Landscape Urbanism: as mechanical detritus

If you haven't seen it in the last 25 years, now may be the right time.

official web site: Blade Runner

Visually spectacular, intensely action-packed and powerfully prophetic since its debut, director Ridley Scott's sci-fi noir thriller returns in a definitive Final Cut, including extended scenes and never-before-seen special effects. In a future of high-tech possibility soured by urban and social decay, 21st-century detective Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) hunts for fugitive, muderous replicants—and is drawn to a mystery woman (Sean Young) whose secrets may undermine his soul. Based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick. Co-starring Rutger Hauer, Edward James Olmos, M. Emmet Walsh and Daryl Hannah. Music by Vangelis. (Embarcadero Center Cinema, SF)

Director: Ridley Scott
MPAA Rating: R
Run Time: 1hr 57mins
Release Year: 1982/2007
Country Of Origin: USA

Experimental Urbanism: Braddock, Pennsylvania

Captain of Industry
One man's mission to save Braddock, Pennsylvania
by Joshua M. Bernstein
photo credit: Bryan Goulart
(ReadyMade, August/September 2007)

“It’s hard to find a town that has tanked as severely and completely,” says Fetterman, who became mayor in 2005—winning by one vote. He beat the incumbent despite never having held public office. Because Braddock is a borough, his powers are limited (managing police, mostly) and his pay a pauper’s wage (about $150 monthly). Nonetheless, Fetterman’s ambition and optimism are limitless.

Where some see another terminally ill industrial city, Fetterman envisions a stage for experimental urbanism, a concept that emphasizes communal living, urban gardens, and an active arts scene, all glued together with do-it-yourself sweat equity.

article: Captain of Industry

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?