Happy Street

(Photo by Dan Hill.)

Giving us another reason to love John Körmeling's Happy Street at the Shanghai Expo even more is this nighttime photo of the Dutch pavilion taken by Dan Hill, of City of Sound. With its hodgepodge collection of ostensibly detachable modules all crazily lit up, this instant city looks like a mini-Shanghai crossed with a mini-Tokyo or Amsterdam genetically modified with a 24-hour shopping mall and Blade Runner. We know we shouldn't be judging things just by their photos, but those Christmas lights spiraling down the columns make the other pavilions look joyless. Just check out this yawn-a-rama.

One half-expects that flanking that fluorescent Happy Street are cybercafes where the local mafia farm for World of Warcraft gold, McDonald's serving dim sums, noodle shops, sushi bars, hot pot dining halls, ping pong halls, laundromats, capsule hotels, Youth Hostels, pieds-à-terre, dormitories where college students and migrant workers from Shanxi province cram into multi-level bunk beds, bookstores selling rare editions of books that survived the bonfires of the Cultural Revolution alongside copies of Mao's Quotations, Chinese apothecaries, mobile phone repair shops, e-waste recycling sweatshops, antique shops filled with Ming ceramics of questionable provenance, an IMAX 3D movie theater, chapels for Western-style white weddings, Falun Gong secret meditation rooms next door to a non-government sanctioned Catholic church, brothels, acupuncture centers, discothèques, coin-operated pissoirs, Chinese shadow puppet theaters, a landscape architecture studio, haberdasheries where tourists can get outfitted with a Mao suit in just a couple of hours, Michelin 3-starred restaurants, travel agencies, car dealerships, a planetarium, a synagogue, a Freemason lodge, an abattoir, an Apple Store selling iPhone knockoffs, bootleg DVDs and dumplings, a miniature golf course and a miniature football pitch, Buddhist temples, tattoo parlors, Starbucks, AC cooling centers, bôiteries, karaoke bars, oxygen bars that always fill up whether or not there's a smog alert or a sandstorm, the venue for Postopolis! Shanghai, fabulous ballrooms for drag shows, hot-body contests, mock same-sex weddings, Chinese opera performances and the Miss Transgender China beauty pageant, detention centers for human rights campaigners, fishmongers, tea houses, calligraphy schools, English language schools, high schools, gao kao preparation night schools where students hook up to oxygen tanks in the hopes of increasing their concentration, National Ethnic Minority Theme Houses, fully immersive Cave Automatic Virtual Environments (or CAVEs), H&Ms, Zen-inspired spas, hipster boutiques, white guy rental agencies, expat watering holes, organ harvesting clinics, sanitariums, orphanages, missionaries, branches of the Louvre, the Guggenheim and the Tate, satellite campuses of the world's leading universities, studio spaces in which guests for A Date with Luyu are interviewed via satellite, Dance Dance Revolution arcades, crematoriums, grottos, betting shops, bakeries, abortion clinics and a cinema that plays all the films of Jia Zhanke all the time.

In the Archives:
The Dutch Pavilion at Expo 2010 Shanghai

City upon a Chicken

(A “multiscape” by Pim Palsgraaf, 2005.)

If a city upon a hill is but a utopian dream, i.e., unattainable, how about a city upon a chicken? A mobile, disaster-averting city with easy access to cheap, local and free range produce, watched by the rest of the world as a model for a sustainable community.

(Spotted on the wonderful Boiteaoutils.)

We Are All Doomed

(At the intersection of landscape and The Jackson 5.)

Despite the country's lack of tourist infrastructure, its history of petro-conflicts, the nonstop flare-ups of ethnic and religious violence, and the fact that you need a letter of invitation to get a visa (and let's not forget to mention declining attendance at major resorts all over the world or even the lack of credit lines to fund ambitious mega-projects), The Motherland Group are nevertheless planning to build a $3.4bn slave history theme park and luxury resort with “the world's only museum dedicated to the memory of the Jackson Five” near Lagos, Nigeria.

If developers are still running around with such hysterical hubris (“The Motherland Group says their resort alone will pull in 1.4m visitors in the first year alone, rising to 4.4m in five years.”), so utterly complacent to the spectacular economic implosions of the last year or so, we — not just them — are all doomed.

Dos personas en el centro de Sevilla

(From El País, via             .)


POSTSCRIPT #1: Many have asked for the complete text; we relent: “Dos Personas encadenarons sus brazos al suelo en una galería subterránea a cuatro metros de profundidad para evitar, o al menos retrasar, el desalojo y derribo del inmueble que ocupan en el centro de sevilla.” Original. (23 September 2008)

At the Gates of the Desert

(Photo by Denise Bellon.)

One last scanned image from Diana Ketcham's Le Désert de Retz to post here, if for no other reason than it's simply a terrific photo.

It's of André Breton and his Surrealist group, posing for photograph after “[breaking] in through the crumbling wall,” as proto-(sub)urban adventurers “enchanted by the Désert as a symbol of the death of man's intelligence by forces that are primitive, elemental, and irrational.” It would be interesting to hear what they did inside: did they enact a Surrealist play; read poetry to each other; have a picnic in honor of Manet and Seurat; play hide and seek; have sex; reenact Marie Antoinette reenacting a day in the life of a shepherdess; posed for more photos, smiling or making faces behind their death masks? Unfortunately, Ketcham doesn't give a single anecdote.

Nevertheless, it's interesting to speculate what new meanings people today in the twenty-first century will exert into the garden.

Will people again see it as “a triumph of artifice” and an “ingenious integration of the civilizing arts, as works that incorporated the techniques of painting, sculpture, architecture, horticulture, and engineering with the content of literature” in much the same way as M. de Monville's contemporaries had seen it? Will today's installation and performance artists seek new forms of expressions having realized that their methods have not only been done before but also been done magnificently?

Or will it be taken up again as a symbol of gross opulence and immorality, the same way M. de Monville's prosecutors regarded it as during the Reign of Terror? Or would people find it rather poignant and precious that it had survived largely intact, against incredible odds?

And what would M. de Monville actually think of the fact that a third of his property is now part of a golf course, which is conceptually not too dissimilar from his pastoral garden?

And what about those who had found it “a frightening place, where one ventured seeking the thrills of terror” among “its monstrous trees, its shadows, its air of isolation” — how might they now think of the politics surrounding its “rediscovery” in the 60s, the calls for its renovation, and the lawsuits that have delayed its restoration? Where before one had hoped to be enveloped entirely by the wilderness in the hopes of gaining some metaphysical insight, one now detects the mundane machinations of a bureaucracy.

In the Archives:
The Broken Column House
A Pyramid For Serving Glaciers

In This Old House, or: Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House

For its new season, PBS's perennial home improvement show, This Old House, takes the task of remodeling its first ever mid-century modern house. In typical TOH fashion, host Kevin O'Connor and his cohorts guide you to every conceivable facet of a total house remodeling project, from the initial client meeting to the post-construction/housewarming party in brutally dense 30-minute episodes. Away from the drawings and AutoCADs and into the trenches. Every trade gets some screen time: architects, landscape architects, carpenters, plumbers, electricians, interior designers, preservationists, suppliers, painters, engineers, etc.

And arborists? Yes, they show you how to cut down a three-story tree safely away from a neighbor's house, though they make it clear that it should only be done by professionals (at quite an astounding price). And historians? Yes, one gives O'Connor a guided tour of Walter Gropius's house in Lincoln, Massachusetts.

In other words, its holistic approach to televised presentation sets it apart from the cluttered world of home improvement shows.

There is even a webcam.



Which inevitably leads us to fabricate a new reality show, The Surreal Life: Bungalow Edition, starring a medley of architects, landscape architects, urbanists, artists, academics, and critics. Their task is to redesign a Chicago bungalow house and its gardens in an historic South Chicago neighborhood, and they must do so amidst cramp conditions and formica kitchen flooring. There is just one bathroom and a half.

EPISODE 1: OPEN BAR
The gang arrives for introduction, booze, and merriment. Highlight of the episode is the first encounter between Peter Walker and Rem Koolhaas. Peter, blinged out in his recently awarded Jellicoe Medal, the designated Nobel of Landscape Architecture, tries to strike up a conversation with the Pritzker Laureate, but was instantly emasculated: “And you are?” asks Rem. Michael Arad, PW's de facto pussy, tries to salvage the conversation and asks: “So, what does Remment mean?” Koolhaas: “None of your fucking business.” And Arad, as it was in the WTC Memorial Project, is never to be seen or heard from in the series again. Peter the Elder blisters into a tirade: “You know, nobody really believes your Lagos fairy tales.”

EPISODE 2: SITE VISIT
The gang moves into the bungalow. Still nursing a massive hangover from last night's bacchanalia, Frank Gehry exclaims: “What this house needs is a little bit of that old time Quaker minimalist sensibility: clear and immediate spatial clarity, but still respectful of its vernacular forms. Straight lines are the new curves.” The Herzog-Meuron agrees: “Yes, but let's change nothing in the kitchen. The laminated floors, red vinyl chairs, formica-topped table, avocado wallpapering, flourescent fixtures — these must all stay.” David L. Hays: “I hate it. I love it.”

But pretty boy Matthew Barney wonders: “What am I doing here?” John Dixon Hunt replies: “Tu ne sais donc point ce que c'est que la matière.” In the corner, delighting in the sight of the former high school football player, Lucy Lippard lets out a mischievous smirk: “Oh yeah, that's what you're here for.”

EPISODE 3: CHARRETTE
The gang gets down to business. But it soon becomes apparent that the multidisciplinary, single team format might not be the best thing.

Thom Mayne: “What do you DO exactly?”
Walter Hood: “You know nothing of context!”
Thom Mayne: “You mean, Nicolai Ouroussoff knows nothing of you?”
Walter Hood: “My gardens will engulf de Young.”
Thom Mayne: “We actually discovered landscape.”
Walter Hood: “5 years ago.”

Kathryn Gustafson: “Don't touch my plaster casts!”

A bit later.

Adriaan Geuze: “Tumuli earthforms again?”
Michael van Valkenburgh: “Post-industrial homage again?”
Adriaan Geuze: “Tell me Michael, were you in Groundswell?”

And still a bit later.

Al Gore: “Have you accepted Nature yet?”
Martha Schwartz: “I hate Nature.”
William A. McDonough: “Lacrimosa dies illa, qua resurget ex favilla judicandus homo reus. Huic ergo parce, Deus.”
Martha Schwartz: “Fuck you!”

At the end of the episode, everyone goes to their corner to lick their wounds.

EPISODE 4: MISTRESS ZAHA
Zaha Hadid, inexplicably with a flock of chinchillas on leashes, arrives a week late: “'Sup bitches!” Inexplicable as well, she heads straight to the above-ground hot tub, which the owners recently won on The Price is Right, in the backyard, and begins to drown down some mai tais. At the end of the day, she leaves for Dubai to wrestle some projects away from the presently preoccupied Rement. No one notices because of a minor incident earlier.

Agents from Toll Brothers were speculating whether it would be better to simply raze the entire bungalow and plop down in its place a mini McMansion, something Colonial or a Mediterranean-style ranch perhaps. “We could even do the same for every bungalow in the neighborhood.” Upon hearing this, James Howard Kunstler implodes, leaving only a bowtie behind to identify the mangled carcass on the sidewalk as belonging to The Kunstler.

EPISODE 5: CAVORTING WITH THE TRADES
The gang meets with the gang from This Old House. Saskia Sassen pairs off with Kevin O'Connor to inspect the master bedroom. No cameraman was with them, but fortunately, they still had their mics on. And in what will certainly become an instant reality TV classic moment, a “slurp” sound is heard.

EPISODE 6: HALLOWEEN SPECIAL
The ghosts of designers past come to haunt the bungalow. Borromini heaps praises upon praises on Gehry: “Guggenheim Bilbao. Que bello, la nuova Chiesa di San Carlo.” And Olmsted on Peter Latz: “Duisburg-Nord is the new Central Park.” But not every spectral emanation was as flattering nor even civil. Ian McHarg takes possession of Ken Smith. Frank Lloyd Wright takes on Norman Foster. Many limbs are twisted, contorted; much sushi and Veuve Clicquot vomited. Double exorcism is ordered. Holy water gets splashed. The room starts to quiver. The house heaves. The garden convulses. And then suddenly, everything contracts into a singularity before finally phasing out of the space-time continuum.



The following day, Sanford Kwinter arrives as a guest critic: “Architecture-less. Landscape-less. Urban-less. Brilliant!”

Says another guest critic, an untenured journeyman: “No designers. Marvelous!”

Link:
This Old House