Archived Weblog Entry - 01/13/2006: "In Progress: Buildings"

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01/13/2006 Archived Entry: "In Progress: Buildings"

In Progress: Buildings
(Draft of the introduction to an essay I'm working on that is supposed to be in a collection about buildings and Detroit, unless the editor thinks it's crap and drops it. . .)

Building Interfaces: The Maccabees

The English Department at Wayne State University, in Detroit, Michigan, is housed at 5057 Woodward Avenue in the Maccabees Building, a 1927 building designed by the famed Detroit architect Albert Khan. The Maccabees were a secret order whose origins are traced to both the Masons and the Jewish fighters whose revolt against the Seleucids has been historically and religiously remembered in the holiday of Hanukkah. The Maccabees building was founded by the group of the same name, but it later became the hub for the Detroit Public Schools system. In The Rise and Fall of an Urban School System, Jeffrey Mirel traces the history of Detroit’s public school system in excruciating detail as a series of political and economic struggles among various state and city constituencies. The school system, Mirel argues, fell into disorder as the result of longstanding labor and political conflicts which crippled the schools' educational mission. Missing from Mirel’s history, however, is any mention of the Maccabees building. Taken over in 1960 by the Detroit Public School System (DPS), the Maccabees building signifies an educational presence in the heart of the city even as that presence engages in a long standing conflict over the role of education in the Motor City. In more recent years, the conflict surrounding urban education has led to the establishment and eventual abandonment of a CEO position to head the DPS (instead of "superintendent"), the mass firings of teachers and closings of schools, and the premature declaration by Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick to take over the school system himself.

If I were to map the Maccabees and its relationship to Detroit and education, I might begin with such observations. The map I construct would note the Maccabees’ absence in a popular conceptual map like Mirel’s (one which is based on timelines, and not physical space) and its central presence in the geographic locale known as New Center. This map would also extend to me and my office on the 10th floor of the Maccabees. In that space, I work on the Department of English’s "Digital Literacy" initiative, an attempt to integrate technology into the teaching of writing. The rise and fall of Detroit education, I note, can be mapped to include my office space even if that connection seems only superficial at first. The connection on this map that I imagine is one which joins technology to space. Maps, Katharine Harmon writes, "find their essence in some other goal than just taking us from point A to point B. They are a vehicle for the imagination" (10). I want to imagine, then, my connection to Detroit as a technological one. The focus of contemporary work on technology and space, and one which fuels my imagination, is the network. Networks draw expected (A to B) and unexpected connections (imaginative). In his work on intellectual and social networks, Randall Collins writes that in networks, "ideas are created out of the distribution of symbols already available at a moment in time, by being reshaped for anticipated audiences" (190). The Maccabees, a symbol of secrecy, institutional foundation, education, and now technology, is being reshaped as the city itself stands to be reshaped conceptually. The Maccabees, I want to show, can be shaped as the hub of a different kind of network than one we currently imagine.

In the age of the network, William Mitchell writes regarding his concept of "recombinant architecture," education and buildings become digitalized in profound ways. "The idea of a virtual campus," Mitchell notes, "paralleling or perhaps replacing the physical one – seems increasingly plausible" (70). Virtual education seems plausible to Mitchell because of the proliferation of communicative technologies which reshape pedagogy like online chat, networked computers, and large virtual library holdings. And while a considerable amount of Mitchell’s argument is devoted to innovations in software and hardware, he draws specific attention to how individuals imagine digital spaces, educational and otherwise.

The most crucial task before us is not one of putting in place the digital plumbing of broadband communications links and associated electronic appliances (which we will certainly get anyway), nor even of producing electronically deliverable "content," but rather one of imagining and creating digitally mediated environments for the kinds of lives that we will want to lead and the sorts of communities that we will want to have. (5)

Perhaps Mitchell’s focus on the importance of imagining digital space is itself a pedagogical gesture meant to demonstrate how virtuality is often actualized through very physical locations. By that, I mean that in order to imagine a digital reality, one may not have to look farther than one’s own physical location. To imagine a digital education (whether that education is within the Liberal Arts, architecture, science or otherwise), one could begin in a very physical educational space. One such location which intrigues me is the Maccabees, for it is the site of two educational missions: the DPS and Wayne State University. That duality prompts me to think of space, technology, and pedagogy in ways not yet imagined. What is the relationship between my physical location and technology, I ask? I first have to imagine it. Thus, not just any building will do for any kind of educational mission or any kind of imaginative gesture. One begins with a specific building interface. In the age of the network, Mitchell claims, "Buildings will become computer interfaces, and computer interfaces will become buildings" (105). The obvious response to Mitchell, and a test case for the relationship between buildings and new media, would be to ask what kind of interface my location, the Maccabees, produces. If the Maccabees is a computer interface, and if we are, indeed, in the age of the network (as Mitchell also argues), how do we enact that interface to conceptualize the city as network?

Replies: 1 Comment

The reference to Randall Collins is cool. Stretched through the sense of my diss, I am interested in R.C. for r/c, or--to speak in terms of UV-Rays--a discussion of networks or "blocks" of R.and.(et).al Callings ...

These blocks are --alas-- a bit outta joint w/ what yer talking about by way of Mitchell, and yet from my remote perspective ... there seems to be some intersections.

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Question: Do ya ever run into Charles Stivale over there in that Gotham known as B.ruse Wayne State?

Posted by gvcarter @ 01/13/2006 10:18 PM EST