puddles, I did scream too!
at 70 mph you can truly scream your lungs out and I thought that was pervesely beautiful because nowhere else I could be so completely alone.
but I no longer have a car and I don't need to scream anymore either.
Architects are usually in absentee or play the advocate for the developer when it comes to the very boring and very unglamorous policy decisions in local government. The people that fills the voids to make these very real decisons are citizens made up of insurance brokers, school teachers, lawyers, and other people who are generally not trained in planning first and foremost, let alone in the architectual nuances of what constitutes as beauty and ugliness. If you want things to change around you...you can't expect others to do it.
There is so much I would like to add to this discussion, but I feel that this in a way is tied to all of the other blogo-bitch sessions that seem to occur on Archinect. In the end, I think we as a professional group are not capable of taking care of our own business. We just can't decide what to call ourselves, we can't seem to convince anyone to compensate us more, and we can't seem to have any real influence on the poor planning and development decisions that go on around us...just to name a few.
I don't think these are problems. I think that are symptoms of a profession that is dying and completely irrelevent to the society that WE THINK we contribute to.
"I think people just have no basic training in visual harmony" liberty bell
but does it not go deeper than a consequential visual disharmony or perception psychology? you don't just expect someone to change the expression on their face simply because deem it not pretty, no matter how many feel-good tapes she has or occasional sojourns to venice and barcelona she takes. a box and a parking lot are (seen to be) the most 'economical' expression of consumerism that is really no longer just an american cartel. the ugliness is not only seen, it is part of the rubric of a life which turns the city into a bigger factory. now a factory in itself is not of course a bad thing, that depends on the owner
and in the american context of things, i can't help but imagine the non-natives that came in and took over land, they took it so much ... the sins of the fathers and all.
you don't just expect someone to change the expression on their face simply because deem it not pretty
noctilucent, I'm not sure I know what you are getting at, but it makes me think of how things are beautiful for reasons beyond the visual (so I may be shooting my own previous argument in the foot, here.) When I see a person laughing in absolute gleeful joy - showing real happiness on their face - that is beautiful, regardless of the "visual harmony" of the actual face. Similarly, corrugated metal siding on a building that is, let's say, in the inner city, built with green technologies, on a lot that had been vacant and full of garbage, with the intent of being a contributing member of the social and physical landscape for the long-term - that corrugated siding is more beautiful then the same material on an exurban WalMart.
Strip development offends me both visually and consciously, I guess is my point, but now I have to get to work so I can't carry the thought any further.
Darnit, well, I tried posting an image, but I guess I don't know the trick yet...
Steven, I think this is a good question, and it hit home for me too. I live in the city of Cambridge, Ontario, where my school of architecture founded a satellite campus a few years ago, and I too get angry quite often at the environment. It's mostly a sprawling industrial town and bedroom community that was poorly planned and features as its crowning disaster Hespeler Road/Highway 24, an anarchical stretch of big-box stores, parking lots and business signs that serves as the effective "main street". Within this mess, though, are the cores of 3 towns, Preston, Hespeler, and Galt, that the provincial government amalgamated together in the 60's or 70's to form Cambridge.
The school is located in Galt, by far the most beautiful of the 3 old towns - or at least, it once was. Galt is a Scottish town founded along a river in a valley that became an industrial centre in the late 1800's, and it still bears a number of beautiful buildings that demonstrate the pride that was clearly felt for this place at one time. Nevertheless, since the amalgamation of Cambridge, a number of beautiful buildings and factories in old Galt have been torn down, replaced by parking lots, cheap vinyl-clad garbage, or some disastrously ugly (and now empty) malls. Many yards have been asphalted over, and 2 flophouses have been emptied out in as many years (most recently, the one "hotel" near my house suffered a fire). Some buildings have been well-maintained and many restored, but several others languish, and the town is pock-marked with empty lots. This is not to mention the problems of poverty, drug abuse and poor mental and physical health at a scale I find shocking for a city of only 100,000.
Meanwhile, a lot of the locals just don't seem to get it; the city is building a fairly sensitively-inserted Civic Admin. Building (can't they just call it a City Hall?) in Galt by a very good firm, and though the mayor and council may not have done the best job of approving this project, a lot of the local griping about the project shows a lack of vision (it eliminates a parking lot, it costs money, it's "too close" to historic buildings, why is it in Galt and not along Hespeler Road?). A lot of people here seem to be blind to the visual and social problems in Galt; most people seem to think that more parking lots are necessary (I seldom see a full parking lot in Galt), and that if it's slightly run-down, it's just not worth keeping. Cambridge frequently appears as a tragic mess, and often I get infuriated walking around this city and seeing how much beauty is ruined by crap. One of the justifications for the School moving here was the architectural lessons offered by Galt. I often can't help but feel that the lesson here is the futility of building beautiful architecture.
I think there's some possibility in recovering the civic pride that once made places like Galt, though it is a bigger task than any single architect can perform. However, although we can blame politicians and developers and private businesses for a lot, the fact remains that architects are also complicit in much of what has happened. I am NOT a Howard Roark hero-type, nor do I like that paradigm at all, but I sense that if more architects stood up for the quality of the buildings they produced, rather than throw their hands up in dismay at their clients and worry that they'll never earn a fee again if they even suggest something better, things might start to change. The forces of banality are formidable, but has it occured to anyone that when we shrug our shoulders and "give in", that's EXACTLY what a lot of those who hire us want us to do? I mean, if enough of us put our foot down, it may not suddenly fix everything, but people might start to take us seriously. This is also contingent, though, on architects actually delivering beautiful buildings, which frankly we may not all be prepared to do.
This can't address everything, since not all buildings even involve an architect; cultural changes need to occur as well. But how can a broad discussion about the visual environment occur when all but a small number of the very guardians and experts of that beauty seem apathetic about it? If most architects are willing to accept the cynical lie that beauty is a hindrance to wealth and efficiency, when architects are willing to produce lame projects rather than pursue any ambition no matter how much they may really care if you talk to them, then why should the general public act differently? Pride requires inspiration, and we need to somehow inspire them for more - and I think it's possible to do it while paying the bills and not relying on slave interns.
Sorry for the long post. So much for my New Year's resolution to be more pithy!
Two brothers - one a hopeless pessimist, the other a helpless optimist.
Its Christmas, and the Pessimist received a hundred gifts of all sizes from his family and friends to try to cheer him up. The optimist received a sack of shit.
Optimist: "Hey brother, what did you get for christmas?".
Pessimist: "Well I must be dying of a deathly disease that everyone else knows about and wont tell me because I'm disliked by everyone - I got too many gifts...", says the Pessimist. "Why, what did you get?"
Optimist says "A horse, but he's hiding somewhere around here!"
alright, i just wanted to open up with that joke.
optimism is directly related to my opinion however, so i guess it applies. yasee, i live in a part of new jersey that never quite survived the late 70's in terms of....well everything. i work in nyc/Stat Isle, and everyday i have to trudge through my route looking at both urban and suburban "sacks of shits" on the way. The issue here is that we as architects were given the misfortune of being able to decipher very quickly the quality of construction in conjunction with the amount of necessity for certain "architectural" features of homes (sans: doric columns on a mcmansion) and compare that to the beauty of the project as a whole. while most people may just say "oooh - its a nice biig house with little bricks just on the front and a chimnay!", we see....well, a mcmansion with a faux-brick facade. and we know whats in it and what could have been bought/made with the same (usually less) budget the buyer paid for it.
and i agree with lb "visual harmony" is something that the public lacks in understanding. what i disagree with lb is trying to "teach" this, for its an inherent sense of balance and scale that is one of the most difficult things to comprehend without having it already.
and jbrl said it well, but i have a correction for my own purposes "c) live in a place that I considerchallenging<i>, or visually interesting at the least."</>
and with challenging, i could at least raise more awareness that we're here not only to please the public's eye and make one smile in admiration, but to make it wince a little and make the mind question why it is that they've accepted anything lesser.
and jbrl said it well, but i have a correction for my own purposes "c) live in a place that I consider challenging, or visually interesting at the least."
some interesting new comments to which i want to respond but can't at the moment. thehoule mentioned parking, though, so i'll drop this:
alex krieger wrote, in his piece in the collection of writings that came out of one of the mayors' institute shindigs, that the perception will always be that there is never enough parking until everyone can park in the spot right by the front door. i think he's brilliant.
that said, louisville's metro area has over 8 parking spaces for every car.
I guess one could be like Paulo Solari, and find a vacant piece of Desert and Destroy it with a new mega community. I recall everyone saying this place is so cool......it is the future.....well what happened to the future.....pretty damn ugly when you turn around and look at it from the desert. The empty desert in all its harshness is damn beautiful and should be left alone.
noctilucent's observations were interesting - a kind of relativism of ugliness - but i think liberty's response is where i'm coming from.
there is the 'less nice' that comes from neglect, entropy, outdatedness, etc. sometimes a loved place can be down-trodden but you can tell that it is a place that is loved, or at least that is hospitable to people. this is what you see in a lot of the urban community.
then there is what i was originally referring to as the ugly development of the exurban landscape - the stuff that was made the way it is on purpose, but with little regard for quality of life. the 80'/80'/80' traffic triangle by which i stop for a redlight every morning could easily have been a permeable surface: grass, landscape, or otherwise. instead it's asphalt because it's cheaper and easier and 'who would care?' so it collects glass from thrown bottles, cigarette butts, shiny red plastic and reflective glass from car lights after accidents, hub caps...
if i took a series of pictures of urban decay and exurban car-focused development and showed them side by side, i think you'd see that a under-maintained storefront is still about people and the traffic triangle described above is against people. ironically, both are places where pedestrians try to walk. guess in which place they are safer: city or suburb?
There are pedestrians in the suburbs? I thought those people were just "what the hell are they doing out heres".
I read a book not too long ago by Joel Garreau:
[url=http://www.link.com] edge city
[/http://www.amazon.com/Edge-City-Life-New-Frontier/dp/0385424345/sr=1-1/qid=1168002190/ref=sr_1_1/104-1618229-4817566?ie=UTF8&s=books]
I used to see the suburbs, especially the exurbs as a wasteland, now I TRY to look at is as a project in process.
It also made me realize that if I want to change anything I have to become a huge developer. And that aint happening anytime soon.
wow Steven, oddly enough I HAVE taken those pictures! It was a photo essay for a class called 'Reading the Built Landscape' and it covered Georgia Avenue/ MD97 from rural farmland through McMansion suburbs with unrented strip mall spaces all the way into downtown DC. The pictures told the story well with minimal captions and actually scored me a 'B' in a class I unfortunately never gave enough time and attention.
Development is like religion, I can only begin to relate to it when it is life affirming. Which pretty much rules out Catholicism and parking lot based strip malls where you can see the Earth's curvature in the parking sea between Borders and Home Depot.
There is something affirmingly honest and base about theses spaces. These are cases of pure by-product space shaped by platonic collections of autherless objects. well, like a forest. Unfortunately the most obvious narratives emerging as a result of these spaces are scorn based and aesthetic driven. But we need objects of hate for progress, or not?.
i hear 'aesthetic' used as a pejorative pretty often these days, usually with the indication that something is not really of concern because it's merely an aesthetic issue. there are whole theories of the roots of aesthetics that i'm not knowledgeable enough to discuss, but i'm sure that at least ONE aspect of what we find beautiful has to do with how well the observed condition supports human life/well-being. so ugly can be not-pretty or ugly can be not-conducive-to-my-well-being.
a forest is life-affirming, self-sufficient, and restorative. that's its honesty/integrity. asphalt is pollution, maybe a necessary evil, but something to be used in moderation. asphalt as 'by-product' of lack of consideration of human well-being is completely offensive.
i agree, aethetics should in any case be read as a result of process which need to be analysed for the sincerity and value to what you describe as "supporting life/well being". But these spaces we are discussing have the sole purpose of supportiing our existence, they are infrastructures, services in volumes, and sheds of easy-...whatevers. Would we not just be decorating these icons of contemporary functions?
no stephen, that is not what i was getting at. relativism would imply an allowable paradox or, rather, the polite disallowance of a paradox: ugly is also beautiful depending on. i do not see how this simultaneity is possible. there is an inherent difference between your version of the ugly and sevensixfive's "aestheticize it". in order to do the latter, there would have to be a shift realized through distancing the object. this is especially the dominion of cinema, which in aspiring to document reality creates a seperate one. for instance, the antonioni's depressing stark milan is recreated within an identifiable beautiful celluloid aesthetic. there is no conflict or relativism that orders the ugliness of the city and the beauty of its representation (they are effectively different objects)and neither is there a contradiction between the sevensixfive's idea of incidental beauty (in rising from the ugly, distances it) and yours of a general contextual ugliness. i am not sure we can all unanimously concede on what is ugly and what is not but being simply unsatisfied by the visuals is unsatisfying. the environment is the physical sediment of the community's life... the ugliness cannot just be the visual shell, it might very well be the ugliness of the system people operate within, the ugliness of mindnumbing 8-6 jobs under a hoped-for minumun wage/maximum production/minimum benefits system. the ugly windowless neon-lit container that makes people look like corpses with its generous parking lot and the urban consequences of that structure are the fatalistic aftermath of the unimaginative disrespect for a more pleasant and healthier way of living.
Last winter I got into a debate with a prof on a related topic. Without going into it too much, I was trying to argue that we could start to make things better beginning with what we have, no matter how poor. He didn't buy it; I perhaps wasn't expressing myself as well as some of you guys are on this topic.
What do you think of Tony Fretton's work? He's quite interesting (he's a brit, if you don't happen to know him - I'm not sure how famous he is), in no small part because of the curious "rightness" of his buildings in spite of their quirkiness. He has articulated an interest in what he calls the shared fiction of the city, and his approach is both loose and sensitive - he's more interested in the relationships of his work to its context than to the perfection of its own internal resolution. Now Fretton works in messy but still reasonably healthy British and North-western European cities, and not the North American suburbs, but I'm fascinated with the possiblity of his critical open-mindedness. Fretton's approach is modest and pliable, but also allows for considerable subversion, and does NOT presume a meek acceptance of what already is.
years ago, like in 1979 we had a urban design class in sci arc thought by ray kappe himself. i forgat but it had a catchy name for it or it had a boring name for it. those days students didn't pay too much attention to classes other than the studio classes.
anyway, this urban design class required agroup of students to take certain part of los angeles, modify with unlimited powers and and make it work if it was broken. i was in a group that was given century city to fix. being in a group of students who were there to get a degree and get a husband, i was burdened with most of the work.
i took advantage of the situation and sent out my group to collect pictures, maps and other data while i sat down in my cubicle and theorized with the help of drugs and booze.
there came the presentation time, i wrote a page long text that proposed the densification of the area by opening it to more bus routes, more development (at the time century city area was not enough populated), and simply suggested that problem was that there wasn't enough people to make it an urban environment. most people looked at me as if i was a trouble maker who endangered the cleanliness and the low crime rates of the area and lectured me to consider a clinical spic and span environment and put that in front of me as the only healthy urban growth with less people and policed, well lit etc etc physical and mental states.
30 years later the population of the area quadropuled at the least and a lot of the things i was saying became a reality.
i am for density, ugliness, visual pollution, traffic jams, underground newspapers and radio stations anything less reminds me chocolote covered swiss streets where much more dubious white crimes take place and anything unusual is promptyly reported to police.
way expensive to sustain and frankly, boring with bastion of homogeneity.
Somewhat unrelated, but I didn't want to create a new thread for the issue I want to bring up.
Anyone run into drawings (floor plans for the sake of conversation) that purely in terms of composition looks ugly, but in terms of a built space you can picture a nice space? Especially if its your own design and you use "it'll look better when its built" as an excuse...
ugliness
A DO OVER PERHAPS?
puddles, I did scream too!
at 70 mph you can truly scream your lungs out and I thought that was pervesely beautiful because nowhere else I could be so completely alone.
but I no longer have a car and I don't need to scream anymore either.
I would have to echo the comments of "switters".
Architects are usually in absentee or play the advocate for the developer when it comes to the very boring and very unglamorous policy decisions in local government. The people that fills the voids to make these very real decisons are citizens made up of insurance brokers, school teachers, lawyers, and other people who are generally not trained in planning first and foremost, let alone in the architectual nuances of what constitutes as beauty and ugliness. If you want things to change around you...you can't expect others to do it.
There is so much I would like to add to this discussion, but I feel that this in a way is tied to all of the other blogo-bitch sessions that seem to occur on Archinect. In the end, I think we as a professional group are not capable of taking care of our own business. We just can't decide what to call ourselves, we can't seem to convince anyone to compensate us more, and we can't seem to have any real influence on the poor planning and development decisions that go on around us...just to name a few.
I don't think these are problems. I think that are symptoms of a profession that is dying and completely irrelevent to the society that WE THINK we contribute to.
"I think people just have no basic training in visual harmony" liberty bell
but does it not go deeper than a consequential visual disharmony or perception psychology? you don't just expect someone to change the expression on their face simply because deem it not pretty, no matter how many feel-good tapes she has or occasional sojourns to venice and barcelona she takes. a box and a parking lot are (seen to be) the most 'economical' expression of consumerism that is really no longer just an american cartel. the ugliness is not only seen, it is part of the rubric of a life which turns the city into a bigger factory. now a factory in itself is not of course a bad thing, that depends on the owner
and in the american context of things, i can't help but imagine the non-natives that came in and took over land, they took it so much ... the sins of the fathers and all.
noctilucent, I'm not sure I know what you are getting at, but it makes me think of how things are beautiful for reasons beyond the visual (so I may be shooting my own previous argument in the foot, here.) When I see a person laughing in absolute gleeful joy - showing real happiness on their face - that is beautiful, regardless of the "visual harmony" of the actual face. Similarly, corrugated metal siding on a building that is, let's say, in the inner city, built with green technologies, on a lot that had been vacant and full of garbage, with the intent of being a contributing member of the social and physical landscape for the long-term - that corrugated siding is more beautiful then the same material on an exurban WalMart.
Strip development offends me both visually and consciously, I guess is my point, but now I have to get to work so I can't carry the thought any further.
What tends to happen with great architecture is someone comes along and dumbs it up! I'm sure everyone has examples of this happening.
^ yep. they even have a name for that: they call it 'value engineering'
windowview.jpg
Darnit, well, I tried posting an image, but I guess I don't know the trick yet...
Steven, I think this is a good question, and it hit home for me too. I live in the city of Cambridge, Ontario, where my school of architecture founded a satellite campus a few years ago, and I too get angry quite often at the environment. It's mostly a sprawling industrial town and bedroom community that was poorly planned and features as its crowning disaster Hespeler Road/Highway 24, an anarchical stretch of big-box stores, parking lots and business signs that serves as the effective "main street". Within this mess, though, are the cores of 3 towns, Preston, Hespeler, and Galt, that the provincial government amalgamated together in the 60's or 70's to form Cambridge.
The school is located in Galt, by far the most beautiful of the 3 old towns - or at least, it once was. Galt is a Scottish town founded along a river in a valley that became an industrial centre in the late 1800's, and it still bears a number of beautiful buildings that demonstrate the pride that was clearly felt for this place at one time. Nevertheless, since the amalgamation of Cambridge, a number of beautiful buildings and factories in old Galt have been torn down, replaced by parking lots, cheap vinyl-clad garbage, or some disastrously ugly (and now empty) malls. Many yards have been asphalted over, and 2 flophouses have been emptied out in as many years (most recently, the one "hotel" near my house suffered a fire). Some buildings have been well-maintained and many restored, but several others languish, and the town is pock-marked with empty lots. This is not to mention the problems of poverty, drug abuse and poor mental and physical health at a scale I find shocking for a city of only 100,000.
Meanwhile, a lot of the locals just don't seem to get it; the city is building a fairly sensitively-inserted Civic Admin. Building (can't they just call it a City Hall?) in Galt by a very good firm, and though the mayor and council may not have done the best job of approving this project, a lot of the local griping about the project shows a lack of vision (it eliminates a parking lot, it costs money, it's "too close" to historic buildings, why is it in Galt and not along Hespeler Road?). A lot of people here seem to be blind to the visual and social problems in Galt; most people seem to think that more parking lots are necessary (I seldom see a full parking lot in Galt), and that if it's slightly run-down, it's just not worth keeping. Cambridge frequently appears as a tragic mess, and often I get infuriated walking around this city and seeing how much beauty is ruined by crap. One of the justifications for the School moving here was the architectural lessons offered by Galt. I often can't help but feel that the lesson here is the futility of building beautiful architecture.
I think there's some possibility in recovering the civic pride that once made places like Galt, though it is a bigger task than any single architect can perform. However, although we can blame politicians and developers and private businesses for a lot, the fact remains that architects are also complicit in much of what has happened. I am NOT a Howard Roark hero-type, nor do I like that paradigm at all, but I sense that if more architects stood up for the quality of the buildings they produced, rather than throw their hands up in dismay at their clients and worry that they'll never earn a fee again if they even suggest something better, things might start to change. The forces of banality are formidable, but has it occured to anyone that when we shrug our shoulders and "give in", that's EXACTLY what a lot of those who hire us want us to do? I mean, if enough of us put our foot down, it may not suddenly fix everything, but people might start to take us seriously. This is also contingent, though, on architects actually delivering beautiful buildings, which frankly we may not all be prepared to do.
This can't address everything, since not all buildings even involve an architect; cultural changes need to occur as well. But how can a broad discussion about the visual environment occur when all but a small number of the very guardians and experts of that beauty seem apathetic about it? If most architects are willing to accept the cynical lie that beauty is a hindrance to wealth and efficiency, when architects are willing to produce lame projects rather than pursue any ambition no matter how much they may really care if you talk to them, then why should the general public act differently? Pride requires inspiration, and we need to somehow inspire them for more - and I think it's possible to do it while paying the bills and not relying on slave interns.
Sorry for the long post. So much for my New Year's resolution to be more pithy!
Two brothers - one a hopeless pessimist, the other a helpless optimist.
Its Christmas, and the Pessimist received a hundred gifts of all sizes from his family and friends to try to cheer him up. The optimist received a sack of shit.
Optimist: "Hey brother, what did you get for christmas?".
Pessimist: "Well I must be dying of a deathly disease that everyone else knows about and wont tell me because I'm disliked by everyone - I got too many gifts...", says the Pessimist. "Why, what did you get?"
Optimist says "A horse, but he's hiding somewhere around here!"
alright, i just wanted to open up with that joke.
optimism is directly related to my opinion however, so i guess it applies. yasee, i live in a part of new jersey that never quite survived the late 70's in terms of....well everything. i work in nyc/Stat Isle, and everyday i have to trudge through my route looking at both urban and suburban "sacks of shits" on the way. The issue here is that we as architects were given the misfortune of being able to decipher very quickly the quality of construction in conjunction with the amount of necessity for certain "architectural" features of homes (sans: doric columns on a mcmansion) and compare that to the beauty of the project as a whole. while most people may just say "oooh - its a nice biig house with little bricks just on the front and a chimnay!", we see....well, a mcmansion with a faux-brick facade. and we know whats in it and what could have been bought/made with the same (usually less) budget the buyer paid for it.
and i agree with lb "visual harmony" is something that the public lacks in understanding. what i disagree with lb is trying to "teach" this, for its an inherent sense of balance and scale that is one of the most difficult things to comprehend without having it already.
and jbrl said it well, but i have a correction for my own purposes "c) live in a place that I consider challenging<i>, or visually interesting at the least."</>
and with challenging, i could at least raise more awareness that we're here not only to please the public's eye and make one smile in admiration, but to make it wince a little and make the mind question why it is that they've accepted anything lesser.
stupid html...
and jbrl said it well, but i have a correction for my own purposes "c) live in a place that I consider challenging, or visually interesting at the least."
some interesting new comments to which i want to respond but can't at the moment. thehoule mentioned parking, though, so i'll drop this:
alex krieger wrote, in his piece in the collection of writings that came out of one of the mayors' institute shindigs, that the perception will always be that there is never enough parking until everyone can park in the spot right by the front door. i think he's brilliant.
that said, louisville's metro area has over 8 parking spaces for every car.
I guess one could be like Paulo Solari, and find a vacant piece of Desert and Destroy it with a new mega community. I recall everyone saying this place is so cool......it is the future.....well what happened to the future.....pretty damn ugly when you turn around and look at it from the desert. The empty desert in all its harshness is damn beautiful and should be left alone.
Steven:
I hear your pain; nothing of interest to add but this image below.
If you look beyond the obvious, it speaks to what your discussion asks(IMHO).
noctilucent's observations were interesting - a kind of relativism of ugliness - but i think liberty's response is where i'm coming from.
there is the 'less nice' that comes from neglect, entropy, outdatedness, etc. sometimes a loved place can be down-trodden but you can tell that it is a place that is loved, or at least that is hospitable to people. this is what you see in a lot of the urban community.
then there is what i was originally referring to as the ugly development of the exurban landscape - the stuff that was made the way it is on purpose, but with little regard for quality of life. the 80'/80'/80' traffic triangle by which i stop for a redlight every morning could easily have been a permeable surface: grass, landscape, or otherwise. instead it's asphalt because it's cheaper and easier and 'who would care?' so it collects glass from thrown bottles, cigarette butts, shiny red plastic and reflective glass from car lights after accidents, hub caps...
if i took a series of pictures of urban decay and exurban car-focused development and showed them side by side, i think you'd see that a under-maintained storefront is still about people and the traffic triangle described above is against people. ironically, both are places where pedestrians try to walk. guess in which place they are safer: city or suburb?
There are pedestrians in the suburbs? I thought those people were just "what the hell are they doing out heres".
I read a book not too long ago by Joel Garreau:
[url=http://www.link.com] edge city
[/http://www.amazon.com/Edge-City-Life-New-Frontier/dp/0385424345/sr=1-1/qid=1168002190/ref=sr_1_1/104-1618229-4817566?ie=UTF8&s=books]
I used to see the suburbs, especially the exurbs as a wasteland, now I TRY to look at is as a project in process.
It also made me realize that if I want to change anything I have to become a huge developer. And that aint happening anytime soon.
oh well, here's the link
http://www.amazon.com/Edge-City-Life-New-Frontier/dp/0385424345/sr=1-1/qid=1168002190/ref=sr_1_1/104-1618229-4817566?ie=UTF8&s=books
wow Steven, oddly enough I HAVE taken those pictures! It was a photo essay for a class called 'Reading the Built Landscape' and it covered Georgia Avenue/ MD97 from rural farmland through McMansion suburbs with unrented strip mall spaces all the way into downtown DC. The pictures told the story well with minimal captions and actually scored me a 'B' in a class I unfortunately never gave enough time and attention.
Development is like religion, I can only begin to relate to it when it is life affirming. Which pretty much rules out Catholicism and parking lot based strip malls where you can see the Earth's curvature in the parking sea between Borders and Home Depot.
There is something affirmingly honest and base about theses spaces. These are cases of pure by-product space shaped by platonic collections of autherless objects. well, like a forest. Unfortunately the most obvious narratives emerging as a result of these spaces are scorn based and aesthetic driven. But we need objects of hate for progress, or not?.
deliver -
i hear 'aesthetic' used as a pejorative pretty often these days, usually with the indication that something is not really of concern because it's merely an aesthetic issue. there are whole theories of the roots of aesthetics that i'm not knowledgeable enough to discuss, but i'm sure that at least ONE aspect of what we find beautiful has to do with how well the observed condition supports human life/well-being. so ugly can be not-pretty or ugly can be not-conducive-to-my-well-being.
a forest is life-affirming, self-sufficient, and restorative. that's its honesty/integrity. asphalt is pollution, maybe a necessary evil, but something to be used in moderation. asphalt as 'by-product' of lack of consideration of human well-being is completely offensive.
wait a minute, just on aesthetics, are we talking about the same ugliness here? Isnt the painting on your profile very ugly steven?...
i agree, aethetics should in any case be read as a result of process which need to be analysed for the sincerity and value to what you describe as "supporting life/well being". But these spaces we are discussing have the sole purpose of supportiing our existence, they are infrastructures, services in volumes, and sheds of easy-...whatevers. Would we not just be decorating these icons of contemporary functions?
" kind of relativism of ugliness" stephen ward
no stephen, that is not what i was getting at. relativism would imply an allowable paradox or, rather, the polite disallowance of a paradox: ugly is also beautiful depending on. i do not see how this simultaneity is possible. there is an inherent difference between your version of the ugly and sevensixfive's "aestheticize it". in order to do the latter, there would have to be a shift realized through distancing the object. this is especially the dominion of cinema, which in aspiring to document reality creates a seperate one. for instance, the antonioni's depressing stark milan is recreated within an identifiable beautiful celluloid aesthetic. there is no conflict or relativism that orders the ugliness of the city and the beauty of its representation (they are effectively different objects)and neither is there a contradiction between the sevensixfive's idea of incidental beauty (in rising from the ugly, distances it) and yours of a general contextual ugliness. i am not sure we can all unanimously concede on what is ugly and what is not but being simply unsatisfied by the visuals is unsatisfying. the environment is the physical sediment of the community's life... the ugliness cannot just be the visual shell, it might very well be the ugliness of the system people operate within, the ugliness of mindnumbing 8-6 jobs under a hoped-for minumun wage/maximum production/minimum benefits system. the ugly windowless neon-lit container that makes people look like corpses with its generous parking lot and the urban consequences of that structure are the fatalistic aftermath of the unimaginative disrespect for a more pleasant and healthier way of living.
except for the fact that i'm paid very well, yep.
as a kmart worker?
steven, that was sleazy.
ah, no, it was just a misunderstanding. i missed the kmart citation and, besides the pay, i resemble that remark. sorry.
The ugliness is not just visual.
(great book - frightening and infuriating)
do they sell that book at sprawlmart???
Last winter I got into a debate with a prof on a related topic. Without going into it too much, I was trying to argue that we could start to make things better beginning with what we have, no matter how poor. He didn't buy it; I perhaps wasn't expressing myself as well as some of you guys are on this topic.
What do you think of Tony Fretton's work? He's quite interesting (he's a brit, if you don't happen to know him - I'm not sure how famous he is), in no small part because of the curious "rightness" of his buildings in spite of their quirkiness. He has articulated an interest in what he calls the shared fiction of the city, and his approach is both loose and sensitive - he's more interested in the relationships of his work to its context than to the perfection of its own internal resolution. Now Fretton works in messy but still reasonably healthy British and North-western European cities, and not the North American suburbs, but I'm fascinated with the possiblity of his critical open-mindedness. Fretton's approach is modest and pliable, but also allows for considerable subversion, and does NOT presume a meek acceptance of what already is.
years ago, like in 1979 we had a urban design class in sci arc thought by ray kappe himself. i forgat but it had a catchy name for it or it had a boring name for it. those days students didn't pay too much attention to classes other than the studio classes.
anyway, this urban design class required agroup of students to take certain part of los angeles, modify with unlimited powers and and make it work if it was broken. i was in a group that was given century city to fix. being in a group of students who were there to get a degree and get a husband, i was burdened with most of the work.
i took advantage of the situation and sent out my group to collect pictures, maps and other data while i sat down in my cubicle and theorized with the help of drugs and booze.
there came the presentation time, i wrote a page long text that proposed the densification of the area by opening it to more bus routes, more development (at the time century city area was not enough populated), and simply suggested that problem was that there wasn't enough people to make it an urban environment. most people looked at me as if i was a trouble maker who endangered the cleanliness and the low crime rates of the area and lectured me to consider a clinical spic and span environment and put that in front of me as the only healthy urban growth with less people and policed, well lit etc etc physical and mental states.
30 years later the population of the area quadropuled at the least and a lot of the things i was saying became a reality.
i am for density, ugliness, visual pollution, traffic jams, underground newspapers and radio stations anything less reminds me chocolote covered swiss streets where much more dubious white crimes take place and anything unusual is promptyly reported to police.
way expensive to sustain and frankly, boring with bastion of homogeneity.
Somewhat unrelated, but I didn't want to create a new thread for the issue I want to bring up.
Anyone run into drawings (floor plans for the sake of conversation) that purely in terms of composition looks ugly, but in terms of a built space you can picture a nice space? Especially if its your own design and you use "it'll look better when its built" as an excuse...
most CD sets I see today look pretty awful regardless of how the built space turns out.
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