1992 (1991) (1993) (1980-1990) (1990-2000) Table of Contents
Kenneth Caldwell, Letters [p. 62], Architecture California, 14. no. 2, November 1992, p. 62 See Text
Chain Reaction, Paul Conrad, Artist, Santa Monica Arts Division Post Card, 1992 See Image
Chain Reaction, Paul Conrad, Artist, Announcement Santa Monica Arts Division, 1992 See Text
Margaret Crawford Mall California, Architecture California, 14. no. 2, November 1992, p. 14, See Text
Paul Bonaventura Richard Diebenkorn, L.A. MOCA Brochure, 1992 See Text
James Doolin Art and Artificiality: Southern California, Architecture California, 14. no. 2, November 1992, p. 9, See Text
John Field, FAIA Seaside Broadside, Architecture California, 14. no. 2, November 1992, p. 44, 45 See Text
Paul Groth Vernacular Parks, Architecture California, 14. no. 2, November 1992 p. 21 See Text
J.B. Jackson The Timing of Towns, Architecture California, 14. no. 2, November 1992, p. 4 See Text
Lian Hurst Mann, AIA, From the Editor, Architecture California, 14. no. 2, November 1992 p. 2, pre-1768, Foreward and Back, See Text
Walter Mosley White Butterfly, Pocket Books: NY, 1992, 292pp., 1956 See Text
John F. Muller Neglected Neighborhood . . . Santa Monica Daily Press, 4 August 2004, 1, 1992, 1946. 1906 See Text
Morris H. Newman Encroachment and Coexistence: Preserving the Edge Conditions of the San Joaquin Valley, Architecture California, 14. no. 2, November 1992, p. 24 See Text
Barton Phelps, AIA, Corridor: The Highspeed Roadway as Generator of New Urban Form, Architecture California, 14. no. 2, November 1992, p. 54 See Text
Andrew Robison, with Judith Brodie, Ruth E. Fine, Margaret Morgan Grasselli and Sarah Greenough Dürer to Diebenkorn: Recent Acquisitions of Art on Paper, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1992 See Text
Martha Schwartz Landscape and Common Culture Since Modernism, Architecture California, 14. no. 2, November 1992, p. 38 See Text
David C. Streatfield The Arts and Crafts Garden in California, Architecture California, 14, no. 2, November 1992, p. 31, See Text
Doug Suiisman American Boulevard: "The Wilshire Project" Architecture California, 14. no. 2, November 1992, p. 46 See Text
Lawrence Weschler Vermeer in Bosnia, Pantheon Books: NY, 2004. (The chapter The Light of L.A. appeared as L.A. Glows in the 23 February 1998 The New Yorker.) 1992 See Text
Documents
Architecture California, 14. no. 2, November 1992
Changing California Landscapes
- Lian Hurst Mann, AIA, From the Editor, p. 2
- J.B. Jackson The Timing of Towns, p. 4
- James Doolin Art and Artificiality: Southern California, p. 9
- Margaret Crawford Mall California, p. 14
- Paul Groth Vernacular Parks, p. 21
- Morris H. Newman Encroachment and Coexistence: Preserving the Edge Conditions of the San Joaquin Valley, p. 24
- Paul Lieberman "I didn't want to Forget" p. 27
- David C. Streatfield The Arts and Crafts Garden in California, p. 31
- Martha Schwartz Landscape and Common Culture Since Modernism, p. 38
- John Field, FAIA Seaside Broadside, p. 44
- Doug Suiisman American Boulevard: "The Wilshire Project, p. 46
- Barton Phelps, AIA Corridor: The Highspeed Roadway as Generator of New Urban Form, p. 54
- Michael Stanton, FAIA The Aftermath of the East Bay Fire, p. 60
- Bloods/Crips Program, p. 61
- Letters, p. 62
Lian Hurst Mann, AIA, From the Editor, Architecture California, 14. no. 2, November 1992 p. 2, pre-1768, Foreward and Back
"When the ice melted, the sea came up and drowned innumerable, river valleys-drowned the Sacramento-San Joaquin from the Golden Gate through the Coastal Ranges and into the Great Central Valley, filling the Bay Area's bays." So the story goes, describing the change that has shaped the California landscape for centuries and continues today, as told by John McPhee in his recent installment of Annals of the Former World in The New Yorker. Then came homo sapiens inhabitation, the Spanish, Mexican, then U.S. waves of colonization, the rush for gold, the fight for water, and at each stage the growth of the population, the built environment, and the imperative for "the control of nature." The control of nature is now so pervasive that only the artifice of a second socially-constructed 'Nature' is known to us-except when history's forces of necessity wrench us out of self-certain self-centeredness: earthquake, fire, flood, or civil insurrection.
"From within this second Nature, J.B. Jackson, in his book Discovering the Vernacular Landscape, defines landscape as the spatial expression of social order: "the field of perpetual conflict and compromise between what is established by authority and what the vernacular insists upon preferring." "Whatever its shape or size [landscape] is never simply . . . a feature of the natural environment; it is always artificial . . ." Thus, landscape is given as societal flux written in the dimensions of space.
"Closer yet to the everyday practices of architects is the challenge to design the landscape within socially- and environmentally-constructed parameters. Here the control of nature actually means its rendering, "the charm of the wilderness, tamed and diversified for convenience and accessibility," as David Streatfield tells us the poet Charles Keeler wrote.
"The articles compiled in this number of Architecture California address these senses of landscape-the physical, the social, the artifactual-each with its particular characteristics of change. Jackson focusses on shared experience of recurring events as the signal characteristic of place-making. Doolin, reflecting flux as a painter can, draws our attention to the profound depth of illusion that characterizes this shared experience. Crawford, projecting a new landscape of "spontaneous malling," shows how the exchange of attributes achieved according to the operation of "adjacent attraction" has successfully made commerce the genius of place and privatized the space of public life. Groth introduces us to vernacular parks, unseen by the official eye of government (and design professionals). [Skateboarding defines itself in part as the constant creation of park and flow, perhaps. KR] Looking at development patterns in the San Joaquin Valley and in northern San Diego County, Newman and Lieberman examine disparate aspects of change originating in the imperatives of economic growth and in the search for symbols of stability in a radically changing social and physical landscape.
[p. 3] "Streatfield and Schwartz describe opposite moments in the history of modern landscape architecture-the Arts and Crafts search for the seemingly appropriate and the beyond-the-modern artist's play with now natural manufactured materials, the new 'appropriate' for landscape. Field, rejecting the vernacular veneer of an imagined past, reminds us of the way we never were, challenging California practitioners to lead a new and responsible shaping of the landscape. Suisman and Phelps take up the challenge by analyzing two artifacts that have transformed the contemporary urban landscapes: the boulevard and the freeway. They embrace the apparent disorder of late capitalist urban development and its postmodern culture and, from this stance, engage the possibility (and illustrate the danger) of harnessing the formal power of these 'monumental' artifacts. They anticipate a new urban order in a larger frame-a possible symbolic unity in the cultural landscape within the context of radical disuntiy in the social terrain.
"Lastly, Stanton and, yes, the Bloods and Crips, address disaster as a force of acute rupture in the changing landscape: the ravages of the earth and of civilized society. Bringing all senses of the term landscape together, one disaster is the result of nature resisting human design, the other of human force resisting the (survival of the fittest) laws of second Nature. Each piece grapples with the potential of radical change-in one case articulating, in the other silently anticipating, the failure to harness our collective knowledge in historical moments of opportunity.
"In the intersices between these points of view I cannot help but see revealed the map that Fredric Jameson envisioned in his 1988 essay Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, the map of a new and historically original penetration and colonization of Nature and Unconscious." We fight to protect the remnants of agricultural lands (which Newman points out were originally wetlands), to recapture the qualities of the wooded East Bay Hills environs (which Streatfield explains were originally grassland), to celebrate the stability symbolized in the Sycuan chief's belltower "watching over her people" (which Lieberman tells us actually recalls the memory of the colonial mission at which her grandmother was a slave). We fight to restore the sanctity of Nature (always ever the fabrication of social consciousness) and the integrity of the individual Unconscious (always ever the product of social being). Here we are reminded by Doolin of his cardinal rule for making art: "Don't be fooled by your own illusions." Yet, it is the production of illusions, particularly illusions about the nature of Nature, that constitutes the late capitalist/postmodern landscape of history as we make it today. The architect, as artiflex, has no choice but to embrace a second Nature: this is our business. However, behind the power of architecture to achieve a visible and symbolic unity is its tendency to efface differences of origins, culture, and class, immersing them in the larger unity of a utopian society. The challenge, and correspondingly the wonderous responsibility of the artiflex, is to contribute to the quality of daily human life and the wealth of our collective culture, mastering the illusory qualities of artifice without illusion, practicing in the company of nature's forces of contradiction and change as yet unforeseen. After all, as McPhee theorizes, "For an extremely long percentage of the history of the world, there was no California. Then, a piece at a time . . . parts began to assemble. An island arc here, a piece of continent there . . . came crunching in upon the continent and have thus far adhered."
J.B. Jackson The Timing of Towns, Architecture California, 14. no. 2, November 1992, p. 4
"Most foreign visitors to the United States eventually come to like us. It is our landscape that bewilders them and that they find hard to understand. They are repelled by its monotony, by the long, straight roads and highways, the immense, rectangular fields, and the lonely white farmhouses, all very much alike. They remind us that in Europe, every city has its own individuality, whereas in this country, it is often hard to distinguish one city from another. With the possible exceptions of Boston, New Orleans, and San Francisco, cities not only lack architectural variety, but they are also lacking in landmarks and in neighborhoods of unique character. We are often asked, how we who live in the midst of such urban monotony can have any sense of place whatsoever.
[p. 8] . . . Let me quote from Paul Tillich:
"The power of space is great, and it is always active for creation and destruction. It is the basis of the desire of any group of human beings to have a place of their own, a place which gives them a reality, presence, power of living, which feeds them, body and soul. This is the reason for the adoration of earth and soil, not of soil generally but of this special soil, and not of earth generally bu of the divine powers connectedc with this special section of earth . . . But every space is limited, and so the conflict arises between the limited space of any human group, even of mankind itself, and the unlimited claim which follows from the definition of this space . . . Tragedy and injustice belong to the gods of space, historical fulfillment and justice belong to the God who acts in time and through time, uniting the separated spaces of his universe in love."
James Doolin Art and Artificiality: Southern California, Architecture California, 14. no. 2, November 1992, p. 9
"One wonders what was here to begin with and what has been done with it? I imagine how the scale would have seemed to the first Europeans on foot or horseback. Dry, scrubby, monotonous flatlands, with not even a tree to relieve the infinite horizontality, with no shelter, no protection-just space to cross as quickly as possible. No reason to settle in, unless, unlike the native peoples, one could deny the reality of the landscape by reconstructing a remembered one of controlling boundaries, gridded roads and temporary structures.
"The majority of Southern Californians still come from somewhere else. Before our first visits, most of us thought we alread knew what it looked like here and how it would be. We had all seen fragments of the landscape rendered in a hundred Hollywood films and TV shows. Many of us, I suspect, came here partly because of what we saw. Many of us were unprepared for what we actually found when we arrived.
"As a landscape painter from the East Coast who arrived in Los Angeles twenty-five years ago, stunned, awed, and horrified, I find the landscape of Southern California at once spectacular and outrageous. Those early feelings must have stirred me because I remain, [p. 10] painting away, moved in one breath and cursing with the next. Like many young artists, I loved to paint what I hated. Being here suited my purposes well. "Art thrives in an extreme environment," I would assert when I had to explain why I was here. I still find this true, but not in the way I first thought.
[p. 10] I should have said, "Artificiality thrives in an extreme environment," because my overwhelming impression upon arriving here was that of endless artificiality on a scale not previously noted by my East Coast-conditioned mind.
In this sense, all urban areas are artificial. But Southern California is different. It is one thing to see a completely man-made settlement in the remote desert and another to see one that spreads out as far as the eye can see. Here the level of artificiality goes beyond the usual structures and roads, the water, power, and communications systems required by most cities. Consider a kind of artificiality that is not the accidental resul of substitution or mechanical fabrication, but based in conscious simulation and deception. As an artist I know a lot about this subject.
The space is too vast, too horizontal. No wonder we have covered out urban areas with so many low rise, low value buildings-anything to fill the empty expanse of desert. No wonder the roaring freeways are our only real monuments-monuments to the all-important need for mobility in an area too huge to cross without them. No wonder there is no intelligent land-use plan beyond the basic gridded battle-ground of real-estate speculation. When space seems infinite, who would consider an overall plan that limits how much one can take for oneself. When space seems infinite, it seems to have its own vast power and self-contained realities that do not relate to any other place. One feels the need to artificially simulate some reassuring realities from other places or times. Back East, where I come from, people call such substitute realities phony, because in the mass media they function only as images and symbols. It is hard for them to understand their actual function here.
As a painter, I am not supposed to be a rational observer. People expect a more emotional reaction, and the extremes of this very artificial environ- [p. 11] ment provide a lot of emotional-and entertaining-content for my painting. But I find that my rational side is constantly questioning the basis of life as we live it here. The time that I have spent in the streets, the mountains, the deserts-making pictures by hand-has given me certain insights. It takes a lot of lookihng before one can see clearly. A good landscape painting is not jus an instant mechanical view, like a photograph. My paintings are formed in an almost organic unity, over a period of months, or even years, from eye, as well as brain, heart, and hand, one stroke at a time. The resulting pictures can surprise me with insights about the physical and social character of Southern California beyond what I would otherwise see. [p. 12]
[p. 12] I have made paintings of the most densely layered urban areas and also of the most desolate areas of Southern California desert. In the desert, the difference between natural and artificial is very clear. The abandoned mines, the tacky little shacks and trailers, the roads and bridges, power lines and aqueducts all stand out clearly in their isolation. They actually heighten the natural character of the landscape around them. This is the first level of artificiality that results from practical contrivance.
But in the urban areas, layer upon layer of artificialtiy covers every square foot of ground, wall, and background space. Greedy dreamers have transformed a boundless, dry, monotonous and lonely space into a land speculator's paradise, utilizing every artifice imaginable-from the most practical constructions to the most useless deceptions, all mixed together.
What confronts us is an immeasurable, three dimensional, larger-than-life assemblage of simulations, illusions, symbols, and images that stretches for miles in every direction. Most of these illusions and deceptions are more closely related to desires than to real lives-they are never real, never tangible.
After many years of observing and then laboring through the process of putting together many hundreds of pictures of this extraordinay landscape, I find that I no longer hate it. I find it to be immensely interesting as a rich source of exotic, paintable forms, full of ideas about our culture and our art. However I remind myself of a basic rule of art making: Do not be fooled by your own illusions. Never conceal from yourself what you are doing, or how and why you do it. Avoid being the fool in your own artificial hall of mirrors.
Does a parallel principle apply to the use of artificiality in the real world? Surely, it is one step to import water to create an artificial oasis, and another to pretend that the oasis is natural. The final step is to enlarge the scale so that there is nothing but oasis as far as one can see, cutting off all awareness of another reality.
"The cliche fool's paradise keeps coming to mind. The changes that have [p. 13] occurred since I arrived a quarter century ago are immense, mostly negaive, and probably predictable. What has not changed is the endless cultivation of illusion to feed the continuing denial of where we are, who we are, and what we really need. Wrapped in this expansive, illusionistic, artificial landscape, we have become completely incapable of perceiving the failure of the economics we practice. We are surprised and angered by the symptoms: overcrowding, congestion, water shortages, sewer overloads, polluted air, unemployment, economic polarizatiion, social injustice-and now, actual rioting and rebellion in the streets.
Do we have a plan for the future that can really address the causes? Of course not. But even if there was one, voters, caught up in the illusionism of the largest artificial environment in history, would vote it down. We're just diddling as Los Angeles burns.
Margaret Crawford Mall California, Architecture California, 14. no. 2, November 1992, p. 14
[p. 14] "Is California the shopping capitol of the world? Although the title has not yet been officiously conferred. The only body capable of awarding such a distinction, the International Council of Shopping Centers, has thus far remained silent. Here are some of the fact: A recent Coldwell Banker survey listed more than 5000 malls in California alone-more than anywhere else in the nation. In spite of tough competition from mega-malls in West Edmonton and Minneapolis, California's malls are still record holders: At 2.65 million square feet of selling space, Del Amo Fashion Plaza in Torrance is America's largest shopping mall; last year South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa generated more sales than any other shopping mall in the country. There are 17 square feet of mall space for every Californian. The system of malls as a whole dominates retail sales in the state, accounting for more than 53 percent of all purchases. To put these abstract figures into perspective, imagine the entire state covered by an uneven pattern of overlapping circles representing mall-catchment areas [The image strikes me as being the Baldessari equivalent of "The Music of the Spheres. KR], each circle's size and location dictated by demographic surveys measuring income levels and purchasing power. Clearly, California has been malled.
The Science of Malling
"How did the malling of California occur? Like the 23,500 other malls in North America, California malls are all governed by strict rules of finance and marketing. These rules date from the golden years between 1960 and 1980, when the basic regional mall paradigm was perfected and systematically replicated. Developers methodically surveyed, divided, and appropriated suburban cornfields and orange groves to create a new landscape of consumption. This was accomplished by honing standard real-estate, financing, and marketing techniques into predictive formulas. Generated initially by risk-free investments demanded by pension funds and insurance companies, the successful malling process quickly became self-perpetuating. Specialized consultants developed techniques of demographic and market research, refined their environmental and architectural analysis, and produced econometric and locational models. Mall architect Victor Gruen proposed an ideal matrix for mall-building that combined the expertise of real-estate brokers, financial and marketing analysts, architects, engineers, transportation planners, landscape archtects, and interior designers-each drawing on the latest academic and commercial methodologies. Gruen's highly structured system was designed to minimize guesswork and to allow him to accurately predict the potential dollar-per-square-foot yield of any projected mall thus virtually guaranteeing profitability to the mall's developers. In their first twenty-five years, less than one percent of shopping malls failed: profits soared as making malls, according to pioneer developer Edward DeBartolo, proved to be "the best investment know to man."
For the consumer, the visible result of this intensive research is the mix-each mall's unique blend of tenants and department store anchors. The mix [p. 15] established and maintained by restrictive leases with clauses that control evey detail from decor to prices. Detailed equations are used to determine exactly how many jewelry stores should be put on each floor. Since branches of national chains are the most reliable money-makers, individually owned stores are admitted only with shorter leases and higher rents. Mall managers constantly adjust the mix, using rents and leases to adapt to the rapidly changing patterns of consumption.
[p. 15] "The various predictable mixes are fine-tuned to the ethnic composition, income levels, and changing tastes of a particular shopping area. Indexes such as VALS (the Value and Life Styles program), produced by the Stanford Research Institute, correlate objective measures such as age, income, and family composition with subjective indicators such as value systems, leisure preferences, and cultural backgrounds to analyze trade areas. For example, Brooks Bros. and Ann Taylor are usually solid bets for areas populated by outer-directed achievers ("hardworking, materializtic, highly-educated traditional consumers; shopping leaders for luxury products") and emulators ("younger, status-conscious, conspicuous consumers"). Sustainers ("struggling poor; anger toward the American system") and Belongers ("midle-class, conservative, conforming shoppers, low to moderate income"). on the other hand, tend to be "value oriented," making KMart or J.C. Penney good anchors for malls where these groups predominate. According to the Life-Style Cluster system, an alternative index, even with identical incomes, the black enterprise and pools and patios groups will exhibit very different consumption patterns. Careful study of such spending patterns can generate a mix that makes the difference between a mere profit-maker and a 'fool money-machine.'
The Utopia of Consumption
[p. 15] "As central institutions in the realm of consumption, shopping malls constantly restructure both products and behavior, transforming them into new combinations. Most directly, the mall, as its domination of retail sales indicates, [p. 16] functions to efficiently circulate large numbers of goods. However, the rigid financial and merchandizing formulas that guranteee and maximize its profits restrict the range and variety of goods it can offer. At the same time, the shopper arrives at the mall with a "confused set of wants." Presented with constantly increasing numbers of products, each promising specialized satisfaction, the shopper exists in a state of fluctuating desire. The mall must simultaneously address these contradictory demands: stimulating nebulous desire and encouraging specific purchases. To survive profitably, it must operate within the enormous disjuncture created between the objective economic logic necessary for the profitable circulation of goods and the unstable subjectivity of the messages exchanged between consumers and commodities, between the limited goods permitted by this logic and the unlimited desires released by this exchange. This subjects retailers and shoppers to a commercial logic that forces both to constantly realize the abstract concept of consumption in money terms. Faced with such restrictions, the mall can realize its profits only by efficiently mediating between the shopper and the commodity. The shopping-mall mix is calculated to organize the disorienting flux of attributes and needs into a recognizable hierarchy of shops defined by cost, status, and life-style images. Merchandise contextualized by price and image orients the shopper, allowing the speculative spiral of desire and deprivation to be interrupted by purchases.
"The physical organization of the mall environment mirrors this disjuncture. All the familiar tricks of mall design-limited entrances, escalators placed only at the end of corridors, fountains and benches carefully positioned to entice shoppers into stores-control the flow of consumers through the numbingly repetitive corridors of shops. The orderly processsion of goods along endless aisles continuously stimulates the desire to buy. At the same time, other architectural tricks contradict commercial considerations. Dramatic atriums create floating spaces for contemplation, multiple levels provide infinite vistas from a variety of viewpoints, and reflective surfaces bring near and far together. The resulting weightless realm receives substance only throught the commodities it contains.
"These strategies are effective; almost every mallgoer has felt their power. The jargon used by mall management demonstrates not only their awareness of these side-effects, but also their partial and imprecise attempts to capitalize on them Joan Didion saw malls as an addictive environmental drug: "One moves for a while in an aqueous supension, not only of light, but of judgement, not only of judgement, but of personality." William Kowinski identified Mal de Mall as a perceptual paradox created by simultaneous stimu- [p. 17] lation and sedation. The jargon used by mall management demonstrates not only their awareness of these side effects, but also their partial and imprecise attempts to capitalize on them [sic]. The 'Gruen Transfer' (named after Victor Gruen) designates the moment when a 'destination buyer,' with a specific purchase in mind, is transformed into an impulse shopper, a crucial point immediately visible in the shift from a determined stride to an erratic and meandering gait. Yet shoppers do not perceive these effects as negative; the expansion of the typical mall visit from twenty minutes in 1960 to nearly three hours today testifies to their increasing desirability.
Retail Magic
"Malls have achieved their commercial success through a variety of strategies that all depend on 'indirect commodification,' a process by which nonsaleable objects, activities, and images are purposely placed in the commodified world of the mall. The basic marketing principle is "adjacent attraction,' where "the most dissimilar objects lend each other mutual support when they are placed next to each other." This logic of association allows noncommodified values to enhance commodities, but it also imposes the reverse processs-previously non-commodified entities become part of the marketplace.
"At an early stage, malls began to introduce a variety of services, such as movies and restaurants. As customers grew more jaded, new attractions such as symphony concerts and skating rinks become commonplace accompaniments to shopping. This expanded the mall's social and recreational role, for teenageers hanging out at the mall replaced crusing the strip; mall walkers began to exercise in the safety and shelter of small corridors; many young adults regard malls as safe and benevolent places to meet other singles. Proximity has established an inescapable behavioral link between human needs-for recreation, public life, and social interaction-and the commercial activities of the mall, between pleasure and profit in an enlarged version of an adjacent attraction. Developers and retailers have recently upped the ante even further by combining shopping with theme park attractions, transforming the mall into a tourist destination. Entertained and stimulated by rollercoasters and merry-go-rounds, shoppers will stay longer and ultimately spend more. Indeed, the two forms had already converged-malls routinely entertain, while theme parks function as disguised market places. Both offer controlled and carefully packaged public spaces and pedestrian experiences.
"With 'mall time' an increasingly standard unit of measure, the conflict between private and public space became acute. Despite Justice Thurgood Marshall's argument that since the mall had assumed the role of a traditional town square, it must also assume its public responsibilities, the Supreme Court confirmed an Oregon mall's legal right to be defined as a private space. Most malls now emphasize this by posting signs and prohibiting picketing, petitions, and anything else deemed detrimental to carefree shopping.
"The contrived packaging, obvious manipulations, and mass-marketing imagery of formula entertainment malls was not without critics, particularly among affluent and educated shoppers. To please this more demanding audience, developer James Rouse expanded the definition of adjacent attraction to incorporate Authenticity-genuinely historic and scenic places-into the world of the mall. Festival marketplaces, such as Ghirardelli Square and the Cannery in San Francisco and Faneuil Hall in Boston, reject mall formulas by mixing historic setting with tasteful renovation and recreational [p. 18] shopping. Highlighting the unique character of a single significant location, these festival marketplaces, use simple themes rooted in genuine contexts as a means of enlivening predictable shopping experiences.
[p. 18] "If actual historic places are not available, they can easily be manufactured. Shopping mall architects easily adapted another theme park concept, Disney's lands, appropriating geographic, historic, or fictional places and reconfiguring them into a specialized shopping environment. This produced a series of specialty centers with invented themes, such as Ports O' Call village in San Pedro, a New England fishing village with a touch of Mississippi steamboat, Oakland's Jack London Village, a timber mining camp, or Beverly Hills new nineteenth-century European shopping street Two Rodeo Drive. Whether rooted in a real context or totally simulated, these malls reduce the complexity and messiness of real places. The demands of marketing erase the uniqueness of place. Still it works: The implied connection between unexpected settings and familiar products reinvigorates the shopping experience. Faneuil Hall attracts as many visitors each year as Disneyland, confirming Rouse's slogan: "Profit is the thing that hauls dreams into focus."
Hyperconsumption: Specialization and Proliferation
"Throughout the period of shopping-mall expansion, economic and social changes were significantly altering the character of the consumer market. Precision in locating and satisfying consumers has become increasingly important since 1980, when malls began to approach the saturation point. In this unstable situation, the continued development of existing mall types was no [p. 19] longer assured. Heightened competition-between corporations, entrepreneurs, and even urban regions-forced a series of shakedowns in the industry. Although the system of regional malls continued to flourish, it was clear that the generic formula mix no longer guaranted profits. The system demonstrated a surprising adaptability: in spite of its history of rigidly programmed uniformity, new economic and locational opportunities prompted new prototypes. Malls expanded by multiplying and diversifying into as many different fragments as the market.
[p. 19] "Existing malls renewed themselves by upgrading their decor and amenities. Future archeologists will read Orange County's social hisotry in south Coast Plaza's successive extensions, the older wings featuring Sears and J.C. Penney's recall the suburbs' original lower-middle-class roots; the elaborate new corridors with stores such as Gucci and Cartier reflect the area's more recent affluence. In the richest markets, luxury malls like the Rodeo Collection in Beverly Hills offer expensive specialty goods in sumtpuous settings, more like luxurious hotels than shopping malls. At the other end of the market, outlet malls sell slightly damaged or out-of-date goods at discount prices; since low cost is the major attraction, undecorated, low-rent buildings only enhance their utilitarian atmosphere.
"New smaller malls eliminate social and public functions to allow more efficient shopping. Strip malls, with parking in front, are the most flexible type; their false fronts can assume any identity, their format can be adjusted to any site, and they can contain any mix of products. In Los Angeles, more than three thousand minimalls supply the daily needs of busy consumers with convenience markets, dry cleaners, video store, and fast food outlets.
"In this overcrowded marketplace, imagery had become increasingly critical as a way of attracting particular shops and facilitating acts of consumption. Through a selective manipulation of images, malls express a broad variety of messages about the world outside.
"Large diverse cities offer veritable encyclopedias of specialized mall types that cater to recent immigrant groups. Here the images retain a vestige of their cultural heritage: Korean malls have blue-tile temple roofs, Japanese malls combine Zen gardens with slick modernism to attract both local residents and touring Japanese. Minimall developers also style their malls according to location: postmodern on the affluent Westside, high-tech in dense urban areas, and Spanish in the rest of the city.
"Malls have not only responded to changing market conditions, but have also become trump cards in the increasing competition between developing cities and regions. Faneuil Hall's success in generating adjacent development development led cities into private-public ventures with the Rouse Company to build waterfront centers as catalysts for urban revitalization. This strategy can also backfire: Horton Plaza, San Diego's spectacular, enormously profitable, and heavily subsidized urban theme park, has remained a city in itself-with little effect on its seedy surroundings. These conditions have been particularly difficult:
The World as a Shopping Mall
[p. 19] "The spread of malls around the world has accustomed large numbers of people to behavior patterns that inextricably link shopping with diversion and pleasure. The transformations of shopping into an experience that can occur in any setting has led to the next stage in mall development: spontaneous malling, a process by which urban spaces are transformed into malls without new buildings or developers. As early as 1946, architects Ketchum, Gina and Sharp proposed restructuring Main [p. 20] St. in Rye, NY, as a pedestrian shopping mall; later Victor Gruen planned to turn downtown Fort Worth into an enclosed mall surrounded by sixty thousand parking spaces. More recently, a number of cities have reconstituted certain areas of malls simply by designating them as pedestrian zones, which allows the development of concentrated shopping. In California, where weather encourages year round outdoor shopping, self-regulating real-estate values allow these new market-places to create their own tenant mix, organized around a unifying theme; this, in turn, attracts supporting activities such as restaurants and cafes. Even wihout removing automobiles, urban streets like Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles and Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills have spontaneously regenerated themselves as specialty malls, thematically based, respectively, on new-wave and European chic. Now, developers are reproducing the city itself in a shopping mall. Still under construction, Universal City Walk in the San Fernando Valley will provide a prepackaged urban experience, a shopping mall combining simulated fragments of Los Angeles-Melrose Avenue, Hollywood Boulevard, and Venice Beach-into a four-block hyperreal city.
"Clearly, the mall has transcended its shopping-center origin. Today, hotels, office buildings, cultural centers, and museums virtually duplicate the layouts and formats of shopping malls. The principal of adjacent attraction is now operating at a societal level, imposing an exchange of attributes between the museum and the shopping mall, between commerce and culture. The world of the shopping mall-respecting no boundaries, no longer limited even by the imperative of consumption-has become the world.
[p. 20: Picture Caption: City Walk, Universal City. The Jerde Partnership, Inc., design architect; Daniel, Mann, Johnson & Mendenhall (DMJM), executive architect; Emmet L. Wemple & Assoc., landscape architect, Model maker, Randy Walker. Photo, Annette Del Zoppo.]
Paul Groth Vernacular Parks, Architecture California, 14. no. 2, November 1992 p. 21
[p. 21] "Design professionals usually see urban parks as official places: special area reserved for aesthetic and spiritual refreshment, and for learning the ruling interpretations of nature and society. Washington D.C.'s Mall and its adjacent museums constitute an obvious example. Other official parks-such as the inevitable collection of pioneer structures rudely collected at the edge of a mid-sized city or the organized arrows pointing the tourist towards the "booster's" view of downtown-lead visitors and local citizens alike to preplanned conclusions. Even though such parks may not be "high style," in their forms they still suggest clear rules of behavior.
"However, if we look at ordinary American environments we can find a very different and very vibrant urrban park tradition, one that we might call the vernacular park. The vernacular park is ad hoc. It is not focussed on a 'correct' visual style, on the adulation of certain types of geological or botanical specimens, or on a prescription for specific activities. It is not particularly urban or wilderness, but simply away from one's normal environment. Like other vernacular landscapes, it is not focused on the future or on abstract ideas, but instead on the present and the everyday. Vernacular park uses often take place where official order is beginning to crumble-in underused area of the city or out on the urban fringe. An uncharacteristically permanent but ubiquitous form of a vernacular park might be a temporary speedboat dock. Vernacular parks often exist within official parks: for instance, a dirt road behind a levee of an otherwise official urban park.
"Children innately create and use vernacular parks largely invisible to the adult population. For the eight-year-old with a tiny boat or model raft to float or to pull with a string, the chains of mud puddles along the side of a road form a public recreation space that can stretch for several blocks. Children of all classes and ethnic backgrounds know vernacular park use, but the adults who create and use vernacular parks most typically come from the lower half of the socioeconomic spectrum. They are recent urban migrants, racial or ethnic minorities, or young adults: people whom the 'official' population might disparagingly categorize as 'working class,' 'low brow,' 'red nick,' or merely 'adolescent.' They often have access to a car-most ofen a used car.
"For many people, the vernacular park is not the covertly transformed nature of official parks, but brazenly commodified nature. The experience of nature goes hand and hand with buying, collecting, and using nature. An exuberant example of this commodification is [p. 22] the Reptile Center gift shop near the Luray Caverns in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. Entrepreneur often run vernacular parks as a business; a brightly colored sign directing mortorists to 'Buy Tickets At Gift Shop' is a typical announcement. How different are the announcements in the official park, where small tasteful signs might merely label the park and credit its benefactor or denote its memorial status (and thus falsely appear to be value-free.) In California's Humboldt Redwoods State Park, for instance, islands of official tall redwoods are discreetly denoted with woodsy log signs. California viewers of a sign saying 'Fannie K. Haas Grove' will automatically connect the trees and the park with the prominence of the Haas family, well known as part of the Levi Strauss fortune and of San Francisco's urban leadership. However, stretching between the official groves of Humboldt redwoods are long areas of private land. In these areas entrepreneurs have erected a vernacular redwoods park: coffee shops, redwood burl emporoiums, dubious museums, and other overt tourist attractions all related somehow to the adjacent trees.
[p, 22] "Both the official and the vernacular are important and authentic parks of Humboldt Redwoods Park. Both zones are commodified. However, at only one of them can visitors buy a redwood burl to take home and make into a coffee table. To the 'official' eye, parkland trinkets are offensive. Yet, since Americans are constantly taught to buy material possessions for their membership in society, why should they not decide to buy into nature as well?
"Interviews and surveys in Jackson State Forest (reported in 1988 by Marcia McNalley and Randy Hester for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection) show that the vernacular park is not a sacred realm but a scenic backdrop for ordinary and everyday activities, many of which ignore nature altogether. Hester and McNalley found that park users felt automobiles, trucks, loud radios, or a motor boat (in the case of water) were usually considered essential; park use could mean such mundane activities as fixing the transmission or watching television. Throughout the U.S. venacular park use for teenagers can mean having a drinking party or just hanging out. The closer a vernacular park area is to the center of the city, the more likely its daytime social promenade will include waxing one's car in the shade while potential admirers cruise by on the nearby road.
"The easy juxtaposition of eveyday activities with a naturalistic backgroung reveals an attitude among these users that does not separate culture from nature-at least not nearly so much as do the people who design official parks. A few years ago a billboard at the entrance to Glacier National Park announced that an auto tape would permit visitors to "Hear Glacier Na- [p. 23] tional Park Come to Life!" Nature, in this format, was clearly something outside the car, separate from humans and separate from culture. Yet in the vernacular park nature is not only outsidde the car but also inside the car. The intervening educational program-if there is one-is commercial. In the vernacular park wilder nature is simply there [usually in the background0, admittedly damaged on occasion. Everyday activities are also there, scenically a bit better off than at home. In their own minds, vernacular users are not desacrilizing the park. For them, it was never particularly sacred in the first place.
[p. 23] "As a lesson for official parks in the U.S., the vernacular tradition reminds us that wherever park use thrives there the automobile is usually thriving too. To plug into the potential vitality of the vernacular park, landscape architects and planners may need to stifle their professional urge to eliminate cars or hid them in the background. In popular vernacular parks, seemingly random parking along the roadside and among the trees blurs the conceptual boundaries between road, parking lot, and park. Inside even Yosemite National Park (as official a park as one might want), the parking lots are dramatic in and of themselves and often see more pleasurable social activitiy than the hiking trails. Along the vernacular zone of the Humboldt Redwoods Park, the predictable roadside attraction of a drive-through tree and drive-on log also prove that parks can embrace automobiles and their occupants.
"Vernacular and official parks may be inherenty contradictory; if so, we must ensure that urban park programs are pluralistic enough to allow both traditions. We must also find ways to mitigate the ecoloigical damage of the vernacular traditions wihout undermining them with official control. We might, for instance, find ourselves designing shelters for waxing cars as well as shelters for picnic tables. If indeed we are to makie an urban park for the furture, perhaps we ought to start with the parking lot. [1991, MOMA]
Morris H. Newman Encroachment and Coexistence: Preserving the Edge Conditions of the San Joaquin Valley, Architecture California, 14. no. 2, November 1992, p. 24
[p. 24] " . . .
The landscape of encroachment, of course, is an archetypal image of California. Much of the state's urban space was originally farmland that was overtaken by land speculation and home building. Los Angeles residents above the age of thrity [now fifty, KR] can remember whern the San Fernando Valley and Orange County were largely agricultural; now development has swallowed much of Northern San Diego County and is gnawing at Ventura County. (Perhaps ironically, the farmland of the San Joaquin Valley could itself be viewed as an encroachment, as the entire valley was wetlands until the nineteenth century.)
[p. 25] The landscape of encroachment is a sort of Steinberg cartoon of sharp contrasts: vast versus compact, vertical versus horizontal, soft versus hard. Even the symbolism is at odds: homebuilders love to sell the countryside with sylvan names like hills, lakes, valleys, and bluffs. . . .
[p. 26] . . .
" . . . In the wake of Proposition 13 (the 1978 tax revolt initiative that limited property taxes) the majority of cities have been in fiscal crisis for more than a decade. Many of them have started redevelopment agencies with the hope of acting as developers and creating new sources for property taxes . . .
David C. Streatfield The Arts and Crafts Garden in California, Architecture California, 14, no. 2, November 1992, p. 31
[p. 31] "The garden was one of the most important contributions of the Arts and Crafts movement to the creation of natural, unpretentious and harmonious environments. Gardens were intended to express regional character, to be built from local materials and simple plants. They were meant to be used as outdoor rooms and places to grow productive plants. The influence of these ideas were considerable, with regional variations appearing in the Eastern and Midwestern states, as well as in California. Because of the extraordinary variety of the physical landscape, California garden makers achieved a diversity of gardens that explored arts and crafts themes, exemplified by the hillside gardens of San Francisco Bay Area and San Diego; by the open-landscape garden, primarily in the Los Angeles Basin; and by the patio garden found throughout the Southland.
"The Arts and Crafts garden emerged in the first decade of the twentieth century as part of a strong reaction against nineteenth-century gardens, which had embraced a wide variety of styles and a heterogeneous array of plants. These collectively represented a set of cultural ideas that had little to do with the landscape itself. Such floristic and stylistic diversity thrived in California, where it was possible to create any kind of garden. The benign climate, the long growing season, and the apparent abundance of water for irrigation led to the importation of plants from many other regions. In this way, the landscape had already been substantially changed before the introduction of the Arts and Crafts ideals.
"When the prodigality of this floral abundance came into question at the turn of the century, Arts and Crafts gardens provided a new set of choices relative to regional "appropriateness." Outwardly oriented to frame views of the landscape, the various garden types provided places in which a domestic space could be settled into the outer landscape. California's mild climate made it possible to spend more time out-of-doors, in the outdoor room, than in other parts of America.
The Physical Regions of California
[p. 31] "California's visually dramatic physical setting is defined by a series of mountain ranges. The Coastal Mountains rise directly from the waters of the Pacific [p. 32] Ocean along the north-south axis from the Oregon border to the Tehachapi Mountains, below which runs the Transverse Range along the east-west axis. This range includes the Santa Ynez, San Gabriel, and San Bernardino Mountains. To the south is the lower plateau known as the Peninsular Range, the western edge of which follows the crescent-shaped shore-line south to the Mexican border. The Los Angeles Basin is a roughly triangular plain lying betwen these ranges and open to the ocean.
[p. 32] "This rugged yet fragile topography has been and is still being created by earthquakes; in addition, wildfires have recurring impacts on naive plants and human settlements. These dramatic processes were largely ignored by settlers, who were preoccupied with the admirable climate . . .
[Picture caption: "Italian cypresses, banana trees and eucalyuptus were used as specimens to provide vertical contrast to the predominantly horizontal shrubs on the terraced slope in the garden Kate O. Sessions created for the B.F. Chase House, designed by Irving Gill in 1911. Photo, San Diego Historical Society.]
[p. 33] Arts and Crafts Sources
"Prior to 1870, California garden designs attempted to replicate either the forms of gardens that wre typical where settlers had come from or garden styles that were popular elsewhere at the time. such cultural imposition was made possible by the unusually extensive range of plants available from other regions of the United States, Europe and Australia, plus an unlimited suppy of irrigation water: Plants culitivated in California could be grown in the rest of the country only under glass. Formal gardens and beds of mosaicculture-a European technique for growing closely cropped succulents in mosaiclike designs-juxtaposed with broad lawns fringed by groves of an extraordinarily large range of trees and shrubs. In 1874, a writer suggested that the ideal mood for California was the "tropical." [In practice, this involved the lavish use of palms and many subtropical species that had to be imported.
"These typically Victorian gardens were largely plant collections, and they had a markedly introverted, self-contained character: only later did gardens begin to take full advantage of outward views. As Arts and Crafts theory and practice became an alternative to these styles, it was taken up by communities such as Berkeley and Pasadena, which had active, civic-improvement societies, as well as individual architects and designers who sought to achieve regional approriateness.
"The conceptual origins of Arts and Crafts gardens in the United States were loosely derived from the ideas of English theorists, most notably John Ruskin's insistence on looking to nature for the development of aethetic principles and on handcraftmanship in which the artisan-craftsman maintained autonomy. Other English writers extolled the virtues of the independent artist-gardener.
"Americans quickly absorbed these ideas, published in new magazines such as House and Garden, House Beautiful, Country Life in America, and especially, Craftsman, the main organ of the Arts and Craft movement. Regional differences developed. In California there were general fidelity to Ruskin's principles, but the influence of English writers and designers were not particularly strong. In the San Francisco Bay Area, the Swedenborgian minister Joseph Worcester's reverance for the holiness of nature was close to Ruskin's, and both influenced Bernard Maybeck. Worcester also appears to have been attracted by Japanese gardens and their symbolism. The existence of a competing Hispanic tradition also provided new challenges to the designers of California gardens. In 1888 Frederick Law Olmsted, working on a plan for Stanford University, proposed a set of design principles appropriate for a new California design tradtion, which he based on the Spanish missions and on Mediterranean courtyard gardens, using little water. Charles Augustus Keeler advocated a mixture of Mediterranean and oriental imagery to provide an ordered harmony. He called for garderns that would combine aspects of the mission and the Japanese garden to create places for repose, study, and domestic leisure. Both traditions emphasized order and the control of nature, and both could be brought together so that "the charm of the wilderness [would be] tamed and diversified for convenience and accessibility."
[p. 33] "These varying points of view confirm the fact that in California the Arts and Crafts movement embraced diverse forms that were not limited to any one style. This range reflected social differences among the garden owners and specific design responses to the distinct physical regions. The one element shared by all of these approaches (with the conspicuous exception of the work [p. 34] of Kate O. Sessions in San Diego) was dependence on profligate use of water.
[p. 34] Arts and Crafts Exemplars
[p. 34] "A coordinated set of principles for private gardens and the entire landscape of the Berkeley hills was developed by the Hillside Club, an improvement society founded in 1898 by Keeler and Bernard Maybeck. Under the guidance of this organization, members completely transformed the grassland hills into a wooded hillside of variegated, exotic trees, within which a variety of carefully sited shingled houses commanded sweeping views of the San Francisco Bay . . .
" . . .
[p. 35] "Santa Barbara was the only part of coastal California that had extensive, open groves of indigneous oak trees. Charles Frederick Eaton-a landscape gardener, architect, and craftsman-embellished his estate for twenty years . . . "nature under control" . . . ''
[p. 35] "A most successful form of natural hillside gardening was practiced in the Ojai Valley by the architects Myron Hunt and Elmer Grey in their gardens for C.W. Robertson and E.D. Libbey . . .
[p. 35] "A completely different form of hillside garden was created in San Diego by the horticulturist Kate O. Sessions, working with such architects as Irving Gill, Frank Mead and Richard S. Requa. San Diego's mesa-like landscape with its steep-sided canyons lacked native trees, and, despite the extensive planting of trees in Balboa Park and on Point Loma, the city never developed a forested character like Berkeley's. Session's plantings sought a new ecological order derived more from a sense of what would grow in the specific climate conditions than from a predetermined set of visual ordering principles.
[p. 35] ". . . the open-landscape garden of the Arts and Crafts movement . . . in the Southland. Houses were placed in the center or on the edge of large lawns, looking out toward the mountains, or a nearby arroyo . . .
[p. 36] ". . . the garden spaces were completely open to the street. The garden space functioned as both a foreground to the views of the distant landscape and an extension of the house.
[p. 36] "The most important exponents of this garden type were Charles Sumner Greene and Henry Mather Greene, who were particularly fascinated by the aesthetic qualities of Japanese gardens . . .
[p. 36] "Arts and Crafts designers favored patio gardens because of their association with Spanish California and Italy. The patio provided space that could be used for a variety of purposes; some patios were covered with retractable glazed roofs or removable canvas panels to become an additional enclosed room, others housed swimming pools. A number of Irving Gill's houses were designed around a patio defined on three siides by colonnades and on the fourth by a wall with glazed openings to a walled garden beyond. These paved partios-furnished with vines, a banana tree, or a small palm, wicker furniture, and rugs-were used as rooms.
[p. 36] [Picture caption: In the Annie Darst garden in San Diego by Irving Gill (1908) the living room opened on to a large pergola covered space, which in turn gave on to a walled garden." San Diego Historical Society]
[p. 36] "In larger gardens a detached pergola would provide a place in the shade to sew, read, converse, or enjoy the view of the garden and the mountains. This created a spatial transition from full enclosure in the patio to partial shade to full sunlight in the garden. Gill's houses represent a form of regional appropriateness derived from Hispanic precedents. But they were also progressive. His concrete houses united advanced building technology with simplified and abstracted references to mission buildings and a romantic delight in the color and wildness of the landscape. The abstract forms were anchored to their settings by pergolas-sometimes open and sometimes covered with creepers and vines that created a delicate tracery on the walls . . .
[p. 36] "Meadow gardening was an unusual garden type, the earliest recorded example of which is Charles Fletcher Lummis's own garden of 1898 at his home El Alisal in Highland Park . . .
[p. 37] Importance to California
"The Arts and Crafts garden in California was a distinct regionalist expression. It shared in the general ideals of garden design elsewhere in the country by creating unpretentious designs out of local materials, in relating buildings to the broader landscape, and in treating garden space as an outdoor room. But it was unique in a number of ways, including the distinctive use of color, the value placed on views, the range of sources and styles, the unique use of the garden room and with extensive impact, the reappearance of a number of professional design features in the gardens of that popular California housing type, the bungalow. In these various ways the Arts and Crafts garden in California established a memorable alternative regional identity. However, like all other attempts to settle this volatile and fragile landscape it depended on the imposition of cultural order and of imported water.
Martha Schwartz Landscape and Common Culture Since Modernism, Architecture California, 14. no. 2, November 1992, p. 38
[p. 38] "In this century, landscape architecture has produced a small but well-known cadre of designers such as Roberto Burle-Marx, Garrett Eckbo, Thomas Church, Lawrence Halprin, and Dan Kiley who, aligning themselves with modernist theory, broke from classical and beauxarts traditions. These designers believed that landscape architecture was an art form related to the other visual arts and that landscape could also serve as a cultural artifact, expressive of contemporary culture and made from modern materials. Although these practitioners could be lumped together as modernists who believe that landscape could and should reflect the needs and values of a modern society, their individual design vocabularies ranged from surrealism to constructivism.
"A more recent generation of landscape architects, including Peter Walker, Rich Hoag, George Hargreaves, and myself [Matha Schwartz] practice within the same modernist tradition-but we are also being influenced by (as well as exerting influence upon) the art world. Today the boundary between art and landscape design has been at least partially effaced. Among this group are Richard Fleischner, Andrew Leicester, Andrea Blum, Elyn Zimmerman, Gary Reivschal, and Mary Miss. This coalition of artists and designers presents an opportunity for landscape to at last be seen again as an aesthetic enterprise and a legitimate art form capable of being judged on formal and intellectual grounds.
"Many aspects of modernism still hold promise for today's world (intentions such as social egalitarianism, honesty in the use of materials, optimism about the future, and, the belief in human rationality), but how have these ideas exhibited themselves in the landscapes of the recent past? While it was based to some degree on environment improvement, architectural modernism has not been kind to the landscape. A great distinction divides the modernist architect's attitude toward architecture and the modernist architect's attitude toward landscape. Architectural modernism has been remarkably disinterested in issues of collective space, for example, focussing instead on the space within buildings. Nor has it developed a formal attitude toward the built landscape. Instead, this was left as a moral arena, unmanipulated although actually socially utilized. Curiously, even those architects who see buildings as being able to manifest ideas are often antagonistic toward landscapes that display visual or intellectual power. Viable landscapes, those landscapes with obvious form, are perceived as competing with buildings and as being too formally active. To allow the building to read more clearly, content must be drained from the landscape. Although every other aspect of the designed environment from buildings to soap spoons has been seen as fair game for architects, modernism never envisioned the landscape as manufactured space or allowed landscape to address issues of form and composition. Well-designed, affordable manufactured products were a goal of the Bauhaus, but the landscape was to [p. 39] remain the pure interstitial fabric upon which buildings wre placed. It was clearly not a field in which cultural attitudes and ideas could be explored. Exterior space was, and has remained, a moral battleground and until recently has rarely been viewed aesthetically, an attitude that has resulted in a remarkable lack of design talents in the field of landscape archtitecture during the last three decades. Those interested in design seek their expression in more fertile fields, such as the visual arts. This, among other factors, has contributed to our degraded visual environment.
[p. 39] "The lack of a modernist vision for our manufactured landscape has had a devasting effect on our urban and suburban environments. Architecture's myopic and self-serving attitude towards landscape as the passive, untouched setting for heroic objects, has been disastrous visually and ecologically. Ironically, it has positioned modernist architects comfortably next to those whom they perceive to be their antagonists, that is, the neoclassical and historicist landscape architects. Modernist landscape architects have been left out on a limb, isolated by an ironic agreement between the lay person and the modernist architect on the point that the landscape should function environmentally and socially, but not intellectually or aesthetically. Landscape architecture has been in existence as a profession in this country for over a century, and the fact that only a small body of notable work of any intellectual rigor exists after those hundred years attests to the unfertile ground for the proliferation of landscape design ideas.
"Many ideas central to modernism are still attractive to me, and thus I distinguish my work from projects by historicist and neoclassicist designers. Of modernism's social agenda, the basic optimism toward the future-where good design can be available to all classes-holds the most power. I view [p. 40] the manufacturing process not as a limitation but as an opportunity, and I see rationality in a positive light. Great landscapes can no longer be made in the tradition of carved stone and the fountains of Renaissance Europe. Instead they must be made today from concrete, asphalt, and plastic, the stuff with which we build our environment on a daily basis. Non-precious materials and off-the-shelf items must be used artfully, and with this attitude we can build beautiful landscapes, not only for the rich, who today will no longer pay for precious materials, but also for the middle class who can't afford them. That we must embrace technology to find the aesthetic opportunities inherent in mass production appears as valid today as it was to the early modernists. While these modernist sentiments are certainly not new attitudes in architecture, landscape architecture has been slow in dealing with the aesthetics of technology, and has evolved a profession based on the romanticizing of the past.
[p. 40] "For example, cheap and ubiquituous landscape materials such as asphalt and concrete are often regarded as lowly and are shunned by developers trying to sell an image of quality. Developers often commit to budgets that can accomodate only lowly materials, although the true (low) value of the project must be hidden from a prospective buyer by attempting to make the product look expensive. The decision to veneer or stamp concrete into stone patterns, for example, ultimately fools no one and simultaneously expresses the lack of value and discomfort with this ruse. It is possible, however, to appreciate asphalt and concrete for what they are-simple, cheap, and malleable-and for their potential beauty when used and maintained properly. This, I believe, is a more realistic and hopeful attitude than the reliance on fine materials applied only superficially.
[p. 40] "Having trained as an artist for ten years . . . My initial interests in the landscape came from sculpture made by artists such as Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, Richard Long, Walter DiMaria and Mary Miss, artists who broke from the tradition of the studio and the commercial New York gallery scene by venturing out into the wilderness to do their work. There they created monumental landscape-inspired sculpture that could not be contained in a gallery or sold for profit. Producing early examples of both conceptual and environmental art, those artists were the bellweathers of a new wave of environmental awareness. They had gone beyond modern art by redefining art as something that was neither a painting to be hung on the wall nor conventional studio sculpture. Art was reinstated as a part of our environment, not as an isol [p. 41] ated event accessible only to the effete gallery world.
[p. 41] "From making discrete landscape objects to shaping the landscape as an integrated work of art and space seemed to me a completely logical sequence. The next step was to move from the pristine natural environment and apply the same ideas of interaction and intervention to the complexity of the city. I am as energized and challenged by this gritty arena as the early earthwork artists who took inspiration from the untouched landscapes of the American southwest.
"My interest as an artist has always been in the mystical quality of geometric forms and their relationhip to each other . . . the landscape must be depicted as architectural space so that it is both recognizable and describable . . . Simple geometries are thus best used in the landscape as mental maps . . . the use of geometry in the landscape is more humane than . . . stylized naturalism. Lastly, [geometry] deals with our manufactured environment more honestly; geometry itself is a rational construct and thereby avoids the issue of trying to mask our man-made environments with a thin veneer of naturalism.
[p. 41] "During my training in landscape architecture, I began to study the works of minimalist artists such a Robert Irwin, Carl Andre, Richard Long, and Don Flavin, artists who deal with the description and manipulation of space. As landscape encompasses a much greater field than painting or most sculpture, the effects must be accomplished with an economy of means . . . Michael Heizer collapsed the vast space of a valley by connecting the viewer with the far side of the mesa along a single bulldozed line . . .
[p. 41] "Artists such as Ron Davis, Robert Mangold, Mel Bochner, Frank Stella, John Newman and Al Held are of particular interest to me. They explore a range of emotions produced by particular visual [p. 42] relationships and delve into the mysticisms and symbolisms inherent in geometry . . .
[p. 42] "The Pop artists-Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg-interest me for their concern with banal, everyday objects and common materials. . .
" . . .
[p. 42] "In conclusion, the modernist architect's break from the beauxarts tradition and neoclassicism was an important event for landscape architecture. As architects had to shed the old in order to develop an aesthetic and philosophical stance to deal with the social needs of post-World War I Europe, we must now shed out romance with our wilderness heritage and the English landscape in order to deal effectively with our expanding urban- and suburbanization. The nostalgia for the (imagined) English countryside (idealized in English landscape and Hudson River School painting) has prevented us from seeing our landscape as it truly is and inhibited the evolution of an approach to landscape appropriate to urbanization. We shake our heads at collective disgust in the ugliness of our manmade environments, and yet we do little to fully consider the scope of the problem or its possible solution. To improve the visual blight, we place diminutive mounds in our median strips and at the bases of our buildings . . . we dredge up the rolling English countryside like a universal balm, wihout questioning its appropriateness or viability . . . Our professions's narrow and moralistic view of what constitutes a correct landscape has disallowed . . . and hampered . . . seeking alternative solutions.
" . . .
[p. 42] "Landscape architecture, as a field, has barely touched upon the questions raised by modernism. To many practitioners, modernism and its attendant growth and embrace of technology are viewed as the cause of the degradation of our natural environment. There continues, however, to be a steady stream of landscape designers who search for meaningful relationships between our natural and built environments, and who work less with romatntic sentiment than eyes opened to the world around them."
John Field, FAIA Seaside Broadside, Architecture California, 14. no. 2, November 1992, p. 44, 45
[p. 44] "A generation ago, many Americans began to fear a grim future for the nations's cities, and in response, there was a massive movement to the suburbs during the post-World War II decades. No one fleeing could have foreseen the similar decline in the nation's suburbs in the 1980's.
"The degeneration of suburban life affects the traditional pre-World War II suburbs-those commuter towns outside Boston, New York, or Chicago that spread out from earlier villages with their prototypical main streets-as well as the sprawling newer suburbs, where housing tracts and freeways engulfed farmland and ranches yet never developed any community focal points other than their shopping centers. Typical of this pattern of growth are Houston, San Jose, and the San Fernando Valley adjacent to Los Angeles.
"Where we live has lost its identity and with that has gone the citizen's sense of social responsibility, yet the comforting feeling of belonging to a larger community beyond an immediate circle of friends is essential in a human environment. The fact is that all American cities and suburbs are spreading far more than the population is increasing. It seems obvious that the destruction of the environment is caused by the subdivion of the countryside rather than by the growth of the cities. We need a different kind of urban development in order to provide housing that departs from the subdivision forms of the last fifty years. We must be flexible enough to adapt to the inevitable economic, social, and technological changes that the furture will bring, without abandoning what we have already built.
[p. 44] "City planning in the United States functions like it did in competing dukedoms in the Middle Ages, but now each socio-political faction demands its share. So politicized is the process that the only goal, finally, is to find consensus on larger issues. This leaves a staff occupied with an endless codifying of small decisions about the design of buildings rather than dealing with the urban experience. Implementing design controls is institutionalizing the whimsy of consensus.
" . . .
[p. 44] "Unfortunately, at present, the most popular idea for dealing with these issues [population increases, housing shortages] and for planning for the future is based on a Ralph Lauren-like notion of creating a past that almost no one ever had. The concept is "the traditional small town."
[p. 45] ". . .
[p. 45] "Better suburbs like Pullman outside Chicago, or Forest Hills Gardens in Queens, which evolved from the nineteenth-and early twentieth-century escape from the city, work as small experiments, but endlessly extending them horizontally has destroyed the essence of their merit. Instead of retreating into a fantasy past, Americans will have to create a new vision and new patterns of more dense development . . .
Doug Suiisman American Boulevard: "The Wilshire Project" Architecture California, 14. no. 2, November 1992, p. 46
[p. 46] " . . .
"Suisman: When Los Angeles first burst out of downtown because of the automobile, Wilshire Boulevard was where the city went . . .
"Phelps: I assume it originally had a trolley car down it?
[p. 47]Suisman: Acutally, in Gaylord Wilshire's founding agreement with the city, which concerned only a few blocks of what is now Wilshire, it was stipulated that there never be trucks or trains on the boulevard. The street was intended to be elegant and residenttial. When the city later brought in the Olmsted firm to study the city's traffic patterns, they recommended that: 1) Wilshire be widened to 200 feet; 2)become a monumental residential parkway . . . the developers had to take it the state Supreme Court to overcome the original zoning restrictions against commercial use.
" . . .
[p. 48] Phelps: "It also exemplifies what Robert Venturi called hyper-proximity, which means things being closer together than they're supposed to be. On Wilshire in Westwood, you can go into the backyard of a one-story house and find yourself within a hundred feet of a twenty-five story apartment building on the boulevard. When you approach from the side streets, it's almost as if you turn the corner and enter a fantasy set of a big city.
" . . .
Lotery: " . . . It has continutiy with respect to transportation, but is discontinuous with respect to communities. And I think the discontinuities may finally be more important.
" . . .
[p. 50] Holston: " . . . L.A. is one of the most segregated cities I have ever lived in.
Robbins: By claass.
Holston: By class, and by race.
Phelps: I believe that statistics show it as the most racially segregated city in the United States.
[p. 51] Holston: The linear boulevards contribute to it. Their dimensions create a cordon effect, cordoning off particular areas. L.A. has been inccrediby successful at keeping groups apart.
Suisman: We discussed the popularity of Westwood and the Third Street Promenade. And they are pretty ethnically mixed, albeit not particulary mixed by class.
" . . .
Phelps: In terms of neighborhood identification, it took me a long time to realize that many people in Los Angeles really didn't have a civic consciousness beyond their local neighborhood. You tend to know only five or six blocks on either side of where you live or work. The growing infrastructural problems of Los Angeles-air, water, traffic-are so big, people are terrified. They will do anything to not think about it. And one of the great ways of not thinking about it is to get very excited about your own neighborhood, or you own street. You get really protective, form an organization, and get very nasty about your neighborhood's future, because that you can see, that you can control. But who knows where the sewage is going? So the new energy behind the 'neighborhood' movement is, I believe, essentially paranoid.
Suisman: Yes, such neighborhoods can become like medieval enclaves.
Caldeira: I think what these people don't want to think about is the heterogeneity and multiculturalism of the city, because most of those local identities are pretty homogeneous. A neighborhood is the largest area that you can keep homogeneous. This creation of segregation occurs in many big cities . . .
" . . .
[p. 51] Suisman: Let's assume for the moment that people will almost universally segregate themselves in cities by class, race, or ethnicity. Two questions then arise. What is the scale of the segregation? . . . In L.A. one of the reasons segregation is so complete is because of the city's scale, meaning that most interactions require a trip in a car . . . isn't the goal than still to encourage contact with 'the other,' the other class, the other ethnic group, . . .?
Phelps: Does this stiuation give new importance to symbols of ahared under- [p. 52] standing? I would propose that Wilshire Boulevard is a monument. And a useful and necessary monument, because it allows for a shared understanding of the landscape of the city. . .
[p. 52] Holston: Because of the freeway system, Los Angeles really doesn't have a visual identity as a city. The untiy of the boulevards is really what the city is. . . .
Phelps: I have to say I disagree with you rather ardently, in your limited definition of the city. I don't see the word city as having been so defined that there are no new chapers in its existence. If you start with the development of the American landscape, the Jeffersonian grid; the idea of wholesale ownership of small pieces of private property, and the temporariness of the landscape-which is perhaps the distinguishing American characteristic: 'trash it and move on-you produce this kind of city. Our older cities were generated by non-American imprints. But Los Angeles offers the biggest collection of 'typical traits' of the American city of the twentieth century. . . .
" . . .
Phelps: ". . . What is the origin of this street? I think you have to go back to the nineteenth century French boulevard, which is primarily a symbolic divider of a city, and which is clearly understood in its use that peoople know what to wear on it and which way to walk when they are there. it is successfully policed, every house has a number on it, it's a totally [p. 53] controlled environment. This became something that all cities had to have. This is what J.B. Jackson would call the Renaissance landscape, with its clear division of public and private . . . So the question that faces us is whether the boulevard is a monument that gets preserved-a historic relic of some value or something else to be used differently. For example, when people start ot sleep in it, we must acknowledge that it has been taken over again and becomes part of what you might call the public realm.
Suisman: You mean the way the homeless sleep there?
[p. 53] Phelps: No. I mean in the medieval sense where life is lived on the street.
Barton Phelps, AIA, Corridor: The Highspeed Roadway as Generator of New Urban Form, Architecture California, 14. no. 2, November 1992, p. 54
[p. 54] "J.B. Jackson "A landscape without visible signs of political history is a landscape without memory or forethought. We are inclined in America to think that the value of monuments is simply to remind us of origins. They are much more valuable as reminders of long-range, collective purpose, of goals and objectives and principles. As such, even the least sightly of monuments gives a landscape beauty and dignity and keeps the collective memory alive."
In his elegant essay Concluding with Landscapes, cultural geographer J.B, Jackson draws an abstract distinction between the messy, ad hoc use of the medieval European landscape (Landscape I) and the clear physical and social ordering of public and private space that develped during the Renaissance and led to the urban formalisms of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Landscape 2). It is the latter, Jackson suggests, that Americans, and American architects in particular, have persistently admired despite its foreignness to an American landscape that he has shown to be distinguished mostly by the signs of temporary and historical conscienceless use. In the remarkable conclusion to his essay, Jackson finds that Renaissance concepts of ordering had only a brief impact on the United States and that the American landscape we encounter today derives from topography of late medieval England with which the earliest settlers were familiar. What he calls our Landscape 3, Jackson believes, has more in common with Landscape 1 than with Landscape 2.
If Jackson's observations seem to seriously question the overall relevance of design, they can also be seen, perhaps, more positively from the architect's perspective, to underscore the value of recognizing the significance of periodic urban transformations and the usefulness of analysing the often unconventional arrangements that they produce.
In California, twentieth century changes in transportation-in particular the supremacy of private cars and trucks and the accommodation by means of elaborate highway engineering of their potential for random and high-speed movement-played a key role in shaping a uniquely complete version of Landscape 3, undiluted by previous urban forms. With this approach, Los Angeles can be seen as a superbly equipped environmental laboratory-the largest (and the most repetitive) collection of these commonplace, undesigned, urban landscape events that have come to characterize the twentieth century developement of American cities, most of which are now more like Los Angeles than their citizens may choose to admit.
[p. 54] "One indication of the radical transformation caused by the construction of the Los Angeles freeway system some thirty years ago is the difficulty we now encounter in imagining the landscape of Los Angeles without it. Freeway construction photos from the early sixties [p. 55] remind us of the enormity of its physical impact as well as the seemingly arbitrary disruption brought about by its superimposition over a fully-developed urban/suburban grid. Harder to grasp now is how the advent of the [p. 56] freeway fundamentally changed the way in which we understand the city.
[p. 56] "Before the colossal pattern of elegantly engineered roadways was imprinted over the small scale neighborhoods through which it passes, residents depended on trolley lines and what we now call "surface" streets to structure their reckoning of the city. Because most buildings were kept low, the system of roads and streets was more diagrammatic than monumental and it was still useful (and easy) to know the names of neighborhoods through which one needed to pass on a trip, for they were posted on street signs across town. This old-fashioned intimacy with places in Los Angeles was obliterated by the freeway system, reducing the names of neighborhoods and the boundaries between them to local lore and obscuring their relations to each other. Now freeway exit signs define important locations and they do so in terms of major cross streets. Newcomers receive seemingly arbitrary instructions to turn "right" or "left" as a first direction upon returning to the pre-freeway streetscape. Movement through the city has become abstract and separate from experience in the life of the street.
Dense parkway planting, intended to soften the juxtaposition of two different scales of building, results in a remarkable duality between the experience of the roadway and that of the bordering streets. The striking clarity of engineerig thought that created the hyperproximity of suburban backyards and fourteen lane roadways can now be perceived only from the air. Thus, the monumental formal implications of the roadway, for the most part, go unnoticed.
Functionally, an exponential increase in the volume of traffic has lessened the promise of dependably efficient automobile travel and rendered the residual condition at street level even less tenable. There, a noisy, fractured landscape of cul-de-sac streets that still seem only recently severed, ugly and ineffective noise barriers, daunting (even dangerous) pedestrian bridges and tunnels, and overgrown plantings stretch hundreds of miles throughout the city. Citizen concern focusses on protecting neighborhoods along the corridor and even reconnecting them across the roadway. Stripped of novelty, the high speed roadway has become a common, powerfully definitive featture of the landscape of the "horizontal," car-oriented city. But a revisionist examination of those all-too-familiar urban conditions- "unresolved" by urban design standards-that result from the superimposition of the freeway suggests the possiblity that new building types and collective forms could be used to reclaim neighborhood identity [p. 57] and even reconnect freeway drivers wtih the places they roll by.
[p. 57] "Preliminary research conducted in 1988 with students at the Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of California, Los Angeles, indicates that, for reasons of cost and political complexity, major freeway expansion in Los Angeles is generally unlikely. No-growth activity in established neighborhoods, an encouraging Cal-Trans air rights leasing program, the lack of clear planning policy, and the record of recent speculative building work together to suggest rather that the land comprising freeway corridors is likely to attract intense and incoherent development.
A 9.4 mile stretch of the Santa Monica Freeway between the San Diego and Harbor Freeways was selected for study because in addition to its status as the most heavily traveled roadway in the world, it displays an impressively varied design as it slices over and through a broad range of topgraphical and neighborhood conditions, it is possible to distinguish the layered phenomenal, formal, and political implications of this freeway landscape. Our 1991 exhibition Corridor: The Highspeed Roadway as Generator of New Urban Forms represents a first attempt to analyze and reconfigure prominent edges of the vast, often suburban, fabric that lies along the right-of-way of the freeway system. It accepts the freeway as a meaningful monumental form and takes its overlay on the city as a stimulus for the development of richer, more comprehensible urban landscape-one that responds to the scale of the roadway and its formalizing potential for the city around it.
Organized into four parts, the exhibition began by documeting the transformation of the pre-freeway city. Superimposition: Building the Roadway compared construction photos from the early 1960s with views of the same sites today. The second part, "Duality Unresolved: Conditions and Possibilities," was composed of a sequence of slides showing present conditions. These were grouped as experiential types: "The Ride," "Hyperproximity," "Disruption," "Vacant Rooms," and "Vestigial Armatures." The latter posed the formative potential of the freeway artifact by showing lively public spaces in Italy that were shaped by the foundations of long-gone Roman structures. In Part Three, "Ways of Looking at a Freeway," differing graphic representations of the corridor ware combined with provocative quotations from well-known observers of the landscape. "On and Off," "The Ride," Topography," "Local Conditions," "Zoning," and "Disruption" suggested alternative [p. 58] interpretations and reconsiderations of the freeway beyond the humdrum of the commute.
[p. 58] The last part, "Proposals for Lateral Incidents," was shaped largely by two concepts that emerged from the 1988 study. We referred to them as "The Middle Layer" and "Informing the Ride."
"The Middle Layer" postulates the insertion of a variety of building types into the undervalued and unprotected strips of property that border the freeway system and straddle two dramatically different scales of buildings. At street level, the Middle Layer raises specific questions of the appropriateness of programs and architectural form, as well as more general issues of neighborhood coherence, noise abatement, traffic reduction, and possibilities for new densities or proximity between living and working space. Current thinking suggests that these latter linkages and their resultant reduction of commuter travel promise one of the few attainable solutions to the rapidly worsening problem of car traffic in Los Angeles. Middle Layer studies need to look realistically at land value and development potential, but another main focus rests on design issues related to the context of the selected sites-their unusual topography and shape, the special construction techniques they will require, and their proximity to a noisy, dirty urban artifact of extraordinary formal power.
"Informing the Ride" explores the experiential duality that exists between the roadway and the surrounding city, and the possibility for citizens to understand both better. It assesses the effect of "marker' buildings and spaces in order to learn how they can fix and identify specific neighborhoods or places within the panoramic view of the city that the freeway driver comes to know and enjoy. Informing studies involve structuring the visual impact of the Middle Layer when it moves into [p. 59] the motorist's field of view. They suggest structures that respond to dramatic transitions in use and perception, both in their horizontal and in their vertical dimensions. Because the particular stretch of freeway under consideration is often elevated above the street plane, these studies need to operate at a larger scale than that of individual buildings on the street. They emphasize three-dimensional concerns of solid and void, sculptural forms, skyline, texture, rhythm, multiple lines of view, and kinesthesia.
[p. 59] Prompted in part, by Jackson's willingness to view change in the American landscape as a positive cultural expression, we have examined ways in which a structural interaction between the freeway and its adjoining neighborhoods can work to the benefit of both. In the interest of posing credible alternatives for a less exclusive planning policy, Corridor proposes a series of Lateral Incidences at selected sites along the roadway. These suggestions represent only a few of the specific sties with Middle Layer and Informing potential. They represent an architect's reading of the implications of certain undeveloped residual situations and are essentially practical. The scale of such projects can be extremely large and their design and implementation would require complex public-private cooperation and neighborhood participation to develop guideline requirements allowing for local specificity and multiple designs. In all cases they would require a fundamental balance between respect for the roadway as a single artifact and the thoughtful restructuring of the social landscape it is intended to serve.
Kenneth Caldwell, Letters [p. 62], Architecture California, 14. no. 2, November 1992, p. 62
[p. 63] To the Editor,
As someone who works with archtectural photographs every day, I took special interest in the May issue. I have reread the articles by Esther McCoy, Craig Hodgetts, and Grant Medford because I found links between them that were not apparent on first reading.
I turned to Esther McCoy's piece first because her stories, which are so direct, so clear, reveal more layers when they are reread. In her funny tale, one many of us have experienced, she establishes the basis for the truth/untruth discussion that can be found throughout this issue. By now, most sophisticated clients understand that architectural photographs are similar to artists' renderings; a building is seen in its best light. It is the good glimpse, not the whole story.
How architectural photography moves forward, out of the invented, or styled, lies in what Hodgetts calls "the political, or the capitalistic." Whoever pays owns the refocused truth. Some [p. 63] possibilities for dialogue about this can be found in Grant Medford's article and more importantly, in his own work. He is quite precise about the distinction between the commissioned work and what he calls his "own photographs." I'm not sure that many of the architects who hire him know about his other work, nor am I sure how the two kinds of work influence each other. But what he is doing-taking photographs of buildings as he sees them, without commission-is a political act. Working outside of the capitalistic/owner model, both Medford (and Abbott) turn away from what Hodgetts calls the photograph's narrative and return to the realm of the photographer's or artist's narrative. The choice to record on one's own, without a capital end in mind-whether with a single image or with moving images, as Hodgetts suggests-will be real movement. I hope more archittectural photographers step outside the constraints of the commission and that Architecture California devotes a future issue to those images, those truths.
Kenneth Caldwell, Berkeley
Chain Reaction, Paul Conrad, Artist, Santa Monica Arts Division Post Card, 1992
Chain Reaction, Paul Conrad, Artist, Announcement Santa Monica Arts Division, 1992
Chain Reaction, Paul Conrad, Artist, Santa Monica Arts Division Post Card, Santa Monica, CA 90405. Postal Meter July 22, '92, $0.19. Addressed to Kelyn Roberts, 2421 3rd St, Santa Monica, CA 90405
"Peace Day! Join the Santa Monica Arts Commission for a celebration of Paul Conrad's 1991 Sculpture Chain Reaction. An afternoon of traditional ethnic and contemporary music and dance featuring Madame Consuma-san Japanese Dance Group, Grupo Folklorico, UCLA Modern Dancers. Santa Monica Civic Center, 1855 Main Street. August 1, 1992, 2:30-4:30 p.m. Free Parking. Sculpture made possible by an anonymous donor through the Santa Monica Arts Foundation. Coordinated by the City of Santa Monica Arts Division. Photography by Ed Goldstein. Information: (310) 456-8350" Santa Monica Arts Division, 3239 Donald Douglas Loop South, Santa Monica, California, 90405
Paul Bonaventura Richard Diebenkorn, L.A. MOCA Brochure, 1992
"Of all of the qualities that distinguish Richard Diebenkorn's paintings, it is perhaps their manifestations of fallibility that attract us to them so strongly. Their looks give us insights into the workings of the artist's mind, mirroring the kinds of decisions, intuitive and spontaneous, which Diebenkorn is called upon to make in the fabrication of a painting: what constitutes the best juxtaposition of colors between one part of a canvas and its neighbor, for example, or the most favorable placement for an arm or a glass or a tree. Most importantly, they show how regularly Diebenkorn is confounded by his own decision-making, how choices made are subsequently adjudged to be inappropriate in the wake of further developments and how frequently they necessitate a degree of new and more inspired thinking to imbue them with the required correctness.
"By approaching paintings as an empirical activity, the artist has chosen to explore picture-making as a series of problems and possibilities. "With each new painting," he says, "I find a way (to go about it) all to soon, and that's when the trouble starts." Although most painters choose to obscure the trial-and-error nature of their craft, Diebenkorn has settled upon a brand of revelatory construction. His adjustments on the canvas take their leads from the precursors and it is entirely fitting that, on occasion, they require the ghost-like showings-through of those first impulsive essays in order to illustrate what was considered too obvious beforehand and what more eloquent options have been advanced with the aid of hindsight.
"As a consequence, the spectator is often aware of a very genuine sense of struggle, of a contest between the wishes and expectations of the painter and the seemingly perverse logic of the picture's components. The presence of restless amendments and rubbing-out in the Ocean Park series and the sometimes copious over-painting in the figurative works stand as a testament not only to a history of frustration and reappraisal, but also to an assiduous honesty, of an approach to painting that marks out the revisionist tendencies of an inquiring mind eager for answers to the questions it puts forth. Diebenkorn's pictorial and intellectual odyssey proclaims an avowed desire "to get everything right" notwithstanding the seeming impossibility of that course.
" . . .
"Any panoramic associations in these unashamedly sensual pictures are perhaps unwittingly reinforced for the onlooker by an understated and atmospheric palette redolent of hazy smog over congested freeways, of shimmering hilltops and parched fields, of dazzlingly reflective pastel-colored walls and freshly watered suburban lawns. Complex and tentative in some instances, straightforward and emphatic in others, the paintings give off a kind of light with which the region is traditionally identified. However, for the artist the heavy-lidded Pacific sunshine is something of which he becomes aware only after periods of activity in the studio. "Non- painters often say, 'What a lovely light here,' but I myself don't see it . . . My own approach is very different. I see the light only at the end of working on a painting. I mean, I discover the light of a place gradually, and only through painting it." In his discriminating avoidance of the easy solution, Diebenkorn has spent the last fifty years searching for the best possible light."
Walter Mosley White Butterfly, Pocket Books: NY, 1992, 292pp., 1956
[He] had cotton candy and caramel corn. . . . We went home feeling dizzy from the red flashing lights and bells . . ." p. 263
John F. Muller Neglected Neighborhood . . . Santa Monica Daily Press, 4 August 2004, 1, 2004a, 1992, 1946, 1906
" . . .
"The city's original 1906 charter mandated district representatives and the direct election of the mayor. However, a 1946 charter reform set the current system, in place, under which the seven council members are elected at large. A city-commissioned study in 1992 found that the change was partially designed to exclude a growing black population in the Pico neighborhood from political power. . . ."
Andrew Robison, with Judith Brodie, Ruth E. Fine, Margaret Morgan Grasselli and Sarah Greenough Dürer to Diebenkorn: Recent Acquisitions of Art on Paper, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1992
" . . .
"Unique treasures from Crown Point Press are three working proofs for Diebenkorn's Combination, 1981 . . . which the artist altered by drawing and/or collage as he developed the image. He considerably modified the forms and made major shifts in color, converting the green field to a reddish one and in reverse changing a red tone in the spade form at the upper right to a green. . . .
" . . .
"Artist Sam Francis made a generous gift of fifty-five prints to the National Gallery last year. Particularly exciting is his untitled work of 1983 . . . our first of Francis' very beautiful monotypes. It is one of an important group of unique images printed from woodblocks . . . in the early 1980s. Francis' strong colors and powerful forms were printed from multiple pieces of plywood, irregular in shape and size, that were laid onto a wooden base, and together they functioned as a matrix. In combination with areas of intense color, Francis used ghost images made from wood that had previously been printed in other works in the series; the thin film of ink that remained achieved gentle modulations of pale tone that heighten the wood grain. His loose painterly marks result from splattering color directly on his matrix as if on canvas. The balance of Francis' gift is a little-known series of self-portraits of penetrating intensity as as wonderful humor, printed in etchings and lithography during the early 1970s.
"Another generous artist-donor last year was June Wayne, the founder of Tamarind Lithography Workshop, which was active in Los Angeles from 1960 to 1970. In addition to facilitating the art of lithography for hundreds of others, Wayne also accomplished an impressive corpus of her own prints. This year she donated twenty-five of these dating from 1951 to 1987 to fill gaps in our collection . . . including the portfolio Solar Flares, 1983 . . . Brilliantly colorful, Solar Flames, Solar Burst, Solar Flash, Solar Wave . . . and Solar Refraction are printed on paper bearing the artist's own watermark and enclosed in a Mylar wrapper that acts as title page and colophon.
" . . ."
Richard Diebenkorn (b. 1922)
Sam Francis (b. 1923)
June Wayne (b. 1918)
Lawrence Weschler Vermeer in Bosnia, Pantheon Books: NY, 2004. (The chapter The Light of L.A. appeared as L.A. Glows in the 23 February 1998 The New Yorker.) 1992
The Light of L.A.
"But light is over!" Paul Schimmel, the chief curator at MOCA, . . . "There hasn't been light in this city for more than ten years now." [He organized Helter Skelter, a show] . . . to prove precisely that in 1992. On first arriving in L.A., in 1981, Schimmel had half expected to encounter some third- or fouth-generation version of the Light and Space orthodoxies that had come to be so closely identified with the L.A. art scene during the sixties and the early seventies-through the hegemony of masters ranging from Robert Irwin* to Richard Diebenkorn*. Instead, he found a younger generation of artists-exemplified by the likes of Mike Kelley and Nancy Rubins-who seemed to have rejected the light aesthetic entirely, opting instead for a decidely darker, seedier, more grimly unsettling and dystopian view of the L.A. realtiy. "Partly," Schimmel speculated, "this was because by the late seventies and early eighties light in L.A. had been so academicized that it had really become little more than a commercial cliché. There was nowhere else to go with it. In part, too, long before a lot of other people, these artists were onto some of the bleak social transformations that were eroding the city itself. Helter Skelter closed on a Sunday, and the worst riots in the city's history erupted the following Wednesday."
"Of course, in its very title, the Helter Skelter show acknowledged the fact that its countervision of the L.A. reality was itself rooted in a long countertradition-one that wended back from the Manson murders into the noir world of the great crime novelists and filmmakers of the thirties and forties. It's interesting how those noir novelists and filmmakers almost completely inoculated themselves against the blandishments of the light of L.A., in part by setting most of their scenes either at night or indoors-in fact, usually both. . . "