Where the Revolution Began

The passing of Lawrence Halprin has close ties to an upcoming book that is being released this weekend celebrating his legacy in Portland. This Saturday is a chance to celebrate the legacy of Halprin in Portland, with the release of 'Where the Revolution Began: Lawrence and Anna Halprin and the Reinvention of Public Space'.



On Saturday, December 5th, at 2pm, join us for the release of a book celebrating the world-renowned Portland fountain plazas designed by Lawrence Halprin. The event will be located at the Ziba World Headquarters Auditorium (map) at 1044 9th Ave NW. A quick rundown of events:

Introduction by: Portland Parks Commissioner Nick Fish

Lecture performance by: Ron Blessinger, violinist, Third Angle Ensemble, with dancer/choreographers Linda K. Johnson, Tere Mathern, Cydney Wilkes, and Linda Austin.

Screening of: The City Dance of Lawrence and Anna Halprin. A documentary about the September 2008 performance in Halprin’s Portland plazas.

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About the Book:
Some additional information about the book, from a press release issued by the Halprin Landscape Conservancy:

"Between 1963 and 1970, Lawrence Halprin and Associates realized the Portland Open Space Sequence: a quartet of public plazas in Portland, Oregon, that redefined the city and set a bold new precedent for urban landscape architecture. Comprised of Lovejoy Fountain, Pettygrove Park, and Ira Keller Fountain), plus the lesser-known Source Fountain, the plazas are a collage of striking concrete forms, gushing water, and alpine flora that, in their seamless mix of nature and theater, created a playful metaphorical watershed coursing through the central city."


:: image via Halprin Landscape Conservancy

"Where the Revolution Began (Spacemaker Press, $29.95) is the story of how these plazas came to be. Born of the creative experimentation and collaboration between the late Halprin and his wife, pioneering choreographer/dancer Anna Halprin, the Portland Open Space Sequence came to life in the unlikely setting of the Portland’s first scrape-and-rebuild urban renewal project. But Halprin defied the conventions of both American urban renewal and midcentury modernism, designing the kind of inviting, exuberant public space not seen since Renaissance Rome’s Trevi Fountain and Piazza Navona.

The book is an outgrowth of “The City Dance of Lawrence and Anna Halprin,” a performance that took place in the plazas in September 2008 as part of PICA’s annual TBA Festival. The book’s release, the performance, and screening is a celebration of Halprin, who passed away October 25 at age 94.

For Lawrence Halprin, one of the 20th century’s most influential landscape architects, the Portland plazas were the first step in a career-long exploration of sequential works of landscape design, from the Haas Promenade in Jerusalem to the Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, D.C. For Portland, Halprin’s work marked the beginning of a tradition of remaking the city around interactive public spaces, such as the famed Pioneer Courthouse Square. And for landscape architecture, the plazas laid the earliest foundations for the ecologically and socially responsive urbanism on the rise today.

Replete with historic photographs and Halprin’s notebook drawings, Where the Revolution Began is a historically complete document of how this pivotal moment in urban landscape history came to be, from concept to fruition.

All proceeds from sales benefit the Halprin Landscape Conservancy, a nonprofit organization devoted to educating the public and preserving the Portland Open Space Sequence."

Essays by:
John Beardsley is the director of garden and landscape studies at Dumbarton Oaks and is the author of Earthworks and Beyond: Contemporary Art in the Landscape and Gardens of Revelation: Environments by Visionary Artists.

Janice Ross is a professor in the Drama Department and director of the Dance Division at Stanford University. She is the author of Anna Halprin: Experience as Dance and Moving Lessons: The Beginning of Dance in American Education.

Randy Gragg is editor in chief of Portland Monthly magazine and has written on art and architecture for Architectural Record, Metropolis, Preservation, the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, and numerous other publications.

Contemporary photography by:
Susan Seubert regularly photographs for National Geographic Traveler, Geo Saison, and the New York Times, among other publications. She was a 1999 recipient of Life magazine’s Alfred Eisenstaedt Award.

Funding generously provided by:
Oregon Arts Commission/National Endowment for the Arts
Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts
Portland Development Commission
Portland Parks & Recreation
Schnitzer Care Foundation
Russell Development Company
And many others.

Reading List: Subnature

Another book that engaged me on my hiatus from blogging is one I picked up on somewhat of a whim as it looked like a fascinating read. I wasn't disappointed, as 'Subnature: Architecture's Other Environments" by David Gissen, quickly became impossible to put down. The reason? It really tackles some interesting terrain that is definitely at the fringes of architecture and landscape, which typically addresses the realms purity and order, whether in terms of materials or the messy nature in cities.



To quickly summarize the main components of subnatures, these include: dankness, smoke, gas, exhaust, dust, puddles, mud, debris, weeds, insects, pigeons, and crowds.

The idea of subnature comes from a hierarchy between the supernatural (above nature) and the natural (our current world view), to include this subset of nature in which existence seems difficult if not impossible. Definitely not the standard fare of typical books on architecture, particularly in our current fascination with new space-age materials and technologies to solve problems, while only a minority instead looking at context, natural materiality and process. Gissen's main thesis is we can capture the essence of these subnatures, we may, "...arrive at a truly radical and alternative concept of what environment means."


:: grotto - image via symphonies naturelles

This is specifically engaging, as the evolution of the book, as explained by Gissen in the introduction, is that this information collected here was the residual ephemera from a more focused study an architecture and nature, including a range of historical and contemporary source material from a wide range of sources. While the main academic pursuit of 'natural architecture' is perfectly relevant, (his dissertation included an 'exploration of nature in modern NYC buildings in the 70s) - the leftovers make for a much more interested concept.

So why is the subnature so interesting, specifically in the context of architecture and urbanism? Gissen mentions some of this context: "I draw on architectural and urban design theorists' key texts and contemporary practicioners' recent design to examine how both groups envision peripheral and often denigrated forms of nature..." In essence, it's not just a historical look at unconsidered materials, but a way of looking at the natural processes in a new way. This is perhaps more authentic than many of the explorations and misuse of the word 'ecologies' (or landscape for that matter) in modern parlance, which takes a much broader (and cleaner) cultural view of interactions between organisms and environments.


:: mud - image via ridgeway

There is some precedence for this realm of inquiry, including a few mentioned in the book. These include Antoine Picon's ideas of anxious landscapes, Gilles Clement's writing on the third landscape, and Francois Roche's (from R&Sie(n)) term corrupted biotopes - all of which explore postindustrial landscapes, debris, polluted ecologies, damaged nature. This coincides with some of our recent fascination with the dirty - including a focus on brownfields, post-industrial landscapes, vacant lands, air/water pollution, and other non traditional sites.

This is also why it is interesting to landscape architecture, as it is a clear refutation of the hermetic condition of pure architecture (i.e. a finished product offering refuge from 'outside'), and the desire to apply this condition to that of landscape, which is constantly in flux and infused with these subnatures. Is our desire to fight against these subnatural forces to create order in the garden, or is a more nuanced ecological approach to understand not just the base forces (geological, hydrological, meteorological) and understand the influence and opportunity of the subnatural forces at work.

Gissen frames this in practical terms as a means to achieving true 'sustainability'. The book "...offers an alternative vision to those contemporary municipalities, developers, and architects who seek to remake cities and buildings through the parameters of a more natural framework based on sustainable principles. Subnature also offers an alternative to the emerging vitalist discourse on 'flow' as the dominant effect of nature in architecture." Juxtaposed between the functionalism of the green building movement which "... advance a seemingly neo-Victorian and neo-Haussmannite vision of urbanism in many global cities... [which] often entails the utilization of nature as an instrument that cleans the world, increased productivity and efficiency, and transforms our existing natural relationship, while advancing the social sphere that exists." (p.23)

While not a specific critique of the green movement, it's more a re-engagement in some of the messiness that ensues from our working in nature and specifically subnature either directly or metaphorically. As mentioned, "Subnatures will not save us from our inequities, but its inherently alienating character enables us to consider how more comforting forms and dynamic images of nature are often used to reproduce existing forms of power in society." This is reflected in equity disparities of the rich being able to afford 'green' and the poor still being marginalized and left to reside with the leftover subnatures.

The final distinction is also made between the concept of reconnecting with nature, included in books like Earth Architecture, and one of my favorites The Granite Garden, and pretty much the crux of many of the projects that venture in new forms of habitat creation (such as PHREE Urbanism), Animal Architecture, or much of the Veg.itectural featured on a regular basis. The photoshopped vegetated visuals versus the messy reality is sometimes difficult to reconcile, perhaps due to the subnatural forces at work. Similarly, Gissen distances the concept from the new theories in architecture that embrace material weathering from Mostafavi & Leatherbarrow, showing that "...evironments appear as fixed and stable systems relative to a dramatically changing architecture object." Weathering and veg.itecture have similarities in expression to date, as it is difficult to choose one or the other - wild process here but not here.

The book itself is visually rich, and is very readable - making it a good book for a range of audiences. While potentially veering into either the overly historicist or the overly theoretical, Gissen toes the line with a certain grace that shows adequate historical background but also modern applicability. The historical is the common jumping off point and ranges within the confines of a coherent thought process (say versus the content schizophrenia of BLDG BLOG)... but is no less interesting.

For instance a 1568 image (in the chapter on dankness) by Philibert de l'Orme showing the idea of a 'builder emerging from a dark cave to become an architect', a metaphor from the transformation from the subnatural realm to the natural.


:: image via Freemason Collection

Additional interesting ideas include the necessity of tobacco smoke in the authenitic experience of Philip Johnson's Glass House, Peter and Alison Smithson's work with rubble at the Robin Hood Gardens, the British Beehive, and countless examples both verbal and visual. Many of these are architectural in nature, but many transcend to include urban spaces or particularly landscape context, making (or blurring) the connection between the three and their various influences due to subnatural forces is a key aspect - beyond just the exploration of the forces themselves.

From the epilogue: "...perhaps this hypothetical architect considers these strange forms of nature as a material endemic to architecture and cities, as opposed to an aberration that must be consolidated, removed or dismissed. He or she is not only engaged with the realities of the modern world but with the social processes that surround architecture, urbanism, and history. To rid cities of subnature negates aspects of urbanity while advancing a narrow concept of architecture's proper environment. By seeing only these things that are useful to a building's program, an architect dismisses key aspects of contemporary urban life."

For me the conceptual and contextual framework of the argument is the most interesting component of the book. It is necessary to include modern interpretations of the application or engagement of these subnatures, but for the most part these seemed somewhat less relevant, taking away from the overall impact of the argument. Perhaps this had to do with an amount of technological intervention sometimes required to achieve a balance with subnatures, more of forcing versus working with these processes. The examples are interesting, and definitely worth exploring (and many of them have appeared on the blogs throughout the recent couple of years). A typical example, for instance, is found in the category of exhaust. The B_mu tower by R&Sie(n) incorporates the exhaust of Bangkok into the form of the project, adding an element to the skin of the building that is responsive to the immediate context.




:: images via new territories

Read and see a full overview here.

"Bangkok is a very dusty gray and luminous city.The pollution cloud, CO2 residue, filters and standardizes the light with only gray spectral frequencies.Over 50 different words could be used to describe the tones and the touching aspects of the absence of color: “luminous, vaporous, pheromonal, hideous, shaded, transpiring, cottony, rugged, dirty, hazy, suffocating, hairy…” The dust dresses the city and her biotope, even going so far as to modify the climate. Within this fog of specs and particles, Bangkok becomes the melting pot of hypertrophic human activity with convulsing with exchanges of energy, where visibility becomes its greatest charm. At the antipodes of the canons of modern urbanism and its panoply of instruments lies, the city of Bangkok, ectoplasmic, super fluid to quote Kipnis. "

"She is conceived in between aleatory rhizomes where the arborescent growth is at the same time a factor of her transformation and her operational mode.The project for the future museum B-mu feeds off of the climatic opposition between the urban environment’s protuberant energy and the indoor subdued and subject to the museum conditioning procedures (white cube). We are talking here of two distinct geometric structures: one is Euclidian, globalization incased, where cultural merchandises are circulated in an aseptic and deteritorialized universe, and the other typology, plunged in a intoxicating urban chaos."

:: images via new territories

This look at old/new in tandem is really interesting, and illustrated the books simple beauty. To focus on one or the other exclusively would have made for a focused but somewhat less vibrant read. The beauty is also that it is so topical and necessary within the framework of our modern discussions of green building: "When we talk of architecture engaging with the environment, very often we mean to say that architecture is harmonizing with, or open to, some aspect of an uncorrupted nature. An architecture that engages with the environment usually incorporates or mimics the mechanics of trees, sunlight, water, and wind; whether developing a country house or a skyscraper, the architect attempts to work the form, program, and system of the building into a mutually beneficial relationship with the environment... But as this book has demonstrated, the environment is much more than the nature we often image to be in some prehuman and pristine form; it is composed of subnatures produced by social, political, and architectural processes and concepts. Unlike the natural environment, we cannot possibly imagine a subnatural environment generated by, nor found within, a nonhuman world. Subnatures force us to confront the implicit nonsocial character of nature, as it is invoked in discussions of architecture and the environment." (p.211)

While virtually impossible to adequately cover all of the content of this book in a short post, I'm hoping to expand some of the notions of these subnatures, so look forward to some additional posting around these concepts, weaving in some of Gissen's information and project examples and some other writings.

Stay tuned, and definitely get a copy of this book for reading and re-browsing. Fascinating stuff.

Thriller

Ok, so I'm happy to admit to being really quite inordinately thrilled about this. The Resistible Demise of Michael Jackson (Zero Books) is available for pre-order at Amazon. I have a contribution - about correlations between the design of Neverland and the transformation of Michael Jackson himself- in this collection of essays about MJ. Much more excitingly it includes contributions by Ian Penman, Barney Hoskins and Chris Roberts, as well as a host of excellent writers from the blogosphere including Dominic Fox, Evan Calder-Williams, Robin Carmody and Sam Davies. You could even buy a copy.

Many thanks to the editor Mark Fischer and to Owen (also contributing) for including me in such a fine array.

Ok, gush over. Back to business. (Straightens tie. Goes back to reading RIBA Standard Terms of Appointment).

Reading List: Beyond No. 1

Perfect airplane fare, on a recent trip I had an opportunity to borrow Beyond No. 1, entitled Scenarios and Speculations, featuring a range of short stores on the 'post-contemporary', edited by Pedro Gadanho. An interesting idea, the slim volume takes a different tack: "...dedicated to new, experimental forms of architectural and urban writing, a bookazine in which, amidst other goodies, an extended network of young and upcoming writers are given the freedom to survey the outline of themes and things to come."


:: image via boiteaoutils

The inaugural volume includes a range of work from authors both known and new, opening up a new wave of potential future reading. Some highlights from my reading were from included 'The Last Market' by Antonio Scarpini, (p. 50) Scenarios and Speculations' by Lara Schrijver (p.12), and an inventive graphic novel by Wes Jones on 'Re:Doing Dubai' (p.88) all offering some specific commentary on our current contemporary life.

Also notable is the humorous short story by Gilles Delalex entitled 'Ventolin, Inc.: A Diary of a Voluntary Prisoner of the Motorway' (p. 36) offering a meditation on a life on the road from a mobile photo diarist/social narrator that spends days on the road and eventually is enveloped into the movement, unable to reconnect with the non-mobile counterpart of dead suburban normalcy.

He heads for home, then is overtaken: "As he approaches the last ramp leading to the familiar suburban streets of home, a cold wave of doubt sweeps him over. Exalted by the sensual freedom of the flow, Maitland wonders about the static nature of his home town and the ostensibly stable and local meaning of his old suburban life. He slows down as if to enjoy a littler longer the addicting feeling of his new nomadic life. Will I ever be able to return to my old suburban streets? Or is my real community here on the motorway? Maitland misses the exit deliberately. He knows that the motorway has become his new home, and he may never come back." (p. 41)

This suburban escape is appropriate as well to my favorite essay, from Bruce Sterling, in a story entitled 'White Fungus' which extrapolates on the life of a fictional architect and his work in the anywhere locale, which is the title of the story: "...the edge city. Semi-regulated, semi-prosperous, automobilized expanses of commercial European real-estate. Mostly white brick, hence the name. White Fungus had paved the region, which city planners were bored, or distracted, or bought off." (p. 19)

The story focuses on place as a major character, showing off the non-place that exists in the non-architectural, and looking at the social constructs that exist (or lack) in what is left over. There is also the hope, through the work of a series of builders that addressed a 'new vernacular' that used ephemeral materials and styles - hovel-like parasitic buildings that were dangerous but at least real.

Another aspect is the reinhabitation of junkspace: "Traffic islands. Empty elevator shafts. Gaps within walls, gaps between administrative zones and private properties. Debris-strewn alleys. Rafterspace. Emergency stairs for demolished buildings. Nameless spaces, unseen, unserviced and unlit. They were just - junked spaces, the voids, the absences in the urban fabric." (p.26)

Essentially a meditation on a new architecture - it seems apt giving the economy and the need to reinvent the role and relevance of the designer in this brave new world. As stated by the narrator: "Our architecture did not 'work.' We ourselves were no longer 'working' as that enterprise was formerly understood. We were living, and living rather well, once we found to nerve to proclaim that. To manifest our life in our own space and time." (p.27)

The fiction of Sterling is apt, along with the similar pomo sci-fi of William Gibson and Neal Stephenson (prior to going all historical on us) - of envisioning not a fantasy world, but something maybe happening next year, but giving it a reality that we can grasp and possibly imagine. What is that if not architecture, creating utopian visions of a new, possible, world that reacts to time, capitalism, and culture and reflects it back on us - both good and bad.

The summarizing quote is from Aaron Betsky, in his essay 'The Alpha and the Omega' which shows the power of both the media and the message: "Architecture is a fiction... Some of the most powerful pieces of architecture do not existing in buildings. We inhabit them through stories, whether they are myths, fiction or poetry. Fictional architecture moves us beyond buildings, in time and space, as well as in possibilities non-built buildings can offer. It shows us a wider range of possibilities and evokes spaces impossible (for now) to inhabit."

And Beyond No. 2, focusing on Values and Symptoms, is soon going to be out, and worth checking giving a look with essays from Douglas Coupland amongst others. This is the kind of reading that gives you a bit of a break from heady volumes - but still provides a way of engaging urban thought in new ways.

Large Parks

In the spirit of one of the finest collections of writing on parks (and landscape urbanism) 'Large Parks' (edited by Czerniak & Hargreaves) a recent post on The Infrastructurist catalogs 10 of the world's greatest large parks. "We thought it would be fun to take ten of the world’s largest, most famous, and most beautiful city parks–some combination of those virtues, anyway–and view them from above, all at the same scale, to get a sense of how they’re situated in the fabric of their respective cities and how they work as a whole." Not sure what the reference of what makes them 'great', not it's completeness - and they admittedly have a Western influence but the idea of parks that are reconciled to a similar scale is pretty cool. Very similar to the graphic in the Large Parks book comparing them in B/W figure ground.

A few of the examples:


:: Central Park (NYC) - image via The Infrastructurist


:: The Tiergarten (Berlin) - image via The Infrastructurist


:: Hyde Park (London) - image via The Infrastructurist

Video: The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces

A great video series on YouTube - featuring 'The Social Life of Small urban Spaces' videos (a companion to the book, or is that vice-versa) by William 'Holly' Whyte . The content is kind of late Mad Men era (OK it's the 1970s, but one expects Don Draper to mosey through the shot looking dapper, but with someone other than his wife on his arm) but still fascinating. I wonder why no one is doing this type of urban analysis in our modern times (and please let me if you know some modern iterations of this) as our media-accessible world this seems easy - maybe even through a series of security cameras stiched together.

I've embedded the first installment below... but check out the full series of videos... I'm through a few and they are pretty intriguing.



Thanks @space2place on Twitter for the link to these.