At first glance, the Ordos 100 project looks like a great chance for younger architects to build something exciting and significant. Located on a barren desert site near the Inner Mongolian city of Ordos, the development of a grouping of one hundred houses for the wealthy is in the planning and design stage. The developer, who has made his fortune in coal, asked the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei to plan and organize the project, and he, in turn, has asked the Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron to select—from their personal “network”— a hundred architects to design the houses. The idea, apparently, is to create a showcase for up-and-coming design talent, and a highly marketable, and profitable, real estate venture.

 A hint of trouble appears when we notice that Ai Weiwei’s design company is called Fake Design. Sure enough, when we look at his overall plan for the development, we find that it copies American suburban tract developments from the 50s, say, in California’s San Fernando valley. Cf. the movie, “The Two Jakes.” Sand-blown, treeless, lifeless for all human purposes, but soon to contain “your Dream House”— just sign here! The picture published in the New York Times of the invited architects surveying their desolate sites is absurdly comic and at the same time sad. What must be going through their minds?  Is this the Wiesenhof Sidelung for the new age? Can I make great architecture here? Will I be mentioned in next Times article? Or, did I come halfway around the world for this? Am I here as an architect, or as a pawn in Ai’s latest art game?

The idea of building large private houses on three-quarter acre plots jammed together without regard for the spaces between or the relationship of one house to the next must be unsettling to many of the invitees, especially considering the history of American suburbs. Some have questioned the lack of even basic design or ecological guidelines in the planning, and may be wondering, too, if Ordos, of all the rapidly developing places on the planet, really needs a retro typology—however updated and upgraded—as the most visible symbol of its future. It would be a more hopeful harbinger of the future not only for this city, but the field of architecture in general, if a number of the Ordos 100 architects banded together and came up with a coordinated overall plan and insisted that it be adopted. And, if it were not, they would simply decline the opportunity.

LW

New York Times article

Ordos 100 website

D. Libeskind, Micromegas, 1981. One of the greatest architectural drawings in line.

Even though I am best known for my drawings, and have spent many years as a teacher of architects, I have never taught drawing. The reason is that each person who wants to draw should devise his or her own way. It makes no sense to teach a method or style of drawing, because drawing is a way of thinking, and it would be wrong to didactically teach a method or style of thinking. Each person must learn from the drawers—and the thinkers—who appeal most to them, and then devise their own ways. Originality—in drawing and thinking—is important, for the same reasons that individuality in all matters of existence is important: it confirms the wonder, and the terror, of the human condition.

 Essentially, each of us is alone. Biologically and psychically we are not only separate from other living things, but also from others of our kind. We cannot feel or think what another person feels or thinks, nor can they know exactly our feelings or thoughts. Because we are social creatures and dependent upon each other, we spend much of our time and energy trying to communicate our thoughts and feelings, and also to understand, as deeply as possible, those of others. It is a uniquely human task and one that requires all our intellectual effort, emotional commitment, and expressive skills. Spoken and written languages are the foremost of these, but drawing—in all its variants—runs a close second. Indeed, as we know, there are ideas and feelings that can only be expressed in drawn form. We might imagine, if we look at the caves of Lascaux, that drawing came before writing and was, in its narrative making of marks, its source.

 When very young, let’s say in my late teens and twenties, I had a fierce desire to communicate my thoughts and feelings through drawing. In high school I had some mechanical drawing courses, where I learned to use t-square and triangles, but little else. For inspiration, I had to look in magazines and art books. I was tremendously moved by the etchings of Francisco Goya, the drawings of Peter Brueghel, the ink and watercolor drawings of Paul Klee. And, of course, the drawings of Michelangelo Buonarotti and Leonardo Da Vinci. Each artist conveyed something different in their work, something that resonated with my own sensibility, but did not sum it up. Different as these artists were, they all had one thing in common: a mastery of line.

 What I mean by ‘line’ is exactly that: a single mark, short or long, drawn with a pen, pencil, stylus, or any sharply pointed instrument that is held in the hand and commanded by it, in coordination with the brain, to inscribe on paper, tablet, plate, or any chosen surface exactly that mark and not another.

 This last qualification is important. When rubbing a piece of charcoal, pastel, or blunt pencil on a surface, one accepts (even hopes for) a certain degree of approximation, even of accident. The resulting tone is, from an analytical point of view, vague, when compared with line. Line is precise and unequivocal. It is here, not there. Making a line is not about accidents. Rather, it is about contour, edge, shape. It is about where one space begins and another ends. It can be spontaneous or studiously deliberate, but it always carves space in a decisive way. It has a clear ethical, as well as aesthetic, impact. The drawn line is one of the great human inventions, and it is available to all of us, a tool both common and esoteric, personal and universal.

LW 

Anyone familiar with my work knows that I reserve a special place in my feelings and thoughts for what I call ‘dumb boxes.’ These are buildings that  are often little more than rectilinear solids of brick or stone facing with holes punched in them for windows and doors. Sometimes they are all glass, with no holes at all. Most architects today consider them the antithesis of creative design, but I believe they are essential to it. The worst thing I can imagine is an urban world of idiosyncratic buildings that jostle each other for attention with no reference to any deeper form of order. The next worst thing I can imagine, though, is a world of dumb boxes embellished by architects determined to disguise their dumbness with all manner of distracting shapes, colors, materials, or tectonic doodads. I say, a box is inherently dumb, so let it be dumb, by which I mean, let it be what it is.

What is dumb about the box? Well, it’s actually we, when confronting it, that are able to be dumb. We know what it is. We don’t have to think about it. In the same way, we don’t have to think about an urban street grid. Thirteen blocks up and two blocks to the right and we’re there. What we find when we get to our destination is another matter, and it may shake, though probably not, our comfortably routine world of assumptions. The same with the dumb box. Within it, we will probably find ‘normal’ life, totally predictable. But we might find the abnormal, even the world shaking. Serial killers live in dumb boxes, as did Karl Marx and Wassily Kandinsky. Right now, a genius is sitting in a dumb box somewhere, thinking through a knotty problem that, if solved, will transform our ways of thinking, even of living. Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” is a concise movie play on dumb boxes and their everyday, sometimes profound, human mysteries. Those of us who live in cities don’t need a movie to tell us that we never really know, for sure, what lies around the next corner.

Architects, however, are today routinely indoctrinated against the dumb box. Even advertising urges us to “think outside the box.” Why? Because it is thought we all hate the box for being too dumb, too boring, and we want to escape it. If we do escape, by buying the advertised product, we usually find ourselves inside another dumb box populated by boring people just like us. It is clearly possible to live an extraordinary life inside a dumb box. Question: is it possible to lead an extraordinary life in anything other than a dumb box?

The extraordinary can only be measured against the ordinary. If the dumb box, and all the predictability it embodies and symbolizes, is the ordinary, then we need it in order to transcend it, if that is what we choose to do. In the world composed only of the extraordinary, the only extraordinary thing to do would be to design a dumb box.

Or, there is another way to look at it. In the world of the extraordinary, which becomes, in effect, the ordinary, the only way to transcend it is to design the more extraordinary—to up the ante. This is what seems to be happening in architecture today, in the post-Bilbao era. It brings to mind the comment by Edward Hanslick, the 19th century music critic, about the operas of Richard Wagner, which their author proclaimed as ‘The Music of the Future.’ “They are all superlative,” Hanslick said, “and superlatives have no future.”

Perhaps, though, there is another way, a way out of the trap of the extraordinary for its own sake, as a kind of ‘can you top this?’ syndrome. Let us make the extraordinary only when extraordinary conditions demand it. Radical social and political changes. Recovery from war and natural disasters. The reformation of slums. Cultural ‘paradigm shifts,’ such as computerization, or the greening of technology. Let us refrain from dressing up old building types in extraordinary new forms that do nothing to transform the way we actually inhabit or use or think about them. Instead, let us deploy the extraordinary in architecture as a way of bringing about changes we believe are important to the improvement of the human condition.

In the meantime, let us inhabit our dumb boxes, striving for the extraordinary when it is necessary, at the same time sustaining as high a standard of the ordinary as we can. After all, it is the common ground—quite deep at that—we all share.

LW 

Jean Nouvel has won the 2008 Pritzker Prize for Architecture. No surprise. The lack of surprise makes it is easy to view the Pritzker as establishment laurels for those who are already well-established. Like the Nobel Prizes, it is conferred on safe, already certified choices. Nouvel’s buildings are certainly of a high quality of design. At his best, he designs beautiful buildings. Who can quarrel? The Pritzker tries to remind us that the design of beautiful buildings within, or maybe—on occasion—closer to the limits of the accepted canon of beauty is the ultimate goal of architecture. People need enclosed spaces, and it is up to architects to design them in ways that satisfy the needs of body and soul. Or, at least, in ways that reassure us about what we already know. Nouvel works masterfully within the limits of what we already know.

So, is there a problem with any of this? Not at all. I say, let the rich bestow upon the famous whatever they like. Let the rituals of power play themselves out as they always have. It is quite a seductive spectacle. We all become part of it, say, by posting comments like this on blogs.

But I have to question how relevant the Pritzker Prize is for the expanding world of architecture. Whatever its claim to reward innovation and expand discourse, I would say not very. Its focus on buildings, and often expensive buildings, leaves out much of the most innovative work going on in the field today, by younger architects making smaller-scale projects, or experimental ideas that never get off the boards or out of the computer—ideas that get published and change our ways of thinking about what architecture is and can be. The Pritzker sends the message that unless one builds, and in a spectacular way, one will never qualify for “architecture’s top honor.” The catch-22 here is that to build you need clients, and to build spectacularly, like Nouvel, very rich clients, and they are seldom willing to risk sponsoring the genuinely new. So, the subliminal message is, don’t push the envelope too far.

The existence of the Pritzker reminds us that the powerful are not as self-assured as they like to appear. They need to engage continually in demonstrations of their power, such as getting on—in an upbeat way—the front page of the New York Times, as well as other major newspapers and magazines around the world. Oddly enough, the Times perennially rails against the Nobel Prizes, not least because its founder was an armaments manufacturer who bought respectability in posterity by creating prizes in his name for intellectual achievement. And it works. When we think of Alfred Nobel, his name becomes synonymous with Albert Einstein, Samuel Beckett, Toni Morrison, Martin Luther King, Jr. The Pritzker is sponsored by the Hyatt Foundation, not exactly “merchants of death.” Still, the formula works. By associating themselves with successful architects and the world of creative thought, they make a significant step up in cultural, and historical, terms. Their domain, and their power to affect the world, is extended and consolidated.

For the recipients of the Pritzker, it’s easy enough to understand why they would accept it, often with speeches of praise for the Prize and its sponsors. The money may be relatively paltry ($100,000, compared with the Nobel’s $1,500,000), but every bit helps and, after all, why not? What’s the harm? Only two have ever declined the Nobel, on principle: Sartre and Le Duc. So far, no architect has declined the Pritzker. If that were to happen, it really would ‘expand the discourse.’

All this we already know. So, why bother to write about it? Perhaps only to step back from the spectacle long enough to see its contour, and its limits. Only then is it possible to see its true place in the order of things, and the wider world that lies beyond.

LW

Musicians’ House. Four musicians will live here every year, one in each quadrant. Occasionally, they will meet in the center space and make music together, under the triangular opening to the sky. Music and mathematics and architecture. Rarely has geometry been considered so seriously in architecture, or taken to such poetic lengths. Clarity is not a conclusion, but the threshold to a mystery that is archaic and prophetic, belonging at once to the first questions ever asked, and the last ones that ever can be asked. An epic cycle of time is evoked here, and it both exhilarates and threatens.

How accustomed we are to architecture entertaining us with its novelty, or its richness, or its melodrama! This building challenges us with its sober, still, enigmatic presence. We are discomfited, unprepared. And then, we hear within it the sounds of music being played, crisp, equally clear and abstract, yet elusive, ephemeral….and we understand. This is what philosophers meant by “the dialectic.” This is what the architect, Raimund Abraham, means by “architecture is a collision between ideas and matter.”

Raimund Abraham’s Musikerhaus in Dusseldorf is under construction and due to be completed this year.

interview with Raimund Abraham:
http://www.nyc-architecture.com/ARCH/ARCH-RaimundAbraham.htm

(This is the fourth in a series of posts on the relationship between ethics and aesthetics.)

Hard as it is to believe, it was once thought that architecture had integrity. Not just the architects who practiced their profession with a principled, uncompromising sense of purpose or mission, but buildings themselves. Certainly, the attribution of human qualities to inanimate things like buildings is and always was what the literary critics call a ‘pathetic fallacy.’ A ‘sad moon,’ may work as a metaphor of our own emotions when we, on occasion, look at the moon, but no one would really believe that the moon itself experiences sadness, or anything else. And yet the belief that buildings had an uncompromising, principled reality about them was once widely held. As a student of architecture, nearly fifty years ago, I was taught that all good buildings had, in fact, three integrities, without which they could not be considered architecture.

The first was integrity of function. This meant that a building’s form and spaces had to be be designed to serve their intended purpose. Fifty years ago, everyone knew this meant its form had to accommodate a known building typology: school, hospital, house, museum….all of which had been established by exemplary precedents.

The second was integrity of materials. This meant that a material was always used according to its inherent properties. Wood, for example, was a ‘beautiful’ natural material, so it should never be painted. The same with concrete, even though it was not beautiful or natural, it’s roughness and ugliness were integral with its ‘character.’ So, it should always be left exposed.

The third was integrity of structure. This meant that whatever held a building up had to be clearly visible as part of its form. Structure was not to be disguised or hidden, as in Beaux Arts buildings, burying, say, the steel frame structure of a building in masonry walls to achieve the effect of an ancient Roman or Gothic building. To do that was to betray the reality of the building, to turn it into something false, a lie, a mere stage set—the antithesis of architecture.

This idea holds that a building is—like a human body or a machine—an assemblage of parts having diverse purposes that must be integrated to form a coherent, working whole. In order to be integrated, each of the parts—function, materials, structure—has to be integral within itself, within its own, intrinsic nature, to join coherently with the others. It is rather like the old saying, “Be true to yourself, and you cannot be false to another.” Each part has to have integrity before the whole can have it, too. In this way, architecture is the embodiment of an ethical, as well as aesthetic, ideal.

Such thoughts were once taken very seriously. We still see their residue in the buildings of some prominent architects in the over-60 generation, who grew up with the idea that architecture had integrity. For the generations following them, however, a building’s integrity–or lack of it–is no longer an issue. The idea is, in fact, never mentioned.

Newer ideas hold that a building—like any product of manufacture—is a unit serving a prescribed purpose, within which its constituent parts are entirely subordinate to the whole. This means that the make-up of any part can vary, so long as the integrity of the unit is not violated. Perhaps the better word is efficacy–the effectiveness of the unit. The ease and speed with which the computer can integrate different systems has taken the emphasis off the different parts and placed it on the whole. In a practical as well as philosophical sense, the goal of design today is an overall synthesis of the elements of building—a form—that is achieved not as a result of assembling parts, but established at the beginning of the design process. Architects who work with any 3-D modeling program know that structure and materials are now subordinate to form. When concrete can be easily substituted for steel framing, or plastic for glass, or stressed-skin carbon fiber for riveted aluminum, without sacrificing the coherence of the form, then the lines between the former distinctions are sufficiently blurred to be insignificant.

There is another factor. The global marketing of brand-name consumer goods has coincided with a social trend towards an effacement of differences based on racial, gender, economic and other stereotypes. It has created a new type of diversity based, ironically enough, on sameness. In the products we buy, the places we go, the ideas we have, we all share the same differences. In other words, we can have different designer clothing, or buildings by different well-known architects, but the differences between these brand-name products are not antithetical or opposed, like the old stereotypes (black/white, male/female, gay/straight, socialist/capitalist, modern/classical…), but are only variations on themes and trends dominating the marketplace at the moment. Ethical distinctions (right/wrong, good/bad…), which are seldom marketable themes, have— like integrity—become all but irrelevant.

LW

The Critic gets it (almost) right:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/23/arts/design/23ouro.html?ref=design

One thing for sure, Rem Koolhaas doesn’t hedge his bets. He also knows how to stick his neck out and not lose his head. He has perfected the old debating trick of disarming his critics in advance. Philip Johnson was also a master at this. Before anyone could criticize the pandering commercialism of his office tower designs, he would say, “I’m a whore.” Rem Koolhaas gives this tactic a European sophistication, a rhetorically polished upgrade. He says that he is trying to “find optimism in the inevitable.” The “inevitable” sounds like fate, something beyond human control, and has an ominous ring to it. Death, of course, is the ultimate inevitable, and who could criticize someone who is defiantly optimistic in the face of that? It’s a heroic position, no doubt, if, that is, the inevitable is as certain as it is made to seem. The inevitable in Koolhaas’ discourse is the ultimate world domination by ‘liberal democracy’ and unfettered, free-market, capitalist economics at the expense of other modes of human exchange. He has set out to put an optimistic face on this inexorable process.

Koolhaas has been plying this idea for quite a few years now. In the 80s and 90s, it took the form of “in early Modernism, the heroic thing for architects to do was fight the mainstream; today it is to go along with it.” Then came “Bigness,” followed by the “Generic City,” and let us not forget “Shopping.” Now comes his big Dubai proposal, which amounts to transplanting a chunk of the Manhattan he celebrated for its “culture of congestion,” thirty years ago, in “Delirious New York,” onto an artificial, offshore extension of the city of Dubai.

Dubai is certainly the inevitable place for the realization of Koolhaas’ ideas. It is by now the capital of an economic and political New World Order. A city-state without income taxes, labor laws, or elections, it is ruled by a corporate oligarchy of hereditary rulers, accountable only to themselves and their investors. Quite a model for the global future. Built up rapidly over the past few years on the wealth gotten from the world’s greed for oil—and more recently as an unregulated sanctuary for cash—it has no depth of history or indigenous culture, no complexity, no conflicts, no questions about itself, no doubts, in short, nothing to stand in the way of its being shaped into the ultimate neo-liberal Utopia.

Unlike Manhattan, which grew incrementally on its grid over two centuries and is laden with everything from history to conflicts and self-doubt, Dubai is a kind of frontier boom-town that has to import everything to be anything, from workers to investors, from ideas to architects, from high culture to low. Now, apparently, it is importing…congestion? Sitting between two deserts, one of water and one of sand, congestion does not come naturally to Dubai. The dynamic compression of space and activity that creates a critical mass of imploding human energy called a city has to be imposed there as an idea and somehow generated as a reality over the next few years, without genuinely urban conditions. The strategy seems unlikely to succeed, except as another attraction in the high-end theme park Dubai has become. But that is not the proposal’s most disturbing aspect. Given the tabula rasa the site offers, and the apparently unlimited finances its owners possess, we might ask: is this the best vision for the future that the architect could come up with?—a gratuitious look backward at the ultimate 20th century city, rather than an imaginative look forward to the possibilities of the 21st century city.

What, for example, are the space-organization possibilities of networks of information exchange, rather than streets? What are the architectural design possibilities of synthetics, rather than steel or concrete building frames typical of high-rise construction? What are the possibilities for increasing choices in non-hierarchically organized urban spaces, rather than classical, Cartesian systems? And so on—the list of new possibilities is long.

Maybe Koolhaas doesn’t believe that Dubai is the place for a forward-looking vision. Or maybe he believes, true to his post-Modernist roots, that the past offers the best model for the future, if it is leavened with irony, and garnished with a dash of the surreal. Or maybe he simply doesn’t have a vision for the future. Who knows? We should care, however, because the world’s attention is focused on Dubai, and on Koolhaas and other architecture stars, and because—like it or not—what they do is taken as a model for the future, even when it is, how shall I say, not nearly good enough.

LW

New York Times article on Koolhaas’ proposal for Dubai:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/03/arts/design/03kool.html?ref=design

Mike Davis article on Dubai

With cities on the rise—many existing ones expanding rapidly, and others, once mere towns, growing into full-fledged urban centers—the need to understand the urban condition becomes ever more urgent. While we would hope that local culture would be a major factor in the design and planning of particular cities in quite different parts of the world, we have to acknowledge that there are more universal factors operating globally today, having to do with international economics and development. Architects are being asked to design buildings far from their home cities and cultures and they inevitably transplant what they already know. What concerns me here is, what do they already know? The case for studying proto-urban conditions—-conditions shared by cities anywhere—-is made in the hope that what architects already know can be deepened to the level of principle. If such a deepening could occur, local variations on prototypical conditions would become more possible, and the present era of typological impositions of one culture upon others would gradually be brought to a close.

The rectilinear street grid, creating straight, continuous spaces lined with building walls, is a proto-urban condition explored by fourth year students at the Cooper Union School of Architecture, under the direction of a team of four faculty, in the Spring semester of 2007. Rather than assign a site in the grids of, say, Manhattan, Barcelona, or Beijing, any of which would be heavily loaded with historical and cultural factors requiring extensive analysis, the given site was an abstracted version of a street space resulting from a rectilinear grid. This allowed us to immediately begin to develop new strategies for inserting programs of use that could inform not only this analogous site, but Manhattan, Barcelona, Beijing, and other cities, as well.

The commentary by Professor Kevin Bone sums up the procedure of the studio: “The studio set out to investigate the ideal of multiple architectural works woven together across an urban landscape and to look at the community of projects from various perspectives. Works were expected to operate in fields of non-specific boundaries. Where the limits of one individual architectural proposal began and another ended was not absolutely defined, allowing for new combinations of urban architectural interactions. To accomplish this, students worked in various groups on various stages of the investigations. Initially students were asked to pair up and develop architectural propositions that communicated with each other. This architectural conversation could be from one side of the wall to the other, through the wall or at discrete positions along the wall, as long as the projects somehow addressed other proposals. As the studio evolved these works (in some cases) fused together into a single hybrid proposition. The pair ups then assembled in larger groups containing several pairs of students. These larger groups looked at all of the proposals of the class and attempted to place them in areas of operation within the site. These groups each produced a kind of spatial/zoning diagram, an architectural master plan for the work of the studio. The best ideas from each of these four “planning” groups were incorporated into a general organizing structure. All students worked on a single idealized urban site and all projects existed simultaneously with each other. The assembly of works became an autonomous architectural work, with accidents and non-intentional spaces provoking further architectural response. The proto-urban problem began to build its own context and its own history. The class and studio began to build its own community and negotiate its own rules for various architectural actions.”

As can be seen in the master model, which was developed at eighth-inch scale, the rigor of the methodology combined with the freedom of the students to design for programs of their choosing resulted in a varied, complexly interwoven, highly articulated architectural landscape. Densely layered spatially and programmatically, it demonstrates a principle often considered paradoxical, that—given carefully considered circumstances—the interests of a community and its creative individuals can reinforce one another. The making of architecture is the key.

LW

The PROTO-URBAN CONDITION–Faculty and Students

The sidewalks of New York are extraordinary, if overlooked human documents. Found on them—as though on the tablets of a lost civilization—are accumulated inscriptions comprising a chronicle of the city’s existential complexity. There are the marks and scratches of the ceaseless movement of people and vehicles; the stains of spills large and small; the ruptures and cracks of destruction and repairs; the often jarring juxtaposition of diverse materials; both fresh and long-faded symbols indicating this and that; and the mysterious black spots that are everywhere, which I have thought were ‘the souls of the departed’ that somehow sank into the gritty surfaces, but which my wife assures me are only the marks of chewing gum carelessly thrown away. The task of deciphering the stories imbedded in even a square meter of any sidewalk in the city would be overwhelming, particularly if we consider that a story they might reveal could read like this:

The light gray is the bottom layer, infused here and there with sandy tan and gravelly blue speckles, and even some dull red flecks that were part of the original matrix. Then comes an almost transparent layer of black soot, deposited unevenly across the entire surface, probably ten years ago when the building across the street almost burned down. Then comes a layer….

Or, like this:

The Con Edison surveyor sprayed-painted a mark indicating where the water main is, six feet below the surface. A woman in soft-soled black shoes stopped abruptly just here, dropping a bottle of ketchup she’d gone out to buy, while dinner was on the stove (she was in such a hurry that the ketchup was unbagged), unaware that the water main was slowly leaking. A drunken man stumbled and….

Not exactly compelling stuff. No beginnings, middles, or endings. No climaxes or conclusions (unless you consider the faded bloodstains of a fatal shooting still visible, but which only an experienced forensic investigator would recognize as such), just the on-and-on of everyday life. Yet we could fill books, even libraries with such stories. Imagine what future anthropologists could make of them, if only the sidewalks would survive a few thousand years—but they won’t. Like the daily lives they portray, they slip unnoticed past our consciousness and beyond the reach of memory. During the next street-digging project, the sidewalks will be broken up and carted in unrecognizable chunks to a landfill, even as new sidewalks are being laid down.

Without the stories, the sidewalks fall prey to gratuitous aestheticizing. They are visually very seductive, if we are not bound by classical standards of beauty. The layering, the diversity, the clashes and unexpected harmonies of textures, colors, tones, lines, dribbles and dots, cracks and joints. They combine to form a vast mini-terrain that is almost entirely of human invention, but not intention. Fusing accident and design, they form a visual field that is unique in part and whole, and inimitable. It can never be repeated or reproduced. Yet sidewalks can awaken the imagination of the visual artist who is easily intoxicated by a depth of possibility that seems, in its contradictions, inexhaustible. Just like the city, at once timeless and ephemeral, monumental and immemorial, they are close—very close—to the heart of things.

LW

Architects, as I said in a recent post, are idea people. We have concepts and make designs that embody or implement them. We present them as clearly and openly as possible, and can only hope that others will find them useful to their ends, and build them. When it comes to the reformation of slums, we are a long way from having designs and are very much at the beginning of the having ideas stage. It is in that spirit that I make this post. I count on the tough criticism of colleagues.

If we brainstorm a little, we can imagine, as one solution, a capsule–a material package–that can be inserted into a slum and immediately, with its use by a person living there, begins to transform that person’s living conditions. What it does first of all is establish a demarcated space that is secure from without, clean and radiant with natural and artificial light within. The sheltered space provides distinct areas for sleeping, gathering, hygiene and sanitation. It provides space for cooking, with adequate ventilation, and for work—whatever type of work the person and his family or friends do for their own benefit, economic or otherwise. The capsule is capable of configuring itself, or being configured, according to different patterns of work and living. It does not produce a module, or standardized unit. If we think of it more like a nutrient, rather than a product, we understand that the results it creates are adapted in unique ways to particular persons or families, because it nurtures whatever is strong in a given situation, rather than imposing a uniform result based on a pre-conceived judgment of what is best. In this sense (letting our imaginations play freely), we can conceive of the capsule as something that organically enhances the living and working conditions of people who use it, beginning as something standardized—like a pill we take when sick—that morphs into a restorative source of energy, metabolizing into material form, enabling health, enhancing the capabilities of those who use it, whatever they may be.

If such a capsule could be designed by leading thinkers, engineers, architects; if it could be produced by the best technicians using advanced technological facilities; if it could be financed by institutions in the private and public sectors with vision of the vast benefits for everyone it would create; then it would seem that such a project could actually be accomplished. If a large number of these capsules were to be inserted into a slum, the result over time would be growth of a healthier living environment, from within. Because the transformation would be incremental, both in time and scale, it is conceivable that an organic form of community could literally grow from the exchange and cooperation of people now inhabiting slums as they reform their living environments.

It is easy to imagine objections to such a ‘magic bullet,’ as the cure for syphilis was called in the 19th century. From the side of the slum dwellers, it might seem an unwelcome intrusion from outside, just another quick fix imposed by the economically advantaged on the desperately poor, serving the interests of the rich by transforming the slum according to their well-intentioned but—to the slum dweller–necessarily opposed values. It is especially important, then, that the transformative capsule enables the slum-dwellers to achieve their goals, serving their values, and does not reduce them to subjects of its designers’ and makers’ will. Inevitably, the values, prejudices, perspectives and aspirations of the designers and makers will be imbedded in the capsule and what it does. Therefore the slum-dwellers should, in the first place, have the right of refusal. Also, they must have the right to modify the capsule and its effects as they see fit. It cannot be a locked system, capable of producing only a predetermined outcome. The implication of these freedoms is that the capsule, whatever its capabilities, could be used to work against the intentions of its designers and makers. Because the effects of the capsule would be powerfully transformative, its possession would involve risk for all the groups, and individuals, involved. Because the sponsoring institutions in the economically enabled sector have the most to lose, it is more likely that resistance to the creation of such a capsule would come not from slum dwellers, but from these sectors. For those who believe in such a project, it is imperative that leaders in the economically powerful sectors be convinced that creation of the capsule is a risk worth taking.

Even without institutional support and sanction, the conceptualization and design of the capsule can and should begin immediately. There is nothing to lose by moving in this direction. And moving independently is probably the only effective way to proceed, because issues of politics and economics, from institutional viewpoints, will slow down or frustrate the process of having ideas and developing them, as it often does in much less complex projects. What is needed now is free thinking by the most creative minds, in order to innovate on the level required by the ‘unsolvable’ problem of transforming slums on a local, let alone global, scale. Because the problem is urgently in need of solution, the effort should be thought of in the same way as that to find a cure—or at least a treatment—for a virulent disease that is already affecting millions and spreading rapidly.

There is really no time to waste.

LW

The question of how theory relates to practice has come up several times related to previous posts. The Electrical Management (Elektroprivreda) Building in Sarajevo, Bosnia, gives us a good chance to consider the issue.

First, a brief (as possible) history. Sarajevo is the capital city of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which in 1991 was one of the six republics incorporated into Yugoslavia, an independent Socialist Federation founded in 1945. With the end of the Cold War in 1990, Yugoslavia began to break up and the republics became independent countries in their own right. In the case of Bosnia, this was accompanied by massive violence, and a war raged on its soil from 1992 to 1995, which the so-called Dayton Accords ended. Tens of thousands were killed and the worst genocide in Europe since the Holocaust was carried out by Bosnian Serbs against Bosnian Muslims. The city of Sarajevo was under blockade and military siege from 1992 to 1995, during which time it had no normal supplies of food or water, no electricity, gas, or heat, and no telephone links. It was almost completely cut off from the outside world.

The UN flew in canned food and basic medical supplies. Journalists were allowed to fly in and out on UN relief flights. A few cultural figures—prominently Susan Sontag—became ‘journalists’ and came to Sarajevo during its darkest hours to give moral support, stage theater performances, and other gestures to encourage people generally, but particularly Sarajevo’s world-class artists and intellectuals. The city was dark and cold and under constant artillery and sniper fire.

The Bosnian Serb army surrounding Sarajevo had in mind to humiliate the people in the city, to punish the city for its cosmopolitan character and traditions. As much as anything, the siege was a terrorist act, a war on diversity and urbanity, an attack on the very idea of city. Thankfully—because of the strong spirit of its people—the terrorists ultimately failed.

In November of 1993, I went to Sarajevo—as a ‘journalist’—at the invitation of Haris Pasovic, head of the Sarajevo International Film and Theater Festival, who was aware of my work from a lecture I have given in Sarajevo two years earlier. I was accompanied by another architect, Ekkehard Rehfeld, who fully participated in all conversations and events. I brought with me forty freshly printed copies of “War and Architecture” (Pamphlet Architecture 15) and a roll of photocopy enlargements to make an exhibition. My goal, put simply, was to help architects there begin thinking about the role architecture would play both during and after the siege. I was able to see first-hand what the people were enduring and many damaged buildings.

The Electrical Management Building, along with the Post Office, Parliament, National Library, mosques and churches were symbolic of the civic life of the city, and therefore were especially targeted by the besieging Bosnian Serb army. I met the architect of the building, Ivan Straus, one of the most respected architects in Yugoslavia, who was also very supportive of my presence and ideas. It was he, during a later visit, who asked me to design a reconstruction of the Electrical Management Building.

In this and other reconstruction projects I proposed for Sarajevo, my theory was clear: the siege, and the four-year-long war, changed everything. Socialism was out, and an uncertain privatization was in. The city was losing its ethnic diversity, as Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, and anyone who could left and, for a while, before the city was completely surrounded, Muslim refugees poured in. The infrastructure of utilities and services was severely damaged, with no idea of where the money would come from to repair them, or when that would even be possible. Buildings vital to the social and economic functioning of the city were damaged and unusable without extensive reconstruction, but, again, how this would be financed was unclear. More than all this, the people of the city had suffered years of deprivation, terror, and uncertainty, and many would be transformed by it. How, I asked, could architecture play any positive role in all of this?

My answer was that architecture, as a social and primarily constructive act, could heal the wounds, by creating entirely new types of space in the city. These would be what I had called ‘freespaces,’ spaces without predetermined programs of use, but whose strong forms demanded the invention of new programs corresponding to the new, post-war conditions. I had hypothesized that “90% of the damaged buildings would be restored to their normal pre-war forms and uses, as most people want to return to their old ways of living….but 10% should be freespaces, for those who did not want to go back, but forward.” The freespaces would be the crucibles for the creation of new thinking and social-political forms, small and large. I believed then–and still do–that the cities and their people who have suffered the most difficult transitions in the contemporary world, in Sarajevo and elsewhere, have something important to teach us, who live comfortably in the illusion that we are immune to the demands radical changes of many kinds will impose on us, too.

The design for the reconstruction of the Electrical Management Building is a case study in the application of this theory. Most of the building would be restored to accommodate corporate offices of the known kind. However, in the space that had been literally blasted off by artillery fire, would be constructed a freespace, to be inhabited by those who, in the reinvention of ways to inhabit space, would open the way to the future.

Architects are idea people. We have concepts and make designs that embody or implement them. We present them as clearly and openly as possible, and can only hope that others will find them useful to their ends, and build them. In the case of the Electrical Management Building in Sarajevo, my theory and design were not used. This does not mean that they are wrong, or a failure. Nor does it mean that those who elected to ignore them were wrong to do so. More challenges await us, and the ideas may yet become useful, in ways that I could never conceive.

LW

It must be said at the outset that no enlightened political leaders in any part of the world can legitimately believe in the practice of what is called ‘slum clearance,’ which refers to the demolition of slums and the displacement of their inhabitants without a thought about where they can go. This is not to say that the brutal practice of bulldozing slums and driving out their inhabitants with armies of police is not being carried on—it is. Recent examples in Africa and Latin America only testify to the persistence of despotic political leaders in places where people have little voice in public affairs. Elsewhere it is well recognized that such an approach simply relocates the problem at a high human cost, postponing the day when it must be dealt with more humanely, and on a more enduring basis.

Secondly, it must be said that the idea of ‘urban renewal,’ which is a less blatantly brutal but still violent approach to the elimination of slums, simply does not work. The practice of demolishing slums and then imposing large-scale housing projects has generally failed, for the reason that slums do have social structures, however misunderstood they may be to those of the higher socio-economic strata from which come the urban planning professionals and bureaucrats who design the renewal projects. It has been shown by many tragic examples that simply replacing slums with planners’ ideas of what people should be living in destroys much of human value that can never be replaced, and causes untold human misery. Slums are inhabited by human beings, many of whom, even at the desperate edge of survival, have invested themselves in their families and communities, and want a better life for themselves and their children. Not unlike many others who are at the lower end of the economic chain, they need help in coping with their circumstances, help that comes from those who control the wealth and resources.

The burning question is: exactly how—in practical terms—is an enlightenment of the ruling, or at least the managerial, classes to come about? What are the best possible scenarios?

At the top of the list: the increased availability of information will make politicians and business leaders aware of the human catastrophe of slums, and this will mobilize them to improve the slum dwellers’ living conditions. In short, government and corporations will make the elimination of poverty a high priority.

This is a most unlikely scenario. The availability of information has done little to mobilize leaders in the past, from stopping the Holocaust to the genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda, the famines in Africa and Asia, the ‘death squads’ in Latin American countries, and many other human tragedies that could have been stopped by the intervention of political leaders. Knowledge of slums is today widely disseminated in the print and electronic media. Leaders give occasional lip service to this problem, but little else.

Another possibility: elected officials and business leaders will recognize that the vast, interconnected webbing of the global economy cannot carry permanently the burden—financial, political, moral—of burgeoning slums. As a result, government and corporations will find more effective ways of employing the slum’s under-utilized human resources.

This is a somewhat more likely scenario, given the right conditions. The costs of slums, like those of a deteriorating environment, are often hidden because they are purposely overlooked, but they are enormous, and cumulative. Slums are increasing in many urban areas already the most afflicted by them, and so is the economic drain they cause. This drain comes from the costs of ‘containing’ slums, which includes the costs of policing at least the perimeters where they abrade with more acceptable urban areas; the costs of dealing with humanitarian crises caused by outbreaks of contagious diseases that might spread into the wider urban population; and of water pollution from untreated sewage, including human waste, being dumped into rivers and streams that must be shared by all; the costs of lost city services, such as potable water and electricity, that are appropriated by slum dwellers without paying for them; the costs of keeping order when unrest or mass violence occasionally breaks out in the slums for whatever reason; the costs—often indirect—of maintaining a large population of illiterate and uneducated human beings, who nevertheless require not only food and shelter, but also intangibles like personal dignity and social justice, which must be ‘paid for’ by somebody, usually elsewhere, in the social network; likewise, the costs—psychological and moral—of having to live with slums, costs paid for by the other social strata in the society afflicted by them. Slums drain a society’s resources, and are a form of entropy that threatens, in the long run, the society’s survival.

Finally, if the perspective is altered to a purely capitalist one, slums can be seen as an unused pool of human potential–that is, of cheap labor–that could be employed in the global economic system. Businesses, supported by government trade policies, have recognized for many years the advantages of cheaper ‘offshore’ labor in the making of many consumer products. As nations such as China and India and Indonesia develop their domestic economies and expand their global influence, the demand for cheap offshore labor will dramatically increase, even as the present ‘outsources’ dwindle. New sources of skilled, semi-skilled, and unskilled labor will have to be found—or created. With the same sort of investment made in training workers in the garment and other consumer products industries in Southeast Asia, present-day slum dwellers could take a first step up in the economic chain. The main impediment to this happening is that government and business would have to cooperate in a coordinated way, and, so far, neither social sector has shown any real interest in doing this.

However, the idea of turning millions of people who have been held down in abject poverty into millions exploited in subsistence-wage sweat shops and factories is far from an ideal solution to the problem of slums. It might be an economic step up, and a point of entry into the game of capitalism, but it amounts to a type forced labor, where the slum dwellers would have little choice but to accept it, considering the alternative of continued abjection and destitution.

An intriguing hypothesis–advanced by a number of people–emerges: what if the slums could be improved from the inside, rather than from without? Or, to put it another way, what if the interventions coming from without were aimed at empowering slum dwellers to find—or invent, using their ingenuity to adapt—the ways to transform their own conditions? After all, they understand these conditions better than anyone, where they work for them and where they do not. If the slum dwellers have admirable ingenuity in surviving under the most terrible of conditions, why should this same ingenuity not be the key to transforming slums and eventually eliminating them?

The biggest task would be addressing the problem of changing the terrible physical conditions of slums. How might the vast pool of human energy embodied in the people who live in slums be liberated to engage the physical transformation of their place of living–their habitat? Answering this question will take much more than political good will, and more than the commitment of money by public and private institutions to such a project, even in substantial amounts. It will require new ideas about how to effect real changes in conditions, and from within.

This is where architects come in.

[To be continued]

LW

I want to be careful of not straining the indulgence of visitors to the LW blog. With this post I might be pushing my luck. Still, I thought it might be of interest to people who know my work to see a few drawings of mine that I came across in an old plan file–certainly the first drawings I made in which I tried to give visual, even tectonic, form to philosophical concepts. They were made in 1973.

The paired, dialogical drawings seem most alive to me. In them, the main ideational threads–conflict and transformation–that run through my work up to the present, are visible. As is my excited embrace of contradictory modes and forms. This is seen in the interplay of the organic and the geometic, the fantastical and the mathematical, but also, less conventionally, in their subordination to both the premeditation and spontaneity of drawing. Architects make designs. Their designs have to embody—or at least allude to—the paradoxical nature of the human condition, and of our personal experiences. These were early attempts that, it seems to me, still resonate with a degree of clarity.

In these same drawings, some nascent formal experimentation appears, the beginnings of a personal language and grammar of formation that has been developed by me over the years since then, in numerous projects and studies. What is interesting—and a little frightening—is that the basic forms, and ideas, was there from the beginning.

The two more identifiably architectural drawings are less interesting today. The ideas, while well enough drawn, are more conventional, more related to architectural developments of their time. So be it. We have to learn. And also, we must never forget, it takes a long time to understand architecture, let alone create it.

LW

ps. The series of which these drawings are a part was intended to be a ‘treatise on architecture,’ but was never published. Naturally, it also included many pages of dialogical text, such as the one posted here….

There are some problems that seem beyond solution. This is because the causes of the problems are either not known, not well understood, or are so paradoxical and contradictory, so hopelessly intertwined with one another that they cannot be effectively identified and addressed. The problem of slums [some prefer the term 'squatter communities'] is one of these seemingly insoluble problems. They are a global problem and a growing one, as exponential population expansion in many countries forces a disproportionate number of people into increasingly untenable living conditions.

Most slums exist in countries struggling to emerge from colonial exploitation, economic isolation, political anarchy, sectarian violence, and a host of other conditions that do not effect more developed countries, or not so drastically. Poverty is the cause of slums—people do not have money, and little prospect of getting any. Thus they don’t have adequate food, drinking water, medical care, education, or any way to escape their poverty by moving away or up. They are trapped in poverty, more or less without hope. But what is the cause of their poverty? The answer is brutally simple: an unequal distribution of wealth and the resources it can buy and control. Why is a country’s wealth unevenly distributed? Again, painfully simple: because the people who have been able to get the money and resources want to hang on to them, and to get more. Their justification for doing this, even in the face of the visible horrors of poverty and the human suffering it causes, is that those who have the wealth and resources are best able to manage them well. If they were turned over to the poor, they would be squandered and wasted, because the poor have no experience at managing them. The stability of society itself would be threatened. Further justification lies in the presumption that if the owners of the wealth and resources are allowed to do their good job of managing, the poor will benefit, too, because the whole community will prosper. This is sometimes called the Trickle Down Effect.

The problem with these justifications is that they are much too optimistic, particularly for the emerging communities and countries where the most terrible poverty is rampant. The poor are in desperate condition and cannot wait for bits of wealth to filter down to them from the upper socio-economic strata, even if that were to happen. Tragically, the upper strata in the societies most afflicted by poverty and the slums it creates are most likely to be comprised of corrupt and rapacious managers of the wealth, whether in the form of political leaders or private entrepreneurs. Presiding over a politically disempowered and disenfranchised populace, the managers have no one to hold them accountable. Cycles of coups, civil wars, and revolutions usually replace one set of self-enriching despots with another, and the state of the poor is unaffected or made worse. One would hope for the enlightened despot to come along who would enforce true reforms that would improve the lot of the poor, but this has not happened and no one, especially the poor, can count on it. Meanwhile, their lives, played out among the most abject and dehumanizing conditions, goes on. Somehow, and in spite of everything.

Human beings are resourceful. Adaptiveness is the essential human quality, enabled by self-conscious intelligence. Where other animals can live only within a relatively narrow, biologically determined range of conditions, humans can modify either the conditions or themselves to such an extent that they can live at the extremes. Extreme heat, extreme cold, extreme poverty. People adapt and use their ingenuity and inventiveness to survive, but also to find meaning and purpose, and whatever degree of pleasure, even happiness, that humans may know. Living in the slums, which means living without many beneficial, even necessary, things, but also with so many threatening, even dangerous, things, is a great test of human ingenuity, and of the human spirit, which means nothing less than finding, or creating, a degree of satisfaction in being human. In the slums, people’s ability to modify the living conditions is minimal, because they do not have the resources to do so. A few pieces of tin, scrap lumber, cardboard make a house. Clothing and food are scavenged from the refuse of others with more. Health care is homeopathic, and life expectancy is short. Education is in the home, but more often in the dirt paths that pass for streets in the slums. Childhood is truncated; children have to do something useful for the family’s survival, as soon as they are able, or—orphaned at any early age, or cast out because they are too expensive to keep–fend entirely for themselves. Slum dwellers have no choice but concentrate on modifying themselves: adjusting their expectations from life to a minimum; surviving on a minimum of material means; learning how to deal emotionally with daily deprivations that would crush the pride and sense of self-worth of those accustomed to having even a modicum of material comfort and security. In the face of these conditions of existence, their resourcefulness is crucial. People with steady jobs and incomes, who are assured of having enough money to go to school, to the doctor or clinic; who can save some money, buy enough food and clothing to last a while; who can plan for the future; all too often coast along without thinking very much or having to fall back on their resourcefulness. But there is no coasting for the slum dweller. Everything is now, today, and each day is a new struggle for survival. The gains made yesterday were maybe enough, but they were consumed yesterday. Nothing carries over, except the needs.

Slum dwellers share something with people caught in a war zone, where the infrastructure of society has been interrupted or destroyed. They have to scrounge and improvise, just to have the basics pf shelter, food, heat. To survive, they have to be inventive. But the people in the war zone can look forward to the end of war, the restoration of society and its services. The slum dwellers have no such prospect. For them the war, its brutalities and atmosphere of cruelty and indifference to human life, never ends.

It is easy enough for people who do not live in the slums and who are nestled more or less comfortably in their lives to shudder at the unhappy fate of their fellow creatures, while at the same time feeling relieved that it is not their fate. Their security seems assured by their ties to the institutions, and persons, managing the wealth and resources. Their roles in the grand scheme might be small, but they fulfill them earnestly, and steadily, and surely they are necessary to the ‘system,’ so long as they are loyal and useful. Or so they believe, or must believe. Actually, they—the middling servants of the great system—are mere fodder and entirely dispensable. Tomorrow, they could get their pink slips and be out of work, for reasons completely independent of their loyal servitude. Corporate mergers. Downsizing. Accounting corrections. Computer errors. Their being cast into the streets, however, is largely metaphorical. Even unemployed, they are still part of the system. Someone will pick them up. They have experience, education, they are certified, conditioned, too valuable to be thrown away. Or so they hope.

The slum dwellers have not been thrown away either, because they have never been part of the system. A relative few manage to find paid work in factories, or as day laborers, but most fend for themselves, the system’s illegitimate children, its orphans. They scavenge in city dumps, living in one way or another on the waste that others, better off than they, produce. And they do this ingeniously. Like the can collectors in New York City, where the state levied a bounty on a few recyclable materials, slum dwellers work hard to collect from the dumps recyclable materials like plastics, fabrics, rubber and even metals like iron from construction refuse and aluminum from domestic discards, selling them to scrap companies, who in turn sell them by the ton to major recyclers. From there the materials are returned in semi-raw form to factories and the cycles of consumption that constitute the global economy. The slum dwellers, the scavengers and pickers, are part of the big system, but not officially, in the sense that they find a recognized and rewarded place. They get no benefits or perks from the companies that benefit from their labor, but get only what they can earn daily from the crumbs that fall off the big table.

From a safe distance, it is tempting to demonize, or romanticize, slum dwellers. On the demon side, they are parasites, unclean, unwanted, unhealthy, attached to the body of organized society. On the romantic side, they are outsiders, struggling subversively within the system, surviving by their wits and stubbornness, masters of that indispensable human quality, ingenuity. Each view is an extreme of the reality, and each serves the purposes of different interest groups occupying higher social strata. Consequently, both views in effect accept the existence, and persistence, of slums.

Of course, only the most rabid ideologues would openly admit such a thing. “We’ve always had the poor, and always will!” proclaim those on the political far right. “The poor will rise up, and revolutionize the whole society!” proclaim those on the political far left. Sad to say, the far right position is more widely accepted. The idea of radicalizing the poor is a dream or a fantasy of people who do not actually share their desperate conditions. They, the slum dwellers, have no time for political idealism—they are too busy trying, day to day, to survive.

There is much that is admirable in the way that slum dwellers struggle against overwhelming adversity, but admiration must be tempered by the realization that they do not struggle because they choose to, out of principle, or in the service of high social or political ideals, but because of their desperation at the brutal limits of survival. It is a mistake—and a grave disservice to them—to imagine that their ingenuity, resourcefulness, and capacities for self-organization can in any way serve as models for our present global society. To believe so would be to endorse the dog-eat-dog ethics that rule their lives and, all too often, those occupying society’s more economically advantaged classes. To believe so would be to endorse the most cynical and degraded vision of the human future imaginable, a throw-back to the barbarous 19th century perversion of believing in ideas such as ‘the survival of the fittest’ and ‘the nobility of poverty,’ which justified the blatant exploitation of many by a few.

The only thing we can learn from slums today is that they cannot be tolerated in any form, or under any circumstances; that poverty, their most terrible feature, must, as rapidly as possible, be alleviated; that the wealth and resources of any community—which prominently includes its human resources—cannot be controlled for the benefit of an elite, under whatever name or ideology it goes; that the survival of the emergent, global society depends on its reformation of institutions—public and private–presently managing society’s material and cultural wealth; and that reform must come not by violence from the lower social strata, but from enlightened leadership from the higher, if not the highest, strata of the social and economic structure.

[to be continued]

LW

Shandor Hassan’s photographs are of places that seem haunted. The feeling comes not only because we see the places at night, and devoid of people, but from a different kind of emptiness, one that is haunted by a non-human presence, or rather, by the ghost of something more vague, more abstract. This ghost is not at rest, as the stillness of the images suggests. We sense its uneasy presence, even if we do not think or speak of it.

These are not places we like to be. Yet they are here, ostensibly for us. The elements that comprise them are, if not exactly friendly, then at least familiar. They were made for us to use and appreciate. They are intended to welcome us, yet they do not. We enter these places reluctantly, only from necessity. Then we leave as quickly as possible.

But what, exactly, haunts them? I believe it is the ghost of American modernism.

It is the ghost of a once-upon-a-time promise of a better life for everyone, a promise that never delivered. The convenience stores sell junk food that makes us fat. The service station dispenses endless fuel for our gas-guzzlers poisoning the atmosphere. The franchise restaurant is everywhere but belongs nowhere. The pawn shop may be easy, but it reminds us of our, and others’, desperation. The promise haunts us and its ghost lingers at the edges of night, dreamlike and restless.

Then we come to the little illuminated house. How cheerful it is! But the ghost is there, too, mocking our optimism and good cheer.

LW