seeing our cities: Cervin Robinson's "By Way of Broadway" and our urban experience

I went to see architectural photographer Cervin Robinson's work the other day. It is titled "By Way of Broadway" and is a series of shots up and down Broadway in New York City, to show a cross-section of Manhattan.

The photos were largely deadpan, head-on views of buildings, with a few perspectives in the mix. While it didn't seem to be the intent of the exhibit, it struck me how little we see our cities as we scurry up and down the sidewalks, mashed up against the buildings in single-file by the rush of cars.

Our entire urban lives are forced into high-speed linearity. But pedestrian life is omni-directional. Do we not loose some richness of urbanity with this tunnel vision? It seems like our buildings are strangled by ropes of traffic, isolated, unable to reciprocate or participate as anything but anonymous, perpendicular shelter or distant monument in this rush.


I found this pdf of his images, hopefully it will remain after the exhibit announcement is gone.

the inevitable Rose Kennedy Greenway commentary

The Rose Kennedy Greenway, flower of Boston's Big Dig, is nearing completion and there are a lot of things to say about it in terms of American use of open space, park obsession and urban shame (it's OK that we aren't suburban, really)... thankfully I have this article from the Boston Globe's Tom Keane to take the edge off my bloviation temptation...

big talk about the formal/informal

There's a lot of talk about the divide between the "formal" (i.e., the planned, the controlled, the centralized) and the "informal" (messy, unplanned life), frequently the formal being associated with the first world, mcmansion, gated-community mentality (although the "first-world" status of gated communities is debatable) and the informal embodied in it's most pure form in Brazilian favellas and the dream worlds of Lebbus Woods.

I'm watching a fantastic video of a GSD lecture by Teddy Cruz (fantastic b/c, in addition to the content, I am in my sweatpants, eating dinner, and able to pause-and-rewind). He is giving a fascinating tour of the Tijuana/San Deigo border and the exchange that is going on there - the clash of the corporation-saturated southern California and the disorder of Mexican Tijuana. Drug dealer's tunnels through earth and buildings, entire houses picked up and transported south to make room for new ones, a double-headed Trojan Horse, built for transparency, straddling the boarder. I could go off on a dozen tangents.

He asserts, as many do, that the formal is ignorant of the informal, which is hard to deny. But isn't the formal just a reaction to the informal? Isn't it a clumsy, ham-fisted reaction to the informal, deriving it's existence from the very thing it seeks to squash?

Isn't it more than that, but actually a product of the failures of the informal?

look at the 'formal' systems around you - they seem to sink into the cracks in our "informal' society, where tight social circles fail and crime sneaks in, the formality of police force oozes in after it. Where private/civic organizations fail to provide comprehensive and open education, public education arises. Where the social contract fails to moderate land use, zoning arrives.

The strength of the organic, freely determined will always overwhelm the hollow and the formal, but can we guide and accelerate this to ensure it is as positive as possible?

Hylozoic soil - mechanical earth.

Philip Beesley's “Hylozoic Soil” in Montreal – this stuff is unbelievable. I found it during my portfolio binge and didn’t have the energy to report it to all my devoted readers (hi mom!) but it relates to a project I was developing for my portfolio that didn’t make it in… Hylozoic Soil reacts to human presence, like some renaissance garden folly/fantasy, the very earth comes alive to meet your needs.
The prototype seems reacts to human presence, it seems designed to amaze and possibly terrify - it tries to touch you. !

what hylozoic means.

architecture and the modern experience

David Claerbout is currently exhibiting at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center, which I just visited (I figured I may not be in Boston that much longer, so I should take advantage of all the free awesomeness that I can). His work, from what I could tell, deals a lot with the passage of time, light as a marker/narrator of a sequence of images or scenes, and from my brief visit a lot about modern loneliness (a condition that is thoroughly modern, I have recently come to realize and will address individually at some point).

Naturally his emphasis on light creates a great deal of emphasis on space, inserting something architectural into many pieces. One seemed to comment directly on a question modern architecture has been dancing around for a while: the role of self-determination, community determination, and variety.

“Sections of a Happy Moment, 2007”, is a series of images, like a slide show, of a blissful afternoon shared by an extended Chinese family in the courtyard of a massive, urban-renewal/Corbusian housing development. After a few slides pass, emptiness begins to undermine sincerity, both of the activity (a few children toss a ball, all watch) and of the housing project (thousands must live in the complex, only one other party is seen). It begins to seem set up, promotional, propagandistic.

While this calls into question many aspects of modern living, for me it highlighted the role of self-determination in modern architecture: in our scale-crazed development paradigm, do we really deliver usable assets to clients? Did this family choose this bleak community of their own free will, and would others? Modern Americans do not, a visit to any of these archi-dictatorial creations will reveal.

Who does the architect serve, and who should be served?

why I love bare concrete monoliths

Library at the University of Brasilia (UNB), from MasonPritchett's Rotch travelling scholarship blog.

the breaking point

New technologies have a tendency to bull-doze the previously existing systems, video kills the radio star, so to speak. But you don't want to always watch a video, for example, while you are driving. Video has turned out to be a compelling way to re-tell a song and develop themes that are not explicit in the audio alone, and is a fantastic complement to radio - however, I don't think too many hard working people get home from work and watch music videos. They do, however, listen to the radio all the way home. New technologies overwhelm, people take them too far, but eventually they reach a breaking point after which they settle down and complement existing ones, enriching rather than just replacing.

Cars opened entire new worlds to our parents and grandparents - any mid-century movie is flush with the romance of the automobile, hard to deny. The lifestyles it has afforded are bewildering in retrospect - an entire generation moved from cramped, dirty cities into lush, spacious towns, remote except for the high-speed luxury of the automobile. But our generation has witnessed the wastelands spawned by this lifestyle, the placelessness, the degraded urban condition even while our cities are enriched by this accelerated transportation.

We sit in our cars, alone, stuck in traffic on the way to the greater togetherness cars promised.

It seems we have reached a breaking point with regard to automobile dependency, people seem to be slowly recognizing the comfort and vivacity of pedestrian life, not to mention its environmental benefits. Cars are an essential complement to urban life, bringing greater concentration and diversity to and between, but they are a means and not an end.

Mitchell Joachim's 'soft car', more an urban planning tool than automobile advancement (of course it is that, too).
new urbanism, a good impulse popularly embraced
pressure for density in my own Boston neighborhood


The same can be said of the standard computer, the time will come when we free ourselves from the relentless screen-restricted information and find other ways to interface with an increasingly networked humanity.

There is no cool site or article to link to for this, I'm just putting my thoughts down.