The Guerilla Farmer's Almanac

The Guerilla Farmer's AlmanacAuthor(s): Edward MitchellSource: Log, No. 5 (Spring/Summer 2005), pp. 145-152Published by: Anyone CorporationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41765047 .

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Edward Mitchell The Guerilla

Farmer's Almanac

Clearing Fields A farmer clears the ground before establishing a field. Once the field is established a farmer will use an almanac to forecast futures. Logging or ground- clearing may be required in order to clear the field for the almanac. Modernism relied on

ground clearing; today we can work with greater complexity. One thing is clear - logging lists facts, while an almanac, which contains logs, aims toward production. A log records, while an almanac predicts.

The N-Body Problem

Log: Part One In 1663, Sir Isaac Newton, a farmer's son, picked up an

astrology book at a world's fair and discovered that he couldn't do the math. Once he did his homework, he could calculate the rate at which two masses move toward mutual

destruction; Newton made logs of planetary motion, eventu-

ally using the data to form equations. Unlike a good apple- bonking, adding a third body to the problem gave Newton a headache.

In 1792, Robert Thomas published The Old Farmer's Almanac. Though most of his readers were farmers, almanacs had a large urban readership. The Almanac contains many basic facts. But in addition, without sophisticated mathematics, the Almanac's secret system, allegedly based on the movements of the sun and the moon, is able to forecast the weather - a chaotic, dynamic system - with 80-85 percent accuracy.

Logging is useful for simple problems, but once fields are constructed, they become complex iNT-body problems of

multiple masses, as Henri Poincairé would observe, producing indeterminate, chaotic behavior in these systems. Cultural phenomena, often viewed as negotiations between individual players, are more often the chaotic result of

multibody problems: mass hysteria, mob behavior, popular fads, or even urbanism.

In order to read architectural almanacs, like young Newton, we will need to learn the numbers so that reading multiple masses as potential architectural and urban forms

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doesn't appear like astrological gibberish. But in order to fos- ter experimentation and risk, we should anticipate the mar-

gins of error conceded by .Af-body problems, rather than the rote determinacy of the two-body problem.

Almanac: Part One The Guerilla Farmer's Almanac will log the basic formulas for

physical problems. But instead of simple beam equations and other one- and two-body problems, it will use software that can calculate nonstandard solutions to multibody problems with 80-85 percent accuracy.

Politicizing the Field Were we directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap, we should soon want bread .

- Thomas Jefferson Log: Part Two

Jefferson, First Architect and Founding Father, promoted the national image of the schizoid superhero: farmer by day and

politician by night. In this split American identity, the farmer's immanent cultivation of land balances the politician's construction of territory. Jefferson laid a grid across the land, and once boundaries were established, the numbers became easier to manipulate. As a farmer, Jefferson was a failure. He could do the Palladian geometry but it was not clear whether he could read the almanac's algorithms.

Developers, like farmers, turn logs into almanacs in order to forecast. In the new national game, the Farmer's Almanac became less profitable than the real estate section.

Jefferson was suspicious of central government, and yet as

president he inadvertently became the most successful real estate agent in American history, purchasing 800,000 square miles of land for 15 million dollars. It turned out that you could make people want bread simply by sowing and reaping on a managed schedule.

Almanac: Part Two The Guerilla Farmer's Almanac will demonstrate the efficacy 148



of the grid for organizing the field but also account for the effects of random events and guerilla intervention. The rules of the top-down political model have been logged by developers and have been effective when working both centers and

margins. The formulas for development will be distributed to

every subscriber in order to level the field. Real estate specu- lation depends upon initial field turbulence - fallow markets are worse than either bull or bear markets - but when the

developer goes legit he demands stabilizing codes like zoning. The new emergent or bottom-up model in the GFA will operate under constant negotiation, anticipating changes rather than stabilizing the field in order to maintain margins.

Pressure Order is not fressure which is imposed on society from without , but an equilibrium which is set up from within .

- Jose Ortega y Gasset

Log: Part Three Pressure causes bodies in three- and four-dimensional systems to self-organize into coherent fields. Behaviors, too, are forms - condensations of random activities into coherent entities. Formerly chaotic assemblies emerged as new behavior-forms during the modern period. We can distinguish how internal and external pressures acting on a system produce these forms. Calculated external pressures like mass

production, forced conscription, propaganda, and state-

sponsored fear try to manage the emergent behavior- forms of crowds, production, and consumption. Excessive external

pressures, like starving the peasants, cutting wages, or tech- nical innovations, produce new turbulent content-forms: riots, crashes, and fads.

Urbanisms are often subject to the external pressures of master plans, mass production, and mass markets. External

pressure effectively reduced the dominant organizations of modernism to two-body problems, like figure/ground, blight/renewal, or profit/loss.

Almanac: Part Three Internal pressures produce emergent phenomena like riots and identifiable neighborhoods like Manhattan's Garment District or the gentrified artists' communities in Brooklyn's Williamsburg, which do not make use of conventional cod-

ing or districting. The dynamic equilibrium produced by internal pressures will become the complex research of The Guerilla Farmer's Almanac . Part Three will marry a website with a cyclometric chart for pressure calculation and will

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include relevant contact numbers for weather bureaus, banks, political action committees, and publicists.

Guerilla Tactics Our commander said that the Viet Cong 'were farmers by day and

guerillas by night . Look for those that are tired . So anyone who yawned was getting fop fed,

- Seymour Hirsch

Log: Part Four The farmer-politician, the original insurrectionist, became the target for the American war machine. Cold War ideology pitted capitalist farmer against communist farmer. The sim-

ple products of state-sponsored two-body systems will

invariably repeat old content/form battles - capitalist "indi- vidualism" versus the five-year "plans" of bureaucratic col- lectives. Both sides learned that two-body problems always head toward mutual destruction, and that balancing the two

through external pressure would reap greater harvests.

Mixing the volatility of capitalism with the discipline of dic-

tatorship, binding the rule set, and issuing it to select friends

multiplied futures for both dictator and entrepreneur. In the modern period, this orchestrated volatility was a form of

managed capitalism.

Almanac: Part Four The Guerilla Farmer's Almanac will work toward emergent collectivism. Alternatives will be predicated on behavior- forms of more chaotic assemblies. The old forms of dialecti- cal modernism will continue to be logged in while we await the publication of the GFA, Part Four will provide tips on maintenance for tools and weapons, tactical code recognition for fight or flight analysis, and recipes for staying awake.

Temporal Urbanism Life is vety different when you're in a crowd. When you're in a crowd you see things as they really are, the smell of fear and hate

generated by all around . . . Life is very intricate when you're in a crowd,

- Paul Weiler, "The Combine"

Log: Part Five When we look at larger-scale chaotic assemblies like cities, we either isolate form and behavior or reduce problems to

simple causal relationships. Behaviors are in fact temporal forms - condensations of random activities into coherent entities. Traditionally, concrete forms like grids, streets, and

plazas become empty containers for programmatic content

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like "business centers" and "public space." Combining these urban types produced collage cities of ordinary architectures in which difference was symbolic. This model of formal and

political "tolerance" was supposed to free us from the alleged tyranny of the grid. In "Collision City," Koetter and Rowe forecast chaotic assemblies, but ultimately they reduced

Collage City1 s conclusion to a log of urban set pieces. Intricacy implies a complexity in urban behavior-forms,

but has been co-opted as a purely aesthetic rather than political tool. Tolerance is absorbed into the formalism of the new and exotic megastructures as measured variation in a curved surface rather than being mobilized in the vague and

open potential of urban shape. The megas true ture freezes the temporal into fixed architectural form. Shaping temporal urbanism recognizes behavior-forms as magnitudes that

implicate, and are implicated by, physical structures.

Almanac: Part Five The Guerilla Farmer's Almanac will operate, like Sim City, on an emergent model. The GFA will play out capitalism's con- tinuous translation of value, and again like Sim City, it will be able to calculate the random possibilities of iNT-body problems. Though Sim City is biased toward conventional urban formats, it is able to generate a lifelike dynamism. As Jane Jacobs used to say, in Sim City things begin to dance. But while gray-haired ladies get nostalgic about reality, the GFA will recognize the potential of simulation. Behavior-forms will begin to interest architects as much as object- forms.

Mass Tolerance

Log: Part Six An intelligent farmer recognizes a field's dynamics in its folds and cusps, and tends those differentials. Today's tech-

nique of "mass customization," while exploiting differentials

by working the margins, tries to micromanage difference with zero tolerance. Mass customization requires margins to remain legitimate to marginal developers and critics. We do not need to see more documentation of the CADCAM

"building process" to assure us of the integrity of architecture's performance.

Freed of the obligation of formal integrity and discrete

ideology, architecture, forecast by algorithmic calculation, may become as light and nimble as the logic of the market. Architects are still producing relics of yesterday's formalist debate disguised as calculating machines. Global capitalism's architectures of monetary flow, transfer, and itinerant signi- 151



fiers still require stable referents, signs, and symbols of its

"progressive" agenda, just as they need nodes in their vast infrastructure of exchange. The "cold glass boxes" of the International Style, according to Robert Smithson, were the

entropie product of the commodity's aspiration to be "99 and 44/100ths pure." Today's architecture of mass customization is absorbing the commodity's latent idealism into architecture's tendency toward monumentality. It is becom-

ing a colossal sponge only tolerant of 100 percent purity.

Almanac: Part Six The Guerilla Farmer's Almanac will integrate the mobile prac- tices of the bricoleur of "Collision City," who invents prac- tices with the nuts-and-bolts acumen of today's digital pro- cessing. The GFA will not produce mass commodities or mass customization but mass tolerance. Mass Tolerance both "frees [architecture] from the obligation to represent architecture at work" (Somoï) and remains situated within the

problem at hand. Architecture takes place where concept confronts mass. Architecture's "pure" ideals only become tolerant through its "mass appeal" to both material con- straints and its ability to form markets. Pure concepts were the tools of the conservative strains of modern ideology. The GFA will appeal to the latent problems of tolerance for both materials and emergent publics. The GFA will provide CAD- CAM software, tool catalogues, construction tolerances, and

product recommendations that include cost analysis and details. It will also be full of holes.

Outstanding in the Field

Asking what The Guerilla Farmer's Almanac will look like

may be like asking what a pile of manure looks like. For the time being, asking how it works may be the question of a revised notion of formalism. Instead of logging in on sides and

issuing graphic standards or nonstandard graphics, we ought to become outstanding in the field by issuing tables for profit- making, writing program code for new behavior-forms, learning how to adjust a bolt on a cutting machine, under-

standing hydrology and waste management, tying a knot, and ordering from a catalogue. Let's turn logs into almanacs.

Edward Mitchell is an adjunct ASSISTANT PROFESSOR AT THE YALE School of Architecture and principal of Edward Mitchell Architects.

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The Guerilla Farmer's Almanac