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Science through the lens of art

This spring, first Ohio’s and now Tennessee’s Governor signed laws that designate methane gas as “green” or “clean” energy. The legislation is pushed as part of a growing industry-funded strategy to delay climate action by codifying misinformation about natural gas into law – and make no mistake, methane is a fossil fuel, a powerful greenhouse gas. We are following closely in the footsteps of the European Union where this kind of designation meant that billions of dollars that were intended to fund climate-friendly projects could legally be used for methane power plants and terminals. But Tennessee is going a step or two further to serve the interests of the fossil fuel industry:

“The fact that methane gas is now legally “clean energy” in Tennessee is a benefit for TVA and its planned methane gas expansion. And it’s not the only recent bill that benefits TVA. Last month, Rep. Clark Boyd sponsored a bill that makes it a Class C felony to interrupt or interfere with “critical infrastructure” like pipelines. In February, Boyd also sponsored a bill to block any future bans of gas stoves. Last year, Tennessee lawmakers passed the Tennessee Natural Gas Innovation Act, which legally categorized methane gas as a source of “clean energy” for utilities. They also passed laws preventing local governments from blocking fossil fuel infrastructure and the state from working with banks that divest from fossil fuel companies.”(Ref.)

The favoring of capital over science in the context of climate change might have the most dire long term consequences, but an anti-science stance, increasingly and fervently pursued internationally by right-wing forces, has immediate impact as well, as we saw (and see) in the context of the pandemic. Antiscience is the rejection of mainstream scientific views and methods or their replacement with unproven or deliberately misleading theories, often for nefarious and political gains. Antiscience is invading the courts (think about the “un-scientific” reasoning in the S.C.’s Dobbs decision) and the educational system (think about Florida’s purging of text books, for example, or the general push to dismantle public education, so that private schools can pick and choose their curricula.

Historically, antiscience was not an exclusive domain of the Right – if anything one of the greatest antiscience authoritarian of all times was Stalin, whose “beliefs” starved millions of people to death. In the U.S. the Republican Party was actually open to science for some decades: The National Academy of Sciences was founded in the Lincoln administration; NASA in the Eisenhower administration, and PEPFAR (U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief), PMI (President’s Malaria Initiative) and the NTDs (neglected tropical diseases) program were launched in the George W. Bush Administration. All this has obviously changed since 2015 when anti vaccers took over and “Health Freedom” became a rallying cry – look at the legislation signed this week by Governor DeSantis and weep. Both medical treatment and medical research are adversely affected.

All this swirled through my head when looking at my photographs of Los Angeles’ Griffith Observatory, and its wall and ceiling murals created in 1934 by Hugo Ballin that celebrate science and scientists.

Beyond appreciating the vistas of the approach path to the observatory and the beauty of the building itself, it is really the idea of what science provides and how it moves us forwards, potentially rescuing us, that matters.

The panels on astronomy, aeronautics, navigation, civil engineering, metallurgy and electricity, time, geology and biology, and mathematics and physics celebrate science, and scientists, including path breaking ones from ancient times and non-Western regions. Will kids, traveling in large school classes, who are no longer educated in the history of science or science’s importance even understand why is depicted and why?

Ballin was onto something there, although he was somewhat conservative at heart. In fact his clinging to traditional mural subjects, techniques and representation stood in stark contrast to the progressive muralists of his times, like Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros who conveyed social and political messages on public buildings. Then again, their work was eventually whitewashed, while Ballin’s embrace of the old-fashioned Beaux-Arts style made his work survive.

Born to German Jewish immigrants in NYC, the artist made his way out West to join the silent film industry, with little success. His career as a painter and muralist for civic institutions, on the other hand, took off. His impact and importance for L.A.’s Jewish community is described beautifully here with lots of historical photographs for specific projects (e.g. the observatory here.). I found the link on a generally very helpful site, UCLA’s Mapping Jewish L.A., that has numerous interesting digital exhibitions.

The art itself did not do much for me, but the ideas that propelled it forward and that it represented, did. The same could be said for what I saw this week, on the very last day of the Altered Terrain exhibit at the Patricia Reser Center for the Arts.

Michael Boonstra burn (…fall creek layers…) 2023 with detail

The work by Michael Boonstra and Christine Bourdette is the polar opposite to Ballin’s representational depictions. Both artists abstract the essence of their subjects, but both are clearly informed by science and Boonstra by the impact of humans on the environment, driven, in part, by a rejection of science. Bourdette is deeply interested in geological processes, from gas formations to the creation of geological strata through the massive forces that shape the terrain across millennia.

Christine Bourdette Notch (2023) with detail and Portal (2023) with detail

Boonstra distills his perceptions of forest fires and their aftermath. Both use materials derived from the earth, charcoal, minerals and earthy pigments to capture the colors of the landscapes they care for so deeply.

Michael Boonstra Nowhere/Now here (snowfields) 2018-2022 with detail

The pairing of the two artists worked well, the overall perceptual sparseness of the exhibition provided sufficient (and necessary!) attention for each piece, in short, the curation was spot on.

Given how much I admired the concepts, and the learnedness that went into these works, why did it not resonate on an emotional level? All I can come up with is that it felt so meticulously built-up, acribic, painstaking construction and marking that captured order instead of chaos associated with destruction, whether from fiery infernos or glacial ice-melt floods and volcanic eruptions.

Christine Bourdette Escarpement 1 (2022) with detail

Maybe the creation of beauty in resonance to the fearful natural forces provides a defensive shield, helps to inform or warn the viewer without frightening them away. I, however, could not shake off a sense of sterility, even when looking at gorgeous color palettes. (A more detailed and receptive review by Prudence Roberts, who knows what she is talking about, can be found here.)

Michael Boonstra burn (bootleg) (2023) with details

In any case, having now jumped across topics in the usual fashion again, let me add one more link as a reminder how science-informed art mapped, successfully in my eyes, the alteration of the landscape through external forces. I had written about art, forest fires and the geological Gorge formation here.

Here is Murphy’s Dark Energy, played by the (now disbanded) Linden Quartet, in honor of Einstein’s science.

L.A. Contrasts

I’ve been told a thousand times over that the word love should be reserved for living beings, and inanimate objects should be liked. I guess adjectives have to pull a lot of weight, then, to express my feelings: I boundlessly, fervently, intensely, unabashedly like L.A.’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, despite the insane amount of money that was poured into its creation, money that was so direly needed elsewhere in this city. (Upon completion, the project cost an estimated $274 million; the parking garage alone cost $110 million, paid by L.A.County raising the funds by selling bonds.)

Designed by Frank Gehry, the home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic opened its doors 20 years ago. It was in the works since 1987, with plans approved by Disney’s widow, Lillian Disney, who had commissioned the project. The construction went through quite a few rough patches, with fund raising stuttering along, and some not happy with the Deconstructionist design.

Inside, a large concert hall contains 2,265 seats with a vineyard-style seating arrangement that helps the audience feel close to the orchestra. There are no boxes and balconies, an attempt to avoid implied social hierarchies that are so often found in traditional performance venues. The room is also column-free, made possible by its large steel roof structure.

The outside is dominated by stainless steel panels, the waves and arcs made possible by a French computer modelling software, CATIA (computer-aided three-dimensional interactive application), a technology borrowed from aerospace and automotive industries. It allowed Gehry to transfer complicated models of the project into buildable forms and help contractors to translate a vision into an actual facade.

That facade delivered unexpected problems: most of it had a matte finish, but some parts were polished mirror-like panels. They ended up functioning like parabolic mirrors, reflecting sunlight in such concentrated fashion that the resulting glare led to increased traffic accidents. The reflected light also heated up surrounding condominiums, causing the air-conditioning costs for those residents to explode, and created hot spots on adjacent sidewalks of as much as 140 °F (60 °C). Two years after opening, the offending panels were identified and the surface sanded down to minimize the reflection ( I learned that from the brilliantly titled report “Dimming Disney Hall. Gehry’s Glare Gets Buffed.” )

The exuberant forms of the building, the simulated motion captured in the curvature, the strutting of the wings, the shimmering, glossy surfaces all seem the perfect instantiation of the movie industry’s selling of dreams that transport us, or try to, as the case may be. The structure links to and echoes its surrounds, both physically and in axiomatic ways, as all truly good architecture does.

It was remarkably quiet on the streets on a pleasantly warm and sunny weekend afternoon, with nary a person walking the blocks around the hall and the adjacent contemporary art museum, The Broad, side walk cafes almost empty.

The contrast to my other stop that afternoon could not have been more glaring: no sterility at the garment district. It was packed with people perusing outdoor markets around Santee Alley, in L.A.’s fashion quarters.

It was so crowded that I had to wear a mask outside. A stream of people perusing the wares, including fashion, jewelry, cosmetics, toys and electronics, hawkers’ calls, laughter and excited talk filling the air, kids included. Somewhat reminiscent of the wonderful time I spent in Mexico City, some years ago, given that I was surrounded by mostly Spanish speaking people this Sunday. The goods on offer were colorful and in abundance. So was the sea of humanity that meandered between the stalls, trying to spot a bargain amidst mass produced plastics and cheap imports.

It felt so alive in comparison to the sterile environment at the city’s center, if also living proof of the income inequality that marks our society.

L.A. county, home to one in four Californians, is one of the leaders in poverty, and direly affected by the epidemic. It hasn’t matched California’s gains in education, health, or jobs. And Los Angeles has been the biggest driver of rising inequality across the state.

The gap between high- and low-income families in California is among the largest in the nation—exceeding all but three other states in 2021 (the latest data available). Families at the top of the income distribution earned 11 times more than families at the bottom. California’s income distribution reflects high rates of poverty. Income is frequently not enough to meet basic needs. Families in the bottom quarter of the income distribution are at risk of poverty absent major safety net programs. Wealth is more unevenly distributed than income. In California, 20% of all net worth is concentrated in the 30 wealthiest zip codes, home to just 2% of Californians. (Ref.)

The density of people dropped abruptly once you entered the adjacent alleys, where I was lured by colorful graffiti and mural works, once again.

The excursion yielded one other discovery: a shop where you can rent some time and appropriate implements to express if not get rid of your rage. There are old car wrecks in a cage, cars you can hit, bang and stomp in any way you like with tools provided, sort of the adult version of the kids’ pillows that absorb their fury. Not the worst idea! Particularly in a city that incites lots of parking frustrations….

Music today is what you could listen to at the Philharmonic this week with Leila Josefowicz playing Thomas ADÈS Violin Concerto, “Concentric Paths.”

My path will go straight North as of this weekend. Will resume posting later next week.

Industrial Beauty and other architectural delights.

I’m a bit out of words after the last round of intense writing, and so was grateful when my inbox showed The Met‘s announcement of one of their new exhibitions, Bernd and Hilla Becher, linked here as a video. Just in time! Great justification to dig up some of my old pictures.

Here is the written description of Bernd and Hilla Becher – not exactly a prickling name for an exhibition, but what do I know. Those two photographers influenced generations of Germans to look at industrial landscapes with new eyes, however.

Their work is fiercely copyrighted, so to see a whole slew of images you need to go to the MET website – it’s worth it!

Using a large-format view camera, the Bechers methodically recorded blast furnaces, winding towers, grain silos, cooling towers, and gas tanks with precision, elegance, and passion.”

What can I say: Using a point&shoot camera, I also recorded blast furnaces, winding towers, grain silos, cooling towers, and gas tanks, although not methodically, or with precision, elegance, and passion. I’m doing it as I do everything when wearing my photographer’s hat: I forage, gather, collect and store indiscriminately and spontaneously, since I find about everything, truly everything in this world of visual and/or thematic interest. Ok. I will never ever photograph sports. So there.

Here’s a sampler, then, of some of the industrial structures that I found in my travels.

And below is a sequence that I really wanted to share while we’re on architecture and design, accumulated by Sheehan Quirke who has a wonderful newsletter you can subscribe to, introducing historical and cultural facts and oddities.

Here are comparisons that appealed to me.

Scottish Parliament (2004, left) and the Hungarian Parliament (1902, right)

Here is some music by Liszt written during the Industrial Revolution. What was happening affected music quite unexpectedly in some ways. Musicians started to compose more freely, and were able to communicate more widely due to the advent of steam engines which sped up travel. This opened new audiences, which included also a growing middle class due to improved living circumstances, not just the wealthy aristocracy. Better machines produced better instruments, and larger audiences required larger concert halls, which led to more instruments and duplicate sections shaping a fuller sound. Music changed. As, obviously, did architectural styles….

What was.

Today I am posting someone else’s photography for obvious reasons. Ukrainian photographer Yevgeniy Kotenko has captured quotidian life in a beautiful series called On the Bench since 2007.

He photographed the view from his parents’ kitchen window in Kiev throughout the seasons.

At this very moment the images strike me as tragically poignant, wondering what all these individual people are going through, likely for years to come, if they survive.

And survival is doubly imperiled for people with life-threatening illnesses, in hospitals that are either not functioning due to dire lack of medication and supplies or being attacked themselves. The World Health Organization reports that shortages of cancer medications, insulin and oxygen supplies are reaching hazardous levels. Hospitals have been hit with cluster munition, according to the Human Rights Watch, and sick children are moved to make-shift bomb shelters in hospital basements.

Ukraine had put particular efforts into the care of sick children, beyond medical treatments. Here is a link to a project that provides children’s wards in hospital with constructed environments that support healing through play and discovery.

The design studio Decor Kuznetsov and the Vlada Brusilovskaya Foundation have teamed up for CUBA BUBA, a project that transforms hospital rooms throughout Ukraine into sensory wonderlands for young patients. Complete with comfy seating, reading nooks, and even open-air chimes, each module is compact and intended for children to rest and relax as they undergo various treatments.The group recently installed its sixth iteration, “CUBA BUBA SUNNY,” which features a shelved room full of greenery and sculptures. Suspended below the light is an ornately carved ceiling that shines a unique pattern onto the eclectic collection. To inspire play, an earlier design’s facade is comprised entirely of holes, allowing kids to wind rope throughout the structure into a vibrant web.” (Ref.)

What was. And what is today:

Here are options to help by Razom for Ukraine and a list offered by VOX.

Today’s poem is befitting the times and the unimaginable braveness of the people invaded or protesting the invasion.

Poem (I lived in the first century of world wars)

BY MURIEL RUKEYSER

I lived in the first century of world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less insane,
The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,
The news would pour out of various devices
Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.
I would call my friends on other devices;
They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.
Slowly I would get to pen and paper,
Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.
In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,
Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,
Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.
As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,
We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,
To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile
Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,
Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means
To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,
To let go the means, to wake.

I lived in the first century of these wars.

S Moody Ave.

I was in a mood. So was the sky.

Walking down South Moody Avenue and neighboring streets on Wednesday I was raging at yet another decision of our city government that is hostile to the poorer part of humanity: investing half a million dollars in benches strategically placed near parks to make it impossible for the houseless to set up sheltering tents. Wanna bet those benches will have dividers so you can’t stretch out on them either? Even Commissioner Jo Ann Hardest, the most progressive of them all, is in favor, although opting for non-divided benches. So adding heads to a site does not count into size, but adding a tent over that head does? Do we know how often first responders have really been blocked?

Here is an alternative:

Looking around me, towers of glass, with beautiful apartments and gorgeous vies, with a median (!) price of $578.000 per unit. I don’t begrudge anyone who can afford $1,795,000 for a two bed room apartment at the John Ross building (if you look at the realtor ads, most offers are strangely above the median price mentioned earlier,) but I do despair when the city spends money on driving the homeless out of sight so we are spared witnessing humanity’s misery. And don’t get me going on using the tax windfall $$ on the hiring of additional police…

Then again, I do acknowledge that large houseless encampments are a huge burden for neighborhoods, when trash and unsafe interactions reach impact levels that are hard to shoulder. Simple comparisons of what it used to be to what is now do, however, neglect to take Covid into account. Here is a news clip on the Portland situation of neighborhood complaints. Note was is NOT stressed: As long as there is no concerted action to build affordable housing rather than spend money elsewhere, we are not going to find solutions.

To be fair, I walked by a huge construction project, with cranes seemingly drawing lines in the sky, in reality chem trails left by low flying airplanes. Maybe this is the promised Metro Housing project for 176 new, affordable homes. City announcements only vaguely speak of RiverPlace Parcel 3.

The site is located across from the Portland Streetcar, and in close proximity to the MAX and Tilikum Crossing, in the amenity rich South Portland neighborhood. Of the 176 planned affordable homes, 17 will have rents restricted for extremely low income residents and 48 will be family-sized, including 18 three-bedroom units. Twenty of the units will provide Supportive Housing for veterans experiencing or at risk of homelessness. Through a partnership with Impact NW, the project will also provide on-site resident services to all residents, as well as early childhood development, youth programming, and parenting support.”

No, that was not it. Instead, it looks like I was photographing construction activity for the new Willamette Blocks. A 6 story and 23 story mixed use building, respectively, with hundreds of luxury condos.

The poem for today was written in 1926, Cummings in best form raging about the futility of war and the empty promises of patriotism. Funny how the satirical sonnet fits with thoughts about our treatment of the houseless, and political approaches to fighting (or lack thereof) of the pandemic as well.

Told you, I was in a mood.

next to of course god america i

E. E. CUMMINGS (1894 – 1962)

Then again, maybe we should listen to this one (anyone lived in a pretty how town), read by the poet himself with musical voice. Maybe this is OUR town. However, there are also these folks to be found in PDX – considerably improving my mood.

Out of (the) wood(s)?

You might remember that I don’t watch sports. Not even the Olympics. I, like everyone else, however, cannot escape images that appear in the media, and my eye was drawn to Kengo Kuma’s wooden architecture of the Tokyo stadium.

A day later the German magazine Der Spiegel provided more background on the architect who has made his mark all over the world with wooden construction, or as the article waxed poetically: created symphonies composed of wood.

His work is indeed pretty spectacular, both in its diversity, its technological innovation and in his continual referencing of contextual features of the landscape or the history in which these new buildings are embedded. The NYT wrote about him extensively three years ago, hailing him as an architect of the future. Our very own Japanese Garden here in Portland is also graced by one of his designs, part of the new Cultural Village. I have not been there since it re-opened after construction and learned today that already repairs are underway.

” We are currently conducting some repairs in the Cultural Village, so the Jordan Schnitzer Japanese Arts Learning Center and Fukuta Concierge Desk are temporarily closed. Thank you for your understanding.

Photographs of the building then have to be found here, while mine captured wood on the grounds of the garden in former years. It is interesting to note, though, that some kind of technological wizardry is always smuggled in despite traditional appearances.

“The (building’s) eaves appear to be clad in razor-thin slabs of stone but, in reality, they are constructed of marine-grade aluminum panels, printed with hi-resolution images of granite. Each has been treated with eight coats of Lumiflon, a clear resin which will prevent the photographic finish from weathering.”

Here are some images of Kuma’s ingenuity across the globe.

https://e360.yale.edu/features/as-mass-timber-takes-off-how-green-is-this-new-building-material

Foto: Takumi Ota / TASCHEN – Marketolace with adjacent Hotel in Yusuhara (Island of Shikoku 2010)
Foto: Hufton + Crow / TASCHEN – Victoria & Albert Museum Satellite in Dundee, Scotland.
Foto: Takumi Ota / TASCHEN – Daiwa Ubiquitous Computing Research Building at University of Tokyo.  Contains sensors for wind speed, radiation exposure, dust particle pollution, temperature and humidity to which the building adapts.
FOTO: DAICI ANO – GC Prostho Museum Research Center (DENTAL OBJECTS…) The wooden structure carries all the load, with no glue used whatsoever.
Foto: Eiichi Kano / TASCHEN – Former shipyard converted into theatre and shopping mall in Shanghai
Foto: Eiichi Kano / TASCHEN – New Museum at China Academy of Art Xiangshan Campus in Hangzhou – built on an old tea plantation, thus terraced, reusing old tiles found in the region.
Interior view
Foto: Martin Mischkulnig / TASCHEN – Civic center The Exchange – Sydney, Australia. Supposed to look like a nest. 20.000 meters of wrapped wood….

You would think that building with wood is indeed the way to go if aiming for sustainability and reducing our carbon foot prints, heavily impacted by cement and steel.

Claims are proliferating: It can save the planet! It is the hottest new thing! In fact people are proudly announcing sustainability as an asset to selling condominiums in wooden-clad buildings, right here in Portland, OR. The 8-storey Carbon12 building gives you a song and dance about that in their short advertisement video, which you can see here.

Not so fast, alas.

Let’s forget about things that go wrong just because a new trend still has growing pains, like the collapse of an Oregon State University project due to inadequate glue, a project that was heavily supported by the timber industry hoping for revitalization. A more lasting problem is the fire risk posed by large wooden structures, like 18 storey-high planned buildings in urban areas. Firefighting unions across the country are signaling opposition.

The bigger question is whether the claims about sustainability are indeed correct. (I am summarizing arguments from a yale.edu article here.) The hope is that global commercial construction can be turned from a giant source of carbon emissions into a giant carbon sink by replacing concrete and steel construction with mass timber. That does depend, however, on how forests that produce mass timber are managed, and how much CO2 would be emitted in the logging, manufacture, and transport of the wood products used in the construction. According to folks from the Center for Sustainable Economy as well as researchers in forestry departments across the country we simply dont have all the necessary data. Just as a local example, the forest product industry here in Oregon is the largest source of CO2 emissions, because of fuel burned by logging equipment and hauling trucks, the burning of wood, and the decomposition of trees after they are cut. In addition, any analysis of CO2 must account for how much the forest is taking up before and after logging, data we simply don’t have. Nor do we know how long the timber products in buildings will last and where they will end up when being replaced, producing Co2 in their own decomposition.

Here is a recent letter by representatives of numerous environmental groups, including the Audubon Society, the Sierra Club, and Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility, that listed a large number of concerns, including fears of more aggressive clearcuts, and selective planting of suitable building timber that would lead to a huge loss in biodiversity, never mind increasing the spread of fires in a too hot world. It is really one of these issues that is so much more complex than it looks at the outset when we are desperately looking for alternatives to the ways we have been polluting the environment until now. And of course the science alone will not decide – there are economic considerations as well, as lobbying efforts by powerful constituencies are part of the mix. Not out of the woods yet.

One thing we do know for sure, though: do due diligence before you buy a condominium, no matter how it’s built, with weakening concrete, or mass timber. Reasons were laid out in the recent NYT, linked to below.

On that note, let’s listen to Liszt. The piece is called forest murmurs, but could as well be the water drowning your apartment…. ok. Let’s be more optimistic. Here is Schumann and his forest scenes instead. Into the woods!

Small Scale

The neighborhood where I have now lived for 35 years is utterly familiar, yet also undergoing constant change. On a larger scale, there are endless trees cut for sub-divisions or single housing, people leaving, people moving in. Families with young children are a welcome addition, and you now hear other languages than plain English on your walks. On a smaller scale, my garden surprises me every year with unpredictable change. This year there’s nary a blueberry on the bush that bent over with them last year, tons of foxgloves have self-seeded, brought in by the wind or the deer, attracting a plethora of bees. The daisies have finally outnumbered the buttercups in the lawn, which took only about 5 years, and the fuchsias have decided to become trees, in full bloom already. It all provides a sense of place.

Italy

It is much harder to get a true sense of place if you only visit, and that for short amounts of time. What will define it when you travel? Your visual impressions? Your interaction with the locals? The landscape that defines the surrounds or the climate? The history that you read up on, maybe? Are you a better able to “get” a place, if you have widely traveled and so can make comparisons? If you go in utterly naive or geared by expectations based on external introductions? Will coincidences play a role, an aversive experience at the hotel, or an unanticipated encounter with the nicest people? These latter events might shape, perhaps, whether you like a place or not, which is different from having a sense of place.

Belgium
Holland

Here is the cause for these musings: Anastasia Savinova, a Ukrainian artist based in Sweden, has generated some creative photo collages, trying to extract a sense of place – Genius Loci – from a large scale entity, a city or rural area, and then injecting it into a small scale object, a building. Guided by architectural cues, visual details, a good sense for local prevalence of certain colors, she constructed these buildings into formations that capture the shapes or ornamentation or idiosyncrasies of places like Paris, Bruxelles, Berlin, and cities in Italy and Holland. I had immediate recognition, before reading the labels for most cities, from my own travels which are guided by visual exploration more than anything else, which meant she really captured something that is specific to each place. Pretty nifty.

Paris
Berlin

The most successful montages, less compressed and calmer, are, in my opinion, the ones that depict places in her geographic vicinity, the Scandinavian countries she lives in or has often visited. Perhaps longstanding exposure. living in a place, leads to true familiarity. This in turn allows you to distill an essence after all, not just a jumbling of multitudinous elements that caught your attention on the road, no matter how much they are part of the reality of those cities. Whatever one thinks of the printed works – they might speak more to those who have the lovely jolt of recognition – the idea itself is creative.

Will I ever travel again? Will the experience change after this eternal time of confinement? Why can my desire to roam not be stilled, even when I have the perfect model right in front of me, a wonderfully snippy ode to small scale familiarity by Billy Collins?

                                            
                 A Sense of Place


If things had happened differently,
Maine or upper Michigan
might have given me a sense of place–

a topic that now consumes 87%
of all commentary on American literature.

I might have run naked by a bayou
or been beaten near a shrouded cove on a coastline.

Arizona could have raised me.
Even New York’s Westchester County
with its stone walls scurrying up into the woods
could have been the spot to drop a couple of roots.

But as it is, the only thing that gives me
a sense of place is this upholstered chair
with its dark brown covers,
angled into a room near a corner window.

I am the native son of only this wingback seat
standing dutifully on four squat legs,
its two arms open in welcome,

illuminated by a swan-neck lamp
and accompanied by a dog-like hassock,
the closest thing a chair has to a pet.

This is my landscape–
a tobacco-colored room,
the ceiling with its river-like crack,
the pond of a mirror on one wall
a pen and ink drawing of a snarling fish on another.

And behind me, a long porch
from which the sky may be viewed,
sometimes stippled with high clouds,
and crossed now and then by a passing bird–
little courier with someplace to go–

other days crowded with thunderheads,
the light turning an alarming green,
the air stirred by the nostrils of apocalyptic horses,
and me slumped in my chair, my back to it all.

by       Billy Collins

Photographs were chosen to add life to the depicted places – people I photographed in the cities captured in the collages.

Music will stretch our brain a bit, a beautiful performance by the Kronos Quartett. I figured a focus on the planet is needed to balance out a focus on an armchair….

Early Knowledge

I don’t remember how large the boat was, or if we were the only people in it, slowly moving forward with a quietly muttering outboard motor. I do remember that I was cold despite a heavy Norwegian wool sweater and a winter jacket, as I was for so many stretches of my 6th months-long South-American trek. Hi-tech, low-weight warmth garments had not yet entered my wardrobe, or backpack, respectively. Cold was soon forgotten, though, when contemplating the color – never seen such blue before, water and sky alike – and expanse of Lake Titicaca, located at 3,812 m (12,507 ft) at the border between Peru and Bolivia. In it, about 9 miles from shore, floated precarious looking islands made of reeds, home to the Uros people who, legend has it, migrated there from the Amazon, and needed to protect themselves from the anti-immigrant shore dwellers…. not a single new story under the sun.

I don’t have photos from South America, so here’s another view of skies in high altitude country, New Mexico.

My trip was in 1975, before the Shining Path revolutionary movement made travel in those regions too dangerous. The organization has been all but eradicated by now, with the incarceration of its leaders and the absence of populist support in light of the many, indiscriminate violent actions. The lake, it turns out, is also in decline, having lost almost a meter (!) in water depth due to climate change and glacier evaporation. A major storm in 1986 destroyed the floating islands of the Uros. They rebuilt closer to shore, an archipelago of about 60 small islets entirely made from reeds, on the Peruvian side as of ten years ago. These days they are a major tourist attraction that provides the Uros with income supplementing their fishing and hunting.

Images from WIkipedia

The memories were triggered by todays’ real topic: the work of an increasing number of scholars who aim to integrate indigenous insights and methods into environmental planning, Julia Watson one of the most prominent among them. Watson teaches urban design at Columbia and Harvard University, specializing in the living landscape, eco-technologies, work located at the intersection of anthropology, ecology and innovation.

Her book Lo-TEK: Design by Radical Indigenism explores how lesser-known local technologies and traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) all aim at a symbiotic design process for large scale environmental constructions that benefit both the people and the ecological systems they are part of. She brings in examples from all over the world – divided into sections of mountains, forests, deserts and wetlands – where sustainable, resilient, nature-based technology provides anything but “primitive” solution to environmental challenges, floods and fires included. Here is a terrific interview that captures her approach in detail. And, of course, the floating islands of Lake Titicaca were one of the examples of the hundreds she observed and described after 20 years of traveling the world to record indigenous practices.

Not to be a spoil sport, I do have a question, though. A focus on working with the environment, rather than dominating and changing it, seems imminently attractive. A focus on local wisdom regarding what works in a specific environment, same. But what about global changes that have already affected local ecologies? How do you scale up from what worked for small populations when they count in the millions, these days? How do you rely on traditional methods of, say, controlled burning when borders of wilderness to population have shifted, the latter encroaching ever closer? How do you work traditional agricultural practices when the climate as a whole has changed, affecting seasons, or when the insect populations that you relied on during a particular time of plant development have declined due to pesticide use by your neighbors?

The interaction between global havoc and local traditional principles is one that cannot be ignored. That said, any approach that tries to translate the feasible parts of traditional symbiotic relationships with nature into something applicable for modern scale deserves nothing but our support. There is certainly more knowledge out there than we have been taught or have even been aware of – let’s hope its proponents find open ears in a world dominated by hi-tech instead.

Music comes to us from Peru – traditional reed instruments included. Give the album some time to grow on you.

Mix and Match, Upside down.

Since cheer is hard to come by these days, I grabbed this story by the horns and ran with it – I found its subject so utterly clever and amusing.

Hungarian artist and architect Andi Schmied spent some of the last years exploring New York City from above. During an artist residency in NYC she realized that the city can be viewed from above publicly only from three locations, the Empire State Building, the Rockefeller Center and ONE World Trade Center.

Before you knew it, she had taken on the persona of an apartment-hunting Hungarian billionaire. Or the wife of one, to be precise. During the real-estate agent guided tours of over thirty exclusive high-rise properties, she photographed the views (as well as the interior of these decadent abodes,) and recorded the sales pitches.

To get to that point she had to engage in quite a bit of cloak and dagger maneuvers. A friend in Hungary posed as the excessively rich husband including a designated website of his business etc; her wardrobe and make-up were changed to play the role. With her background “checked” and her passport inspected, she sailed through guarded sky-scrapers, fawned over by the sales fleet.

The results can be seen in a book, recently published, that is about much more than getting a glimpse of New York from above, usually reserved for the privileged few.

Private Views: A high-rise panorama of Manhattan can be explored here.

“The skyscrapers visited by Schmied were carefully selected due to their representation of a new type of luxury. Those selected for their architectural interest include the MOMA Expansion Tower by Jean Nouvel, Gehry Tower, Jenga Tower, and 432 Park Avenue. Among the buildings visited for political reasons were the Trump Tower or Time Warner Centre, where recently more than a dozen owners have gone to prison, after anonymously buying an apartment through shell companies. For buildings of economic interest, Schmied visited 220 Central Park South, where its penthouse duplex has been sold for a record sales price. Other buildings selected ranged from reconstructed early American skyscrapers to luxury condos (such as the Woolworth Tower Residences, or Pine Street 70) and penthouse suites for sale within luxury hotels (such as the Four Seasons, Ritz Carlton and the Baccarat).”

The photographs and conversations with the sales personell are interspersed with essays that discuss the issue of “Private Views,” including the problem with the shadows these buildings cast, and ghost apartments used for money laundering or speculation. Essay contributors include Peter Noever, Anthony Vidler, feminist architecture collaborative, Sam Stein, Sharon Zukin, SITU Studio, Sara Bernat, Jack Self, Ava Lynam, and others.

Marvelous idea, smart execution, hope she gets the attention she deserves!

Schmied’s previous projects focused on architectural idiosyncrasies as well. A book depicting a quasi ghost town in China, near Beijing, allowed a glance into a world usually closed off to us. Jing Jin City contained photographs, essays and renderings of a luxury resort town that has remained largely unoccupied since construction began in 2002.

“The city’s four thousand mansions exist in various stages of incompletion, set around a Hyatt Regency Resort Spa, horse racing track, and 18-hole golf course. The place is maintained by a small army of caretakers who also make up most of its permanent population. Lacking tasks to complete, they spend their time wandering the streets, occupying the homes they are meant to guard, building constructions in living rooms, and adapting the city to their needs.”

I figured I’d match Schmied’s views of Manhattan from above, which can be found here, with my photographs coming from the other direction, looking up, like the rest of us foot soldiers. I’ll take the woman on the street gig any time over the dame in the tower scenario….. for the company alone.

This is where I lived in the 1980s in NYC, overlooking Sheridan Square in the Village.

And what better music for the ravages of capitalism than the Drei Groschen Oper…..


Haight-Ashbury

This is the last of my on-site San Francisco reports, I will be driving home next week. It covers part of a neighborhood, Haight-Ashbury, that was synonymous with San Francisco for us European kids in the 60s, home to musicians, hippies, flower power and other cultural aspects that defined some of our youth.

It was the America of our imagination and our dreams, naive as we were, having no clue how diverse a country this is, how diverse even a single city like San Francisco, in its multiple neighborhoods.

More importantly, it is the neighborhood where my local land-lady and overall fairy godmother grew up, a woman who is the definition of grace, social justice- and civic – engagement, as were her parents and her 8 siblings, by all reports. Thank you for all you did for me in these difficult months, Purcell! Your wit, your wise counsel and your cooking sustained me.

My walk today never took me to Haight street, a central aspect of the neighborhood, but centered on Waller St, Oak St and over to Steiner St in order to explore the famous Edwardian and Victorian houses, called Painted Ladies. The 1906 earthquake spared this area for some reason, so you have an accumulation of old architecture, some imaginatively renovated.

Other are still in various states of decay, but all given towards pastel colors.

Progressive politics can be spied through the windows,

Healthcare is a human right

in the name of the local High School ( Ida B. Wells!)

and in the signage on churches, local businesses and bars.

Memories of yore were frequently triggered, although I was so hooked on Frank Zappa at the time, that many of these other bands did not get fair play.

There was something a bit surreal today, wandering in the bright sun and heat while approaching November, with ubiquitous wealth displayed while an unhoused person digging through a public trashcan was yelled at by pedestrians, with an election unsettled while Bernie clings to the window….

A clear signal to witches, ghosts, and other scary creatures that it’s time to descend on us….

Have a safe Halloween. Maybe it’ll provide this:

Meanwhile, let’s fly back in time with Jefferson Airplane….