Nuclear Blue: The Manhattan Project and Its Quieter Effects
Mark Stanley
Mountain Time
Eliyahu Keller
Spectral Pursuits in Secret Gardens: Of Phonetics, Surveillance, and Cold War Lab-Prisons
Ryan Bishop
Techno, Techné: Raves, Abstractions, and Militant Subjecthood
Philip Glahn
PART 2
Silent Siege: In the Shadow Landscapes of Sanctions
Ghazal Jafari
Designing within Conflict (No one asked me to come, but here I am)
Malkit Shoshan
Core and Coastline: The State of Political Exception in Beirut
May Khalife
Soviet Telescopes in Latin America’s Cold War
Pedro Ignacio Alonso and Hugo Palmarola
Border Blimp Bomb
César A. Lopez and Jeffrey S. Nesbit
Coda
Engineering the Underworld
Gretchen Heefner
Atlantic Networks and Geometries: Visualizing Military
New York (1783-1815)
Victoria Sanger
Basements as Invisible Defense
Dongwoo Yim
Forgotten Fire Control Towers in Plain Sight
Randy Crandon
Carter Manny and the Design Industrial Complex
Charles Waldheim
{Excerpts}
Victoria Betterly, Carly Browngardt, Keaton Bruce, Breana Haselbarth, Logan Paulukow
Contributors
Image Credits
Kate Wingert-Playdon
This edited volume Constructing Invisibility follows the 2023 Architecture and Environmental Design (AED) symposium establishing a design and research series focused on the inherent interdisciplinary nature of Tyler School of Art and Architecture’s built environment disciplines, specifically including architecture, landscape architecture, city planning, and connecting with school wide lenses such as history, aesthetics, and critical studies, to name a few. Integrated into a bi-annual symposium, this volume is the first of a multi-year research effort centered on forwardfocused topics related to the advancement of research initiated by the AED faculty and include speakers and scholars whose research and creative work branches out from, and overlaps with, pressing challenges and current practices in the design fields. A primary goal of each symposium is to reach scholars and researchers from within the Tyler School of Art and Architecture and Temple University, and to engage topics that are trending across allied fields and diverse disciplines, more broadly. The series success relies on the
collaborative dialogue with invited speakers from multiple universities, institutions, and cultural organizations who can catalyze and inspire the Tyler community—faculty and graduate students alike—to continue to address the role of cross disciplinary engagement as a part of increasing design praxis and elevating design research. The topics are not pre-established, rather they come from the relationship between faculty areas of research and urgent issues affecting the built environment.
The interdisciplinary dialogue that comes with each symposium is expected to push at areas of research about the built environment that will impact the future of design practice.
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Constructing Invisibility is in part a record of the dialogue from the 2023 symposium, a segment in a stream of design research activities at Tyler and stands on its own merits for increasing the production of knowledge.
Constructing Invisibility
Infrastructure, militarization, and the extreme environment. A research symposium.
Fig. 1 William Toney, Untitled(2024); courtesy of the artist.
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Fig. 2 William Toney, Untitled(2024). Photograph by Neighboring States; courtesy of the artist.
Fig. 4 William Toney, Helicopter.1(2024); courtesy of the artist.
Fig. 3 William Toney, Untitled(2024); courtesy of the artist.
2 “Designing Within Conflict: Building for Peace,” presentations, projects, and stories, 2024 (images by
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Fig.
Malkit Shoshan).
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necessary for navy, war, and fortification….20
Overall, Mangin’s input was both solicited and yet held at arm’s length by the establishment. The political context was not favorable. Over the course of the 1790s an initial Francophilia, in gratitude for aid during the American Revolution, had dimmed and for a time
America was turning back to England. At the time of the Hamilton letter and canal project, there was a “quasiwar” against France, and New York was fortifying against a potential French invasion.21 He suffered setbacks: although he was the architect in full partnership with John McComb, he was absent at the ceremony laying the first stone of City Hall in May of 1803, and
Fig. 1 Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division, The New York Public Library. Casimir Goerck and Joseph-François Mangin, “Plan of the city of New-York” The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1803-11. Digital image:
his name was erased from the record.22 Most likely his associations with slavery in Saint-Domingue were distasteful to many: Benjamin Latrobe, learning he had lost the City Hall competition to the Mangin-McComb team, disparaged the former as that “St. Domingo Frenchman.”23 Several months after the City Hall disgrace, in November 1803, Mangin’s map of New York was rejected.24 Both Koeppel and Leroy hypothesize that he was discredited for political reasons not substantive ones since his map was largely accepted. Despite his pleas to Hamilton, he was not given a military position in the United States Military Academy at West Point, founded in 1802. It could have been because of Jonathan Williams, first superintendent of West Point, who mistrusted foreign engineers in the current political environment.25 Although the strong presence of Frenchmen and a Francophile curriculum at this military academy beginning in 1816 calls the lasting impact of this turn of the century francophobia into question.26
His later work continues to attest to his multiple competencies in town planning, surveying, engineering, and architecture. By 1816 he was sickly, supporting a family of five children, and out of work. He applied to the City of New York for alms of 50 dollars.27 There is no further trace of him after 1818. The odds had not been in his favor. Whether for espousing slavery, being French, or having an allegiance with Hamilton, his ideas were not formally accepted. Yet they were so much of his time, and so well presented graphically that they were impactful nonetheless as we will now see.
Mangin’s Plan for Manhattan
The most famous work by Mangin is a “regulating plan of the city” for the Common Council. On December 11, 1797, Joseph-François Mangin got the commission in tandem with accomplished surveyor Casimir Goerck, but Goerck died in a yellow fever epidemic in 1798 and Mangin solo completed a six-foot-square manuscript on April 10, 1799 (now lost). In July, the Common
Council commissioned an engraving of it by Peter Maverick at half the size and completed in 1803 known as the Mangin-Goerck plan (fig. 1).
By now it is clear that Mangin’s comment explaining his intentions to present “not the plan of the city such as it is, but such as it is to be” is part of his synthetic engineer-planner’s delineation of the city.28 Yet this quote is often cited as proof of its his perceived arrogance, his plan’s impracticability and an explanation for why it was rejected.29 In fact, Koeppel’s analysis demonstrates how Mangin grappled with landowners and recorded and projected redesigned streets below the base of the Commissioner’s Plan.30 His flaw was not having authorization to open streets. Moreover, Koeppel points to how Mangin planted the seeds for a large vision of New York, the idea of having a planning document to project the city into the future “captured an enduring legacy.”31 Although Mangin’s map was recalled in 1803, it was preempted by the even vaster projected grid Randel proposed in 1811.32 But this time the plan was fully backed with the legislature. As for the colonialist-style land-grab of the enormous grid, Mangin and Randel had a common culture in tacitly continuing the institution of classism and slavery and saw no obstacle to dispossessing Blacks and other marginalized populations in the northern extension of Manhattan’s grid.33 Just as the French towns in Saint-Domingue were part of a military and state sponsored network of racial oppression so were Mangin’s and Randel’s grid structures for Lower and Upper Manhattan. The 1811 Commissioner’s map was met by attack and litigation. Where on the one hand it provided wealthy individuals “equal opportunity” to buy land and commodified real estate in New York, on the other hand many landholders virulently opposed the gridding of their land, and it set the groundwork for how squatters were displaced and a whole vibrant mixed race and class community, Seneca Village, was erased from the map later in the century.34
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The Goerck-Mangin map emphasized and extended the built parts of Manhattan of its day,
that any failure behind the lines will seriously affect the chances for military success. 25
As graduates of this new program were preparing for roles in defense industries, candidates were eligible for deferments by their local draft boards. Manny enrolled in the Harvard Business School’s new 12-month course in September 1941 , completing courses in accounting, marketing, industrial management, statistics, procurement, mobilization, governance, and economics.26 Although both were still in Cambridge, Manny saw less of his friend Philip Johnson during his graduate studies as he courted Radcliffe graduate Mary Alice Kellet, his future wife.27
In May 1941, Harvard Business School announced the closure of its traditional two-year MBA program. Going forward, the school committed to the ongoing
training of industrial administrators through its 12-month program in parallel support of the US Army Industrial College, which had trained military officers and civilians in war logistics since its inception in the 1920s.28 The new Harvard curriculum in industrial administration was accompanied by the formation of a new Army Supply Officers School and a Navy Supply Corps School, established at Soldiers Field, the football field adjacent to the business school.29 These programs complemented an expanded Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) Program at Harvard that was first established in January 1916 in the context of the Great War. While Manny remained a civilian, his experience in the graduate program was shaped by the rapid mobilization of Harvard’s educational capacities in service of the looming war and the arrival of various uniformed cohorts on campus. Campus and
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Fig. 5 Reserve Officer Training Corps ROTC students marching in Harvard Yard, 1944. Courtesy Harvard University Archives.
Fig. 5 Reserve Officer Training Corps ROTC students drilling with rifles in Harvard Yard, 1944. Courtesy Harvard University Archives.
Cambridge life quickly came to emulate the national preparations for war, as Harvard graduates entered the military, ROTC officer candidates marched across Harvard Yard, and Harvard schools pivoted to prepare graduates for various roles in the war.
The relationships the Harvard Business School developed with the army and navy in the run-up to war were not simply improvised in response to national emergency; rather, these relationships stretched back to the US involvement in the Great War, 1917–1918. During those years, Harvard witnessed the depletion of its student body and attrition among the faculty. In the early 1920s, Assistant Secretary of War Dwight F. Davis called on the dean of Harvard Business School to inquire how officer training might effectively include instruction in industrial production. This conversation informed the establishment of the US Army Industrial College in 1924, to complement the long-standing US War College and also resulted in an annual program for army and navy officers to enter the Harvard Business School’s two-year MBA program. By 1939, several
hundred of these officers had graduated from Harvard, with several occupying positions of significant authority in the US military hierarchy.30
With the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Harvard’s mobilization to a war footing accelerated and intensified. By June 1942, six months after the Japanese attack, Harvard had consolidated its contribution to the war effort as a primary training center for supply and logistics across all armed services branches.31 Professor W. Arnold Hosmer described the school’s contribution as “an instance of the art of administration in action, based on foresight and on another factor—that administration, whether in civilian or military fields, is essentially the same art. It is the art of getting things done in spite of difficulties.”32
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Following the entry of the US into the war in December 1941, Manny’s draft number was called as the Selective Service conscripted a far larger number of young men than before. Upon his registration examination, Manny was found unfit for military service and declared IV-F (4F), due to a childhood bout with
Fig. 7 Army Air Forces Statistical School graduates, Harvard Business School, 1942. Courtesy Harvard University Archives.
