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You hear the last 30 seconds on the radio, after which there are three more, worse songs. The DJ then comes on and either manages to avoid naming the fantastic song, or mumbles it, or dies midsyllable. This is without fail.

You hear it at a friend’s house, low in the background, and they notice your attention drifting to the stereo, turn it up, and tell you how awesome it is.

You make it to the record store once in a blue moon, pick an album based on the cover art or band name, and every song through the album is increasingly more incredible until it peaks, usually at the end of what would have been side a. Or maybe the beginning of b.

Somebody emails you a video and tells you it’s mind-blowing, and you don’t believe them and ignore it for a few days, and then in a fit of boredom watch it, and they are right.

Most often– you hear about how great some album is but it’s only a few weeks until your birthday/christmas/secretaries day and so you wait, and you get exactly what you wished for, this album, and you rush and put it in your cd player/ipod/gramophone player and it’s so underwhelming and flat that you can’t get through a single song. You keep skipping ahead to find the great one, the one that made other people love this album so much, but eventually it just loops back to one, you hear that first chord or beat again, and you give up. It then sits dormant for 6-8 weeks (sometimes even longer). Eventually you notice it sitting there, get curious, and play it agian, almost invariably in your car. Somehow you preternaturally know to turn the volume up before even the first track is cued, and then when that first sound is made it gives you the chills, and you begin slapping every hard piece of vinyl you can find and wiggle your butt the few inches of freedom the car seat allows, and pump the gas. Basically, you do the lame-ass car dance we all know and avoid in company, singing along only in the chorus, because you do not know the words. The tiny imprint each chord made on your brain the first time is now a deep well that accepts the massive noise coming out of your speakers. You always reach your destination before you want to. You always sit until the track is over. And it is never that good again.

Weak, I know, but today all I have is a link.

Terrifying, inaccurate, and vaguely eugenic.

More here.

This bleary-eyed sketch appears to involve an enormous disk-shaped elevator (mediating between an office tower and a parking garage if I remember–pretty banal for a dream). The outer rim of the elevator is a gigantic rubber gasket, followed by an equally humongous inflated cushion area, with a small ring of trees in the center. The cushion undulates slowly as the elevator descends. Despite the complete lack of guardrails, I remember being pretty calm on the ride down.

ps- These sketches are done quickly and while not yet totally awake. I swear I can do better.

Jean has been doing some amazing research for a project we are doing on the Pierce Elevated in downtown Houston. In the process, she uncovered a series of diagrams made by Arthur Colemen Comey, a landscape architecture from Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a report on the urban landscape of Houston in 1913. These diagrams are engrossing, first of all, for the detail in their rendering (sorry, can’t get more detail from the scans), and their graphic clarity, but also because they represent an inconceivably different Houston that is so foreign and compelling as to invite historical revisionism and speculation. To Wit (click for a larger version):

A unique method of denoting population. Note, despite the fact that “white” and “colored” populations are marked separately, these populations appear to be more integrated spatially than they are today.

Once again, a unique “property value topography” map. It’s been a while since Houston was this center-weighted.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we had a ring of wetlands instead of the 610?

Children walking, alone, to public parks with paid attendants? What is this, Cuba?

These streetscapes seem almost quaint in their scaling. Streetcars? Pedestrians?

It’s easy to dip into nostalgia for a prewar America looking at the last few images, and I do think that the scale and civic nature of what is suggested there is something that Houston should be striving for right now. But the fact is, this city will never obtain this kind of scale again. So the question becomes: what do we like about this imaginary Houston of 1913? And what can we do now, almost 100 years later, that can improve upon those desires? After all, this was a city that hadn’t made it yet as a major metropolis, and yet was already struggling with infrastructure and traffic. It was a city still searching for a good port and native industry, and was occasionally crippled by outbreaks of typhoid or even tuberculosis. It was a city that had a ward system that divided its populace into informal castes. This is not a city to be nostalgic about. So how can we take the fever dreams of an impossibly remote city, and translate them into our future? That’s not a rhetorical question. It’s one that demands answers.

I just returned from the BLDGBLOG filmfest, and things are probably still too close to really make a salient comment, but here’s a first shot before I collapse.

Watching these (fairly fast-paced) slideshow presentations was watching architectural expressionism brought to an extreme (and often ludicrous) end, over and over and over again. A general formal concept or analogy was adopted, adapted, transformed, and repeated until it formed a unified backdrop for cinematic action. It made me feel like I had two options: scoff or accept. Either these people were ridiculous and their work has no real effect on the built environment, or I would have to realize that these people are condensing the stuff of our present futurity, registering how our society thinks we should be building, today, for tomorrow. There did not seem to be a middle ground; how can you mediate between those two poles? From my phrasing you can probably tell which side I landed on. Yes, a lot of the work was based upon previous ideas of futurity, whether HG Wells or Star Wars. Yes, these projects are (as professed by the artists) a flimsy shell around a few salient angles and overall ideas, only meant to stand up for a few seconds, from a few angles. The images are created at incredible speed, populated and then filtered by committee until something approximating the right tone is reached. In other words, these are not bold singular visions or demands; they are collaged approximations of a conjectural moment. And, as such, they are actually more powerful, because this makes them thin and nimble enough to cut holes in our accepted reality.

Some of this work was so similar to the current glossy techno-expressionism as to seem almost a parody; but honestly, if this stuff is a valid way of approaching architecture, how would these guys do if given a thousand percent more time, and the constraints of reality? It’s been acceptable for the last thirty-odd years to profess admiration for previous incarnations of stage-set architecture, from Versailles to Las Vegas. So why does Disneyland have a current monopoly on obsessively detailed falsity? Why aren’t these guys doing casinos? Why can I go to any high-end shopping center and get rigorously approximated pasts, but no futures? There is room for some biomorphic aggregation in my local strip mall. I can feel it.

A cake cannot take more than 1 week to complete.

People rarely respect a cake, but fundamentally disagree with it.

If you make a fantastic cake, most people will eat it and enjoy it.

If you make a delicious cake of dubious beauty, people will remark on how tasty it is.

If you make a beautiful but slightly bland cake, people will tell you how good it looks.

Cake writing is usually brief and entertaining.

There are no cake consultants.

Non-bakers, when they see a cake, will frequently say “Ooo! Cake!”

Reading about it, you probably want some cake right now.

I went to the “Sustainable LA” Short Films Program at the Silverlake Film Festival. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but I certainly didn’t get it. It felt like the curators of the event didn’t prescreen anything– the vast majority of the films were either 1)Promos, 2)PSAs, or 3)Made-for-the web shorts that really needed some explanation in order to make any sense. Watching a six-minute time-lapse of the erection of a cold storage facility was cool, but I needed to go home and find this to gain any perspective (or even find out what the hell it had to do with sustainability). A bunch of the other stuff fell into the predicable traps of either being shrill and lecturing, self-congratulatory, or overly positivistic and boosterish. Worse than that was the fifteen minute, silent photo slide show from Sundown Schoolhouse. I left wanting to punch these guys in the face– I don’t want to blow a quarter-hour in a dark room watching what my friends did over the weekend, much less complete strangers. It was incomprehensible, pretentious, slow torture.

I’m sorry, I guess I needed to vent. Not everything was bad– a good quickie from Wolfpack, an impressive tour of the Path to Freedom “urban homestead,” and a to-the-point water quality PSA were brief gasps of quality. But the star of the hour was the first piece by Edible Estates, of their second project in Lakewood. This is an organization that has been replacing normative suburban front lawns with fully functioning vegetable gardens. This piece was compelling not because it was slickly produced or even because of it’s sustainable qualities (it’s roughly identical to any side-yard veggie garden), but because it was the only point at which any real extrapolation of green activism to the general public was even attempted. The Path to Freedom project is incredible in its breath and depth, but is ultimately impossible for the average family– all these people do is farm their lot. The interview with the owner of the Edible Estates project, rather than focusing on cubic yards of landfill saved or carbon interred, talked about how the garden has re-introduced him to his neighbors, how the family’s relationship with food has changed, and most interestingly how his yard is now a usable space for his children. He relates the transformation of what is essentially a no-man’s land, a defensible zone, into a mediating space between public and private, between his sidewalk and kitchen. The point is made that in most houses, the front lawn is something between vestigial and decorative. It only makes a tiny change to make it perform. I left the whole event not wanting to buy a home composter, or bike to work, or petition for a cleaner bay, but instead wanting to plant bell peppers in my front yard. Mmmmm bell peppers.

Tianamen Square might be undergoing some changes soon. According to Ma Yansong, an urban planner charged with updating the square, the problem is

“Tiananmen is … the physical centre but not the real centre. No Beijing people go there… The question we posed ourselves was, how to make the area more enjoyable if we no longer need it for tanks?”

The obvious angle on all of this is the rapid transitions taking place in China. The country as a whole seems to have just discovered the concept of Public Relations, and perhaps this is an extension of that. I’m not nearly an expert so I’ll reserve my comments in that arena.

Another tack would be these traumas themselves, and discussing the healing process that has to take place in any public space undergoing transition. The strategy here to me seems to be remarkably similar to that used in other historically charged spaces… the (perhaps unfounded) belief that enough trees and grass can obviate any kind of cultural trauma. Call it the “green band-aid effect.”

But what I really want to explore is the question posed, verbatim, from the hired architect above. Paraphrased, how have changes in military strategy changed urban design? Many of the world’s most famous squares and plazas were created, in part, as parade routes, assembly grounds, or simply to commemorate a famous victory (or less common, a famous loss). These are rigidly controlled, immense grounds for the massing and geometric arraying of huge numbers of individuals. With the advent of modern military technology, this began to include motorcycles, cars, cannons, and tanks, as well as infantry. Anyone who lays out their pens in a line on their desk can appreciate the joys of assembly.

The future of the military, however, seems to exist on two divergent paths. One is the development of hugely expensive technology operated by an increasingly smaller number of specialists. The culmination of this kind of thinking is currently the fighter jet, so the public face of this sort of military thinking is probably the Blue Angels. With all of the action taking place overhead, the fixed vantage becomes less important, and the idea of “massing” becomes obsolete (sports stadiums and rock concerts being a notable exception.) The event is played out as vectors and trajectories, not as geometry and arithmetic.

The other future we’re seeing right now, one that is much more immediate, is urban warfare. Small teams of highly trained people that work in a loose network across a constantly varying and incredibly complex three dimensional terrain. Once again, the concept of assembly and ordered arrangement is almost entirely foreign. This kind of military might is more often shown in a likewise atomization, in cable news and advertisements and blog entries. It is “embedded” into our consciousness, not displayed outright.

So what is the future of military urbanism? The former implies a distant vantage, about noise and movement, someone unrelated to the ground below. The other effects a pervasive background chatter that colors everything but never concentrates to a physical reality. I feel that these forces are somewhat expressed in, on one hand, the increasing inhuman scale and speed of streetscapes, and on the other the increasing reliance on surveillance and control in the public realm. Freeways, after all, have a quasi-military origin, as does closed-circuit television.

Perhaps the greening of Tianamen doesn’t represent the elimination of military urbanism, but rather it’s utilization, atomization, and slow diffusion. Perhaps the future landscape of our cities will be as much about control and defense as it is about citizenship. We are building an entirely new form of walled city, one where the moats and battlements are part of the fabric, not surrounding it.

I’ve been doing a lot of research about repurposing (or dual-purposing) infrastructure as public space. But with all of my bluster, I missed something in my own backyard. The City of Santa Monica is opening its first new park in years, Airport Park. The city claims the 8.3 acre park will have “playing fields, an off-leash dog area, restrooms, picnic areas, a playground for children, parking and lots of open green space”. Or rather, already has, as the grand opening was last Sunday.

The location of my favorite beach should give away the fact that I find this all terribly exciting. The fact that a) I have a dog and b) This is less than a mile from my house is just an added bonus.

Look at the last 20 years of urbanism. What percentage of new public space have been created in and around infrastructure? You have repurposed dumps, docks, and even aqueducts and elevated rails. You also have honest attempts to create viable public space between and under and even over freeways. This is just a tiny fraction of what has happened in the last twenty years. It has surpassed experimentation and is now a gradual refining of strategies to mitigate the negative aspects of the quasi-industrial (noise, pollution, access) and emphasize the positive (space, reclamation, freedom, sublimity).

So I ask: why wait until these sites are dormant or decrepit? Why shouldn’t we be reclaiming this valid public space now? It’s silly to assume that freeway systems and airports and power plants are a fixed quantity; all infrastructure becomes obsolete eventually. What’s the fifty year plan for the space under your local freeway?