The slabs in front of me seemed at once the most and least architectural objects I’d ever seen. They were banal and startling, full and empty of meaning. Here were the techniques of Land Art, medieval construction, marketing and promotion, architectural exhibition and the new nativism rolled uncomfortably if somehow inevitably into one. — Los Angeles Times
LA Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne takes a trip down to the U.S.-Mexican border in San Diego to attempt the challenge of critiquing Trump's border wall prototypes, "alternating bands of substance and absence, aspiration and impossibility".
10 Comments
It's only intentional minimalism when you plan to do something banal.
I’m concerned the media is getting too good at talking about Trump and so bad about covering anything else. Hawthorne is better than this, but I get it. Just a symptom of a toxic culture that can’t solve real problems—that would be a better angle than assessing the aesthetic qualities of a racist wall. Just heard him talking intelligently about Portman on NPR, so much better than this.
This wall is a crime against humanity. Just like the architects of the Nazi death camps those responsible will be tried and brought to justice once the current regime crumbles. Let's just hope we won't die in nuclear war first.
Now let's please stop talking about the style of gas chambers and the likes.
Trump is corrupt to the core, but he (like the Russians) only took advantage of the divisions he saw. His populism is founded on "feelings of cultural and demographic displacement, and with being looked down upon by cosmopolitan elites" according to an article in today's Washington Post. The reason I bring this up is because "looking down" on the average person's view is what architects are taught to do.
Take Hawthorne's observation that this wall sample looks a lot like what Tado Ando or other minimalists pass of as deep stuff. No doubt it's an over simplification of the sublimity minimalists shoot for with light and other effects that this wall sample has none of. I only ask that you consider the obvious, which Mr. Hawthorne stumbled on to. Sometimes a concrete wall is just that, and when you dismiss this view, it's yet another example of how "cosmopolitan elites" look down their noses.
You don't have to like traditional architecture, but not to recognize the disconnect between the perspective of everyday people and the esoteric musings on a concrete wall play into the populism that gave us Trump. If we're going to flush the Republican's who abet Trump's behavior, we need to look at the world a little more like the people for whom we build, the same people we were before our initiation into the sacred halls of architecture.
Most red state people don't want or hadn't thought of a wall until T proposed it. But in a weird way, he shows a proactive creativity that many politicians lack--just a bad solution. It showed people that he had solutions for them and was thinking of them, unlike others. There's much better ways to show mid-America that you care about them.
Social media is insidious in how it put this idea into the minds of deplorables much quicker than previous media. Either way, once you start writing "arch reviews" treating a wall like another development, it does give it currency--even this comment does, adding more fuel to the social media fire. Insidious.
W actually started this wall thing.
And failed as T will
What I find annoying about the big urbanism movement is their misuse of the term "architecture" and "architecture critic" as meaning anything in the built-environment.
No, those are buildings. Architecture is a particular intention to make the built world meaningful to human beings and human experience. Maybe a racist wall can be reviewed as a dam or power line, but that is not architecture. There's no intent to be architecture. This is the opposite of architecture, the intent to do damage to human beings and even worse because it is a racist dam that can't and probably won't be built.
The wall clearly has nothing to do with architecture, and Hawthorne's self-conscious preening about "is it architecture" makes him part of the problem.
I do accidental minimalism every day after breakfast.
JLC-1....something to smile about...thanks!
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