Arts South/North: Too Much Living Above All Else
1. A few weeks ago I Slogged about Alice Wheeler’s show at Chambers in Portland (it’s up through Oct. 14; I haven’t seen it yet). Just noticed an in-depth review of it by Jeff Jahn here. (Jahn calls out this image, which struck me, too, even in reproduction.)
2. Sat down with the new issue of ARCADE last night, and it’s not bad, not bad at all. Includes a ranging, connective piece on the stellar collection at the Douglass Truth Library by Charles Mudede and a toothy debate about “Vancouverism” between Julie Bogdanowicz and James Eidse. Come on, ARCADE—put those stories on your web site with the others.
Until that happens, here are a few snippets from the Vancouver argument, diligently typed in by me:
Bogdanowicz: In an attempt to curtail sprawl by increasing housing in the center of the city, Vancouver planners have made a livable downtown that appeals to the suburban needs of predictability and control. The Vancouver Model is laudable in its attempt to address the issues that forced suburbanites out of the city in the first place; but, in some respects, this conception of livability impedes urbanity. … Of course a successful city has to be livable, but the livability in Vancouver has been narrowly defined and the preconcpetions of the Model obstruct possibilities. The planning department has not been critically engaged with the city. Instead it has coasted on this formula. Livability is the ideology through which the Model manifests itself.Eidse: I don’t completely buy the ideology argument. The hybrid composition of the point-tower on podium is a case in point—where the podium addresses a New-Urbanist deference to the street, and the point-tower achieves a Hong Kong-style valorization of residential density. It’s a sort of New Urbanism from the waist down … My sense is that planners are a pragmatic group that simply want to be shown something better. The perceived orthodoxy of the present situation has as much to do with the architects’ failure to imagine and communicate other possibilities as it does with any sort of dogmatism on the part of the planning department.
Bogdanowicz:Yet Vancouverism has emerged as an ideology in its own right. The promise of our early innovations have become doctrinaire. This leaves little room for ingenuity … Somehow, livability and architecture have become mutually exclusive, which has enabled a new-urban-suburbanism in downtown Vancouver, with too much living above all else.
Eidse: The problem isn’t that the buildings look the same, but that they fundamentally are the same and don’t necessarily look it. Architects have responded to the planners’ Model by manipulating the only variable that remains: a frivolous play of surfaces. Architects have become either complacent participants in this marginalization, or have attempted to operate outside of this context, positioning themselves as critics rather than actors.
Any architects out there who care to engage the points?
nah, I'm not an architect, but I took Drafting for three years ...
I think we need to realize that all choices fit one into a series of boxes. You can either choose the Swedish set of boxes, the Canadian set of boxes, the New York set of boxes, or the Seattle set of boxes.
Vancouver's boxes are designed for people who are comfortable living in a multi-cultural society, where ownership is not the highest goal of society and millionaires are not regarded as gods.
Seattle's boxes (greater Seattle) are designed for people who subscribe to the myth of the middle class while forcing the actual people who are middle or lower class to move outside the centers of powers and worshipping both ownership and wealth/millionaires as the greatest good.
It's a choice. Note that Vancouver has cities - West Vancouver and North Vancouver - where the average resident is far wealthier than the average Vancouverite - but less is made of this actual disparity, whereas here we make a point of the disparity and it's more in your face.