Historically the Park, Conventionally the Urban Drive-in

Outside
The space of film has made it to the streets, departing from the enclosed theatre soon after the advent of talkies. The self-contained theatre of the family car provided outing to the drive-in, where wholesome fun could be indulged in with the flexibility of varied childrearing styles including the freedom to be loud. Increase in land values, television, the VCR, and popularity of home screening rooms made for a greater privatization of experience with home theatres.

However, the metropolis of urban settings allow for city dwellers within the built fabric, the pursuit of moving images via other modes of transportation: the bicycle, public transit, pedestrianism. Still in search of social family fun, the color of celluloid, the scale of projections, and the renewing properties of open-air, the interest exists for the entertainment of film. The chosen space of an outdoor screening, in an urban context can find home in the park as the site often left un-infilled as for leisure, congregation, anonymity, reminders of the range, or the city’s iteration of the drive-in.

Parks as the thickening of the road allows for the turnoff—a deviation between destinations, meaning a break in the enclosed forms that house institutional functions. The park is a place for the pleasure of travel, detour, Sunday drive, dog walking locale since agrarian domestication, natural social scene, sunbathing sockless feet-in-grass, relaxing, returning to self, ultimate Frisbee impromptu choreography, people watching, other passing lives, passing lanes on film, visual stories of another destination.

Sitting
Projection on the sides of buildings animate their facades, re-appropriating either alley, sidewalk, or parking lot as opportunities to invite audience. Means for putting the body at rest to offer the user’s attention seems less accessible in terms of comfort without the site for rest as green space. With an increased ability to tune out hiccupping town sounds, the park bench incites taking a load off.

For a moment, the body is in position to view, a simultaneity to a series of park-based activities. With adjustment in terms of view orientation, seating now serves additive organized events hosted in the public space of the park. The bench may be an opportunity to create a microcosm of the park, with above ground planting opportunities. On casters, the micro-park travels to aggregate an amphitheatre for a traveling film festival, takes off down the street to partition commercial sidewalk fronts, or offers mini gardening locations for food production.

Origin
For ninety minutes, the street becomes home. The infrastructure of road, channeling flow, is symbolic of the kineticism of film: moving information responding to light, traversing a surface. Travel is involved as the body prepares to vanish, eyes taking to the illuminated field producing on-screen microenvironments, formed by interests and routes, in whatever capacity the parallel temporary landscape draws, often with implications of other cities entirely.

The space of theatre, garden, and park are re-appropriated public space after hours. The road leads to landscape urbanism: the adding of another layer, as occupancy of either user or intervention, upon the open-air space of the city. The park is your bike-in, walk-in, cine-al-fresco.

Download your very own “big fucking laser”.

gRAFFITI rESEARCH lAB

“Dedicated to outfitting graffiti artists with open source technologies for urban Communication”

This is what G.R.L can offer you! With the slightest twitch of your hand you too can have the ability to make a statement; 200 ft tall. These unknown instigators (I've tried feverishly to find out who they truly are) have concocted a techi system capable of turning any ninny on the street into a true graffiti artist. Living by an “open source belief” these artists have made accessible to the public through their website, instructions and codes on how any average Joe (well maybe not so average but perhaps an extremely resourceful nerdy chap) can create a projection system capable of projecting real time graffiti onto the facades of big ass buildings.

These guys have been all over the place, having fun or making serious commentary on political and social issues relative to the cities that they decide to merrily or seriously encroach upon. In their Rotterdam L.A.S.E.R.T.A.G. Tour, the team (also can't be sure to their true group representative number...perhaps five) arrived to the top of a parking garage in their Hymermobil, a souped up R.V., and set up camp. Laptops, projectors, lasers and camera's were calibrated to accept the nights coming ephemeral vandalism. On an over 200 ft. facade the group took turns lasering the building with electric blue stylized text of their tag names and cartoony logos. At one point cops appeared to question the event only to retreat after learning of innocent artistic intention. The next tag on the wall was “fuck pigs”.

In another episode this past April of this year, the group collaborated with other guerrilla like groups (A28, thruth move, geek graffiti crew, home X heroes, OpenLab, and Lean Reid) to spread the propaganda to impeach Dick Cheney. The team busted out their pimped-out rickshaw cart and bikes, equipped with intense sound systems and while pumping grooves, transversed the Brooklyn Bridge from Manhattan to the B-side. It was a spectacle indeed that made some onlookers cringe and others break out in dance.

Once deciding on an appropriate building to project on (there are detailed instructions on the website of the characteristics of appropriate buildings), the group dismounted and set up the Big Laser. Their words of discontent with politician's agendas flared up in electric blue, sending the message loud and clear.

So where does this all leave the 20' by 20' piece of road? 1. Projection indeed. It's fast and quick and unexpected on a surface such as Piedmont Ave. It's still not clear to me what the message should be, but what is clear is that an inundation of words or images is important and observer inclusion and participation. That constant stimulation seems critical in grabbing passer byers attention. One primitive setup could be that the projection coming from a computer could be “commandeered” by cell phone operation. If someone wants their message projected they simply text their message to a cell phone (mine), and those messages are transmitted to the computer (again by me the transmitter). Thoughts? Suggestions?

http://graffitiresearchlab.com Check out their website for the screenings

THE LE ROY STEPS

Throughout time, the staircase has gained a great symbolic importance relying on its power to levitate (or raise). The first images of staircases appeared during the Middle Ages in religious paintings, where, through the multiplication of staircases, it was possible to show the various stages of Hell or Heaven. During the Renaissance this imagery of space was accentuated through the use of the perspective. Here the staircases where conceived as a “window opening into infinite space”. For the Tenebrous school, to which Piranesi belonged to, staircases were part of a vertical maze which unwound and lead, not to the liberating sky, but to a space of abyss . At this point, uncertainty and perhaps even fear surrounds the stairs.
This same play on symbolism has been adapted by various other genres such as film. Laurence Oiver’s Hamlet places the staircase as a prominent part in the setting, providing an entrance or exit for the characters as they move towards the unknown. Moreover, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo uses straight staircases of multiple flights to express both fear and wishes to descend.
In parallel, these maze-like-structure enhance the idea of movement. The labyrinthine constructions of Escher play with the idea of an infinite stair ascending and descending at the same time.
In Animal Locomotion, Eadward Muybridge used photography and kinetography to study movement. He worked with nude model ascending and descending staircases. Cubo-Futurist paintings such as Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (1912, Philadelphia Museum of Art) also play with movement. In the latter, the painting’s composition is based on a diagrammatic superimposition of the human body’ s physique and movement, and the geometry of the staircase structure. Julio Cortazar’s short story, Instructions for climbing a staircase, touches on the poetry of the staircase and as the title suggests, plays with the vertical motion of the ground and of the body:
“Nobody can have failed to notice that the ground often rucks up in such a way that part of it rises, forming a right angle with the flat surface of the ground, while the next section runs parallel to that flat surface, followed by a new perpendicular, ad that this behavior is repeated in a spiral or a broken line, reaching extremely variable heights”.

Through its impact on various media including painting, photography, film, the staircase has established a specific role in the iconography of everyday life. My proposal of the Le Roy steps has slowly evolved to a more explicit exploration of the site and its play on the different associations and imagery, directly or indirectly, related to staircase. The surface has become a primary focus as I have attempted to record its particular characteristics, as well as the interactions, perceptions and relationships associated with it. As a result, weather, people, the body, movement and psyche are all elements inform and influence the site as well as my analysis of it. Using different media, my final presentation will consist of long scrolls revealing a 1 to 1 scale recording of the steps. In this endeavor, rather than proposing a conventional intervention, the site becomes the project itself; a process that acknowledges the richness and experience of the le Roy Steps.

The median seems an intensely American convention, offering often rather menial landscaping fed by precious water resources for the safety, aesthetic, and presumably anti-erosion, purposes of passing highways and motorists. The life of the average American, stuck in their car commuting for an hour and a half each day, is filled to the brim with these often completely overlooked swaths of land. Occasionally, however, the median becomes the object of attention. For a few weeks every summer in Maine, for example, on the highway between Portland and Bangor, the median strip is awash with purple and pink lupines, transforming a typically uninteresting drive (except for the occasional moose sighting) into a rather transcendental experience. It is here, where the median successfully mediates between parkland/nature and the highly constructed reality of your automobile and the asphalt, that the median takes on a new identity—an identity of place, rather than of forgotten space.

The thing about medians is that, as their name might suggest, they are in the middle of often quite busy streets, and are therefore by their very nature uninhabitable. They are traditionally waste spaces, neglected but not completely forgotten, and as such, they seem ripe for landscape urbanist interventions. They are the part of the fabric of the urban surface that deals perhaps the most directly with the way most of us experience the urban surface—the car.

As such, and before such thoughts had surfaced in my consciousness, I am drawn to the particularly Berkeley spectacle of people commandeering the median strip on Shattuck Avenue in the Gourmet Ghetto for the consumption of pizza from the Cheeseboard. The reappropriation of the median strip for pedestrian purposes is, to my mind, one of the ultimate forms of Landscape Urbanism—the transformation of landscaping into an inhabitable landscape. It is amazing to witness how this simple act transforms the neighborhood—in some ways, it is like parking day every day in the Gourmet Ghetto. Cars drive slower in response to the unexpected intrusion into their territory, and anyone can come and eat on the median strip and instantly have the sense of belonging like a local. This unusual act unites pedestrians in its unexpectedness. Where the median strip traditionally mediates between the car and the outside, when inhabited by people relaxing and enjoying a meal, it serves to further alienate the automotive passersby from the outside, while serving to mediate between the pedestrian and the car.

The project that Evan and I are proposing for this median strip, then, seeks to reinforce its human inhabitation, while at the same time making it a safer and more comfortable experience. We are interested in designing a prosthesis to ease and make more graceful the consumption of pizza in the median, while at the same time perhaps landscaping the median in such a way that it is a landscape created with human inhabitants in mind rather than automotive. It will be designed in such a way that it will hopefully successfully mediate the boundary between landscape and landscaping; when inhabited, it will act as landscape, but when empty of human inhabitants, it will read as landscaping. Whether or not this intentionality will weaken the experience of median reappropriation remains to be seen.

To Be a Culvert. (or Does Landscape Art Underperform)

Is landscape artwork roping larger areas to stun us with their impact as sited within stark “natural” surroundings?
Do we ask the same of architecture as it relates in scale? Perhaps architecture needs to be great architecture or monumental to achieve the effect and experience of successful landscape artwork: that it is beautiful, meaningful, incites return only promising to continue to be equally delightful with each pass, like a book.

Does scale allow landscape art to resonate with landscape urbanism because of the open-air outdoor phenomena, with axes, a particular approach, and varied occupancy like the Sun Tunnels of Nancy Holt that have a particular situatedness to day and night. Light, sun or stars, as view invites the body to positioned particularity in space, the way perhaps the Schouwbergplein in Rotterdam (“Red Crane”) can by the orienting of spotlights. The design of the plaza has been critiqued as underperformative, as the plaza goes unoccupied outside of events. Demands for the programming and proof positive of good design for this urban condition are requirements we wouldn’t dream of imposing on Landscape art. Would we?

Fluctuating Intersections:

Legal graffiti at 5 points, New York


The qualities that define conventional typologies must be modified when considering a site as part of a continuous surface of architecture, landscape, and infrastructure in an aggregated urban continuum. As part of the continuous landscape, programmatic elements begin to collide, and shift as impermanent insertions into the folds of the fabric. This changes both how the program is conceived, and how the architecture that houses it reacts. The program is dislodged as a fixed element in a permanent landscape; architecture then develops the ability to adjust itself to conform to the shifting urban conditions and programs. The analysis of a limited number of possible programmatic elements (museum, park, and graffiti wall) is a representative subset of the larger functioning context.

The power of graffiti writing is tied to the sites where it occurs, and is essential to assessing its’ importance and potential. Many cities have permission walls, or legal graffiti parks, and the ‘authenticity’ of the graffiti that appears in these places is debated by hardcore writers, city officials, and others. One side of the debate is engendered by the idea that the power of illegal graffiti can be seen as tied to the ‘broken window’ theory; graffiti suggests a lack of control and authority, which encourages people to commit crimes. However, it can also be perceived that graffiti can wrest the sleeping citizen from rote inaction in the face of increasing control that is eroding free thought. If it is true that creating a graffiti park might remove the power of of graffiti, the desirable aspects of this power need to be understood and preserved. For example, the promotion of violent crime is probably not a desirable quality, but the consideration of choice and consequence of free action is not (as?) harmful.

"Basically, when I look around, I see us living in a modern day Babylon, full of temptation, sin, distraction, corruption, injustice, and misguided fools being mentally enslaved. It seems to me the only way to wake people up from this kind of numbness is to destroy what they know: Their business, their places of commerce and their biggest place of gathering, the cities! Put it on their trains, on the lines they take to work, on their rooftops, on their highways, on anything just to make some people realize that culture isn't lost and that, at the very least, a small group of kids is fighting to keep it alive."

-Coda, Philadelphia Graffiti Artist

The basis of the power of graffiti can be seen in its disregard for authority. This disregard that some suggest promotes lawlessness, is an important counterpoint to another extreme, the possibility of complete individual control, whether through force, or more subtle ideological means. Disregard for rules is one way to counter control, but an open media for the broadcast of messages is another. True graffiti is the combination of these. But if the message is in fact a portion of the mode of empowerment, then it can also function in isolation of rule breaking. It is not likely that it can replace the absolute freedom involved in of breaking the rules, but it might also serve a means of encouraging free thought, independent of the broadcast site. Consider the following from the WikiHow site on How to Graffiti:

Many cities have "permission" or "legal" walls specified for graffiti art. Legal graffiti is often more respected than street art. You have unlimited time and freedom to do what you please. Compare legal walls to quick throw-ups found on the street. You will find that legal walls are intricate and aesthetic. Street art is just trying to be seen. Legal graffiti art is more remembered and respected by those who do not completely understand the art form.

The ‘respect’ here needs to be considered as respect from the establishment. However, graffiti writer and researcher George Stowers has commented on the generalization that all real graffiti art is illegal, "In all actuality, spraycan art does not necessarily have to be illegal or on a wall to be considered as graffiti art, although, philosophically, this might be the purest essence of the art form. What matters is that the art is produced in graffiti style." The ‘style’ of graffiti art can be seen as its formal aspects, and possibly the cultural context that allows it to continually rewrite itself.

If style and broadcast are graffiti’s essence and this becomes the basis of the concept for designed graffiti surfaces, then a new graffiti park will focus on aspects of shifting form and transmission. The form of the broadcast surface becomes as mutable as the changing message on the surface itself. It becomes a manifold for messages, exporting numerous signals at any given time, from any given perspective.

From the perspective of broadcast, the graffiti park performs like a museum. However, the conventional museum is a store house for artifacts based on themes such as ‘art’, ‘culture’ or ‘history’, where subject matter is categorized and separated, eventually to be displayed in the form of an exhibition which establishes a point of view laid out by the curator, which is often governed by conventionally taught understandings of subject matter. In collision with the graffiti park, the museum becomes more of a working surface, one that might begin to reflect a physically shifting, perceptually fluctuating past, changing as it intersects with the present and possible futures. It is a exhibition space for the palimpsest, where the archeology of the site combines with its’ future potentials to create a dialog between the two.

The field that contains programmatic elements is at once an element in its’ own right, and a surface open to further intervention. All of the elements operate within this framework, moving within it. New aspects plug into the demarcation of use zones. Public square, grassy knoll, skate park, memorial, dog park, all begin to interact and collide, encouraging open discussion and discourse on the needs of the city. The physical manifestation of this discourse will adjust along with the changing discussion.

Ohlone Park & The Parasitic Parterre

The project was at first an investigation of Ohlone Park, paying attention to the disjunction between its uses (daytime sleeping areas and storage of fully laden shopping carts for the homeless, for example) and its form. Much of the park is largely unarticulated, with peculiar 2D figures on the ground and extruded vents and other infrastructure related to the BART tunnel below. One edge consists of the backyard fences of the houses to the north, while the other is a bike path running along Hearst Avenue. To escape the sun and the street, the homeless population uses the shaded areas along the erratic fence line in undefined sections of the park where defined programs – dog run, playing fields, community garden, playground – are absent.

The 32'-square "park" at Bonita Avenue and Berkeley Way is treated as though it is a fragment of Ohlone Park that has been displaced two blocks to the south. In reality it is a street closure mechanism consisting of wedges of grass and a formal axis of pathways leading to nothing, surrounded by bollards. It is a parterre shaded by mature palm trees at a quiet intersection near the entrance to an underground parking garage. It is almost never used by anyone, except for the occasional smoker, dog-walker, or resting cyclist.

The proposal introduces depth to the flat site, using it as a means of accommodating and organizing both formal and informal programs. By peeling up the surface of the street, the mundane street closure device becomes an activated and inhabited site. The urban surface is doubled, with areas for lounging and a skateboard ramp on the top and sheltered, secure storage for shopping carts (those full of possessions and refurbished empties) and a repair facility/bike shop underneath. The shop provides stewardship and security for the park during the day, and a lit street presence at night. Refurbished shopping carts fitted with locking mechanisms are provided in exchange for damaged ones. Full carts can now be stored for up to 24 hours, and no longer need to be taped or chained to lamp posts in the area.

The new site would draw visitors from Ohlone Park, allowing its fragmentary nature to be understood in a new way as it is reconnected to the city fabric. Its combination of programs intentionally brings diverse users to a small shared area. While this is an acknowledgement that typically excluded users should be considered in shaping the urban surface, the programs themselves occur at different times of day and week, and direct confrontation between users would be somewhat limited. The supervision of the shop staff might discourage misuse of the park, but would obviously be of limited influence and reach.

The project does not attempt to criticize the way that Ohlone Park functions, or to make any moral statement about homelessness or inequality in the city. It does attempt to promote interaction (or at least proximity) between diverse users, who tend not to see one another except at long distances in Ohlone Park.

Landscape Urbanism often seems to mean the preparation of urban surface to accommodate a flexible range of programs. In this case, the program is both highly general and highly specific – the existing flat, mute surface has instigated little activity, and the manipulation of its depth is not an idle formal gesture construed as public art but a suggestion of how new kinds of program can activate a small, difficult site.

considering the ferry terminal

What is the traditional function of a ferry building and what is its relation to the city? A ferry building marks a transition from land to water, from city to nature, and from that which is ordered to that which is unpredictable. From the water, a ferry building is a gateway to the city and a vessel for the city’s identity (a static identity?). For the commuter, a ferry building is a space of coming and going, responding to the needs of a body constantly on the move. For the tourist it is a site to apprehend the city, and currently in San Francisco, a place literally to consume the city.

Twenty minutes separate the space between Alameda and San Francisco. A ferry terminal on either end will provide the function of getting you from one side to the other, yet the treatment of the water edge is vastly different between the two sides of the Bay. On the San Francisco end you encounter a built-up city edge and a street grid, and on the Alameda end you are confronted with a decomposing water edge and a vast, undeveloped open space. The informality of the latter is a rich source of latent potentials and contradictions. One contradiction is the screening of an extreme formality—a military formality, a need to straighten a channel and reclaim land for the purpose of ship building and repair. Navy aircraft carriers are still brought into the channel for repair. The irony is found in the finer grain; zooming in on the aerial image of the straight shoreline reveals an edge of concrete rubble and landfill. The edge is slowly disappearing into the water.

What is the appropriate operation to extend a new ferry terminal out from this unstable water edge? The answer may be found by contrasting Alameda’s terminal with her sister across the Bay. The traditional ferry building is a place of orientation, a fountainhead of the city, and a common ground upon which anyone may find belonging. The Ferry Building of San Francisco desired to embody these ideals through a formal manifestation of material:

The ferryboat passengers’ experience began by first catching a glimpse of the tower, then by approaching closer until the ferry glided into one of the “dolphin slips,” and finally by entering the Ferry Building on the street level where waiting and smoking rooms were found finished in kiln-dried Oregon pine with elegant steel trusses overhead. A grand stairway covered with pink marble led the departing passengers to the upper level promenade which ran the full length of the building and rose 42 feet high with clerestories overhead. This “nave” possessed a rhythmic series of arches made of buff colored pressed brick. (Charles Page. Union Depot & Ferry House: San Francisco 1978)

The memory of this space of the everyday, where tens of thousands of commuters once passed through, has been re-configured into a foodie paradise. You can buy rare mushrooms by the quarter-pound in a stall where gentlemen once smoked cigars while waiting for their ferry. Numerous cafes, food shops, and even cooking supply stores line the old arcade. Today’s ferry passengers do not need the building, unless they ran out of $20/lb cheese; their ferries depart from piers that are no longer integral to the building itself, and thus they can avoid the tourist trap.

However, it is this anachronism, that of an almost recreational or touristic food experience alongside a daily commuter hub, that I wish to amplify for the Alameda design. People will come early on their commute for the joy of drinking coffee by the water, or linger at the end of the day for a beer or glass of wine, people-watching as passengers disembark. Kayakers will launch onto the water with the ferry boats cruising right by. The commuter might live vicariously through the kayaker. The space of the everyday and of recreation are conflated into a single performative surface, an island upon the Bay. The formal arcade is replaced by the limitless geometry of the pontoon which supports the island. At its ideal end, the island is infinitely extendable, an operation freely permitted by the user, who inflates or deflates the pontoons at will.

If the San Francisco Ferry Building is Nick-at-Nite-Urbanism, the Alameda terminal is You-Tuburbanism. Maybe you want to watch Nick-at-Nite anyway, but at least you have a choice.

Taking to Hind Legs and Stereovision

“Which came first, the house or the road leading to the house?” (Brickenhoff.)

Street is the site of movement, a place for moving, symbolic of moving image as journey becomes conceptual. Travel is involved as the body prepares to vanish, eyes taking to the illuminated field aggregating on-screen microenvironments, formed by interests and routes, in whatever capacity the parallel temporary landscape draws, often with implications of other cities entirely.

We are frequently watching films at home, close to home, in familiar theatres: what does it mean to show films from Other places at home. Are movies a bout a particular place, screened at a particular place, by locals, home movies? What’s the experience of being a pilgrim and make films about place? Does that introduce questions of authenticity, tourism, documentary research, meaning for films on the move.

My monitor: a public space portal. YouTube continues to offer us amateur filmmaking, now the road more traveled. Are we free to safely and obtusely revisit colonial leisure-class, train-window travel from our sofa as the sacred space of single-screen theatres diminishes.

BYPASS

The photograph above was taken under a highway system in Shanghai, China.

In "Joys of Automobility" Webber concludes,“ our central challenge is to invent was to extend the equivalent of automobile to everyone […]”, thus stating that the biggest problem is finding social equity with mobility. Enthralled with the automobile, technology and their facility to connect-and I will argue to fracture as well- cities have rapidly expanded and furcated giving way to “edge cities” and multi-centric conditions, slowly leading away from the “downtowns” or original center. As distances amplified (and continue to do so), “paths” disappeared in favor of the road, the boulevard, and the highway… A pronounced need for connections (be it physical or virtual) has led to the creation of enclaves of technology and business centers, a dependency on vehicular transportation, and an increase of supporting infrastructure. Nevertheless, questions such as “what to connect?” and “who to include?” are based on very selective/exclusive (perhaps strictly capitalist) processes that “bypass” areas in privilege of others, thus fracturing and creating enclaves (of inclusion and exclusion) in the city. With that said, having access in the city is important but I would argue that social equity is not about mobility (which merely scratches on the surface of the problem), it is about integration.

Manufactured Landscapes

Dir. Jennifer Baichwal Canada 2006
This mesmerizing documentary focuses on the work of renowned artist Edward Burtynsky, internationally acclaimed for his large-scale photographs of nature transformed by industry, or “manufactured landscapes.” Burtynsky creates stunningly beautiful art from civilization’s materials and debris. Director Jennifer Baichwal follows Burtynsky to China, as he captures the effects of the country’s massive industrial revolution. We see a factory that makes 20 million clothes irons a year, a dam which razed 13 cities to the ground and displaced more than a million people, factory floors over a kilometer long, and the breathtaking scale of Shanghai’s urban renewal. With stunningly beautiful sequences, the film raises all kinds of questions about ethics and aesthetics of modern human “progress” without trying to easily answer them, thus leaving us free to meditate on the human endeavor and its impact on the planet. (90m) (redvicmoviehouse.com)

trailer: Manufactured Landscapes

That which leaving the homestead has allowed for: the road is invitation to market, the means to globalization. Welcome pilgrim. New communities of retired resource scurf, are we symptomatic of rhizomatic runners of invasive grasses.

Supply Side Landscape

Lyster's "Landscapes of Exchange" and Webber's "Joys of Automobility" each seems to point discussion back to the condition of the edge city. Current organizations of labor and capital are clearly less spatial than ever before -- where Thomas Friedman sees a "flat" world in which specific skill sets and specific localities are divorced from one another, Lyster and Webber propose that the market drive for interconnectivity and intermodality already suggests that a rethinking of transportation "landscapes" is overdue. When most people can do their jobs from virtually anywhere, or from their homes, the city and its singular identity are increasingly pulled at the edges. The difficulty of defining "landscape urbanism" surely arises from this constant stretching and reconnection of networks -- what is "urban" and what is "landscape" when everything is being pulled apart and quickly reconstituted?

I would suggest that landscape urbanism describes the kind of practice that would address this perpetual edge condition. The image above, a Bruce McCall cartoon from the New York Times Op-Art column, pokes fun at a recent initiative to introduce congestion pricing in Midtown Manhattan. The implication of the drawing is that such market-driven strategies for the management of traffic flows might sound reasonable, but they would produce an artificial boundary with far-reaching effects on the urban surface. If our goal is to reduce pollution, congestion, and single occupancy vehicles, the measures we take to provoke such reductions will require a new design practice to mitigate negative spatial effects and to take advantage of opportunities.

It is hard to say how this macro-scale version of L.U. relates to the more acupunctural, interventional scale of the shopping cart parking and repair facility. There is the obvious relevance of traffic calming as a kind of urban science, whereby all flows of vehicles can become more regulated and predictable. But the site is also adjacent to an office block parking garage; its anonymity and barrenness are a result of this adjacency. Who would appropriate a small grass square for picnic lunches or other break activities when that square lies beyond the parking lot, its placement a matter of allowing cars to exit the lot without having to confront oncoming traffic. In the center of a relatively lively community, the Bonita Avenue site is incongruous because of its inherent lack of even the suggestion of connectivity, exchange, or place.

You Will Be Assimilated

The expansion and proliferation of contemporary networks, including digital and physical manifestations of connectivity, increase the effective scale and area of any one location due to its connection to a larger context. This can be seen as part of an expanded nature, of which humans are just one part: “the ecology of dump heaps should be more rewarding for the time spent than the ecology of the grasslands of the Great Plains”. However, while the networked condition may be ‘natural’, and the benefits of increased connectivity are apparent, some of the (after) effects are problematic. Questions being asked of the new landscapes created by networks include how they can be better predicted and programmed, how they can become more socially equitable, and how to reduce their environmental impact. New networks should not be unquestioningly accepted; while they are here to stay, they are simultaneously open to modification, in fact, they are defined by modification. The challenge is to ascertain which modifications are possible, and will have positive effects.

The idea of a landscape as extended and integrated form, where territories are expanded by infrastructural networks, requires consideration of the larger urban scale as part of any intervention. From Landscapes of Exchange, “this new articulation of territories are not formally site specific, but instead encompasses the coordination of material connections via transportation infrastructures and virtual connections through automated transfers and communication systems across larger areas of operation.” However, it is suggested that it is desirable to “predict and orchestrate the progressive accumulation of preexisting collisive sites in advance of the emergence of unintended and reactionary occupation, so that the less intentionally spatial operations – which are often the most spatially provocative… can in some way be more appropriately staged.”

The appropriate staging of the expanded landscape, without detracting from the benefits of the increased flexibility, becomes a question of incremental adjustment. The car and the road can be improved to be more equitable, accessible, environmentally responsible, without being eliminated. As suggested by both Webber and Brinkerhoff, adjustments to the existing network, alternate methods of control, increased transit modeled on the advantages of automobiles, could be the alteration needed to change the system.

However, waiting for technology to advance to a point that will correct previous neglect may not be a strategy for making improvements today. Accepting the certainty of impermanence and increasingly connected, expanding landscapes may be inevitable. Architecture, or landscape urbanism, may only be a reflection of that inevitability. The only possibility may be to understand the environment so that it can be navigated. But design is a manner of manipulating, or reconfiguring material into form and space. The act of design has an impact by its very nature. The impact is guided by the designer, due consideration needs to be applied when engaging the network. Interventions should be deliberate, considering the larger connections, engaging and amplifying opportunities, producing a “net gain in environmental quality and in the overall quality of life”.

Albany Bulb: ecosystem of the future.

These readings relate directly to the current situation of the Albany Bulb. The ongoing debate about its future is fueled by two sharp perspectives: 1) City officials invoke historical picturesque idealism when addressing the site, in an effort to 'wipe it clean' from its social deviance and democratic nature. Their attention to 'environmental preservation' in a romanticized picturesque sense is a convenient excuse to deny the social, ecological diversity and freedom that has literally grown from a former trash dump. The second perspective has to do with shedding social constructions of aesthetics and social hierarchy, and more with celebration of current passive processes and their tendency to find robust balance without design intervention.

Michael Hough, in 'Design with City Nature' would most likely place Albany Bulb in the category of 'fortuitous urban landscape'—where landscape elements freely develop an independent, diverse and robust ecology---'where the maintenance man dare not go'. The concept that these ecosystems may be the prevailing ecosystems of the future is quite astounding and interesting to consider. (Think: Fresh Kills).

I think that this makes a lot of sense, where social progress, human development, and environmental preservation are no longer dialectic. I think that human ecology and its relations with its surroundings are inevitably interdependent, and we must further our understanding of this opportunistic relationship, not just its differences. I think that that the conversation about humans and the environment is one of inclusion and acceptance of 'natural' ecological processes(social, cultural, environmental), where what we DO do is just as important as what we DONT do. In a really broad sense, I think that we can find better ways to integrate win-win situations for humans and our planet. Like landfills that increase coastal habitat, provide a picturesque escape for trail-walking humans and dogs, and even provide a little affordable housing for the urban poor. Wait, that's Albany Bulb, as it is right now.

sea change

green, green, green. I think it's time we change the color of the argument. Let's call it blue. Yes we are concerned with plants and carbon cycles and energy and love and could not all those things be blue, blue as the sky or blue as water (neither of which are actually blue upon closer examination but rather transparent. never mind that). Our views of nature (as seen literally through the photographer's lens) are often marked by conceptions of a distant "other", which is often a green "other".

Think of the fantastic views of Central Park as an island of green within the gray city. It's thrilling, but isn't it so artificial? Yes we know this about Central Park, but if we recognize our views of wilderness as an artificially constructed separation, we might be at liberty to say everything is artificial. Or alternatively everything is natural, and it is only our re-presentations of it that make it artificial.

Let's atomize this big amorphous weight of sustainability into bite-sized pieces while we're about changing the color. In this way we might localize what is almost impossible to achieve at the level of agreement between nations (see Kyoto). Also as architects, we tend to receive opportunities in spurts, in dispersed locations, and isolated circumstances. We need a blue system that works like an oxygen tank, infusing any atmosphere with vital substance.

I think of "green" architecture as plastic flowers, whether it is imitative of form or process. We aren't good at truly imitating nature. But we're actually good at doing nature because, after all, we are part of nature. We shouldn't have to feel any obligation to bring the outside to the inside, or vice versa. The outside is already in, the inside is already out. It is a continuum of space much in the vein of FLW and Mies. Blue architecture can go one step further and say not only is the space a continuum but so is the material a continuum: what we build with has a cycle of creation and destruction that is not separate or extracted from nature but remains a part of it, even as we employ it in our buildings.

I see my project of the ferry terminal in Alameda as blue for obvious reasons but also to elaborate on the above notion of a continuum. I'm fascinated by this idea of the constructed water edge as a result of military order upon the landscape, yet it is an order with weakness and false edges. The composition of the edge at the moment is rubble, plastic bags, chunks of concrete. In my scheme the water edge may be infinitely extended and retracted by a series of pontoons that achieve geometric flexibility. You can walk on the water, or walk into the water, or kayak on the water. There is no end of the city, and likewise no beginning of nature. Commute and recreation are conflated within a single landscape.

It is a negotiation between those persistent environmentalists, who hold this ideal of the world as a perfect green sphere, made gray and imperfect by human intervention, and those who herald the virtuosity and technology of gray. At Alameda, it has been in the past a victory of the gray regime. In the future, we recognize the traces and negotiations between gray and green, but no longer do we wish one side to win. We wish it to see that it was blue all along.

Going Green

Each of the readings seems to address ways in which the commodification and moralization of nature and its simultaneous psychological detachment from the city and culture can problematize "sustainability" as a goal or effect of architecture and planning. As it increasingly enters the public conscience, the possibilities of sustainable practice are often reduced to sets of superficial criteria and laundry lists of small, universally applicable techniques. While noble in intent and realistic in scope, such reductions lead to an understanding of "green" design as a thin veneer of gadgetry and responsibly produced surface materials.

As Hough argues, the potential for a more holistic, scaleable, and complex organization of ecological measures in the city is nearly impossible when such technology is never considered or implemented beyond the scope of a single building. Unsurprisingly, Peter Eisenmann likes to deride (or avoid) the question of sustainability entirely, likening the architect's application of green building practice to the application of green dots to a city plan: the emphasis is not on the local conditions and the connections among sites and to the larger city, but on the branding -- often in the marketing sense -- of a small piece of it. The expertise of such practice resides with technical consultants and bean counters, not with designers.

While I continue to think about program for my site, and how a parking structure for shopping carts might be paired with a set of flexible activities in a mutually beneficial way, I am also thinking of the ecological footprint of the site and how the proposal might begin to acknowledge natural process and systems, either through rainwater management, reduction of impermeable surfaces, or development as a habitat for particular species of plants and animals (hopefully not rats).

Soylent Green Is People

The "Machine in the Garden" presents historic efforts to contrast technology and nature in an attempt to advance environmental agendas (whether admittedly or not). The illumination of the separation of humans and technology from nature as a polemic is rejected as being rehashed, and likely doomed to failure in a manner similar to historic efforts based on fear of the future. The argument is that we need to connect to the local; to underrepresented people and immediate ecologies along with the larger environment; to “make images of nature speak in local tongues”. Both Jarzombek and Ingersoll similarly argue the limitations of current thinking on sustainability, pointing out some of the shortcomings of sustainable architecture itself in the process. These include too much faith in society or the individual, not enough connection to the bigger (and urban) picture, or lack of concern for elements outside of the sustainable discussion (like aesthetics) as well as problems of depth, i.e. green as a marketing package.

"Design with City Nature" begins to make an argument for ‘sustainable’ efforts that can connect into existing systems of parks, industry and other urban elements. Without seeing them, I don’t know if these projects address all of the criticisms outlined in the writing, but no project could. They appear to be genuine efforts to effect change in a meaningful way.

If landscape urbanism is about the hybridization of disciplines and therefore urban design elements (including policy making, development, planning, architecture, and landscape) then a sustainable ecology should be a natural outcome. If landscape urbanism considers the suburb on equal footing with the city, if it understands the global in terms of the local, if it injects space with flexible possibilities, then it should be able to integrate into an environment that allows it to be “sustainable”. I don’t know if it is doing this or not, but I can see how the ideas would be considered compatible. Maybe it should be called something other than ‘landscape urbanism’, or ‘sustainable’; maybe ‘comprehensive design’, or just good work.

In terms of the proposal, the ‘operable graffiti museum’ can benefit from further sustainable analysis, but it will be one that considers larger aspects of sustainability, like integration into a community, an understanding of history and local culture, as well as a way to consume less, or tread lightly on the land. I think some consideration of ‘social sustainability’ has begun to happen through earlier investigations. In an effort to create a ‘lighter’ proposal (in terms of material used and economic to the impact on natural resources) the structure might become a framework and not a permanent structure, and any portion of the landscape that is carved out can be balanced on site, rather than trucked out. These strategies are additions to an overall effort in “designed to produce a net gain in environmental quality and in the overall quality of life”, which can happen in even in the least hospitable place. Maybe the future isn't so scary after all.

boo-hoo

While I am unclear as to how to relate the readings for this week to our design project for/study of the median strip, they do raise some interesting issues and bring to light some critical problems with the pursuit of sustainability in architecture. Problems of execution and public perception plague and hinder even the best of intentions; as Ingersoll says “the common conclusion that a ‘sustainable’ architecture… will also be more beautiful has rarely been supported by evidence”. I simultaneously agree with this statement and am maddened by it, but a discussion of these frustrations isn’t particularly relevant, so I’ll omit it here.

These readings bring to the forefront the question of the definition of “natural”. Is a natural system one that is completely untouched by man (a state of being that Bright calls into question at the most fundamental level)? Or is it the prevailing ecosystem of the future the forgotten space of the city, as discussed by Hough, the dirty in-between spaces where colonies of scrappy plants and animals manage to eke out a living? Perhaps this is the ugly face of the landscape urbanism of the future—the unmanicured and questionably natural spaces at the edge, wherever edge has managed to persist in spite of our expanding efforts to eliminate it and keep on pushing out. Perhaps this is all we can hope for, and perhaps it is all we deserve. Sigh.

vernacular archidentity