Examples are not difficult to collect. Lashkar-e-Taiba ’ s attacks on Mumbai are already one illustration of this. The utopian urbanism of this Pakistani state within a state may be based on an expansive geographical vision of Dar al-Islam, whereas the cosmopolitan logic of Google and Google Earth is a singular denuded space into which competing claims can be enveloped. The platform utopia of Google Earth ’ s cosmographic capacities are instrumentalized by fundamentalist politico-theological geographies, such that one space can interweave through the other in the same projection. And again, their interweaving and interdependency produce the space of their encounter (once more, the lesson is less that jihad can fit within Google Earth but than Google Earth fits within jihad). The space of this interlacing of utopias is made and thereby entered into, not entered into and so made, or again, after Adorno, “ but in that we travel there, the island of utopia rises out of the sea. ” But this doubling is also the work of emergent platforms, fundamentalist or futurist. In everyday urban design, we see forms based on both openness and closedness at once, often rendered into the official symbolism of the state. While the George W. Bush – era US embassy in Berlin by Moore Ruble Yudell (though it looks like Halliburton ’ s design) didn ’ t bother even to suggest civil space or civilian purpose, some others do. Consider Kieran and Timberlake ’ s winning design for the US embassy in London, one quickly derided for its schizophrenic posture to the world, both transparent glass and defensive bunker at once. It may be a confused compromise of contemporary clich é and contradictory programmatic requirements, or it may be a perfectly tuned ambivalent and affectless posture for what global architectural presence even means to the Obama era. Similarly, for Morphosis ’ s Los Angeles CalTrans building, dynamic expressionistic forms look like public sculpture but perform as martial security program: decorative camouflage precisely. It is ostensibly an open, green democratic building in which the virtue of architectural innovation and artistry is on display for public edification. The building ’ s footprint is defined in relation to post – Oklahoma City Bombing guidelines against vehicular proximity, a gigantic concrete skirt opening only along one corner, where pedestrians encounter outsized expressionistic metal fingers as they try to enter. Housing the higher administrative functions of
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The Stack to Come