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News & ArtsTuesday, May 5, 2009
Visual Art Currently Hanging
Posted by Jen Graves on Tue, May 5, 2009 at 10:02 AM
Here's one artist on another—and getting the freaky current-day setting of Robert Morris's earth work in a rapidly developing corner of Kent just right.
Eirik Johnson is showing his series Sawdust Mountain at At G. Gibson Gallery; above is from his series Borderlands.
(Chris, thanks for the tip!)
2
I love this photo. See, anti-four-packs, this is what you're up against; there are many thousands of houses like this in rings around Seattle. They'll be covering the earthwork in a few years, count on it. LA here we come.
3
I'd rather live in a four pack than one of those things. From what I can see, it looks like those houses don't have much in the way of a yard anyway. Isn't that the point of suburbia, living in the middle of a large yard, a good distance from your neighbors?
4
I love this -- when I was a kid growing up in the country we had to drive by this same housing development on the way to the "city" and although I'd never seen an apartment building before, I still asked my mom "What's the point of those building not being connected? They could fit more in and they all already look the same anyway."
5
@3, the theory is -- and this is straight out of New Urbanism 101 -- that you cluster the houses together in one corner of the larger development, which allows you to preserve the rest of it as "open space". Those two words have shamanic power in modern urban planning. What you get IN THEORY is the same overall density as the old-fashioned suburban cul-de-sac streetfronts, but you've got some lovely nature to go with. What you get IN REALITY is waterlogged fields and scrapheaps separating the individual clusters of neighborhood, making them even further removed from town life than old-fashioned suburbs, even more car-dependent, even more desperately soulless. That's because New Urbanists understand neither cities NOR SUBURBS, their supposed bête noire.
I guarantee there's some language like this in the promotional materials for this development. See that barren field? I'll bet they call it "parkland".
I guarantee there's some language like this in the promotional materials for this development. See that barren field? I'll bet they call it "parkland".
6
@5,
Yeah, my sister has lived in a number of those developments over the years. Those "parklands" always creeped me out. They seemed like the perfect place to dump a body.
Yeah, my sister has lived in a number of those developments over the years. Those "parklands" always creeped me out. They seemed like the perfect place to dump a body.
9
My friend has a house about three miles south of there: it's decent-sized, but the yard is on one side of the house and is only about 6' wide and as long as the lot. Creepy. I'd rather just get a condo in the city that didn't have the extra two bedrooms and didn't require a car for everything.
10
I'm pretty indifferent to four-packs. For the most part they're all right. Yeah, they're "ugly", I guess, but you can't really tell yet; the city is filled to the brim with hideous apartment buildings from the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s and 00s that are oftentimes much worse -- but you don't notice them because you see them every day. Ordinary cruddy buildings fade into the background over time. But that first time you drive by, it's "ugh, where the hell did that come from?"
And many of the suggestions for improving them have been along the lines of "if only a million-dollar architect could have designed this, it would have come out so much better", which is ridiculous -- there's a reason million-dollar architects don't design four-packs, which is a million bucks divided by, uh, four.
The truth is, ordinary housing has NEVER been designed by top architects. Those Craftsman bungalows that go for so much dough these days were mostly assembled from kits. Likewise, the thousands of gorgeous old apartment buildings around the country were mostly whacked up as quickly as possible by developers looking to make a buck with no oversight at all. Right here in Seattle, the famous Anhalt buildings were mostly built in a couple of weeks.
Aesthetics have never successfully been legislated.
My hope for cities basically boils down to "jam 'em in tight, give 'em the retail spaces that are flexible and useful, and hope for the best". Demand comes from below, not above.
And many of the suggestions for improving them have been along the lines of "if only a million-dollar architect could have designed this, it would have come out so much better", which is ridiculous -- there's a reason million-dollar architects don't design four-packs, which is a million bucks divided by, uh, four.
The truth is, ordinary housing has NEVER been designed by top architects. Those Craftsman bungalows that go for so much dough these days were mostly assembled from kits. Likewise, the thousands of gorgeous old apartment buildings around the country were mostly whacked up as quickly as possible by developers looking to make a buck with no oversight at all. Right here in Seattle, the famous Anhalt buildings were mostly built in a couple of weeks.
Aesthetics have never successfully been legislated.
My hope for cities basically boils down to "jam 'em in tight, give 'em the retail spaces that are flexible and useful, and hope for the best". Demand comes from below, not above.
11
I'm pretty indifferent to four-packs. For the most part they're all right. Yeah, they're "ugly", I guess, but you can't really tell yet; the city is filled to the brim with hideous apartment buildings from the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s and 00s that are oftentimes much worse -- but you don't notice them because you see them every day. Ordinary cruddy buildings fade into the background over time. But that first time you drive by, it's "ugh, where the hell did that come from?"
And many of the suggestions for improving them have been along the lines of "if only a million-dollar architect could have designed this, it would have come out so much better", which is ridiculous -- there's a reason million-dollar architects don't design four-packs, which is a million bucks divided by, uh, four.
The truth is, ordinary housing has NEVER been designed by top architects. Those Craftsman bungalows that go for so much dough these days were mostly assembled from kits. Likewise, the thousands of gorgeous old apartment buildings around the country were mostly whacked up as quickly as possible by developers looking to make a buck with no oversight at all. Right here in Seattle, the famous Anhalt buildings were mostly built in a couple of weeks.
Aesthetics have never successfully been legislated.
My hope for cities basically boils down to "jam 'em in tight, give 'em the retail spaces that are flexible and useful, and hope for the best". Demand comes from below, not above.
And many of the suggestions for improving them have been along the lines of "if only a million-dollar architect could have designed this, it would have come out so much better", which is ridiculous -- there's a reason million-dollar architects don't design four-packs, which is a million bucks divided by, uh, four.
The truth is, ordinary housing has NEVER been designed by top architects. Those Craftsman bungalows that go for so much dough these days were mostly assembled from kits. Likewise, the thousands of gorgeous old apartment buildings around the country were mostly whacked up as quickly as possible by developers looking to make a buck with no oversight at all. Right here in Seattle, the famous Anhalt buildings were mostly built in a couple of weeks.
Aesthetics have never successfully been legislated.
My hope for cities basically boils down to "jam 'em in tight, give 'em the retail spaces that are flexible and useful, and hope for the best". Demand comes from below, not above.
13
More on topic: I really like what Johnson is reaching for with these photographs. I'm not quite sure he's getting there, at least not every time, but it's interesting. I really like the next one in the series, the garbage dump picnic in the woods or whatever it is. The "West Oakland" series is even better; I wish there were a hundred more pics.
14
@6 - They are the perfect place to dump a body. Just ask Gary Ridgway. Some of his victims were dumped not very far from there. I remember driving down Peasley Canyon Road right after he started talking, and seeing a huge search crew, floodlights and all, on the side of the road. I later found out they'd recovered a number of body parts (well, skeletal parts, really) from that site.
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