Slog
News & ArtsWednesday, October 3, 2012
Architecture Amanda's Ghost City
Posted by Charles Mudede on Wed, Oct 3, 2012 at 8:17 AM
Amanda Manitach, a finalist for the 2012 Genius in Visual Arts, has a poetic essay in City Arts, Psychogeographique, that's connected with the City Arts Fest, the tickets of which are available here, and concerns the city, the funnanimal city, the flesh and layers of the city, the remains of the city. Her city is, of course, Seattle, and she presently lives in a doomed place...
I live on Capitol Hill’s Bauhaus block. My apartment is in one of the buildings scheduled to be torn down next June to make way for a mixed-use building. Two months after I moved in, property management left a printed letter wedged in my door explaining the situation. Along with everyone in the neighborhood, I was shocked that even this historic cluster of auto row buildings and beloved boutique shops like Wall of Sound and Le Frock could be demolished and replaced by condos.The essay, which I'm unable to not say was partly workshopped in my Writing the Class at Hugo House, speaks to one of my leading concerns and obsessions: human memory and the restlessness of urban space. Recall the opening of Borges's short story The Aleph...
On the burning February morning Beatriz Viterbo died, after braving an agony that never for a single moment gave way to self-pity or fear, I noticed that the sidewalk billboards around Constitution Plaza were advertising some new brand or other of American cigarettes. The fact pained me, for I realised that the wide and ceaseless universe was already slipping away from her and that this slight change was the first of an endless series. The universe may change but not me, I thought with a certain sad vanity.Indeed, the ceaseless universe is always slipping away...
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Except the building is not being demolished, but remodeled. This was covered right here in the Slog, remember?
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Remember, by changing it, it no longer exists.
If I cover your car with legos, than it no longer is a Chevy Volt, but an Electric Lego Wunderkar.
If I cover your car with legos, than it no longer is a Chevy Volt, but an Electric Lego Wunderkar.
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