Harvard Design Magazine #39

Wet Matter
No. 39
F/W 2014

The ocean remains a glaring blind spot in the Western imagination. Catastrophic events remind us of its influence—a lost airplane, a shark attack, an oil spill, an underwater earthquake—but we tend to marginalize or misunderstand the scales of the oceanic. It represents the “other 71 percent” of our planet. Meanwhile, like land, its surface and space continue to be radically instrumentalized: offshore zones territorialized by nation-states, high seas crisscrossed by shipping routes, estuaries metabolized by effluents, sea levels sensed by satellites, seabeds lined with submarines and plumbed for resources. As sewer, conveyor, battlefield, or mine, the ocean is a vast logistical landscape. Whether we speak of fishing zones or fish migration, coastal resilience or tropical storms, the ocean is both a frame for regulatory controls and a field of uncontrollable, indivisible processes. To characterize the ocean as catastrophic—imperiled environment, coastal risk, or contested territory—is to overlook its potential power.

The environments and mythologies of the ocean continue to support contemporary urban life in ways unseen and unimagined. The oceanic project—like the work of Marie Tharp, who mapped the seafloor in the shadows of Cold War star scientists—challenges the dry, closed, terrestrial frameworks that shape today’s industrial, corporate, and economic patterns. As contemporary civilization takes the oceanic turn, its future clearly lies beyond the purview of any head of state or space of a nation.
Reexamining the ocean’s historic and superficial remoteness, this issue profiles the ocean as contemporary urban space and subject of material, political, and ecologic significance, asking how we are shaping it, and how it is shaping us.

Table of Contents

EDITOR’S NOTES
The Other 71 Percent
Pierre Bélanger
Who’s Afraid of the Ocean?
Jennifer Sigler

ARTIFACTS
Body Boundaries
Jenna Sutela
Backstroke
Luis Callejas
Ballast Water
Rose George
Cold Meets Wet
Nicola Twilley
Currencies
Astrida Neimanis
Land Under
Elena Megia Nieto, Theo Deutinger
Liquid Traces
Lorenzo Pezzani
Regional Design Thinking
Henk Ovink

COLUMNS
Interplay
Keller Easterling
The Black Beach
AbdouMaliq Simone
Why Fight Them When We Can Eat Them?
Bun Lai
Thalassophilia and Its Discontents
Christopher Connery
The Bottom of the Bay, Or How to Know the Seaweeds*
Catherine Seavitt Nordenson

ESSAYS
Built on Sand: Singapore and the New State of Risk
Joshua Comaroff
Destination Whatever: Touring the Cruise Industry of the Caribbean
Supersudaca: Martin Delgado, Zuzanna Koltowska, Félix Madrazo & Sofia Saavedra
How Climate Change Might Save the World: Metamorphosis
Ulrich Beck
Between the Tides of Apartheid
Pierre Bélanger
Camps, Corridors, and Clouds: Inland Ways to the Ocean
Charlie Hailey
Moving Ships Over Mountains: From the Conquest of Nature to Political Ecology at the Panama Canal
Ashley Carse
Sundarbans: A Space of Imagination
Dilip da Cunha, Anuradha Mathur
The Smell of Money: Fishmeal on the Periphery of the Global Food Economy
Kristin Wintersteen
Volume and Vision: Toward a Wet Ontology
Philip Steinberg, Kimberley Peters
INSERT
Excerpt from Sundogz
Mark von Schlegell

INTERVIEWS
Ocean Sensing
Dawn Wright, Xiaowei Wang
Bodies, Boats, and Borders
Rebecca Gomperts, Sara Zewde
Liquid Governance
Patri Friedman, Martti Kalliala
Un huracán de lenguajes
Héctor Tarrido-Picart, Victor Hernández Cruz

REVIEWS
Watermark
Max Haiven
Bernard Tschumi Retrospective
Emmanuel Petit
City Choreographer
Mimi Zeiger
The Mound of Vendôme
Lucas Freeman
UIA2014 Durban
Sean O'Toole
PLUS
Building Soft
Byron Stigge, Hilary Sample
Flotsam: A Visualization of Swimmers, Sinkers, and Spills in the Urban Ocean
Martin Pavlinic, Luis Callejas
Rereading: Rachel Carson, “Undersea” (1937)
Hali Felt, Kate Orff
Waves of Power: Advertising the Ocean
The Editors