SOME THOUGHTS ON URBAN GRAZING
by Chris Perry
The following is a sort of sampling of themes and thoughts taken from a general course of study initiated by both Jesse Reiser and Nanako Umemoto's Advanced Studio and Stan Allen's seminar 'Architecture and Utopia.'
"Hey pal, how do we get to town from here? And he said, 'Well just take a right where they're gonna build that new shopping mall, go straight past where they're gonna put in the freeway, and take a left at what's gonna be the new sports center, and keep going until you hit the place where they're thinking of building that drive-in bank. You can't miss it.' And I said, 'this must be the place.'"
Laurie Anderson Big Science
'Place' read as an over-produced, formula-driven, star-studded reel of market-infiltrated culture and theme- (posing as culture) infiltrated markets; its mass production of cast-in-place spaces a sort of ratings-sensitive place-surfing within the new hegemony of corporate sponsored urbanism. " Apparent diversity masks fundamental homogeneity" in a process of systematic programming akin to that of Big Media's use of serial arrangements of "the repeatable, the cyclical, and the expected." Variations on well-established themes support a search for relaxation and amusement, a "perpetual drift in suspension of judgment and personality"
"And oh it's so beautiful. It's like the Fourth of July. It's like a Christmas Tree. It's like fireflies on a summer night. And I wish I could describe this to you better. But I can't talk very well right now, cause I've got this damned gas mask on."
Laurie Anderson Night in Baghdad
Yet another reading, perhaps, is one which attempts to posit an optimism within the fortifications of such seemingly negative, consumption-rabid urbanisms. In contrast to those critics aligned with Frederic Jameson's jaded reading of our current political and cultural crisis, some theorists, including Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Rosalyn Deutsche, and Michel de Certeau, have insisted on the latent potential for locating positivisms within such dystopic constructs. Within the fastidiously fertilized fields of assorted Blockbusters, Best- Sellers, Chart-Busters, and Double-Iced Mocha-Cappuccinos, then, does the entranced urban grazer stand a chance?
In the article "Imagining an Impossible World Picture" Miwon Kwon supports a reading of contemporary urbanism which attempts to resist the value judgments inherent in excessively negative critiques of late capitalism's onslaught on the "politically vital public arena" of the city. The charge that advanced communication technologies, electronic reproduction, and the globalizing forces of corporate capitalism are ruthlessly pillaging important forms of urban space÷main streets, civic halls, and downtowns÷is presented as a polemic inextricably connected to presumptions about meaning and form as they relate to notions of authenticity and 'the good.' What Kwon sees as "old criterias of composition, coherence, and, most crucially, clarity of meaning" ultimately support a nostalgic reminiscence of the traditional city in the face of loss and fragmentation. The assumption, for instance, that methods of surveillance and regulation belong only to the contemporary semi-public/private spaces of the mall or mega-store and hold no relevance to the traditional spaces of the street, park, courtyard, and square is indicative of a kind of selectively reflective nostalgia.
Similarly, in the cinema of Wim Wender's, a more complex and hopeful reading of the city can be posited. Viewing the city as a sort of open history book, Wenders reveals place within loss, tranquillity within chaos. It is the very disorder and disparity of the city which gives it "a real quality of life." In Wings of Desire Wenders depicts Berlin, for instance, as a city where everything imaginable can be found, alluding to desolate and residual urban spaces which, despite their apparent undesirability, actually promote and foster various positive and productive usages: the provisional fantasies and adventures of a seasonal circus which appropriate the vacant footprint of a demolished apartment building, or the visceral outpourings of distorted guitar chords deep within the left-over spaces of cavernous basements and cellars. Furthermore, it is the poignant juxtaposition of such un-planned or dis-planned spaces to those which have been rigorously managed and manicured that ultimately provides for a fundamentally complex reading of the contemporary city. It is a reading which reveals a non-dialectical relation between positivism and negativity, a defiance of an oppositional relation between history and contemporaenity.
"She said, 'What is history?' And he said, 'History is an angel being blown backwards into the future.' He said, 'History is a pile of debris. And the angel wants to go back and fix things. To repair the things that have been broken. But there is a storm blowing from Paradise, and the storm keeps blowing the angel backwards into the future. And this storm, this storm is called progress.'"
Laurie Anderson The Dream Before
How, then, to think a productive and yet 'progressive' architectural project within the context of an urbanism identified by the new and seemingly negative typological phenomena of the mega-store, big-box, and shopping mall? In other words, to what degree might architecture work to enable or facilitate a positive reading within this new urban paradigm, to operate tactically as suggested by Wim Wenders, ultimately revealing and nurturing assorted productive latentcies? What is certain is that today's urbanism is fundamentally complex and thus demanding of a sophisticated reading, one which, as Miwon Kwon suggests, in so far as it confronts fundamental issues of regulation and surveillance, neccesitates a resistance to idealizing past conditions, working instead to embody the openness with which such conditions (good or bad) were read.
Christopher Perry holds a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from Colgate University and is a candidate for a Master of Architecture '97 at Columbia University.
FOOTNOTES:
1. Laurie Anderson "Big Science" from Big Science
2. Margaret Crawford "The World in a Shopping Mall " Variations on a Theme Park Pg. 9
3. M. Christine Boyer The City of Collective Memory Pg.66
4. Margaret Crawford "The World in a Shopping Mall" Variations on a Theme Park Pg. 14
5. George Romero Dawn of the Dead
6. Laurie Anderson "Night in Baghdad" from Bright Red
7. Miwon Kwon "Imagining an Impossible World Picture" Sites and Stations Pg.80
8. Ibid. Pg.85
9. Ibid. Pg. 83
10. Ibid. Pg. 82
11. Ibid. Pg. 84
12. The City: A Conversation Between Wim Wenders and Hans Kollhoff Pg. 66
13. Ibid. Pg. 74
14. Laurie Anderson "The Dream Before" from Strange Angels