Could the entire mood of a neighborhood depend on something as simple as street width? That was the question David Yoon, a writer, designer, photographer, and self-confessed urban planning geek living in Los Angeles, asked himself after returning from a trip to Paris. He started documenting existing streets of Los Angeles and narrowing them to see the effects that his manipulations had on the city. — mascontext.com
32 Comments
PHOTOSHOP URBANISM
This is all about image-making and doesn't make sense to turn major LA boulevards into narrow side-streets. The images presented make it all seem cute which is point of the visual thesis.
Shrink a nine-foot grizzly bear and you have a teddy. Turn a tank into a toy and its no longer a deadly weapon, When big things become tiny they become cute.
The cute and narrow effect. If we had a way to miniaturize people maybe this would work. Right now this is just photoshop urbanism.
awesome! As a photography exercise.
In real life you can't just squeeze city blocks together. But you can extend sidewalks, plant more banana trees, and such.
Next exercise, I wanna see urban environments (say NYC, or Paris) stretched out to Americana size!
Eric, obviously it is just photoshop. But it also clearly shows a street which has a lot more value to many people. Call it cute if you want to be snarky, but there is an absence of pedestrian scaled streets in America, and this is a unique, if simple, way of looking at that.
full-of-it, Obviously, this is NOT about Photoshop, or software or computers. Its about scale and about size. Making things small renders them cute. Down-scaling rooms or streets creates a more intimate experience. It's just an effect and it is just as obvious. You don't need to travel to Paris, just visit Disneyland. Main Street is the destination you're looking for.
eric
the image on the link of sunset blvd at echo park looks like a typical side street in just about any city in the northeastern US.
eric - of course it doesn't make sense to reduce the width of major arterials (and those overly narrowed streets should be one-way, not two), but as a visual exercise in scale it is pretty interesting. I really don't understand your rant about "cute." I live with streets that wide (even narrower) every day.
Actually it's an interesting exercise: the examples given are not always an improvement in the doctored picture, but I'll say right here that for Echo Park II (third example down) I'd a quadrillion times rather walk down the street in the fake second picture than the actual first one.
Toaster. Thanks.
My approach to criticism is to look at whats in front of me and identify by name the visual aspect that makes it an image. I'm not that interested in the political or practical part. I just like to name and point out the rhetorical devices and patterns. The effect of cuteness from scale down-sizing is the only point I'm making. And it is as interesting as you want to be.
eric
Yes, but when dealing with the width of streets in relation to the height of buildings along them and how they affect the feel or psychology of the street, "cuteness" and "intimacy" is not all there is to it and really explains nothing. I can point to many, many small or tight streets throughout the world that aren't really that cute or intimate.
This photographic exercise reminds of Matt Logue's Empy LA. I also can't remember where (or if?) I saw a show of manipulated photos of LA streets with all advertising and signage removed. These images simply distort photographs of streets, in one step, to provide a completely alternative perspective on the urban space. I don't consider "cute" to be anything but a subjective bi-product of this specific exercise.
Paul, Emilio. Yeah I think thats where I was going. I was comparing the positive responses of the streetscape photo-manipulations with how scaling down something makes 'cute'.
Of course I can emotionally respond to the pleasantness and scale of the streets. but the analytical part of me sees a device.
eric
$2.45 for a gallon of gas? the HELL?!??!?
eric - here are a few examples in the Boston area - typical residential streets (straight up google street view - no editing):
notice that cars are parked on the sidewalk b/c there isn't enough room.
proof this is the US b/c of the flag...
I dunno about these streets being "cute" though (or particularly safe)- especially this one (which is 2-way, btw):
and for a bit of comparison - this is in the midwestern neighborhood where I lived as a teenager - street is similar width as three pics above:
so - maybe something else is going on besides street width...
A Toast.... for keeping the discussion up.
A wide street is a wide street. A narrow street is a narrow street. Changing scale of the wide street to narrow is the 'cutefying' effect. Which is the visual structure I was pointing out and giving it a name. A better name is needed.
To stay with architecture, those gift shop souvenirs of miniature buildings; the Eiffel Tower, Empire State and Chrysler buildings, are cute replicas because of scale. Little dogs, toy furniture, even babies are 'cute' when compared to the standard, normal, average, expected size. With 'cuteness', size matters.
Right now I am looking at women's makeup and toiletries. Small little things. I like the ones that have tiny architectural elements. Like miniature furnishings. An odd effect.
eric
But Eric, dismissing the exercise as just "cutefying" is just a way not to consider what's going on in the photos. In some of the examples, the Photoshop version is not "cuter" and I think the street seems better in its original state; in others I think it improves the street and I gave one example.
It would be more valuable to look at exactly which elements of the streetscape the Photoshop version is improving or worsening. The relationship of the scale of streets (and open spaces) to the buildings along or around them has a long history of examination and study (including Leonardo da Vinci). Your examples of making things in the world "cute" by making miniatures of them is off the point: a tighter street is not necessarily a case of "miniatureizing" (the pictures don't also scale down the buildings and trees, just tighten the streets), but rather a question of scale relationships and the experience of pedestrian and drivers.
Emilio. I could cafre less about whats 'really going on' in this photo-shopped illustration. But if you want to go there, fine. This is too easy.
Each and every example of the photo-shopped streets turn heavily used, busy, Los Angeles transportation corridors into narrow, dangerous pedestrian orientated streets. These newly narrowed streets and all the streets around them would end up totally congested and unworkable. Gridlock in one word.
Two examples in LA: Robertson Blvd at the border of Beverly Hills and Los Angeles, at times almost impossible to drive. A nice cute street perfect for celebrity lunching and people watching. A hangout for paparazzi. You know the stretch; its famous for movie star fender benders and paparazzi chasing photographers. Didn't someone almost die while trying to avoid an accelerating getaway? Maybe they should ban cars.
On the less tony side side of LA, Pico and Normandie, across from the Greek Orthodox Church, Normandie narrows to one lane each way. Freeway traffic just halts. Gridlock.all the time. Not fun not cute.
Parking is a bitch in these areas. The solution is to do away with cars, permit only and/or limited parking (not a good idea for all those boutiques and cafes that depend on the out-of-the neighborhood drive-to to it trade). Lots and lots more public transportation.
From what I hear Paris is a tough city to own a car in. But I dont know for sure.
Like i said before, I could care less about pointing out the impracticality of the schemes. My interest has always been about the visual devices used to communicate.
If cute is not your favorite word pls come up with a better one. really. my turn for coffee.
eric
Methinks you're taking those photos a little to literally. I don't think the exercise was one of examining the implications to LA traffic systems and city planning in general...it's a fricking visual exercise for God's sake. You obviously have an agenda (pro-car, anti New-Urbanists, whatever the hell) and your bile towards those photos is just laughable. "narrow, dangerous pedestrian orientated streets"?!? wha? as opposed to safe, pedestrian menacing super highways? I can sense your love of cars here and God forbid anyone mess with your gridlock LA. Yea, I'm sure LA's gridlock is due to a few streets narrowing down to pedestrian scale...give me a fucking break.
You know what, the hell with this, I'm tired of these stupid Archinect pissing matches (it's one reason I hadn't posted in a long time until two days ago...and I used to give as good as I got) A discussion is one thing, but this one is not really that "cute". I really don't care what you think about those photos and your contribution to this discussion is just pent up anger at something I really don't care about. See you in the funny papers.
LA is good with its car culture and I love driving my car on its streets.., checking out new buildings, signage, street life or lack of it, stop when I want to, pick up my friend Eric and go have a breakfast at Norm's like we did last thirty years, talk about Reyner Banham, stop again walk to market in Koreatown, get in the car again and go on the freeway to see the new architecture in N. Hollywood in the Valley. There are many streets to explore in this city, some even narrow, just like the ones I saw in Paris or growing up in Izmir..,widthwise.., walk all you want. In my thirtyfive years in LA, I observed pedestrian population quadrupled.
If you don't have a density like this creating narrow streets is kind of like people coming back from Italy and asking their architect they want to have a Palladian stairs to their Italian ranch style home with vinyl windows, driving everybody insane.
It is "cute" asking LA to be like Philadelphia.
Hey Eric, do you wanna drive to Rancho Cucamonga next week? I heard there is a grand opening of a new Target , they are giving free hot dogs, soft drink and a chance to win a big ass SUV which we could use.
The problem with most urban intervention panels I go to is, instead of working with what we have, most experts want to bring things that are not our existing physical environment but top down physical changes turning into impossible wish lists. And most of these people are so called progressives. Duh! Narrowing the Sunset Blvd. via photoshop is a manifesto for new construction and new urbanist developments? It will happen naturally perhaps fifty years from now when fossil fuel for cars is depleted and electricity is scarce, public transportaion is better and Sunset Blvd is reduced to two lanes plus a metro underneat or an elevated rail, with 25' sidewalks on each side where people sell and exchange goods. Beverly Hills is overgrown, and each large home is occupied with six to ten families.
Eric is just breaking down the image to its mechanical devices and graphic meanings. It s called reading..
And he knows this city well.
Thanks Orhan, for the comment
WHENever I try to get abstract I get in trouble. I need pictures to compare and contrast to clarify what i am pointing out. What i do, and I do this all the time with everything, is that I try to connect a phenomena or a perception to some visual logic or idea. Its all about how do we know what we see?
What I do, my approach, is to catalog variations of imagery and define and name them in language terms. Its axiometric as logicians say. I am developing a logic for visual phenomena.
thanks
Wow, the LA contingent banding together...well, if Ohran joins in, I just can't resist.
Hmm, harumph, yea, so I posted a series of pictures on the sort of Italian version of Archinect. It's a series of photos of the Campo in Siena and each subsequent picture is modified in Photoshop to widen the square a bit, pull the buildings apart as it were. I wanted to see how large I could make it before it begins to lose any sense of its historic enclosure, of working as a proper piazza. Very interesting, simple visual exercise, but little did I know.
Three or four Italian architects immediately accused me of asking Siena to be LA, Americanizing the Italian context, and thought my exercise was "carino" (look that work up yourselves). A well known Italian planner said I was devastating the fabric of the city with these pictures, ruining any sense of the pedestrian scale of the town, shattering the surrounding neighborhoods, destroying the famous Palio horse race, and committing a serious crime. A couple of people said I was creating a "dangerous, menacing space, full of angst". The Lega Nord liked it, they thought I was taking away the "Southerness" of the town and joining it more with wider Northern cities and thus promoting the severing of Italy in two. The remnants of the Communist Party attacked me for promoting towns unfriendly to the worker and common folk and being a capitalist roader.
The lesson here is don't fuck around with Photoshop, you never know who you're going to piss off.
Meanwhile, at the Olympics Opening Ceremony:
"But the dancing sick-kids salute to the National Health Service, complete with a Mary Poppins air raid and a giant Franken-baby? Much less fun, and more than a bit bizarre. "I don't know if that's cute or creepy," said NBC's Matt Lauer proclaimed about the baby, as if "cute" were actually an option."
Emilio, that is overly theatrical and politicized as if it is a team sport. Though, we are talking about Los Angeles. Just ideas, images and manifestations. If we say everything is alright, then what is the point of discussion. You are generalizing, in a way numbing down the voice of the discussion. It is the image in a context we are talking about. Substance is being discussed with site specifity. Tell me about LA, Sunset Blvd, Lincoln Blvd, Wilshire via these images. Tell me about urban experience in this city, its geography, infrastructure, layout and feel.
Los Angeles street widths are engineered with certain programmatic and pragmatic hierarchy and decades of work went into them.
I personally like this engineering but also feel the city is not yet reached to its critical tipping point as far as its pedestrian density in 90% of its street network to necessitate extra surface for sidewalk populace.
The City of West Hollywood did implement reduced traffic lanes successfully on some dense sections of Santa Monica Blvd. narrowing down with a median planters and tree program on both sidewalks. It took some careful engineering, planning, integration of metro station plans and reaching to a critical density.
Aw, c'mon Orhan, can't even laugh along?...."we are not amused", the Queen said to James Bond.
And the comments I received in response to mine were not exaggerated and hoary? or simply just laughable? I really respect what you write here at Archinect, and you're one of a small group here who actually has real discussions as opposed to brawls, but to trot out and agree with the hoariest, most clichéd, and most pointless comment on the small scale street as "trying to bring Italy here" and "cuteness", which is trotted every tiresome time, well I just expected a little more based on what you’ve written before. I don't know LA as well as you but I do know Italy very well and there's more to what's going on in certain cities and towns in Italy and their scale than "cuteness", I do know that much (and I don't really feel like getting specific here and starting down another long discussion).
And then to point to the picture of a super-dense (probably coastal) Italian hill town, as if to imply that any of the doctored photos we are discussing have anything even close to that density, and then throw in another stale factoid of bad American Palladian homes with vinyl windows (huh?) wanted by the usual "great unwashed" after coming back from Italy (also a denigrating cliché), as if that is implied anywhere in those doctored photos, that would be real substance in an argument and not theatrical, yea?
I really couldn't care less about "site specificity" regarding those photos, that's not the way I looked at them (can't I have the freedom to look at them apart from their being specifically LA?), and I care even less about the agenda of those who posted them and what they may want to do to LA. You could do that exercise with any street or city or place in the world, and many other fantasy modifications as well (the wonder of Photoshop), which was exactly the point of my comedy scenario...and yes, it was theatrical, the better to point out how specious some the comments I've gotten are, and well, just to have some fun.
The USA already has and has always had "Italian" scale - and so does LA as you pointed out - just like Italy already has "Los Angeles" around many of its large cities. And most people in Italy that care about those subjects recognize that the "Americanized" parts of Italy have some inherent problems, just as they recognize that the tight medieval fabrics of the older sections have their modern day problems (getting cars in and around is just one of them). If my last comment dumbed down (and intentionally so) then some of your and Eric's comments over-intellectualize those pictures and their implications to an absurd degree, and I'll just disagree with you about all your comments having real substance.
I've never lived in LA but I have been there a few times and have done some readings on it (Banham's Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies is one of my favorites) but this: "Los Angeles street widths are engineered with certain programmatic and pragmatic hierarchy and decades of work went into them" is a total oversimplification. Really? No LA streets are nightmares of their type, no horror shows of traffic and almost or actually killed pedestrians, no grand mistakes anywhere in the LA grid? They were all perfectly thought out and make absolute sense, huh? Nothing at all you could improve on. Wow, that's one amazing city, that LA, I should move there soon.
But I now realize neither of you will stop considering those photos as anything but comments (and denigrating ones at that) on your precious LA, and, not having the detailed knowledge of the city that you do, and not really feeling like a long discussion on the merits of West Hollywood and the issues with Sunset Blvd. (or even if hippies and rock bands still live in Laurel Canyon), I will bow out...actually I might just take another nice, long break from posting on Archinect...a little bit goes a long way.
E. I think you argue just to argue...or to see yourself online. Stop staring ...it's only the internet.
Really? Then what's Orhan's excuse? (5,207 comments). I hadn't posted for a year or two, so there goes your theory. Also, that name is an alias so I'm not really staring at myself.
Yea, I'm very familiar with that method of dismissal "oh, your points are not actually worthwhile, you're just arguing to argue, son....there, there, that's a good boy, run along now", at which point I usually quote Roberto Benigni: "Go take a flying fuck, testa di cazzo!"
Aw, see that, you made me post again....well, I won't look at it.
Btw, eric, I only re-commented because Orhan stepped into the discussion, I usually like what he has to say (there are exceptions). So why don't you run along now and catalog some variations of images.
emilio your post about "posting a series of pictures on the sort of Italian version of Archinect. It's a series of photos of the Campo in Siena and each subsequent picture is modified in Photoshop to widen the square a bit, pull the buildings apart as it were." is genius i really hope you did that!
Thanks Nam, but no, I was jus' funnin'. I don't even know if there is an Italian version of Archinect.
"Stretched images of noteworthy domestic architecture and social situations in Silica Boy show my commitment to fiction..."
it sort of seems irrelevant whether yoon's doctored images are 'cute' or not. they're a wordless critique and a provocation, any response being legitimate. yoon is likely not indicating that the modification is preferable so much as providing a visual critique of what he's seen by asking the question 'what if...?'
if it gets designers (and non-designers, maybe more importantly!) thinking about the places with which they are familiar and considering that it could have been very different, with different implications for how life is lived in such a place, it's a successful project.
i also think emilio's studies of italian piazza's is a brilliant idea and wish it were real and i could see it.
If “cute” that is all that tight streets represent, then fine, that’s what Yoon is doing. I was trying to argue that it’s not all they represent. This street is tight but not necessarily cute:
However, what Quondam writes is true, something of Los Angeles’ character is lost in most of those second pictures, and I said so above. Virtuality might be a better term for what they are, and I agree that you could go even further with his exercise (also said so above) as your illustration well shows.
But bringing up fiction sparked my interest a bit more, since it then brings up art and how it deals with and modifies cities and the landscape as a fiction to comment on reality. When I wrote about Italy already having "L.A." (more specifically the wide highway/gas station/ strip center/industrial sprawl kind of stuff; not so much L.A.’s residential character) what also came to my mind is how Italian art has been dealing with that exact thing since the 50s as a way to get beyond the hilltop town/medieval center vision of Italy (see neorealism and Antonioni and the novels of Moravia and Pasolini, among others). Antonioni set most of his movies in that (then) modern landscape (picture the sprawl around Milan, with the ribbon highways, Agip/Esso stations, and smoking factories) to deal with specific issues of alienation and separation. I guess you could argue that he thought the old areas were in fact too cute for what he was trying to say, but I would say they were too "unmodern".
Also, very often in fiction, particularly movies, two seemingly diametrically opposed cities can be used as substitutes for each other. My favorite example is David Lynch’s infamous Eraserhead. When I first saw it I was convinced that he had shot the movie in the tight industrial/row house neighborhoods of Philadelphia along I-95 (Bridesburg, Fishtown, or Port Richmond). Lynch had called the movie “a Philadelphia of the mind”, based on having lived in a very seedy section just north of Center City. But later I found out that Lynch had actually shot the whole film in L.A., which completely blew my mind.
Don’t know what I’m getting at, exactly, just the notion of fictional cities and how they relate to the real.
Hey, Orhan and Eric, how about this insider's view of L.A.? (scroll down to video)
Whaddya know, Ice Cube......brilliant.
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