Vacant Lots and Ghost Cities

Anything can be designed and built today. Not that it will be. The cities closet to me— Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo, and Detroit— will only occasionally be home to projects that elicit awe. They’ll rarely be featured on the familiar circle of webpages consulted daily by designers and architects tracking the boundaries of what’s possible. The vacant lots that interrupt once busy blocks break apart these cities into fragments, some vibrant and some decaying, but each only a stuttering partial description of a place. Downtown, businesses pressed together in groups create densities belied by the emptiness visible only buildings away. Still vital residential neighborhoods sit well outside of these centers, separated by parking lots and vacant land. The life of the downtown seems to depend on how willing to and where people cross these meandering, empty areas.

Only recently back from my first trip to Kalamazoo, this type of vacancy is particularly on my mind. I found the city to be a troubling collection of beautiful turn-of-the-century buildings besieged by vacancy, modern infrastructure, and neglect. Unintentional and unpredictable empty urban spaces are a defining feature of this city, more so than the late Victorian and Art-Deco buildings that remain. At the perimeter of the city’s central business district, one of Kalamazoo’s best coffee shops is in a small former gas station surrounded by railroads, warehouse buildings, and busy streets. With views in all directions, its more like a building amidst the dunes of Lake Michigan than one near the heart of the city. The dunes are an uncomfortable metaphor for the emptiness that infects American cities, calling to mind the desert sands of North Africa that threaten to bury whole towns. Like the walls built by residents to keep the sand at bay, a fundamental principle of urban planning is that vacancy is to be fought— unrelentingly.

Which makes my discovery of the “ghost cities” of China even more startling. These “ghost cities” are real estate speculation at an unheard of scale. Housing and commercial space for millions, constructed and bought by investors expecting to reap the profits brought by an ever expanding Chinese economy. And promoted by a government determined that national growth meet yearly targets impossible without massive spending on infrastructure. The most dramatic case of this may be seen in the new city of Ordos, a city in Inner Mongolia 25 miles outside of an existing city. Housing and commercial building have been constructed for 1.5 million new occupants and have stood for the past five years largely uninhabited while construction has continued unabated.

Here emptiness takes a very different form than in American cities. It isn’t the open space of the vacant lot or of even the Mongolian steppe that surrounds Ordos. It takes the form of an idealized contemporary city, but responds only to itself. People are absent and there is as of yet no viable plan to bring them to it. Real estate prices are too high and there can be little incentive to be the first resident in a city of 1 million. Meanwhile investors hold onto the property waiting for the interested.

And in the center of the city is the recently finished Ordos Museum. Designed by MAD Architects of Beijing it is their first “realized” project of any real size. A giant shimmering aluminum stone set atop a paved stone terrace the color of the steppe, it has the solidity of a massive cliff but the impermanence of something washed ashore soon to be carried off by the next wave. The building was unveiled to the world not by proud dignitaries, the government, or museum trustees. Rather, the architects themselves made a movie cum advertisement showing off their work to the world. The movie opens with a bearded Mongolian nomad leading his horse across a desert when in the distance he sees the Ordos Museum. Shot after shot show man and horse framed against the metal facade and then indoors at the bottom of deep plaster canyons that slice through the building’s interior.

As the man and horse walk around the building there is never a view of the surrounding “ghost city”. Its skyline is hidden— or possibly even removed digitally. The architect’s work is independent of its actual site, tied instead to the imagined site of a lone building set into the Mongolian desert. It makes for good film, and the empty city is a generic and undesigned mess, but the omission when combined with the deep problems of the empty city makes the architect’s act an incredibly cynical one. The building will secure them future commissions and further launch the careers of what is one of the signature young design firms in China, but this will be done regardless of whether the building or the city of Ordos is ever inhabited. And so we marvel at an empty building. We marvel separately at an empty city, disbelieving that a country of billions has such vast inequity, bureaucracy, and moves at such speed as to create and preserve an uninhabited city.

It’s clear why a young firm like MAD Architects would seize the chance to design a museum for that city, even knowing the likelihood that it might remain empty. The neutrality of its design is likely an acknowledgment that the future of this place is in flux. But to design and then publicize their building entirely separated from its context seems uncritical— and criticism is what’s most needed when faced with a “ghost city.” As it stands, the building is no more useful than the developer-style strip housing that fills block after surrounding block. It’s bold, even accomplished. But it’s emptiness is damning. Despite all the work required to take this museum from rendering to reality, it finally feels no more “real” than the images of unbuilt projects that clutter the websites of young architects all over the world.

Meanwhile existing cities still age; attacked by vacant lots and neglect.

Ugly

It’s not a useful word, ugly. The word is unattractive enough, an odd collection of letters that manage to be both awkward and diminutive. But there is a certain pleasure to saying it, too— ugly. The pleasure is in the word itself, it’s the selfish enjoyment of judgment and it’s in the sneer that is an almost essential part of contorting our mouths around its letters. We may love beautiful things, but we like even better to call something ugly— the louder the better.

Left behind however in all of this shouting is the thing being described. As forceful as it is, ugly is empty. It’s power is self-contained. It describes nothing. To call something ugly depends upon a listener to understand. It requires an unspoken agreement about what makes something ugly. Or else it requires follow-up. Ugly either depends on nodded assent or else starts an argument. It ends the conversation or else it is just its beginning.

When applied to architecture, ugly assumes and too often gets that consensus— “Concrete is ugly!” For some buildings, like Boston’s City Hall, little more than that is expected to be said. That simple and absolutely empty statement, once voiced, is immediately tied to ideas about the failures of modern architecture, the imposition of monumental public buildings on traditionally-scaled cities, and the reactions to industrialized materials and construction practices. Ugly, here, has got cultural back-up. It’s got subtext, yes, but the assumptions are too heavy for those four letters. It makes me want more words.

Build me a city, but make sure it’s not ugly.

With such consensus, where does this ugliness, then, come from? Is it a perversion to design ugly buildings or to enjoy them? Or is consensus an illusion and ugliness just descriptive of our own need to divide the things we like from those we don’t?

Cold. Hard. Unlike ugly, these words don’t presuppose judgement. They describe. And yet, if the topic is modern architecture. If the topic is concrete, they are said with similar inflection. Ugly. Cold. Hard. To be continued.

City Hall & Boston’s naked modernism

City Hall, Boston’s aging rock star of 1960’s modernism, has been getting a lot of attention recently. In 2005 ArchitectureBoston, the Boston Society of Architecture’s bi-monthly magazine, published an issue on the history and current state of the building. They followed it last year with an issue dedicated to proposals by young area architects for its transformation.

Architects paying attention to a favorite building isn’t surprising. Mayor Tom Menino’s decision, however, that the city should relocate its operations to South Boston and put the building up for sale is surprising. Passing over the very strange decision to advocate the city government leaving the city’s center, Menino’s argument for a waterfront view in South Boston stands primarily on his criticisms of the architecture of the current city building.

David Boeri, host of WBUR’s Radio Boston, used Menino’s announcement to put together an hour long radio treatment of the building which brought together familar arguments about the character of modern architecture, traditional public place-making, and the need to preserve modern buildings for their historical role in shaping contemporary culture.

What interested me more than the intentionally opposed arguments of paneled experts were the interviews with people on the street, office workers, and government officials. Of the exposed concrete finish and its massive cantilevered forms, certain phrases were repeated. The building is ugly. Concrete is cold. It is hard. Ugly. Cold. Hard. These are the words that hang over architecture today, together a shroud too small for the thing it’s trying to cover.

Ugly. Cold. Hard. Dealing with these words seems necessary for any architect hoping to hold onto his own love for designs that elicit each of these. And for the architect whose buildings will likely be accused of one or all. So, a post for each. Ugly. Cold. Hard. Let’s begin.

Bearing Walls

"Something there is that doesn’t like a wall". Frost stands on the side of nature. His provincial farmer is shown to be close-minded and dull in comparison to the poet. For the buildings that linger in American cities from the mid 1960’s I sense a similar antagonism— though curiously inverted. The poem I want to write for these monstrous and beautiful buildings is also such a wall, a declaration of taste and priorities that separates me from those who dislike, strongly, their concrete walls.

Philip Nobel swung at these walls in a 1999 essay in Metropolis. [Yes, this post hardly seems current, but my interest is.] His article is presumably an essay illustrating several case studies of midwestern (important to contrast them with the furiously arrogant coasts) architects designing service buildings for those suffering from Alzheimer's. He hopes to investigate architecture’s ability to heal, in particular, and the legitimacy of the architect’s interest in positively impacting the lives of others. These questions are far too large for the few designs he mentions. And really they are mentioned only as an afterthought to his real interest— pages of invective against Paul Rudolph’s 1960's design for the Boston Government Services building. He writes with an anger disproportionate to his subject. The claims come fast and hard. The building makes sick people sicker (the building is disorienting to those with mental illnesses who seek social services there). Then, harder. The building kills people (a tragic self-immolation took place in the building’s chapel). Finally, buildings like it killed the architect (a weak shot at Rudolph’s death from cancer associated with asbestos). He writes to tear down walls based more on ideology than on their material.

Nobel tries to give Rudolph a perverse theory of psychology that would make him culpable if not consciously responsible for the buildings supposed failings. But his quotes from the architects writings and lectures are no different than those of any other late-Modernist who made sculptural works that reached towards art. Really, Nobel hates the building. And he isn’t alone. His article has been picked up by various bloggers and conversation threads about architecture, those eager to explain— contain— the very strange building in the midst of their city. Something there is that doesn’t like a wall.

But I do like these walls. I like their strangeness. I resist the idea that the textured concrete of their surface is threatening because it is rough to the touch. I’m energized by the landscape this building creates. It’s a building I want to share. I bring friends to its open plazas and grand stairs so that they will be populated— these incredible spaces that are too often empty. My urge to inhabit these spaces is intense and it is this primitive feeling that makes me so certain of the power of these walls. There is real poetry to be written about this place— both its genius and its tragic failings. I’m trying to figure out how to do that.

You don't expect to step off of the T and find yourself in a movie. Not that there was one this evening, but there was something in the air. Smoke, actually. The platform was filled with the light gray of engine smoke. Hundreds of feet along the platform, light was refracted through thicker air. It was smog. The air was polluted and were I to see it every day I would be broken down by it. But to see it once this evening, it was magical.

It didn't cause worry. When smoke should scare me I feel like I will know. It took a station I've been to every week for years and made it new. I walked up the escalator and into the concourse hall and saw how the smoky atmosphere had drifted upwards and reached even the top
of the barrel vaulted space. I saw rays of light and colors that looked vibrant against the sparkling gray atmosphere. I saw why movies look so good and so different from the every day, the artifice behind the magic. Somehow the dirt and grunge of the evening commute had caused something festive. I like that I found my version of the Christmas holiday in the accidental stage set of a Boston train station.

And somehow great and disappointing that when I asked a cop what was going on he just shook his head and said it happens, plenty of times. I smiled, shook my head and walked into the night.

Shrinking City

Boston’s a small city. It’s even smaller when the skyline turns into a set of stacked alphabet blocks. Spelling out a shared feeling here. Go Sox. The buildings will look tall again in another few days, but for now Red Sox nation’s playing baseball.

Thinking with my hands

I’ve been tempted several times to write here about the idea of a virtual world. I’ve imagined that the Sims or Second Life are more than games. Our world is full and they are providing new digital frontiers and the freedom that comes with them. These online communities offer opportunities for the adventurous to build rooms, houses, cities— even characters and identities for themselves. Spaces open up online and relieve some of the stress of physical and social constraints that surround us.

Still, I have never actually entered this world. I’ve been tempted intellectually by the idea, but not the reality. There is something about creating a virtual world in the image of the one we live in that continues to leave me unimpressed. It’s too literal and seems almost unnecessary. Yes, the rapid rise of these worlds amazes me. Commerce, entertainment, communication, relationships all occur now in these digital spaces. But, I can’t help but wonder if the appeal of an alternate digital world comes at the cost of diminishing our own. The depth and success of the simulated world can be measured best by one’s own detachment from this one.

I’m not interested in predicting the path of Second Life or how much of our time we will spend in digital worlds as they become more established and further linked to people and products in this one. I’d rather try to get at what about this vision of the internet feels limited to me and whether there are others that push further.

Though imperfect and dated, the first time I opened Google Earth I felt like I had been given a gift— in this case a colorful ball that I could toss and spin and whose scale was slippery. It was all encompassing at one moment and intimate at another. I loved it how it could be grabbed with the mouse and rotated and how it would spin just past where you let it go, suggesting physical laws mirroring those in this world. It enforced the idea that its interface needed not to be seen as a screen. It could be a ball. It was a continuous and smooth surface. Not something distant to be controlled by clicking on arrows or by remote control, but an object apparently close and able to be directly affected by the movement of my hands on the mouse.

As infants we learn how we can with our hands and voice make an impact on the world around us. Materials give at our touch if they are soft, press back if they are hard. A flame feels hot and yet can be extinguished with a breath. I need to use childlike imagery to describe my experience with Google Earth and I think its the this quality of regression that marks the sophistication of the program and my hopes for digital technology.

There is a scene in Spielberg’s Minority Report in which the police officer played by Tom Cruise stands in front of a glass screen and thinks with his hands, grabbing information, sorting through it, repositioning it. His eyes move as quickly as his hands. He’s searching for something and the balance of command and uncertainty is masterful. It was mesmerizing even as it was really a superfluous moment in the movie. More a physical retelling of the Sorcerer's Apprentice than a vision of the dystopian future. But the attraction of this theme is worth paying attention to— and the Youtube videos that pair scenes from Minority report and advances in computer interfaces suggest that many are. I’m attuned to the the idea that we can use our bodies to aid our minds in understanding the world. Finding ways of organizing and using the information available to us is, maybe, an extended infancy— one we are only beginning to get used to.

The idea that thinking is something that could be given a shape, and that we could someday “think with our hands” as easily as we now talk with them, is rich. The potential of the internet and its ultimate integration into daily life seem to be here more about illustrating the extent of our own inner life than in creating ever expanding virtual simulacra of the world outside.

(Note: I’ve used Google Earth for years now and really wanted this post to be a lead-in to an amazing product from Microsoft call Photosynth, but the post veered in another direction. I’ll come back to it.)

Architecture and The Sleep of Reason

I expect that mine won’t be the only architecture blog to talk about Eyal Weizman’s new book, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. This book more than any other I have recently come across argues that at the intersection of culture, politics, and violence lies architecture. And that is a seductive idea for anyone working in a field that too often feels headed for cultural irrelevancy.

Weizman sees architectural practice and theory at the roots of the conflict, informing specific strategies implemented by individuals, groups, and institutions over the past forty years, and grounding the rhetoric used to frame the extents and nature of the occupation. Proposed solutions to the conflict even turn to a redesign of the disputed territory, offering an architectural solution when none can be found in politics, economics, or diplomacy. Individual chapters of the book cover aspects of Weizman’s research into each of these, but perhaps more than his journalism it is the illustrations he uses in the book that may be what make it so provocative— particularly to designers.

Among site photos, film stills, charts and many, many maps, Weizman includes collages he has made of the occupied territories juxtaposing existing Israeli and Palestinian settlements with the proposed infrastructural projects intended to keep them apart. Described as “vertical partitioning,” these projects are proposed solutions to the re-division of space claimed by both states. Their sweeping—massive bridges, tunnels, and walls— carve up a single continuous landscape into independently occupied and controlled territories. These proposals apply bold Modernist planning to a post-modern or post-structuralist conception of space and the result is dizzying, both formally and intellectually. It is also exciting. Forty years of settlement, violence, and politics have produced a spatial landscape so complicated that even a familiar vocabulary of highway infrastructure and concrete barriers becomes fantastic and strange when manipulated to address the political and cultural landscape of the conflict. Their literal function— connecting parts of the territories while separating others— is subsumed by their appearance as a snapshot of contemporary Israel. As such they feel more like the projects of an architectural studio, students’ projects whose success is gauged by their ability to use a vocabulary of building to address ideas of identity, culture, and power.



But Weizman seems wary of letting his illustrations leave the world for the shelter of the studio, for the isolation of architectural theory and debate. The collages he includes are not his solutions. Though trained as an architect, he uses his graphic abilities to serve his research into areas as disparate as military maneuvers, settlement patterns, and international law. He represents architectural interventions upon the occupied landscape as white voids superimposed over photographic montages of the landscape. The addition of architecture is depicted as an absence. It’s an attractive solution to representing something that exists for the moment only as an idea, but its graphics are loaded. Their snaking white forms cut out of the landscape are appealing. In an arid desert landscape, the interventions are a dominant feature and their clarity reads in contrast to the the accreted patterns of settlement and their complicated relationship to topography and to each other. They not only illustrate, but organize, the political and cultural factors not apparent in a photograph. The architect’s, and my own, undeniable attraction to designs that introduce visual and functional order onto a site, I’m reminded of a prophetic image warning against the seduction of clarity. Critiquing darker side of Enlightenment thought, Francisco Goya warned in an eighteenth century print that “the sleep of reason produces monsters”. The collages contained in Hollow Land make me question whether I am looking at a well-intentioned attempt to produce a functional solution to an intractable problem or a sanitized version of the cloud of nightmare creatures lurking just beyond such a rational approach.


Weizman suggests that in the face of political and cultural injustice, the professional may have to transform his or her practice to adequately address the situation. Borrowing strategies and language from Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) and founding member Rony Brauman, Weizman ends his book urging that architects’ roles in the Middle East conflict may be primarily to “bear witness” to events and practices there. It is a step away from the sweeping architectural proposal and the idea that a solution to the conflict might have an identifiable shape. While attempting to offer humanitarian support, whether providing shelter for those without it or providing visual representations of diplomatic proposals, designers can use their skills to introduce a narrative of the ways in which architecture and planning are used as weapons. Architecture is a weapon with pervasive but less immediately recognizable effects on international conflicts. In Hollow Land, Weizman offers a testimony to the particular ways in which the Israeli occupation has used this particular weapon. Ultimately this is not a book for architects. I was heartened to see that the Harvard Bookstore (where I found the book) it was not shelved with books on architecture but with books on the Middle East. As a testimony to strategies of occupation, this book will hopefully be read by those mediating the peace process and the determination of the shape and relationships between Israel and Palestine.

Looking for Architecture on Slickr

Architecture wanders. It’s got legs and though we don’t live among a landscape dotted with moving cities, it’s still notoriously hard to pin down. Part of the problem is that we talk about buildings, not to mention architects and Architecture, with relative ease—even and maybe especially when we know nothing of the places from which they come. We’re surrounded by buildings, but architecture is more likely to found in books, the places architecture can get closest to its own ideals. So the liveliest buildings live almost as comfortably on paper as they do rooted to the ground. And those of us interested in architecture compare buildings in northern Europe to those in New York, swerving steel forms rising above docklands to cantilevered concrete set amidst a sea of parking. The comparisons aren’t so casual; they’re tied to the extensive hagiography of the architects and to the classifications of style, materials, and building technologies. On the page buildings are involuntary participating in someone else’s arguments about them. Exciting buildings today look like this says one article. Architecture looks like this says another. But a little screensaver application I found recently has got me wondering if it hasn’t side-stepped the most judgmental parts of my own field to get at the good stuff underneath. Slickr, an add-on to the popular photo sharing site Flickr.com, streams a series of downloaded images selected according to “tags”, or search terms of your choosing. Type in architecture and you get all those images that someone felt compelled to label that wy. The algorithm doesn’t ask for a reason, and doesn’t judge quality. It’s wonderfully removed from five hundred years of academic wrangling. A construction site in Beijing is followed by a plantation era mansion. Time, location and style melt smoothly into each other, assisted by the soft fades and slow zooming motions across each of the images.

What I like best about Slickr is what it finds its way free from and the patterns and behaviors that still manage to emerge as I keep watching the stream of images. The screensaver provides a snapshot of architecture today. Each image is part of a story but one only accessible in parts. Watching them, I can't help but give the stream of images associations better rooted to places I've visited. I imagine myself sifting through a street seller's boxes. Not post cards—these images are more personal—but family snapshots of unfamiliar relatives and family celebrations that aren't quite like my own. Funny, now, to be caught in New York and in Paris, imagining a street scene only as a context to try to explain the impact of these images.

But thinking of my own vacations and the wandering I've done trying to wander towards architecture feels about right, because the photos on Slickr are snapshots. They're memories of places visited by others. They're buildings people traveled to see. And it's here that I sense culture creeping back in. The pictures on Slickr are often of monuments and they are in places introduced by guide books, magazine articles, and travel programs. What someone takes the time to visit, take a picture of, and categorize as "Architecture" has most likely already been labeled that way by someone else. So Slicrk doesn't really escape the categorization of architecture; it just manages to acknowledge how many different voices are out there trying to make themselves heard.

But still, I like that Slickr presents only the evidence and not the argument of those decisions. I can imagine but not really know which art history classes individual photographers might have sat through. Which of the documentaries on major architects someone might have seen. And which magazines, books, even songs someone listens to while travelling. All I can really tell is that each picture is something that someone thought interesting enough to try to remember and something close enough to their own idea of architecture to give it that name. The lack of certainty feels right. Slickr's a collection by a collector more interested in the objects she has found than in the organization of her collection. The collecting is fun. The objects are what's important, and Slickr gets at the joy of being in the world and seeing something surprising. It's why I would take a picture, or draw a sketch, or write down a note about what I had seen. But, I think, it's also why I would build—to add something for someone else to see, touch, and move around in. To be a part of something that might find its way into the collections of someone new.