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
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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