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.