[Finish camera at the 2008 Beijing summer games / photo: Hans Gruber]

I've been meaning to post a link to the fabulous interview series Fabian Neuhaus has been posting on his blog UrbanTick. To bolster his research on "cycle studies" and space-time related technologies, the scholar has been engaging in extended conversations with a range of multidisciplinary specialists. The most recent instalment in this series focuses on Hans Gubler, the head timekeeper for the 2012 games in London. Gubler is with Omega, a 150 year old Swiss watch manufacturer that operates under the umbrella of the Swatch Group.

The exchange between Neuhaus and Gubler touches on the preparation for 2012, the logistics and contingencies of sports timing and addressees interfacing with the media. Gubler describing on how timekeeping has evolved over the last seventy years:

In the 1930s timing was still done manually, meaning using stop watches. An early version photo finish camera already existed but was not approved by the sports federation in those days. Horse racing was the first sport where a photo finish device was put in place. With the arrival of the transistor in the 1940s things changed rapidly. Our company started to develop timing devices of which the key element was a high precision quartz. Electric photocells were used to start and stop timing at great precision. At the same time the photo finish technology was further developed and eventually homologated for Athletics and used for the first time at the London 1948 Summer Olympics. In the meantime conventional photo finish film technology has been taken over by computer technology. New technologies also include the introduction of transponders.

The meandering conversation considers the specific demands of various sports and gets downright philosophical with a few of the questions. Gubler delivers the following—expectedly precise—definition of time: "Time can be either described as space (amount of time) into which a quantity of work/activity is placed or the moment things are happening (from now to the end of race)."

In reading this great interview two thoughts come to mind:

• One could get a fascinating perspective of an event or area of study by engaging the numerous experts, specialists and technicians that "do the dirty work" behind the scenes. This is a point that Geoff Manaugh touches on from time to time when pondering the significance of architecture to janitors or elevator-repair personal versus ivy league educated designers or critics.
• Gubler's comments about the micro-resolution of time reminded me of The New York Times interactive piece "Fractions of a Second: An Olympic Musical", which is a remarkably lucid, dead-simple visualization/sonification produced to contextualize results from the most recent winter games in Vancouver.

The following text is an excerpt from an essay on surveillance, security and David Fincher's Panic Room that I wrote in 2003. Before starting my M.Arch I had the good fortune to end up in profoundly inspiring seminar course entitled "The Cinematic City", taught by the venerable film theorist (and Cronenberg expert!) Bart Testa. Given that it is culled from a larger text, this passage may be a bit jarring. If you haven't seen the film, scanning the IMDB plot synopsis may help you get your bearing. Please excuse the clumsy pre-grad school citations and note the links to the "making of" videos at the bottom of the post.

[Panic Room title sequence, screen capture(s) via: guttervomit]

It's hard to detect, but the first sound heard in Panic Room is a police siren. It occurs for an instant before the title sequence begins, synchronized with the start of Howard Shore's angst laden score. The action ends with a SWAT team charging into the Altman residence to find the aftermath of the evening's violence. In a sense, this siren and the police 'assault' on the Altman home act as authoritarian brackets that frame the entire narrative.

[…]

At 1:30 AM on the first night in her new home, Meg Altman is fast asleep in her bedroom. The camera zooms out of the master suite into the outlying hallway. For a moment we can see Meg Altman's bed framed by the doorway to the master suite. The camera zooms out further through the spindles supporting the banister (framing the doorway) and then twists while descending down two floors to the first floor where it levels out while approaching the entryway where we see a car pulling up through the latticework of bars, blinds and mullions of the front windows. This car deposits Sidney Perlstein's drug addict nephew, Junior, and his accomplice, Burnham on the front doorstep of the townstone. The pair have arrived with designs to claim a stash of bonds stowed away within the Altman residence panic room.

The camera pans in stride with Burnham (who is still visible through the window) as he approaches the front door while zooming in on the door knob and lock. It zooms right 'into' the lock the moment that he turns the handle on the opposite side of the door, to see if it is open – it is locked. This is the first instance of one of the central themes of the film: architecture mediating the relations between characters and the dance of interiority and exteriority. Burnham walks back to Junior (who is playing lookout outside the front window) and gestures that he will check the back door. The camera turns around 180° and glides across the entire length of the entry level to the back door. Its arrival at the door coincides with his, he checks it and it is locked. The camera pans to the left to reveal another door which Burnham doesn't bother checking, but through its mullions we see him ascend the fire escape. The camera pans upwards following this movement, cuts through the ceiling, an interstitial space and flooring to the second level to reveal Burnham being stymied by another locked door and pulling down a spring-loaded fire ladder. The camera zooms out and ascends, passing through another separation between levels to the top floor. We catch a glimpse of the master suite and are reminded of Meg Altman's slumbering presence and her ignorance of the antagonists 'casing' the perimeter of the townstone. The camera turns a corner into another room, arcs back and points straight up to reveal a skylight – which it turns out is unlocked. Burnham opens the hatchway (which is wired), a few sparks fly and the continuous shot is broken and cuts to the panic room control panel where the display changes from "SYSTEM ARMED" to "ZONE 19 DISABLED". The distinction between interior and exterior has been broken and the security of the townstone has been compromised.

This shot lasts for approximately three minutes and is the longest of the film. It is also one of the most important as it alludes to the intricate spatial games that will play out for the remainder of the narrative. David Fincher described the shot as follows:

I think [screenwriter David] Koepp was trying to establish a really specific relationship between the windows and the burglars, the predators, were looking through. It's kind of like with fishbowls when cats presses their noses up against them. Also, since in one stylized shot where we float through the entire house, it established the geography.¹

All through this "establishing of geography" the gaze of the camera dissects the townstone. While the camera is incapable of penetrating the envelope to the exterior of the house, it passes through the separations between levels within the interior with ease. This shot lays bare the capabilities of the panoptic system to pierce through its jurisdiction and foreshadows a later permutation of the same gaze – the electronic eyes of the surveillance system. Under the scrutiny of the camera the brownstone becomes:

…transparent and porous. Information leakage is rampant. Barriers and boundaries – distance, darkness, time, walls, windows, and even skin which have become fundamental to our conceptions of privacy, liberty and individuality – give way.²

Why post a seven year old fragment of an essay? For starters, this shot pretty much single-handedly inspired my interest in long takes. Secondly, Panic Room has a deep thematic resonance with Anthony Vidler's The Architectural Uncanny, a text that became quite important to me. In that book Vidler describes the "dark recesses and margins" of space as vessels for fear and phobias, inevitable side-effects of our futile attempt to 'claim' space "to protect our health and happiness". Spatial pessimism aside, the shot works as a brilliant example of how cinema can engage (and undermine) architecture – the sequence functions as an elaborate puzzle. Revisiting this shot is a reminder of how brilliant aspects of Fincher's early work were and I'm still not quite sure how he ended up making an ass backwards movie about Brad Pitt.

Nothing I've wrote here does the original shot justice – see it for yourself. Also, here are links to a fascinating two-part video series on the making of the sequence: Part I/II.

Notes:

1. Epstein, Dan. Inside Panic Room, David Fincher – The Roundtable Interview. http://davidfincher.net – retrieved spring 2003
2. Staples, William G. Everyday Surveillance: Vigilance and Visibility in Postmodern Life. Boston: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000. Pg. 50.

For the past few weeks I've been incrementally working my way through Fabricating Architecture: Selected Readings in Digital Design and Manufacturing, a forthcoming collection of essays published by Princeton Architectural Press. The text is edited by Robert Corser and contains a range of short texts on building information modeling (BIM), mass customization, structural surfaces and case studies by practitioners including KieranTimberlake and ShoP.

One essay that I keep coming back to is "Automation Takes Command: The Nonstandard, Unautomatic History of Standardization and Automation in Architecture" by Kiel Moe in which the author sketches out a long winding road of a backstory to contemporary fabrication practices within architecture. Moe describes the adoption of fabrication as emerging from much broader systems of "numerical control" tied to military and management modes of organization – he's essentially debunking the "we're in the middle of a manufacturing revolution" rhetoric and instead advocating a more expansive consideration of the historical relationship between design and technology. An excerpt describing which aspects of fabrication actually are novel:

What is "new" in digital fabrication, and thus the source of much promise and interest, is the control of a tool along a path no longer guided by the neurological-muscular feedback loop of a human technician. Instead, it is now controlled by a path in a numerically controlled blanket of points. Our current use of the term numerical control in digital fabrication was coined by the U.S. Air Force after World War II in their search for an elaborate manufacturing system of producing primarily repetitive and occasionally complex components for warplanes and weapons systems.

Moe identifies numerical control as a predominant mode of social organization and points to "floating currencies, future markets, [and] the proliferation of digital technologies of all types" as evidence of this pervasive ideology. The author then steps back from the 21st century and conducts a survey of past technology that considers the role of the clock within Benedictine monasteries, the laws of perspective, the Jacquard loom and early 19th century ordnance production by the U.S. Army. This whirlwind tour of temporal and spatial organization and the shift away from artisan crafted manufacturing provides an absorbing setup to discuss WWII-era electronic numerical control and the development of rudimentary CAD/CAM workflows.

[US Patent 2,820,187 / Motor Controlled Apparatus for Positioning Machine Tool / 1958]

While other architectural theorists (such as Michael Speaks) have discussed how the WWII aerospace industry foreshadowed fabrication in architecture, Moe directs his attention to highlighting the unemployment caused by the adoption of these techniques within the automotive industry in the 1970s and 80s. This shift to a labour perspective is jarring and the author leverages this tension and states that "digital fabrication technologies will not change building production without fundamental shifts in the social and market structures of design practice." He cites Gehry Technologies as an example of a "social" implementation of digital design and manufacturing – a success story. I feel Moe missteps in not acknowledging how a new generation of designers are exploring craft through mass-customization – is this not relevant? Does this fact not problematize the discourse surrounding "traditional" numerical control? Apparently not. This grievance aside, it is impossible to dismiss an essay that sketches out a middle ground between Manuel de Landa's War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (1991) and the aforementioned Kieran & Timberlake's prescient book Refabricating Architecture (2003), I'll definitely be on the lookout for more research by Moe on fabrication, labour and the history of technology.

Fabricating Architecture: Selected Readings in Digital Design and Manufacturing will be released on July 17th.

The Perpetual Storytelling Apparatus (pictured above) is a drawing machine designed by Julius von Bismarck and Benjamin Maus that utilizes a vast archive of patent drawings to create an illustrated narrative. The software driving the device scans the text of a recent bestselling book and extracts keywords, these keywords are used to search for patent drawings which are reproduced sequentially. The resulting procession of drawings could potentially go on indefinitely as the archive of drawings being referenced is seven million patents deep (and includes patents produced as early as 1790).

In the final sequence in the above video, the camera pans up some two dozen drawings and quite compellingly illustrates how the design or functionality of adjacent schematic drawings is related. The device works as kind of a diagrammatic free association machine and while there is a certain whimsy in chaining together a string of technical drawings that are detached from their accompanying documentation, the Perpetual Storytelling Apparatus deals with intellectual property rather than fantasy.

In the video, Bismarck & Maus highlight that patents "reflect the mindset of society in a certain time" and a strange tension between the assembly and operational diagrams produced by inventors and the history and social nature of technology permeates this apparatus and the drawings it produces.