Thresholds 31 - Call for Submissions

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thresholds 35

residual

“Waste is the result of bad design.”
Eric Lombardi, EcoCycle, 2006

“There are, probably in every culture, in every civilization, real places—places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society—which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.”
Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 1967

Relegated to an occasional afterthought, the residual has been to a large degree invisible and forgotten. One may attribute such erasure to the paradox that the residual is at once ubiquitous and placeless: the ubiquity has led many to equate the residual with the staggering material waste of our time, where “garbage” is most often dealt with out of convenience or utility; residual’s lack of location, or specific locations, has made it so banal that the problematics itself becomes unnecessary, disposable and even obsolescent.

Some practitioners and theorists, however, have steadfastly embraced the residual for its heterotopic situation and materiality, its subversive relationships with the built environment and the cultural context, and its potential to offer principled strategies for one’s existence in a world characterized by flux. Gordon Matta-Clark’s Fake Estates (1973-4), for instance, poised to examine the intersections between city bureaucracies, use value, artifacts and architecture through fifteen slivers of found lots scattered in Queens and Staten Island, New York. Dominique Laporte observes in History of Shit (1968) how the regulations on bodily refuse helped articulate the emerging concepts of the public and private in 16th-century France. Michael Warner, in Trouble with Normal (1999), argues for an ethics of living on the socially condemned margin that resists the normalizing forces of the mainstream culture. Paul Auster, in the memorable ending of his novella, City of Glass (1987), contemplates what remains after the total deconstruction of the self.

thresholds 35 invites contributions examining the material, historical, aesthetic, architectural, urban, political and cultural origins and implications of the residual. We invite critical perspectives that explore these issues in a variety of media, including essays, projects, proposals, policies, works of art and literary/filmic criticism.

thresholds 35 will be released in summer 2008. We are no longer accepting submissions for this issue.

Chienchuan Chen, Editor
thresholds
MIT Department of Architecture
Room 7-337
77 Massachusetts Ave.
Cambridge, MA 02139

inquiries, text/image submissions: thresh@mit.edu