd Street Development Project
follows in 1985. A master plan by Philip Johnson lingers, but in 1993 (president: Clinton; mayor:
Dinkins), four years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the idea returns as "42nd Street Now!" Disney
announces the restoration of the New Amsterdam Theater.
Giuliani becomes mayor in 1994. He presides over the Wall Street bubble, the media bubble, the
Internet bubble, and the art bubble, and he instigates a law bubble of his own. Giuliani's is a regime of
enforced quality of life. The police become a cadre of roving, computerized flaneur, ridding the streets
of surprise to deny criminals access to victims. The city becomes safer for some, more dangerous for
many others. "Zero tolerance" is a deadly mantra for a metropolis: What is a city if not a space of
maximum license?

In 1996, a new zoning law orders the removal of sex-related businesses from Times Square. Comfort
has become an essential human right, security a Faustian gambit - surrender freedoms to gain the
illusion of certainty. Liberals condone the suburbanization of New York.
9/11
From now on, the most important city in the world is dominated by the tower from which first dangled
an ape. What is the connection between zero tolerance and the cult of Ground Zero? In any case, the
disaster resurrects Giuliani's depleted persona.
New Yorkers surrender to empathy. The tragedy of 9/11 inspires a mood of collective tenderness that
is almost exhilarating, almost a relief: Hype's spell has been broken and the city can recover its own
reality principle, emerge with new thinking from the unthinkable. But politics interfere. In spite of
Bloomberg's pragmatic sobriety, the transnational metropolis is enlisted in a national crusade. New
York becomes a city (re)captured by Washington. Through the alchemy of 9/11, the authoritarian
morphs imperceptibly into the totalitarian. A competition for rebuilding Ground Zero is held, not to
restore the city's vitality or shift its center of gravity, but to create a monument at a scale that
monuments have never existed (except under Stalin).
On March 17, at 9:30 am, the winning architect rings the bell of the New York Stock Exchange. At 8
pm, the president issues his ultimatum to Saddam, the "displaced" author of the WTC disappearance.
At midnight on March 20, the war starts. At 8 am, at a breakfast meeting in lower Manhattan, the
"Master Design Architect," an immigrant, movingly recounts his first encounter with liberty.
Instead of the two towers - the sublime - the city will live with five towers, wounded by a single scything
movement of the architect, surrounding two black holes. New York will be marked by a massive
representation of hurt that projects only the overbearing self-pity of the powerful. Instead of the
confident beginning of the next chapter, it captures the stumped fundamentalism of the superpower.
Call it closure.

Roam Free
ROBO SPACE: How Space Perception Separates Man From Machine
By Luc Steels

For a robot coming fresh into the world, there is at first total confusion. What is "above"? What is
"behind"? To the newborn android, all sensory input is a blur. Blobs float into view, the occasional
sound drifts by, 3-D space is a mass of contradictory coordinates.
The problem isn't the hardware. Autonomous bots like Honda's Asimo and Sony's SDR-4X II have
cameras for depth perception and microphones to help pinpoint a sound source. And in the lab,
researchers in artificial intelligence have made strides in symbolic reasoning, allowing machines to
make inferences based on definitions of spatial concepts.
But combining sensory perception and spatial reasoning remains elusive, which explains why robots
lack a true sense of space. They don't know how to navigate a building, interact with physical objects,
or dance from room to room. The trouble is, we have no clue how all this works. We know only that
spatial cognition is incredibly complex and hard to achieve - so complex, in fact, that it can't be
programmed by hand but must somehow evolve.
Differences in culture and language create their own problems. In English, we find it natural to think of
the "front" of a tree as oriented toward the speaker, and so we say "The car is in front of the tree" to
mean that the car is between ourselves and the tree. In many African languages, the front, or face, of
the tree is oriented in the same direction as the face of the person looking at the tree. So, for exactly

the same position of the car they would say "The car is behind the tree." This makes communicating
with humans tricky.
Figuring out how to teach spatial cognition is precisely what's going on in current robotics research,
including in my own laboratory. We are trying to create robots and robot cultures that develop an
autonomous approach to space, time, and action. To do this, the machines remember a vast number
of sensory experiences and try to recognize recurring bits and pieces. Over time, this helps them
impose structure on the world and learn the consequences of their actions. We also program the
robots to play language games in which they not only invent and learn words and grammatical
constructions but also establish the meanings being expressed. In one of our experiments, thousands
of androids played almost half a million language games, communicating about objects and their
locations and evolving a shared vocabulary and a common set of concepts in the process.
Experiments like these predict a future in which robots can cultivate their own spatial cognition and
language, adapted to whatever environment they find themselves in. Without this ability, they will
forever remain brittle and unable to cope with a fast-changing, open-ended world.

Luc Steels is a computer science professor at the Free University of Brussels and director of the
Sony Computer Science Laboratory Paris.

The Geography of the Genome

DNA SPACE: Welcome to the Biotechonomy
By Rodrigo Martinez, Juan Enriquez, and Jonathan West

The most powerful code is no longer a string of 1s and 0s. It is As, Ts, Cs, and Gs: adenine, thymine,
cytosine, and guanine. During the past 10 years, there has been a boom in the generation and storage
of raw genetic data. A good lab or genetics company creates the equivalent of more than eight times
the printed collection of the Library of Congress every single month. And the rate is soaring. Compare
the mounting number of As, Ts, Cs, and Gs in GenBank, the National Institutes of Health's sequence
database, against a graph of Moore's law, for instance, and suddenly Moore goes flat.
In the biotech community, the focus is now on mining genetic and proteomic data. Unlike oil or
electricity, most of this data is neither scarce nor expensive. Anyone can access it, anyone can use it.
As a result, researchers expected genetic information to become a global resource, shared equally. In
fact, this hasn't happened.
It turns out a new world hierarchy is developing, one that separates those nations and regions that are
bioliterate from those that are bio-illiterate. This is the world of DNA space, populated by a selfselecting few who have chosen to participate in the new technology revolution. The price of admission:
the ability to produce, read, or translate DNA. This means that even as biodata begins to drive
industries from agribusiness to computing, cosmetics to chemical manufacturing, few nations have the
skills required to develop, access, and use it.
To assess that conclusion, the Harvard Business School Life Sciences Project mapped which
countries and domains massively accessed (via FTP) the three largest public biodatabases in the
world in September, October, and November 2000 and 2001. During these six months, countries
checked out a lot of data: 43 terabytes, approximately seven times more than was downloaded over a
comparable period from the Library of Congress.
Yet it turns out that few countries understand or read large-scale biodata. Nearly all - 92 percent - of
the data was downloaded by users in 10 countries, half of whom live in the US. Europe, which has
similar population, education, and income figures, accessed just 22 percent of the data. No country in

Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, or Asia (except Japan) downloaded 1 percent or more of this
free information.
And who, in particular, is using the information? Within the US, we expected the leading consumers of
large new data sets to be primarily research scientists, mostly at universities. Again we were
surprised. Users from .com domains downloaded about half of all US data versus 38 percent going to
universities (.edu).
Biogaps are growing not just among countries, but within them. The top five biotech patent-producing
states account for 57 percent of all such patents in the US. And, looking at where biotech companies
are headquartered, there's a concentration of them in very few zip codes: 92121 (San Diego County,
California), 94080 (South San Francisco, California), 20850 (Rockville, Maryland), and 02139
(Cambridge, Massachusetts).
A single organization was responsible for 93 percent of all Canadian downloads from the European
database. The least concentration occurred in the UK, where the biggest user accounted for 15
percent of downloads, and the top three for a modest 34 percent.
Meanwhile, Japan is in an info deficit, importing more than it exports. As the second-largest global
users of biodata, Japan-based organizations are huge accessors of US and European databases. Yet
Japan's own version, DDBJ, is underutilized, even by Japanese. Mostly universities, not businesses,
are doing the downloading in Japan. This is odd in a nation where business funds more than 70
percent of all research. Downloads from .co domains (equivalent to US .coms) accounted for only 0.5
percent of total files. Educational institutions made up 93 percent of the 2001 downloads.
Columbus' first squiggly outline of the Americas couldn't foresee the rise of the Spanish empire or the
spread of diseases across the hemisphere. Likewise, this map of biodata flows doesn't tell us who will
be successful in the life sciences revolution and who won't. As information leaves wet labs and siliconresearch facilities, we will no doubt see the world, and life, from a different perspective. This map is
just the first draft.

Rodrigo Martinez, Juan Enriquez, and Jonathan West are founding members of the Harvard
Business School Life Sciences Project.

Tastes Great, Less Filling

AD SPACE: Will Advertisers Learn the Hard Lesson of Over-Development?
By Steve Hayden

Nothing happens until somebody sells something. Not war, not peace, not the adoption of fire or the
wheel. Not penicillin or PCs or deodorants that are strong enough for a man but made for a woman.
Every idea, no matter how self-evidently brilliant or idiotic, has to be sold. And that, in 50 words or
less, is why there's so much advertising out there.
Every space has become ad space. Everything from sports arenas to nature walks and kazoo players
are sponsored, branded, and bartered. You're soaking in it. Blasted, assaulted, insulted, surrounded,
distracted, hypnotized, and occasionally seduced by countless commercial messages each day. Ads
flying in the sky, painted on the streets, projected onto buildings, driving by on taxi-tops, chattering on
electronic devices. No amount of plastic sheeting and duct tape can shut them out.
Ad clutter has increased every year for two decades, but lately it's become overwhelming. In 2002,
every hour of daytime network TV contained nearly 21 minutes of commercials. Some cable networks

have 60 seconds of ads for every 140 seconds of programming. The average fall fashion magazine
requires a reader to flip through 128 pages before getting to an actual article. Thirty percent of email is
100 percent pure spam.
Something interesting happens in the midst of all this noise: The value of any given ad erodes. A
viewer's ability to recall a given message drops 45 percent when the number of ads in a commercial
break doubles, according to Nielsen Media Research. Advertising has the most impact in countries
with low clutter - Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands - and the least impact in the most saturated
countries: Japan, Hong Kong, Italy, and Spain.
What's it all mean? The 300-year-old advertising ecosystem - where marketers subsidize media in
exchange for the chance to make an impression on consumers - may finally be breaking down.
Advertising built its power on the ability to interrupt your busy day and put a new idea in your head. A
snippet of a promise, an image, a design that may make a product seem more familiar when you see it
in a store, even if the commercial itself irritated the hell out of you. Now, too many messages, too
many channels, too much junk, have led to a global case of ADD.
Overloaded consumers flee advertising by leaving the room, turning the page, or just glazing over.
And digital tools - from pop-up blockers to PVRs - are taking over where the remote control leaves off.
Hollywood and Madison Avenue are fighting back with neat tricks like the undeletable gigabyte. But
the fact remains that advertising is running out of space in the most important medium of all - the
human brain. It takes a great mind to hold two opposing thoughts. It takes a third-stage schizophrenic
to hold 52 makes of automobiles and 55 brands of cereal.
The solution is the same as it's always been: Do better ads - the kind people talk about around the
water cooler, or point out in magazines. Occasionally, ads can be so good that they become part of
culture, works of art or protest or comedy that resonate far beyond their initial intent. Which is, always
and unfailingly, to sell something.

Steve Hayden ([email protected]), best-known as the creator of Apple's 1984 commercial,

is vice chair of Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide.

Join the Club

GOLF SPACE: The New Town Square Has 18 Holes
By R.E. Somol

The American Southwest, the greatest beneficiary of Jefferson's half-mile-square settlement pattern,
has recently become the most notable region to abandon the grid. From Las Vegas to Arizona to
Orange County, California, there is a Bermuda Triangle of lost orthogonality, an arid territory made
improbably fertile by the emergence of a new form of development: the golf course. Here, recreation is
the basis for infrastructure: Golf courses are invariably the first figures to appear on the landscape green gaskets awaiting the arrival of the next round of tract homes. As carefully cultivated carpets,
courses require massive amounts of energy and resources to be maintained in a perpetual state of
newness - indeed, golf space seems to transform everything around it into a desert. Through an
organic alchemy of greens, subdivisions once denigrated as typical and reproducible can now be
experienced as exceptional and exotic frontiers.
There were 2,641 golf courses constructed in the US during the 1990s, more than triple the number
built in the '80s. Orange County alone boasts roughly 60 courses (1 per 50,000 residents, or twice as
many per capita as adjacent Los Angeles). The nearby Ocean Trails Golf Club, at $120 million the
most expensive in the world to build, offers residential lots (vacant) beginning at $1.2 million. Not
simply an amenity, the golf course is an extraordinary investment opportunity and the most popular

planning technique available today; it effortlessly combines personal security and group play,
community identity and topographical variation. The 18 standard stoppages of the course set the scale
for development, and the double-loop structure (two laces of nine holes each, both of which begin and
end at the same point) is perfectly calibrated to a planning trend that has turned neighborhoods fully
inward.
The same desire for enclosure that fuels gated developments is at the heart of the success of golf
courses. Residential golf communities (invariably gated) are simply an extension of the radial and
other antigrid types of Orange County and its progeny - from Disneyland to the UC Irvine campus,
from the Spectrum office park to the Fashion Island mall. The new domestic courses transform exterior
space into a form of interior by mobilizing the landscape not merely as a natural resource for health
and adventure, but as an acquired sign of value and security.
For two centuries of westward (and Western) expansion, the grid served as a durable and generous
device of speculation, planning, and development. With the passing of modernism in the late 1960s,
the grid lost its pervasive power, indicted as an emblem of inhumanity and homogeneity. Now, with the
rise of golf space, the grid as a neutral tool of planning has been replaced by organic figures of
development such as the sand trap and the water hazard.
In retrospect, all this may have debuted in 1971 with the longest drive ever recorded by a human when astronaut Alan Shepard used a modified 6-iron to hit a ball, he said, "for miles and miles and
miles." The moon's surface had been reclaimed: the final frontier as the last resort. Three decades
later, the golf course's indifference to context continues to drive the pervasive colonization of any
available space, in cities and suburbs, in deserts and parking lots. Golf space offers the perfect petri
dish for business transactions, a self-reproducing site where tomorrow's resorts are conceived and
negotiated today. It grants people the power to venture ever inward - manifest destiny in reverse.

R. E. Somol is an assistant professor in the UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design and
principal of PXS, an architecture firm in LA.

Tent City
LIMBO SPACE: Neutral Ground is Hard to Hold
By Thomas Keenan

Two weeks before the war in Kosovo ended, the president of the International Committee of the Red
Cross wrote in the International Herald Tribune, "The most urgent thing in Kosovo right now is the
need for the creation of a humanitarian space."
He didn't mean just hospitals, kitchens, water stations, or even the vast infrastructure of refugee
camps. He was also talking about the freedom to move, speak openly with those in need, and gain
access to information and to people on all sides of the conflict. At its most basic level, humanitarianism
calls out for a special kind of space - a space of neutrality. Relief work challenges borders and
governments; it aspires to create and protect a nonpartisan zone in the name of ordinary people,
whether they are the victims of natural disaster or of violent conflagration.
At the beginning of 2002, according to the United Nations, there were about 12 million refugees
around the world, as many as 25 million people displaced within their own countries, and more than
500 nongovernmental organizations acting in partnership with the UN High Commissioner for
Refugees. Yet even as the need for relief grows, humanitarian space is shrinking - in the physical
realm of camps as well as the conceptual arena of neutral conditions. This is due to a variety of
pressures: As aid agencies mobilize ever greater amounts of resources - trucks, tents, food, medicine

- and operate in more and more politically charged situations, other parties are increasingly exploiting
their work.
Sometimes repressive governments placate their people by outsourcing basic services to the NGO
community. In 1999, some two years after the Taliban took control of Afghanistan, half of Kabul's 1.2
million citizens depended on Western food aid. Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid notes in his book
Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil, and Fundamentalism in Central Asia that this gave the country's warlords
"the excuse to absolve themselves of taking responsibility for the civilian population." Relief agencies,
committed to helping the weak and suffering, kept the assistance flowing freely.
Refugees often are the incidental result of war. But in many conflicts, one of the warring parties
intentionally displaces people. As author David Rieff points out in Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the
Failure of the West, the UNHCR vehemently protested the ethnic cleansing of Muslims and Croats
from Serb-controlled areas of Bosnia in 1993. Yet, he writes, "there had been times when it found itself
having to in effect abet it." The mandate to protect refugees put the UN agency in an impossible
position: "either standing by and watching the murders go on, or itself facilitating the larger Serb war
aim of the transfer of the non-Serb population" out of parts it had seized. The agency chose to move
people to safety, and hence to "purify" the territory. "I prefer 30,000 evacuees to 30,000 bodies," said
the agency's head in Bosnia.
At other times, defining a crisis as humanitarian provides a convenient alibi for an international
community that prefers to avoid a political or military response. The world stood by in the spring of
1994 as Hutu militants in Africa killed up to a million of their Tutsi neighbors. The Tutsi-led Rwandan
Patriotic Army finally put an end to the massacres and ejected the former government and its
paramilitary legions. Only then did Western nations respond with a massive show of relief. The
attention came too late to address the political crisis, and only after those responsible for the genocide
had fled into camps in neighboring Tanzania and Zaire, taking with them millions of Hutus who were
terrified by their leaders' talk of Tutsi reprisals. In the camps, the killers took advantage of the flow of
aid and money to regroup, rearm, and organize an effort to continue the pogrom.
In the aftermath of these experiences, many relief agencies concluded that they needed to adopt a
more political stance, whether that meant taking sides, adding the protection of human rights to their
mandates, or simply working in league with the world's powerful governments and their armies. In
early 1999, for example, along the border of Kosovo, aid agencies toiled essentially as subcontractors
of NATO; one UNHCR official told a reporter, with satisfaction, that "NATO not only builds the refugee
camps and ensures their security, it sets the humanitarian agenda."
But the defense of neutral space has never been more important - precisely because of the
inescapable burden of politics. Far from being a way to avoid politics, humanitarianism offers an
essential yardstick for measuring the possibilities and stakes of political action, including the use of
military force. In December 1999, James Orbinski, then head of Doctors Without Borders, put this
most clearly as he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize for the organization. "No doctor can stop a
genocide," he said. "No humanitarian can stop ethnic cleansing, just as no humanitarian can make
war. And no humanitarian can make peace. These are political responsibilities, not humanitarian
imperatives."

Thomas Keenan teaches literature and politics at Bard College, where he also directs the Human
Rights Project.

Best-Laid Plan
PUBLIC SPACE: Somewhere Between Success and Failure
By Rem Koolhaas (Guest Editor)

When modernist architects dreamed a new form of public life, they imagined a liberated ground: Freed
from the suffocation of narrow streets, people would roam among monuments, communing with a
newly ordered nature that would receive them like an "open hand." At the Chandigarh Capitol Complex
in northern India, architect Le Corbusier's hand hovers like a ghost above his decaying dreamscape.
But don't be fooled by the emptiness: For half the day, this space is teeming with people, filled with the
eclectic chaos of an informal economy. Every morning a market appears, every afternoon it
disappears. And to this day, the jury is out on whether this daily injection of chaos is an architectural
success or a failure. Public life in spite of architecture? Or public architecture as enabler for life? The
emblem of yesterday's architectural heroism has become an icon for the insecurities of today's urban
planners. When the space is vacated, as shown here in a photograph by Dominique GonzalezForester, all that's left from the Western imagination's most radical attempt to organize public space is
a lesson in the sublime.