Suburban Still Life

Another upcoming highlight to our class will include a visit by Linda K. Johnson, a dancer and performance artist most known locally for both the work recently at South Waterfront and the ongoing series of dances that celebrate the local legacy of Anna and Lawrence Halprin and Portland fountains entitle "The City Dance of Lawrence and Anna Halprin" which is a regular annual performance in the city (more here from Portland Architecture as well).


:: City Dance - image via Portland Architecture

Back in 1999, she was involved in a curated installation related to the UGB. From the ORLO site: "Spanning Boundaries” was a series of site-specific art works, performances and a one-night symposium into the exploration of Portland’s Urban Growth Boundary (UGB). Growth issues are a provocative topic throughout the nation and each artist created installations along its edges. In this intriguing visual juxtaposition of site/non-site art, “Spanning Boundaries” created a broad civic dialogue about community identity, individual rights, historical antecedent and the future of Portland’s growing metropolis."


:: image via Orlo

Johnson's installation entitled 'The View From Here' included site specific performance work at Riverside/Clackamas, Bella Madrona/Sherwood, Broughton Beach/Marina Drive, Dabney State Park/Troutdale, Springwater Corridor/Powell Butte and Jackson Bottom Wetlands/Hillsboro.

A quote from the book Urban Sprawl, by Gregory Squires "The UGB has even attracted the attention of artists, surely a rarity for a land use regulation. Dancer and performance artist Linda K. Johnson set up camp for 36-hour stints at four different points on the UGB, living in a fence-like tent supplied with a TV set and Martha Stewart dishes and bedding. She quickly replaced her specialized choreography with straightforward chats with visitors, pulling opinions from yuppies, school kids, construction workers, and architects. Out of the resulting "suburban still life" came new, complex understandings of the way that the UGB has affected "every single solitary aspect of the way we livie... traffic, education, taxes, our desires and housing and architecture." For Johnson - and for many other Portlanders - the growth boundary has become "a different viewfinder to see the city through" (Gragg 1999).

Quest for the Livable City

For an upcoming seminar class that myself and my colleague Brett Milligan are teaching in the Winter Quarter at the University of Oregon Architecture Program here in Portland, I've been doing a good bit of research on our local planning. Look for some upcoming posts here and at Brett's blog FAD on the topic of Portland's Urban Edge.


:: Portlands Urban Growth Boundary

The class will investigate the phenomenon of the Portland Urban Edge in . One recent resource that I picked up from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy is an hour-long documentary called 'Quest for the Livable City', part of their Making Sense of Place Series.


:: image via Northern Light Productions

I just finished watching the DVD and it's a great overview of some of the pros and cons of our unique system of land use planning, a passable primer for understanding the edge in a number of ways. Check out a quick trailer here:

Thinking It Over and Over

Things are likely to be a little quiet around these parts for a while as an onerous work load (oh poor old me) takes its toll. I will at some point pop up in various places writing on topics as varied as the return of James Wines to the architectural consciousness, the geography of heavy metal and why suburbia isn't funny anymore, but for the moment all I can do is point you in the direction of some good writing elsewhere.

Entschwindet und Vergeht is superb as usual on the uses and abuses of the Crystal Palace and yer Owen Hatherley is terrific on the joys of dancing to the digital angles of electroclash. Also, check out his link to an intriguing and (to me) unknown lost monument in the excellently titled Iron, Glass and Failure post.

Slightly redundantly I will echo Murphy's endorsement of the Sesquipedalist's excellent series of photo's of the ruins of Gillespie, Kidd and Coia's St Peter's Seminary. Mockitecture has a convincingly Venturian post on decorated Brutalism, as well as a fine collection of photos of Burger King's Whopper from around the world. And I've been enjoying this site a lot recently. It slightly does my head in visually, but has a fabulous collection of interior photos ranging from Sol Le Witt's house to a collection of empty and desolately beautiful nightclub interiors, all velvet seats covered in cigarette burns and scuffed dancefloors.

The AOC have another new blog site for their latest teaching outpost, this year looking at the Thames Valley. I'll be spending a lot of time in the wilds of Kent myself, as the expansion of Lydd Airport into the otherwise silent marshes of Rainham is the setting for a project I'll be teaching at Canterbury architecture school this semester. In this - if not in all other senses - I'm not as glamorous as my colleague, who is teaching an Intermediate Unit at the AA this year entitled the Pop Vernacular Research Laboratory.

Also, when FAT make their much heralded return to Yale in the New Year, we will be bringing our students over to see the lovely East Kent coast (lucky them) where we will go on a booze cruise, draw sections through cross channel ferries, attempt to dissect the various dubious notions of Britishness bound up around the place and generally roll in the clover on the White Cliffs of Dover.

The photo at the top of this post shows the extraordinary infrastucture of Dover. Note the road into the harbour, which descends past Dover Castle before sweeping you over the edge of the cliff, around the town and down in a loop onto the bleak concrete forecourt of the terminal itself.

From there you can drive onto a boat full of nutters playing fruit machines on their way to France to buy inordinate quantities of cheap booze. Trundling the other way is an ever increasing number of container lorries full of washing machines, clothes and children's toys. Countless B&B's cater for asylum seekers and their tabloid mirror image, illegal immigrants. The town is a locus for national pride and - sorry to say - a bit of a shit hole. This is, in some senses, England.

Incidentally, while researching Dover I came across this.

(Image at the top of the post is via)