City Dance

I've been meaning to post on the City Dance performance from last year. I was fortunate enough to be a participant in the workshops and as a movement usher and it was one probably the single most profound urban event I've ever been involved in or witness of. I missed the screening of the video and release of Randy Gragg's book on the Halprin Sequence which I'm really sad about so I've been looking around and collecting some of the videos from the event:


City Dance - Keller Fountain from Philip Beech Home Video Studio on Vimeo.

WPA 2.0 entry

Economic ecology in the North American Peripheral Corridor City

The scene is a state highway hurtling through the valley of an endless landscape of detached houses, strip developments, franchise outlets, electrical lines, and brightened signs of businesses forgotten the moment they are passed by. This highway is one of a hundred and one that run North-South across the country. It is, at a glance and by thought, wholly unremarkable to our public consciousness. And yet this scene, is now and will be, the present/future reality of the way we live.

The highway is 99W. It runs concurrent with Interstate 5 until just south of Portland, Oregon, where it splits westward, plunging through the wine country and bread basket of the Northern Willamette Valley, and breaking apart amidst the Coastal Range as feeder roads splinter into the logging forest and further towards the Pacific Ocean. This corridor serves to link these local productive economies with national and international shipping routes clustered around the confluence of the Columbia and Willamette Rivers. But along its stretch, back washes and eddies of the global consumptive economies disrupt the identity and desires of cities and towns as we thought we knew them.

Implicit in the structure of this landscape is the contested relationship between the desire for a private life rooted in a specific place and the privatized individuality of global consumer culture. The people that live here do not work here, and the people who work here do not live here. Every day three quarters of the populace trades places with other economic actors in a ballet of transposition played out in a ritual of coffee served out of small windows, loads of goods rattled across tarmacs in small carts, and the ever present smell of carbon emitted from combustion engines.

This "in-between landscape" between local production and global consumption continues even into the very fabric of the fine grain of the urban condition. The great majority of businesses in the area thrive on the market share of the highway. Their business model is utterly focused on the customers in their cars moving from sub-region to sub-region. To partake in their business, even if they are your immediate neighbor means to enter that market stream. As a business, to partake in this market share requires the resources to develop ones own infrastructure, focused inwardly as an extension of the national highway system. This gives a significant advantage to national and multi-national corporations who have the strategic experience and tactical capabilities to 'plug-in' to the standardized network of transportation infrastructure. McDonalds, Jiffy Lube, Sunoco, et al. To be an small business or independent business owner is to be dependent on strip mall developers who provide a 'plug-in' unit of standard dimensions and shared infrastructures. These developments heed only to their own internal logic which is in turn driven by the demands of external national and global market forces.

The town below and around this scene is Tigard, a periphery city that goes by unmarked from the view of an automobile. It is the background on which this ballet is set. Where the highway rises on a viaduct over a disused rail track the Main Street breaks away and runs parallel for a half a mile, rejoining again, sublimated back into the stream. Businesses dot its length though they seem undifferentiated and largely unable to compete with the strip development that is ever present along the corridor route. A town center that is swallowed by the conditions of the urbanized landscape, it is readable only as a depression amongst the unreadable field condition of the "sprawl" that surrounds it. Its Main Street will never be a nexus of self subsistence and community support, the vision of which maintained within American imagination throughout the 20th century. This long held dream is now clearly a myth of a past America, one whose grave was marked amidst the confused squeals of 24 hour punditry and editorial page essays this past fall. It will have to find a way to re-identify itself as a civic being which has no pure understanding within its local context; rather as a complex, multivariate node of hybrid economies, itinerant market forces, contested ecologies, and new images of civic life. One in which recreation occurs in re-purposed industrial sheds, markets are traded on the surface of structured parking lots, and people come and go by way of feet, rails, and roads.

At this heart of this city unrealized, lies nascent capacities for this new vision. The confluence of potential transportation developments at divergent scales converge at heart Tigard. A recently renewed commuter rail running on the disused heavy rail tracks, a potential for a new regional light rail line run in tandem with the highway, and the eventual need to replace the highway viaduct itself present an opportunity for infrastructural investment sourced from a variety of funding streams.

However, the normative methodology of transportation infrastructure guided by the single purpose designs of civil engineering will only continue the trend of economic and civic disassociation. What is needed is an integrated design thinking that considers the potentials of infrastructure as a lasting part of our narrative history and public imagination. A public infrastructure which incorporates and allows for local ad hoc economic and social activities to participate in and engage with the comings and goings of the global surge of capital.

Cities Without Cities Charrette Presentation
Nicolaus D Wright Summer 2009
Critics: Hajo Neis, Thomas Sieverts, John Brehm, Shawn Collins

Infrastructure: Its meanings and methodologies

Stan Allen's Points + Lines: Diagrams and Projects for the City is my crucial reading for getting this project off the ground. Actually it has been my reading for a while now.

The book chronicles his work through the 1990's in the development of a number of essential theoretical positions from which his work is framed. Of particular interest to me in light of recent competition call is the notion of infrastructural urbanism. This can be understood in a way as a precursor or perhaps correlary to landscape urbanism, especially considering that Allen was for a time James Corner's partner in Field Operations. Certainly this can be observed in comparing Allen's layered diagrams for the Reconstruction of the Souks of Beirut project to that of FO's diagrammatic language.

His writing and drawings begin to form an understanding of infrastructure that is crucial to the formation of a successful project that engages urbanism by means of "laying the ground".

In his project for Barcelona, Logistical Activities Zone is particularly helpful in that it the project, though developed through traditional representational strategies (plan, sections, models) is represented finally as a manual, in the form of a matrix of interconnected topics (surface, service, organization, structure, repetition, anticipation). Primary to this mode of representation is the understanding of notation and scoring as a necessary means of representing the potentials of the infrastructural field.

Kahn's flow diagram for his traffic plan for Philadelphia, a particularly amazing project which is far understudied, is an early example of what notational representation may accomplish. Further afield one may look toward the notion of scoring, as in music or dance, particularly the non-traditional scoring methods of Merce Cunningham and John Cage. Of course for urban landscape architecture this is old hat, see Lawrence Halprin's tome RSVP. Notations use in urban design allows for the production of "directed indeterminancy" wherein robust and specific proposals sustain overtime yet are open to supporting multiple interpretations.

Since this is an informal thing I'm going to jot my notes on what I meant to write about: which is the specific meaning and intention of infrastructure as an architectural method. I'll flush it out later and fix this post rather than saving it an forgetting about it.

Infrastructure:
-establish realistic framework for future collective contribution
-constructing the site itself, preparing the ground for future building, conditions for future events.
via: surface, service, networks
Infrastructures medium is geography [it's method is choreography?]

"Traditional represenation presumes stable objects & fixed subjects."
The contemporary city is not an artifact.

Infrastructure - collective nature not the establishment of rules but the fixing of points of service, access & structure.

Infrastructure works strategically, but encourages tactical improvisation.

Infrastructure accomodates local contigencies while maintaining overall continuity.

catastrophe point - threshold at which continuitie's structure and function of a system is easily altered or broken.

Proposed Projects:
Parque De Lago - Paisajes Emergentes
Hydro Park - Tania Delage
The Peoples Public Works - ReBar