Anna Hillman's Amazingness

Although her images are taken primarily in England, Anna Hillman's Amazingness Project seems like a great visual accompaniment to William Cronon's edited volume Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature.

Immerse

A filmic exploration of the place and space that focuses on the relationship between three distinct locations: the abandoned railroad worker town of Amboy, California; a cabin in the Angeles National Forest; and a metal-smithing shop (now gone) located in front of the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood. Co-directed, co-produced, and co-edited with Christy Snyder.

Habitus

An experiment using Pierre Bourdieu's concept of Habitus as a way to de-construct the relationship between narration and imagery. Filmed in Super-8 at the Thousand Palms Oasis in the Coachella Valley Preserve, the objective is to gradually reveal the discrepancies between the site described in the narration and the oasis seen in the film, thereby asking the viewer to consider their experience of the film in light of Bourdieu's habitus: "The habitus allows us to both think that we have chosen what is necessary to us, and to think that what we have learned is actually natural to us. When this transformation determines our modes of living in the general area of taste, as well as the specific area of aesthetic taste, it allows us to misinterpret acquired taste as primary experiential preferences." My goal is to disturb the process of 'consuming' visual media, and to expose our assumptions about this medium as 'primary' and 'experiential' by making its reception a struggle.

Palo Alto Urban Petroglyph Project

Ghost Trajectories Project @USC

Are All Places Nostalgic?

Walking through the USC campus yesterday, I began to walk by landmarks that were especially nostalgic for me. A scaffolding tower on the football practice tower where Christy and I climbed to gaze at the downtown skyline, the swimming pool where I swam, the track outside of GFS hall, the Doheny library, etc. But in between these landmarks, I noticed other spots with which I had no personal connection, and I began to think about the nostalgia these places might hold for others. A window in a dorm, a table in the student union, etc. This led me to wonder whether or not ALL places have nostalgic potential, and how many places we all pass by daily without a thought, that might be laiden with nostalgia for others.

What makes a place nostalgic? For whom? What experiences are most salient for nostalgiac recall? How are these experiences conditioned by culture?

Graceland

Well, I went kicking and screaming, but came out a convert. Thanks to Sue Faulkner my March trip to Memphis included a visit to the King's humble abode. Frozen in time, it's pure 70's kitsch. Not pictured here: the lounge in the raquetball house, my personal favorite.

Thoughts on California Cities

Overheard:
"San Francisco is a place you go to fit in.
Los Angeles is a place you go to stand out."

"Where are you from?"
"Los Angeles."
"Oh, I'm sorry."

David Byrne on the La Brea Tar Pits:
"Somehow, the sight of giant beasts stuck in tar pits amidst the backdrop of LA’s extreme luxury and urban sprawl seems a too perfect metaphor: big lumbering creatures lured to their demise by what they think is a lovely sparkling fresh water pond…or something like that."

From Urban Cartography:
"Few American cities have been so worthy of both love and hate as Los Angeles - not New York with its single-minded focus on being the biggest, tallest, deepest and most extreme example of everything a city can be, not Chicago with its roots firmly planted in the midwestern work ethic and philosophy of the Prairie, not cities that are so single-mindedly tied to their history as Boston or San Francisco. Los Angeles is a singular example of possibility, a model of how emptiness offers redemption and corruption, and how the two may be inextricable at this frontier."

Dorothy Parker:

“Los Angeles is 72 suburbs in search of a city”

Quentin Crisp:
“Los Angeles is just New York lying down”

Frank Lloyd Wright:
“Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.”

Andy Warhol:
“I love Los Angeles. I love Hollywood. They're beautiful. Everybody's plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic.”

Jean Baudrillard:

“Cities are distinguished by the catastrophic forms they presuppose and which are a vital part of their essential charm. New York is King Kong, or the blackout, or vertical bombardment: Towering Inferno. Los Angeles is the horizontal fault, California breaking off and sliding into the Pacific: Earthquake.”

Moshie Safdie:
“I prefer San Francisco to Los Angeles. I prefer New York to Philadelphia. Why? The kind of concentration that is achieved in them creates certain choices, an openness of society that is not possible in the lower-density environments.”

Oscar Wilde:
“It is an odd thing, but every one who disappears is said to be seen at San Francisco. It must be a delightful city, and possess all the attractions of the next world.”

Mark Twain:
“The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.”
Of Los Angeles:
"It's a great place to live, but I wouldn't want to visit there."

From Stuff White People Like:
Though they live in a world class city, San Franciscans have a crippling inferiority complex about New York and even hinting at that will make them very sad or very defensive. Fortunately, there is a fool-proof method for quickly returning the conversation to a positive, trust-building tone. No matter how much you have offended someone from San Francisco, you can always make them feel better by asking them how they feel about Southern California. They will instantly talk of how it is filled with crime, pollution, hegemonic culture, and the wrong kind of white people: “I swear California is like two separate countries, and I am so thankful that I live in the cultural center of the West Coast.” This will allow them to reassert their superiority and leave the conversation with a positive feeling about themselves and about you.

"The San Francisco artists tended to be anti-intellectual and uptight. A lot of energy went into hating New York and Los Angeles." —Bruce Nauman Calvin Tomkins' New Yorker article titled Western Disturbances

Cultural Landscape Readings

A bibliography from Mary Corbin Sies, Gilda Anroman, Claudia Rector, and Krista Park...

...and an excerpt from my qualifying exam "Place and Space in Anthropological Perspective" Hasbrouck, 2001:

A great deal of work addressing place and space has also been generated within cultural landscape studies. Although many of its contributors are cultural anthropologists (c.f., Bender, ed. 1993, Cohen and Odhiambo 1989, Cruikshank 1990, Hirsch and O’Hanlon, eds. 1995, Myers 2000, Olwig 1997, Strathern 2000) and cultural geographers (c.f., Appleton 1997, Barnes and Duncan, eds. 1992, Cartier 1997, 1999, Conzen, ed. 1990, Cosgrove 1993, 1997, Cosgrove, ed. 1999, Cosgrove and Daniels, eds. 1988, Holdsworth 1997, Lai 1997, Lowenthal 1997, 2000, Meinig, ed. 1979, and Norton 1989, Walker 1997, Zelinsky 1997), the field also includes significant works from archaeologists (Cunliffe 2000, Thomas 1993, Tilley 1993, 1994, Ucko and Layton, eds. 1999), sociologists (Zukin 1991), historians (Borchert 1997, Groth 1997, Porter 2000, Ritvo 2000), art historians (Green 1995, House 2000), architects and planners (Hayden 1997, Howett 1997, Rainey 1997, Riley 1997, Swentzell 1997, Upton 1997), and others as well (Armstrong 2000, Jackson 1997, A. King 1997, Schama 1995, Vitek and Jackson, eds. 1996). This highly interdisciplinary field has obvious roots in cultural geography and cultural anthropology, but its works tend to focus explicitly on “the history of how people use everyday space—buildings, rooms, streets, fields, or yards—to establish their identity, articulate their social relations, and derive cultural meanings” (Groth 1997: 1).

"Landscape denotes the interaction of people and place: a social group and its spaces, particularly the spaces to which the group belongs and from which its members derive some part of their shared identity and meaning. All human interaction with nature can be considered as cultural landscape…" (Groth 1997: 1).

This perspective, then, moves decidedly away from the traditional privileging of abstract space in social sciences, or a concept of landscape divorced as much as possible from the subject. Instead, it argues that culture and landscape are mutually implicated, and multiply interpreted. Hirsch states: “There is not one absolute landscape here, but a series of related, if contradictory, moments—perspectives—which cohere in what can be recognized as a singular form: landscape as a cultural process” (1995: 23). Similarly, Morphy and Flint (2000: 1, 13) argue that “[t]he environment we inhabit is inseparable from human culture, [and]…culture is part of a dialogic process which involves human action in a world that is subject both to local trajectories and external forces.”

Common themes in many of these works include understanding indigenous non-Western interpretations of landscape, issues of class and political economy, neo-phenomenological explorations of cultural relationships to the landscape, post-colonialism, environmental consequences of various culture/landscape configurations, and globalization as it relates to local contexts and cultural understandings of landscape.

NYT: The New, New City

NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF's piece in the June 8th Architecture Issue of the New York Times raises number of interesting issues around how we might begin to understand emerging urban cultural landscapes like Dubai and Shenzhen. Through the voices of architects caught up in the recent bubble of development, Ouroussoff seems to be constructing an argument that there is a continuous tension between the environments that this rapid development tends to privilege and the rich specificity of locality. Although he does gesture toward learnings from cities like Las Vegas and Los Angeles, he doesn't fully develop how this tension might play out.

“If you take Venturi’s ideas about the city,” Holl said, referring to Robert Venturi’s groundbreaking work, “Learning From Las Vegas,” which called on architects to reconsider the importance of the everyday (strip malls, billboards, storefronts), “and put them in Beijing or Tokyo, they don’t hold any water at all. When you get into this scale, the rules have to be rewritten. The density is so incredible.” Because of this density, cities like Beijing have few of the features we associate with a traditional metropolis. They do not radiate from a historic center as Paris and New York do. Instead, their vast size means that they function primarily as a series of decentralized neighborhoods, something closer in spirit to Los Angeles. The breathtaking speed of their construction means that they usually lack the layers — the mix of architectural styles and intricately related social strata — that give a city its complexity and from which architects have typically drawn inspiration.

Ouroussoff's visit with Wenyi Wu, a young architect working for a Chinese firm called Urbanus, is handled rather cursorily, when in fact it appears to offer a set of very promising interpretive tools for understanding these new urban settings.

Wenyi Wu, a young architect working for a Chinese firm called Urbanus, led me around the area. The firm has been studying how people carve a living space out of seemingly inhospitable environments, hoping to develop an urbanist model more deeply rooted in the spontaneity of everyday life. He took me to a small museum Urbanus designed on the outskirts of the city. A series of stepped galleries stand at the base of a hill between an urban village and some banal housing complexes above. A series of long ramps pierce the building, joining the two worlds. More ramps encircle the exterior, so that you have the impression of moving through a system of loosely connected alleyways. The idea was to transform the unregulated character of the urban village into something more formal and humane — to extract the essence of its character without romanticizing the squalor. The circuitous paths of the ramps echo the surrounding alleyways; the layout of the galleries suggests the footprint of the migrant workers’ housing but on a more intimate scale.

But Ouroussoff ends here, and gives far more print space to the squarely modern sentiments of architects Stephen Holl and Rem Koolhaas.

“In America, I could never do work like I do here,” Steven Holl, a New York architect with several large projects in China, recently told me, referring to his latest complex in Beijing. “We’ve become too backward-looking. In China, they want to make everything look new. This is their moment in time. They want to make the 21st century their century. For some reason, our society wants to make everything old. I think we somehow lost our nerve.”

“A city like Dubai is literally built on a desert,” Koolhaas conceded when I asked him about the project. “There is a weird alternation between density and emptiness. You rarely feel that you are designing for people who are actually there but for communities that have yet to be assembled. The vernacular is too faint, too precarious to become something on which you can base an architecture.”

Rather than framing these sentiments as fact, we should be asking why these expressions of despair about the 'postmodern condition' exist, who is perpetuating the myths of Modernism in the built environment, and why. Architects themselves, and the process and frameworks they chose, are key points of critical examination here. But beyond this, we'll need to demand more from journalists, like Ouroussoff, who elide history and cultural landscape by dismissing these localities as empty places where architects are left with "nothing to sift through but sand."

For architects faced with building these large urban developments, the difficulty is to create something where there was nothing. If much of contemporary architecture depends on sifting through the cultural and historical layers that a site accumulates over time — whether neo-Classical monuments or Socialist-era housing — what can be done if there is nothing to sift through but sand?

This reductive perspective is indicative of Modernism's potent (and insidious?) residue. It reminds me of a conversation I once overheard on a flight from Pittsburgh to Orlando. As we were beginning our descent over a vast stretch of wetlands, a middle-aged man leaned over to the person next to him, pointed out the window and said, "You see all that down there? All swamp...good for nothing but mosquitoes and alligators." Beyond the immediate clash his statement had with my own memories of canoing in those same waters, I began to wonder what the generations of Seminole natives would have to say about his view of their home land.

Florence street window

Elvis' lounge in raquetball room

Graceland detail

Graceland detail

Elvis and Ellie

Door Handle - Florence, IT