“The X just means we don’t know what’s going to happen,” he adds. This is the spirit of experimentation behind Studio-X, an ambitious global educational initiative currently underway at GSAPP. Equal parts learning space, public forum, and international think tank, Studio-X “affords an enormous bandwidth for thinking about the future of cities,” Wigley says—a mandate that he cites as the core mission of the program, and the reason he first proposed it four years ago... With sister offices now open in Mumbai, Amman, Beijing, and Rio de Janeiro, and more in the offing in South Africa and Japan, Studio-X New York is one spoke in a wheel of architectural activity that is at once international and intensely localized. The overseas branches aren’t intended to be subordinate to either Columbia or the Manhattan pilot office—“not like Starbucks selling some sort of wisdom from New York,” as Wigley puts it. They’re idea incubators in their own right, feeding new knowledge about how cities live and change into a greater community of thought... “It’s about expanding the notion of the university beyond the institution itself,” explains Jeffrey Johnson, the director of the New York–based China Megacities Lab, who has led groups of students on semiannual visits to Studio-X Beijing since it opened in 2009... Situated, like the New York studio, in the very heart of their respective downtowns, each Studio-X satellite operates as a discrete unit, with local directors setting a specific agenda. Yet all of the outposts, following the program’s mission, look to reinvigorate the urban conversation in their particular cities by engaging not just designers but culturally omnivrous thinkers from diverse backgrounds... Gavin Browning, who preceded Twilley and Manaugh at Studio-X New York, admits that the two halves of the Studio-X population are often “operating in separate spheres.”... The space’s social character is part of its appeal. “The potential for the contact there to be informal allows for discussions to take place that don’t take place in a more official setting,” says Jeffrey Inaba, the head of C-Lab, another fixture of Studio-X New York... And then there is the question of how the overseas locales are meant to work in concert with one another, as well as with the university. When they’re not being visited by one of the American student groups (which is to say, the majority of the year), the far-flung outposts operate entirely independently of Columbia. Although that gives them considerable leeway to chart their own course, it reduces the overall coherence of the program. “We all have access to each others’ planning calendars,” says Twilley, referring to her fellow Studio-X directors, “and I check what they’re up to.
But we haven’t translated that information into a coordinated series.”... Some of Studio-X’s satellites are located in places where certain political issues, the kind of things that might be spoken about freely on the campus of Columbia University, simply cannot be addressed. Wigley, who also sees the program as a vehicle for bringing corporate figures into architectural conversations, believes there’s room for healthy debate, but he tends to downplay the potential for outright conflict.

The talk is an extension of one of my favorite posts, a preliminary atlas of gizmo landscapes, which attempted reconsider the iPhone, not as a discrete, independent hand-held device (“the phone that magically has the internet in it”, which I think is more or less how Apple wants you to think of it), but as a networked object that both produces and is produced by a wide array of distant and not-so-distant landscapes, from zinc mines to Fed-Ex distribution hubs... Relatedly, the iPhone’s manufacturing chain — what I call the iPhone’s landscape of manufacture in the atlas talk — has been the subject of several recent news stories.

This American Life’s excellent “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory” begins with an excerpt from Mike Daisey’s one-man show about his trip to Shenzhen — which began when Daisey saw a few photos of the inside of an iPhone factory, and was shocked by the absence of robots — and follows the excerpt with reporting that confirms what Daisey saw in Shenzhen... Second, the CEO of Foxconn, Terry Gou, seems determined to correct the perception that his company dehumanizes its workers: “Hon Hai has a workforce of over one million worldwide and as human beings are also animals, to manage one million animals gives me a headache" [yeow!]... Finally, the New York Times ran a lengthy piece on “Apple, America, and a Squeezed Middle Class”, which explores Apple’s decision to relocate the bulk of its manufacturing operations from the United States to China over the past decade... For Mr. Cook, the focus on Asia “came down to two things,” said one former high-ranking Apple executive. Factories in Asia “can scale up and down faster” and “Asian supply chains have surpassed what’s in the U.S.” The result is that “we can’t compete at this point,” the executive said.”

This is a particularly interesting supplement to the component of my talk that touches on manufacturing because while I focused on Longhua Science and Technology Park — the FoxConn factory-city in Shenzhen — and the kind of place that it is for those who live and work in it, the Times article explains that the appearance of Longhua, which I described as “the iPhone city”, required the disappearance of another city, back in the United States. (This makes it a similarly good supplement to the This American Life piece, for the same reason.) There’s a huge set of issues tied up in the relationship between Longhua and Elk Grove, as the article indicates, from the ethics of labor conditions to the rise of logistics landscapes as the key node in global trade chains to the disappearance of the manufacturing jobs that formed the foundation of the American middle class (and corresponding “job polarization”).

"This interactive digital media project visualizes cultural geographies of submarine communications networks. These networks currently support almost all of our transoceanic internet traffic. Using video and photography of landing points and cable stations across the Pacific Rim, Surfacing maps the cultural processes that have come to shape the development of transnational internet infrastructure. "