cityofsound

Benjamin H. Bratton (Postopolis! LA)

Benjamin Bratton’s talk was another absolute highlight for me, and indicated the value of having someone on hand to pick apart, delineate and articulate the theoretical landscape emerging around the event. I also value his saving me from what would’ve been a particularly tricky write-up by sending me the talk and letting us post it here in full (see below).

I hugely appreciated his contribution. Benjamin had spent a few days soaking up Postopolis! LA by the closing day, and so was well-placed to be performing a kind of ‘summing up’, speaking as a sociologist rather than a designer as such. But he went beyond that, placing the talks in a fundamentally important wider context, politically and theoretically.

Despite being prepared for it, I’d been fascinated by the quantity and ferocity of attention focused onto the ‘global financial crisis’ in the US, from the mainstream media’s news channels certainly but also as a pervasive topic of conversation and concern amongst most I met - it’s way more so than in Australia (which could be because it hasn’t hit Australia fully yet; or because it won’t to the same degree) and although I saw more signs of it in the UK recently, the concern in the US is more so than there too. It appeared to be gripping almost everyone and often with a paralysing effect. (Though there were also healthy signs of the apparently innate American drive to reinvent a way out of dead ends, fresh shoots in unlikely places, and Postopolis! LA was far from pinned down by gloom. Wandering around the city, too - rather than watching CNN - I feel more confident for its future. And in the context of Bratton's talk, the dizzying depth of the crisis here might actually be constructive.)

Bratton quickly and usefully outlined some broad brushstrokes of what this all means, exploring the vocabulary of ‘post-’ in numerous contexts, and then went at least one better by outlining a few key ideas that might move us forward. I was drawn to three in particular. Firstly, that of using subtraction as a design principle rather than addition (a theme that LA is well-placed to explore, having both an over-abundance of macro-scale infrastructure in the first place, which could be pared back in interesting fashion, as well as an endemic informal creativity at a micro-scale). This alongside an openness to accidents and informal improvisation (something I’ve explored over the years around the idea of adaptive design). Secondly, that we should “resist the recovery”, as ‘recovery’ necessarily implies going back to something, trying to recreate conditions which would then merely set us up for the fall again. So we need a new way of thinking about moving forward from this place, rather than looking backwards or thinking we are post- yet. Thirdly, that the political - including governance in all its forms - is something we cannot allow to simply disintegrate, but we must actively engage with, including (perhaps especially, though he didn’t emphasise this) from a design perspective.

His talk was deeply serious - perhaps we’ll soon be post-irony, and not before time - without being soporific or sanctimonious. It was also deeply learned, and pinned up on a complex latticework of useful references, yet accessible and entertaining in a fashion that’s often beyond academics. This, despite his laconic performance comprising of simply reading out his printed-out talk, leaning against the lectern in the late-afternoon sun - “I want to be precise” he said.

(Somewhat interestingly, in addressing the ‘post-’ in the Postopolis! title, he became only the second person out of over 50 speakers across both events so far to take on this idea, along with James Sanders in NYC. Although as Geoff later pointed out, the Postopolis! name is derived from the ‘posts’ that bloggers produce - almost imagining a city composed of so things - rather than implying it necessarily concerns a condition ‘after the polis’ as such. I personally like the ambiguity of the title, and both Sanders and Bratton took the idea for a walk in interesting directions, and both quite differently, amidst different global conditions.)

Bratton later said modestly that there’s an “inherent advantage in batting last”. Well, you still have to step up to the plate and knock the ball out of the ground. Which he did.

So here below and in full is Benjamin Bratton’s talk from Postopolis LA!, entitled Pre and Post, and which he’s releasing under a Creative Commons ‘attributions no derivatives’ license. I've added contextual links where I felt appropriate.

Mike the Poet (Postopolis! LA)

This is the only performance at Postopolis! LA - and this genuinely was a performance - that I just had to close the laptop and stop ‘recording’. So expect notes to be short, entirely in inverse proportion to my enjoyment of Mike Sonksen aka Mike the Poet.

A third-generation LA native, Sonksen’s a tour guide and teacher by day, and however you describe this by night. Coming on like the unholy union of a rapper, gospel preacher, the late night ranting of a gentleman of the street, a particularly engaging geography teacher and an unhinged urban planner, he careered around the Standard’s conference room, a bundle of energy to close out the night. His repeated mantra - “I’m A-Live in Los Angeles!” - providing punctuation between about 4 or 5 poems depicting the history of the city, its music scene, its authors, its landscape etc.

Entirely spoken-word, it’s a little like Mike Ladd or Saul Williams without the backing tracks - less lyrically or sonically adventurous, for sure, but hyper-focused on Los Angeles, and so unique. Mike Davis, no less, has said “Mike The Poet sings the flatlands and the mean streets. In the City of Quartz, he is his generation's Walt Whitman.” Davis, who taught Sonksen at UCLA, has also said "He's the hipster antidote to my glum books."

Sonksen has a CD and non-glum book called I’m Alive In Los Angeles, and you can hear a few of his pieces up at MySpace - though it’s odd to hear the slightly sanitised, slower versions of those poems there. They hardly compare to seeing Sonksen from a few yards away, voice overloading the mic, words tumbling out of his mouth, the room a suddenly engulfed in a raging torrent of street names, myths and cultural history.

Although we'd moved inside by this point - it was a bitterly cold night 15 storeys up - this is one session I wish could've been back on the rooftop. It would've been amazing to see him in that context. Still, the very next ‘performer’ at Postopolis! LA, the following evening, would be the LAPD’s Chief of Counter-Terrorism. Which was just about perfect.

Mike the Poet [MySpace]
Profile of Mike the Poet at the Los Angeles Times

Oyler Wu Collaborative (Postopolis! LA)

Another question and answer session with The Two Davids of ArchDaily/Plataforma Arquitectura. If you want to start a smart, funny, Chilean architecture-based talk show, you know where to go.

Oyler Wu Collaborative are an LA-based but they started in NYC in 2001. (I’m interested in these practices that move across the country, given the different cultural backdrops. It was a perhaps inadvertent theme in the ArchDaily guys’ choices - note wHY architecture’s combination of Japan and American and see also Austin Kelly straddling LA and Switzerland.)

Dwayne Oyler and Jenny Wu provided a set of smart, thoughtful answers. I’ll do my best to recall them here.

To the difficult question of ‘what Is architecture for you?’, Oyler replied, as many did, that “architecture is inherently a synthesis of so many different things” - not evading the question so much as suggesting it’s too complex and variable to answer. Though he did then attempt to nail it with “architecuture is specifically the exploitation of material and tectonic ireas for the creation of spatial experience” (which I note is perhaps closer to a more traditional answer to this question, more akin to Corb's “masterful, correct and magnificent play of volumes brought together in light”...)

Wu suggests they’re “more interested in the process itself”, in “experimenting with new ideas,” and constantly exploring detail in the work, throughout construction. Here she specifically mentions fabrication (a theme that would emerge numerous times over the week, perhaps partly due to the looming presence of SCI-Arc in the architectural community here and partly due to the long LA tradition of working with industrial design (boat builders, car designers etc?)

They’re also involved with academia (as many architects tend to be - it’s a way of making a living) and so constantly questioning their work is part of the deal.

Question: "What should be role of architects in current society?"
As opposed to some of the ‘strategic thinking / design thinking’ answers this question sometimes elicited, Oyler suggests that “architecture tends to work on an individual basis” I.e. it affects one person at a time. It concerns “how one person engages the work from a tactile and experiential standpoint”. Wu adds that the “architects’ role is the making of space, of human interactive space”. Oyler adds this is about an “obligation to build … and to build well.”

In terms of innovation, Oyler suggests that there’s an “incredible over-emphasis on the role of innovation - we never set out to design projects that are ‘innovative’. Yes, technology can enable some new possibilities but you can also create incredibly innovative architecture without technology - so if ‘innovation’ is driving the thing you’re making, it’s misguided.”

In terms of this ‘innovative’ technology, Wu describes how, yes, their work is “all CATIA, Rhino, Maya. You have to know it, as a tool, but it’s not the end point in itself. Don’t let the tool become the end product.”

The ‘social networking’ question draws a blank look. They ultimately respond that it’s “important, but not our favourite thing to do.” They’d also suggested that their schools are the source of networks to some degree, and to the Davids’ question about education for young architects, they respond that its fundamentally important to “go to the schools, talk to the people there, see which school has the right spirit for you …”. They say this as, at the end of the day, “architecture is real hard. It’s hard work, long hours, the pay’s not great. You have to love what you do - have to really love it.” They give the sense that it’s important to flush this out early on.

As to what skills they look for, Wu responds, with a smile, “You have to be able to do it all! That sounds like a joke, but when the 2 of us are teaching 3 days a week it has to be someone who does it all. We had someone in the office in front of a computer doing Maya in the morning and he was pounding nails in the afternoon. We’d like to be an office that gets big enough so that that’s not the case, but right now you have to do it all.” She adds that they “work in iterations”, and they don’t employ ‘grunts’. “We don’t have grunts in our office.”

(That’s an interesting sentiment in terms of ‘liking to be an office that’s big enough not to have people doing it all’. Another approach is to stay small in order to retain the ‘do it all’ holistic nature of the work - that the architecture might be better informed by someone comfortable and proficient with both Maya and nails. But the drive towards scaling up is seen as a natural - if incredibly difficult - progression in architecture for sure.)

A good conversation, although you feel Oyler Wu have a little more to give, perhaps, particularly as they’ve been featured on one of the handful of truly essential architecture blogs: that of Lebbeus Woods. I was particularly taken with their write-up of their Density Fields project there, not least the final passage, which further reinforces many of the primary interests we heard about at Postopolis! LA, from OW and others:

“The lack of conventional separation between design and fabrication has allowed us to use the construction phase as an extension to the design process. It has been especially helpful with our aspiration to create a level of engagement that is equally as powerful at the scale of an individual as it is as a site strategy. Overall, this process has led to a period of material discovery, invention, and experimentation that comes only through the difficult, but profoundly rewarding task of realizing the work on a given site.” [From 'Density Fields', by Oyler Wu Collaborative, at Lebbeus Woods]

Oyler Wu Collaborative

Postopolis! LA, day four / Los Angeles

(Photos and links to follow)

Day four of Postopolis! LA. All is going well. Over halfway through.

I have to buy a camera battery charger, and after a bit of research I head out to the quite wonderful Samy’s camera shop in Fairfax. Four floors stuffed with Hasselblads, Leicas, Nikons, books, software, film, paper, specialist services and knowledgeable staff. Nearby a Whole Foods supermarket is fairly extraordinary - busy, and full of organic, locally-sourced food, though not exactly at low, low prices. There’s a small recycling facility outside, and a few bikes, yet part of the real     footprint of the store is visible in the form of the large car-park outside. This all needs fixing (ideally by a smart home delivery network of grocery boys and girls, on bikes laden with sensors.) I’m particularly taken by the giant rusting arms which hoist billboards in to the sky. There are a few signs of closed shops here, and several of the billboard arms stand there empty, as if giant hands plaintively stretching up into the blue sky.

I catch the bus back from Fairfax, which drives along the vast 3rd Avenue, first past wide palm-lined streets of mansions, and then through Latino suburbs emblazoned with fabulous vernacular typography. The bus rides here are great, each a kind of moving census.

Earlier that day, I’d wandered around the quite unique Bradbury Building. As a tourist in Downtown, it’s near obligatory. It’s pretty special, though I was also taken by a ziggurat-like modernist block opposite, ‘The Angelus Plaza’, which turned out to be housing for senior citizens. Next to the Angel’s Flight funicular up to MOCA and the Walt Disney Concert Hall, those oldies - or “elders”, as they quaintly call them here, as if we are forest-folk - sure are lucky. Even better, they’re opposite the fantastic Grand Central Market.

As good as Whole Foods is, I much prefer this market. Described as ‘European-style market’ - which presumably means it’s not to be confused as a supermarket - It’s the real thing alright. As I’ve mentioned here before, I think public markets tell you a lot about the city, whether that’s a chic array of fresh flowers and furry chestnuts for the well-heeled of Zürich’s Burkliplatz, or the fresh fish, coffee and newspapers at Seattle’s Pike Place, or the lush produce for foodies at Melbourne's Victoria Market, or the bustling modernista Bocqueria in Barcelona’s Ramblas. Or best of all, the Mercat Santa Caterina in Barcelona, which combines ancient civic function with contemporary architecture by EMTB (see related entries one and two).

This one isn’t quite in the class as the Santa Caterina, but has the heritage (relatively) and is certainly full of life. The food itself sketches a picture of LA, comprised primarily of Latino and Chinese offerings. It’s all mariscos and tacos and beans and chop suey and chow mein. It’s busy too, the polyglot chatter providing another informal census. I could spend hours here, people-watching.

Yesterday’s overcast conditions prove to be a blip in a week of warm spring-into-summer sunshine during the day, clear blue skies that will later magic away the day’s heat from our base-camp pitched halfway up the LA skyline. It gets cold early and stays there, but we decide to stay up there too, all night. The rooftop location is an integral part of this particular Postopolis! experience. Amazingly many people stay out all night too, so thanks for the hardy denizens of LA for this.

Standout talks for me tonight are by the LAPD’s Chief of Counter-Terrorism Michael Downing, SINTRA’s Bryan Boyer, Stamen’s Eric Rodenbeck, Matthew Coolidge of the Centre for Land-Use Interpretation, and Christopher Hawthorne of the LA Times. It’s a very strong, varied line-up tonight. The contrast between the last session of the previous day (Mike the Poet) and the start of this one (the LAPD’s Downing) could not be stronger. This exemplifies Postopolis! to me; that we can have such a breadth of speakers - both articulate, informed and deeply concerned with the urban landscape of LA, in their own very different ways - and in a near-continuous flow which is appropriately disjunctive given the city, yet with hidden or oblique connections waiting to be uncovered (credit to Bryan Finoki, who happened to invite both.)

As weekend is approaching, the bar over the other side of the building kicks into party mode, and the music bounces around the corners of the Standard in our direction, the skyscrapers around us forming a kind of resonant chamber. During Fallen Fruit’s talk, 'Don't Stop Till You Get Enough' briefly spills out directly over us from a speaker mounted on the wall we're projecting onto, bringing a temporary halt to proceedings. Regine has head in hands, though everyone takes it in good humour, some even throwing a few shapes. After a word from Joseph Grima, the Postopolis!-side speaker falls silent again. (Though “You can be my lucky star” drifts across later on ...)

The wi-fi is not holding up well to the demands of Postopolis!, though to be fair we are streaming the events to hundreds of people directly over the hotel’s internet connection. I’m also uploading a few hundred 4mb photos per day, as are others. Cesar, Jose, Ferris and the Storefront crew do a fantastic job in lashing all the equipment together with numbed fingers, particularly as two DV cameras have inexplicably burned out in the last day alone. We end up streaming via a MacBook’s in-built camera, propped in front of the speakers, connected directly over the side of the building to an ethernet socket in a hotel room about 4 floors below. Notes to follow.

Steve Roden (Postopolis! LA)

(Photos and links to follow)

Steve Roden was, for me, one of the stand-out performances at Postopolis! LA. He’s an artist whose work I’ve admired for a long time, and it was a pleasure to meet him at last. His background is as a visual artists, primarily painting, but his work has freewheeled across film and video works, and the soundworks, often in relationship to architecture and public space, which is how I’d discovered him.

Roden gave an utterly beguiling performance, a beautiful analogue counterpoint to much of the digital work around him, although his discussion of systems, aleatoric processes, interaction, of invisible (audible) landscapes and architecture paralleled many of the themes of the other speakers. The audience were attentive, silent and engrossed. Part of this was due to his delivery - a careful, dryly funny, self-deprecating, quiet Californian; part of it was due to the ideas and realisation of the work; part of it was something undefinable. It’ll be difficult to convey that here, so I’ll stick to ‘just the facts, ma’am’.

Using a slightly temperamental iPhoto and talking to the photographs, he described his work over the last 6 years or so with a particular piece of classical music, translating score into letters such that this emerging set of predetermined rules would define subsequent painting and sculpture and sound works. Incredibly, all of this work relates to a “12 page classical music score found in my grandma’s garage when I was a kid”. He’s never listened to the original piece of music, and admits he doesn’t read music enough to imagine it - “never got much beyond Every Good Boy Does Fine” ... He shows photographs of the resulting paintings and sculptures suggested by the score.

He mentions several times that he’s concerned that “sound doesn’t just become a soundtrack for sculpture” and these strategies are all ways to avoid this easy parallel and explore some deeper, more intrinsic connections.

His sound practice began by “trying to activate spaces through sound”. They’re “mostly about listening, making field recordings in a space”, and then manipulating them and “sending them out into the same space”, using simple effects like guitar pedals and tape loops. He likes the idea of a viewer not realising that the sound they are listening to is actually the manipulated sound of the space they are standing in.

His work for the Schindler House - “an intimidating landscape, because it is one of my favorite spaces in the world”, he notes - used sound from the spaces in and around the house to set up a view towards the main entrance of the house. He also recorded sounds in the garden, and situated them at the back, such that the sounds would lure visitors to the back of the house, so they'd eventually turn around and see a view that people wouldn’t usually see.

So Roden suggests that most of his early work wasn’t dealing with history or conceptual aspects of the architecture, but more with its materials and physical presence. He’d make a piece that would hover within a piece of architecture - and respond to its use of materials. He then describes a project in Greece, which he sums up as “a piece of non-music next to a piece of non-modern architecture”, clicking around photos of his plastic sculptures hanging in trees next to a significant, contested church designed by Dimitris Pikionis. Again, he mentions this concern about the sounds becoming a soundtrack for another object - he’s interested in a deeper relationship.

He then moves to his work for a skyspace by James Turrell (see also Roden Crater by Paul Schütze). (Another intimidating space, I might add.) His approach to this soundpiece was originally built from recordings of the space - which were barely audible, so quiet and remote is this work. His intention was to “insert one tiny thing into the space so as not to disturb it”. But he realized that he was really “just trying to make a Turrell for Turrell”. So he changed tack, and while searching online, found a set of tuning forks, which each was  purported to be “tuned to a different orbit of a different planet”. Roden notes with a wry grin that this was “obviously not true, but totally wonderful to buy into.”

So his work instead became a form of audio map of the cosmos - as the Turrell work is focused on the deep sky - creating the “the idea of the sounding of what people might be looking at”. He says it’s the loudest piece I’ve ever done, which was “really kind of frightening, and egotistical in a way”. It only played for an hour a day.

Roden then discusses a project with Caltech, which is based on a map called an interferogram, which is a coded satellite image of earth’s movement during an earthquake. Making another sideways step, these images matched perfectly the colours of a children's glockenspiel, such that he could translate the image into a kind of “player piano roll” for 60 of these metal instruments. In effect, this installation would “read” the drawing and translate into a map, which in turn created “a layout of sounding things”. So it would literally play the drawing into the structure, which would then perform. The resulting installation was thus a “direct engagement architectural structure”. Though he expresses some dissatisfaction with the robotics and technology aspect of the project, he was intrigued by this scaling up process: “What happens when you make something which is smaller than a turkey with your hands and then make it into something you can enter.”

He notes with a quiet smile that one of his scientist collaborators at Caltech was also dissatisfied as he was ultimately “very unhappy that the piece didn’t sound like an earthquake.”

Then to a piece composed for the Alvaro Siza pavilion at the Serpentine Gallery in London. This used contact mics on the surface of the building, such that the sound of the building itself was tapped and sent through guitar pedals. He also used the architect’s drawings to generate scores - he shows an image of beautiful Siza sketches, coloured pencil drawings. He performed an electronic and acoustic piece in the space, and then mapped the space in sound based on readings from particular points within the building.

With this, he thought “maybe you can hear what the space looked like”. Then, claiming that “I’m not a musician”, he performs the Siza pavilion on a small glockenspiel, reading from his own graphical notation. This is startling beautiful, the metal keys chiming clearly through the conference room, and the crowd are hushed and rapt with attention. Somehow, the background thud of the DJ downstairs is repelled by the tiny instrument and the place falls silent before a round of generous applause.

Roden then changes gears completely, to show a set of photographs that he recently acquired concerning some peculiar works by the architect Wallace Neff. Neff is known, if at all, for building Spanish-style houses in the Pasadena and elsewhere of the 1920s. He was a kind of “architect to the stars” (houses for Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks et al). They were, as Roden notes, “sprawling backwards-looking houses”.

But amazingly, from the late 1930s onwards, he also designed a series of houses - indeed an entire building system - based upon a construction technique of inflating a large balloon and spraying concrete over it. These are pre-Dyamaxion dome houses.

He says that a photo dealer found about 100 photographs related to the project last week, mainly snapshots, which Roden has acquired. These could well be a set of Neff’s own photos - including snapshots of a quote from Oliver Wendel Homes that Neff typed out - as well as 6 pictures of vernacular dome housing in Damascus, which Roden assumes he viewed as a precedent.

Roden then clicks through the photographs, which are simply wonderful. They show the entire construction process, from the balloon slowly inflating as air is injected in, with details of it being tethered, then concrete poured, and then some slightly surreal images of people proving how firm the structure is by attacking it with mallets.

Incredibly, Goodyear were involved in this project, based around a planned community in Arizona. Yet only one is left standing in the states. Some were built in Brazil, W Africa and India, all essentially done as fast shelter structures. There are also images of a school in Mexico, which is the largest thing Neff did. Brazil was only place where he was able to do a commercial structure - a gas station.

oden describes how little-known this work is, partly as Neff is often looked down on by most people interested in modern architecture. (He tells a story of Pierre Koenig casually dismissing him. “Not interested“.) Others who love his "Spanish Colonial Style" works, say the domes are “the blemish on his career”.

To Roden’s eyes, it’s “a wonderfully misguided and beautifully idiosynctratic structure … there are lots of human qualities and a lot of mistakes, in most peoples’ eyes.” Neff was apparently obsessed with this work his whole life. Roden has recently produced a work based around the way houses were constructed - a sound sculpture built with his own breath, using balloons to create the structure, and recordings of his own breath blown through old pipes from a church organ.

In the Q&A, I ask why, with some notable exceptions - such as Peter Zumthor, who writes beautifully about sound in Atmospheres, or Juhani Pallasmaa in The Eyes of the Skin - why sound is so neglected within architecture. Roden thinks there’s “a long history of not considering sound”. He mentions how he recently went to a school designed by Thomas Walter who designed the US Captital Dome, in which you would be unable to properly hear someone standing a metre away. It’s “the most ill suited space for a classroom imaginable”. He also points out that this conference room in the Standard Hotel is sitting on top of a large space with a DJ booth, such that the sound from downstairs echoes through the hotel.

He finds it odd that there’s often little notice of sound by people who inhabit loud spaces, as he’s unable to ignore environmental sound himself. He sometimes stops in noisy supermarkets, on the verge of incredulously asking people “Can you hear that?!”. Certain people seem to be able to ignore it on some level, perhaps as he notes its intangibility, at least physically, which makes it difficult for people to articulate.

He thinks this is slowly changing - at least “some of the dialogue is changing” - partly as sound has become a more prominent artform, so people are more comfortable perceiving it as a presence in a space, perhaps akin to light.

Another question from the audience on what the Neff dome houses actually sound like. Roden smiles and replies that “the house is filled with air, but not in a perfectly formed shell, so it’s totally inconsistent and human.” He says you can stand at the wall on one side of the dome and send a sound wriggling right across its circumference to the wall opposite.

A great talk/performance. As Rachel Abrams noted afterwards, it may partly be because people were “desperate for a bit of analogue”. Yet there were also profound ideas at work here, not just from an artistic perspective, but deep rivers running parallel to many of the concerns elsewhere at Postopolis! LA.

Steve Roden

wHY Architecture (Postopolis! LA)

(Photos and links to follow)

David A and B (David Asseal and David Basulto) of ArchDaily/Plataforma Arquitectura had a clear, consistent methodology running through Postopolis! LA, which formed a kind of bedrock that the other talks were able to springboard from. Each of their invited guests was subjected to a live interview with the two Davids, comprising of the same questions each time. It produced some interesting variations on answers to the same questions across the set, which I’ll try to bring out. I think these will all end up on ArchDaily too though, so I’ll keep the reportage shorter accordingly.

wHY architecture are a well-known LA-based practice founded in 2004, and led by Yo-Ichiro Hakomori and Kulapat Yantrasast. Yo Hakomori, who is here representing, was born in Japan but emigrated to the US when young, and so is an American citizen. Yet he was then educated at the Graduate School at University of Tokyo, and so positions himself as an interesting hybrid of American and Japanese.

The Davids ask “what is architecture?” Hakomori replies by referencing Bernard Rudofsky’s Architecture Without Architects. Hakomori was a scientist before an architect (biochemisty) and had become interested in “what common people built. Minka houses, the architecture of the south west, or throughout northern italy. The non-pedigreed architecture that is derived from the deep-seated things in the people that create it.”

He vividly recalls the first cathedral he walked into in Amiens, “awed by the construction of stone and way the light entered the apse”. Or walking into the Pantheon, and then walking and cycling through France and Spain and “seeing the kind of things you don’t encounter in the US.”

He then tells a story of being at Louis Kahn’s Salk Institute, watching over the vast spaces as a person emerges from pillars, then struggles to get their cart across the path of water and concrete, and then disappears behind pillars. (An oblique yet poetic vignette, perhaps in the Japanese style?)

As he is “bicultural”, as he puts it, he was first inspired by architecture of Europe, then at school in Japan discovered another way of thinking about space, deeply seated in the psyche and religious base, which is different to how it is in the West. “Being from both sides of Pacific, I think differently from both sides.”

The Davids ask what should be role of architect in society? He references his Grand Rapids Art Museum - the first LEED public building in US - and the responsibility of building in the environment. He references vernacular architecture again, which has this intrinsically … He remembers sitting on a roof top in Greece, noting the ancient wind towers facing towards prevailing wind to collect wind and cool the house ‘naturally’. He also sees that the architect has the responsibility to think about way the city grows. To engage in “intelligent planning - how building relates to the city”, and not contrary to structure of the city.

He references the Maya Lin-designed park at Grand Rapids, which has “become the living room of Grand Rapids”. How the building was driven by an understanding of that role, and Kahn’s thought of “the street as a society of rooms”.

The Davids ask “how important innovation is to your practice?” Hakomori responds instead by noting that it’s “not in everybody’s mind to think about history.” He’s not advocating that they’re trying to be historicists, but it’s important to think about the history of Los Angeles, and how it’s like a biological phylum or tree, with many branches that relate to each other at the same time. “Innovation isn’t something we’re trying to do - it’s not on our mission statement if you will - but in developing concepts they try to be innovative in their thinking - they have relationships with certain practices or people that they connect with.”

The Davids ask what role of social networking has in their practice (a question which confuses almost everyone all week, perhaps understandably). He says it’s important, and that “Kulapat is good at that”. They don’t do it out of a conscious effort to “make social networking”, though. “What do you recommend to young people/architecture students?” Hakomori reiterates that he studied biochemistry, and worked in a lab for a year or two before architecture school. So he thinks it’s fundamental to be “looking at different things”, to be “allowed to explore different fields, even if you know you’re going to be an architect”. “A well-balanced education”, which the US can have, through studying one subject first, and then studying architecture in graduate school. If you “choose architecture later period in your life, you tend to be more mature, more focused … and so a well-balanced liberal arts education is not a bad thing at all.”

Next question: “What skills do you look for in a new architect when you’re hiring?” “Passion, enthusiasm … You have to have the basic skillsets - if you don’t know how to use AutoCAD it’s going to be tough! But beyond that, passion …“

To questions from the audience. The first is a complex question, which takes a few attempts at phrasing. It’s regarding vernacular architecture and post-digital architecture, and essentially asks, now that we can create any form we want, how should we understand vernacular architecture, whose form was intensely connected to a particular environment or condition. What’s the proper balance between traditional and contemporary construction methods?

Hakomori discusses that vernacular is a reaction to an environment and culture - “a response to the specifics of that location”. Yet his office doesn’t aim to emulate a vernacular for that space. But might recall, say, how George Kugler looked at the mission churches of Santa Fe - the simplicity of the form, and the “naked walls” of those churches, as he put it. And that simplicity of form is interesting. Given that people built with the resources they had available (craft and materials they had locally), the question perhaps also implies a “critical regionalism”.

So perhaps when we use the technology that we understand now, we might enable an insertion within it of the regional characteristics that would be appropriate for specific areas. In that sense it has a quality that vernacular architecture had. In their practice they don’t foreground that, but they do approach a similar condition via a concern for sustainability i.e. by using particular materials that come from that part of the world.

Ben Cerveny asks how the Grand Rapids museum participates in the public, in that this involves managing an interface between public and private space, and that there’s a politics to that.

“When you’re working with private space, do you move your work into an interface with public space?” Hakomori responds that “all projects contribute to public realm … all buildings have an interface with street.” He specifically references the Casa Wakasa, Osaka as it also indicates that this is complicated in either direction - that there’s also a desire to create a private realm outside of public realm. So there’s “a layering that occurs” in these spaces.

wHY architecture

MIchael Dear / USC (Postopolis! LA)

(Photos and links to follow)

Michael Dear of USC's Geography department is the first to address the conditions of the US-Mexico border with respect to LA. I hadn’t read his book The Post-Border City but I had read the excellent Princeton Architectural Press publication Hyper-Border (see also Regine's review), which covers some of the same, contested ground.

An engaging speaker, despite the gloom into which he submerged (day one, pre- speaker lights) and working without images, he sounded English (I later wonder how this affects his view of the situation).

He starts be saying that LA “is a border city. We’re now living on the border. In fact, anywhere on the US you’re living on a border”. In a sense, he sees this as the “portable border”, the “border to go”, or the ‘frontera portade’ as a colleague of his has it. He states that “the border is a pre-eminant condition defining what we are and where we’re going to be.”

Dear undertook numerous journeys along the border in researching the book (Bryan Finoki, who introduced Dear, later tells me that Dear has driven its entire length (2000 miles?), on both sides. It occurs to me that a bit of infrastructure this large, complex, variable and politically-loaded is likely to generate surreal responses.) As if to to illustrate this, Dear relates a remarkable, ludicrous situation: he asks us to imagine a large, steep canyon that existed close to Tijuana (‘Smugglers’ Gulch’?) which directly connects Mexico to US. The US have poured 2.5 million cubic yards of earth into the canyon, such that this particular border no longer exists. A dam is built to deal with the geographical impact of this, costing over 4 billion dollars to reinforce this new border zone. Yet in order to prevent the dam from being eroded, there’s a tunnel through the dam. So imagine an an earthenware dam that’s 150 feet high, with a tunnel going through it that not only allows water through, but allows people to pass through. He says a border patrol person he was talking to thought “the whole thing would last about a week … the whole project was at least 99 per cent politics”.

Another illustration: in East Colorado, it’s difficult to know where the border is. You can inadvertently cross it - and thus inadvertently break the law. It’s become an area dotted with memorials for some reason, and Dear suggests he’s become a bit of a “monument freak”. As the memorial is on the border, you can walk around the memorial taking pictures and you’re crossing the border each time. He describes doing this constantly to the delight of a few old Mexican men, cackling away and shouting out, “That’s illegal, you understand!”

He unreels another vignette, about the leader of a vigilante group (who are ostensibly citizens who take it upon themselves to patrol the border, to huge controversy) who who went to jail because he was aiding migrants across the border illegally. (This is a land of extreme contradictions.)

“LA is a post-border condition”, he says. In the last census in 2000, 46% of LA residents were of Latino origin. It will be a majority by the next census, and by 2050, the majority of California will be of Latino origin. He says that even if the boundaries were closed now and no other person crossed, the proportion would still increase, as the Latino growth is due to ‘natural increase’ i.e. people having babies. Which, he wryly points out, is what people do.

He declares that “LA is now the rule, not the exception.” This condition is increasingly applying to all American cities. And he says this is undoubtedly a good thing. “Diversity is a privilege”, he says, and one of the most remarkable features of this city in particular is its diversity.

“LA and Southern California represents a rule about the way urban centres are made”, Dear says. In the old days we had centres (Chicago, Boston etc.), and the centre expanded outwards. LA flips that logic, not building the centre first, but last. “It comes from the hinterland inwards. It gets built later. There are 26 downtowns in LA county. It was built on different principles.”

He asks us to drive out towards Palm Springs and see that there are no town centres there. “They’re added later, as a decoration, to improve consumption, to let you celebrate. We’ve reached a different kind of city-building in this region.”

Dear says he’s “driving it home as it’s the material basis for urban change. The future of cities is shown by Los Angeles more than any other city in this country. San Francisco has become so like LA they’ve become inseparable. Sure, it’s got a nice bay, but the fundamental urban organisation is the same.”

He says he first saw this in Sao Paulo. The numerous centres. He thought it looked like LA.

They all have this LA “scrim”. A “decentralised fragmented urbanism”, and this place is the best place to start looking at this.

(This is all fascinating, and I would broadly agree with much of it. However, I’m not sure LA as a model can stretch quite as far as Dear and others imagine. Here, partly due to his impassioned delivery pushing him to it perhaps, he’s perhaps pushing LA too far as the model for all US cities, and cities elsewhere. He doesn’t quite say that LA is the city that can tell us most about the world, but he’s not far off. Los Angeles will do this to you. It’s the kind of ‘solipsurbanism’ that almost traps Kazys Varnelis too, in the introduction to his otherwise thoroughly excellent book ‘The Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles’. We can learn from Los Angeles, clearly (and rather more than Las Vegas) but the applicability of its lessons, characteristics and modes to all other cities ignores vast local differences in urban culture elsewhere.)

(Again, I wonder if this is because Dear is also migrant (English > New World), who can tend to romanticise and exaggerate difference c.f. Banham, to some extent. I do this all the time in Australia, and here, as you’ll have noted.)

(This idea of building the centre afterwards, if at all, is a fundamental problem in LA. It leaves a city bereft of civic gestures, with a concomitant reinforcing effect on the individualism that can affect Anglo New World cities. The solution is not clear, not easy, of course, but it’s a problem nonetheless and not necessarily to be celebrated. The idea that a civic loam is thriving in LA in certain areas, certain communities is certainly true, and a more interesting aspect to observe. But is it enough to bind a city?)

(And I should note that LA always had a downtown, a centre. So the thesis is a little oversimplified in that respect. It’s a minor quibble however - the ‘improvise numerous centres as you develop, and post-habitation’ thesis is broadly true, and as noted previously this polynodal aspect of LA is now a hugely desirable model for cities over 2 million inhabitants. If the civic space can emerge too.)

Dear concludes by looking at the border region, again “as a manifestation of all these changes”. He says “What’s happening here is what’s going to happen to the country - and I for one will be very glad about that. America was not founded by closing its doors to immigrants, me included. It’s greatness is in assimilating all those things. The sooner we absorb the postmodern condition, the sooner we will get over so many of the hang-ups that infect our discussion of what this city is becoming …”

It’s a great talk, and helps frame numerous subsequent discussions over the next few days.

(I’m also intrigued by the focus on the border, in a way. Even in framing the talk as ‘post-border’ or ‘portera frontade’. Obviously it’s an important facet of the relationship between the US and the south, but as LA makes abundently clear - as does Dear talking about the census - the border may as well not exist. In that LA is a city centred on far more complex organisations than a sharp line in the sand. Rather, the way it moves is far more diffuse, dissolving such structures in hybridised networks. As Varnelis et al make clear, a vast stew of variable, transient, occasionally interdependent networks is a more promising organising model for the city, if more complex. Dear clearly understands this, but I wonder if it makes more sense to just ignore the border altogether.)

Bryan asks some questions in follow-up, around these ideas of diversity and control. Dear’s responses are around the ideas of “the spaces we see in cities as function of the fragmented, decentralised city.” He says “you’re going to go on building spaces of difference. We’re not building spaces of diversity, as diversity is overcoming the physical space”. He says that “all cities have their gated communities now. There is no integrated city being developed, I don’t think. The contemporary example is Dubai, jewels scattered throughout the city … I think this is OK (perhaps he means 'understandable' here) because we don’t have old forms of society.” (This is at the heart of my note above - do we still have the need for civic spaces as we society has changed? I think we do, but am aware that could be wishful thinking.)

He then flips up “the more optimistic side of the coin. That people have long time found ways of overcoming the physical space.” His example here is of Brasilia (I think I heard him say Brasilia) where people arrived there and destroyed all of that symmetry … People have a way of overcoming space. People have a way of overcoming international boundaries. And that particular boundary is only since 1848.”

Michael Dear (USC)
The Post-Border City, by Michael Dear

Postopolis! LA, day three / Los Angeles

(Photos and links to follow)

Day three of Postopolis, and fewer sneaky excursions, so fewer observations.

I do get out to Broadway though. This is an amazing example of adaptive reuse of urban space. It’s essentially the same form it was built in, but it’s changed completely in use and occupation. And as a result, the street feels busy, alive. In this way, it validates numerous examples from the talks at Postopolis! LA - and from the city itself - about how vibrant city life can be enabled not through glittering new infrastructure (chance would be a fine thing anyway) or designed urban development, but instead by ‘subtracting’, ‘re-use’, ‘appropriation’ and ‘un-designing’.

Broadway is an amazing array of buildings - and particularly facades - from the ‘20s and ‘30s and ‘40s, but these same spaces are now home to numerous, multiple units of consumer electronics shops, jewelry and 3 pairs of sneakers for 20 dollars. It’s quite a spectacle. Broadly Latino though all with the other facets of LA’s demographics in attendance, it’s as if the city had just left a giant movie set behind to be inhabited as the city saw fit. (Hollywood did do that with aspects of LA, movie facades later adapted and appropriated by residents - this is the same principle, though more so.)

Entrepreneurial commerce fits into the tiniest of gaps here, probably on the most tenuous legal basis and in highly mobile, transient sense. Sure, the street feels scruffy. It’s low-rent, and probably does not make much money for the people working here, incredibly long hours I would guess. But is full of life nonetheless, a bit of Downtown that feels like a giant, dispersed market, in sharp contrast to the often largely empty streets of the more designed parts of Downtown or the wasteland of Pershing Square. In the context of the global financial crisis, which is on constant rotation on CNN, this part of town is redolent of a thriving economy. Many lesssons here for the urban planner, no matter how unpalatable to the traditional schools of thought and practice. This is as close to Non-Plan as you’ll get.

The downtown itself is an odd place. There are some beautiful buildings here, though not quite as well-crafted as some earlier US cities perhaps. It’s caught in the throes of these turbulent movements, eddies of activity like Broadway jostling against the new loft spaces, characterised more by plaintive ‘for rent’ signs more than activity. But there are signs of that other new resident population emerging nonetheless, with 7/11s, Rite Aids, bars and galleries dotting some streets.

The USC Geography department’s walking maps of Downtown LA explain why the area feels like a movie set:

“To the surprise of many urban experts and millions of suburban residents of Los Angeles — who view sprawling Los Angeles as "100 suburbs in search of a city" — there always has been a significant downtown Los Angeles, even before the new skyscrapers began sprouting in the 1960s. Ironically, much of the built environment of the old commercial downtown was not destroyed by new development, mainly because most new projects were located to the west and northwest of the old "historic core." Today, dozens of blocks and hundreds of buildings (most of which are exactly 150 feet tall) in this subregion look essentially the same as they did in the 1930s. The human occupance and use of this subregion, however, is very different than it was 60 years ago”

Contemporrary LA emerges from these adjacent streets called, from East to West: Spring, Main, Broadway, Hill, Olive, Grand, Flower, and Figueroa, before exploring into larger numbered grid, and then erupting at all points, in all directions.

US cities are always about myth-making, and here perhaps most of all. So there’s also an air of nostalgia that is played out on these streets, for all its post-modernity - or indeed because of that.

‘What to do with this city?’ is also a question that hangs heavy as one walks around. Its built fabric is firm, and the most obvious thought is that the streets are wide-enough to take the return of trams, or light rail, as well as bikes. That pocket parks will be cultivated in the numerous square kilometres of (generally empty) parking lots that punctuate every block. That the resident population will bring life back to all these streets, not just the frayed edges of the rapidly-dispersing Skid Row. But this is urbanism-lite, and entirely out-of-step with the city and its ability to be conceived of in such easy, over-simplified and often ethically dubious measures.

The next-most-obvious thought (usually the more interesting ones, as Eric Rodenbeck later notes) is that the city is perfect for post-boom re-appropriation and subtraction (in Bratton's sense), and that the streets of Broadway, Toy District, Fashion District (and Little Tokyo to some extent) are the places to look. Think instead of a deserted city slowly overgrown with variegated life, left to its own devices rather than planned. Those parking lots becoming parks through time and accretion of native vegetation, slowly engulfed by local weeds due to the removal of cars rather than the insertion of urban design. No need for bike lanes as peak oil wreaks its havoc on the number of cars on the street and they become safe for cycling and walking, through a more sophisticated and ‘natural’ approach of shared space. The freeways become mile-long markets or gardens, overgrown with flowers. The LA River becoming the world’s largest continuous urban park through neglect rather than re-design (although the stormwater and sewage infrastructure for LA does admittedly need altering to fully enable this - more later), its length punctuated by food production, retrofitted PV arrays, PRT hubs, snaking bike paths and Rollerball tournaments. Spending any available money on articulating new civic structures through soft infrastructure of legal, social, cultural, informatic, political approaches, and nurturing activities rather than building hard infrastructure.

I don’t mean to associate the citizens of Broadway, in all their sophisticated innate understanding of street life, with weeds and other flora, nor fall into the ethnographer's trap of seeing them as a homegenous teeming mass of sauvages noble, but I hope you see what I’m getting at. When walking through Pershing Square, what seems to be a disaster of professional planning and design, on the way to bustling Broadway, and in the context of large cities worldwide struggling to build new hard infrastructure anyway (having sold their armature long ago, through lowering taxes, encouraging private property and thus NIMBYism) tactics such as this seem the only game in town.

To Postopolis! LA, day three. Today, it’s overcast, even cold. There’s another good crowd, but it’s freezing early. (Will we ever attain an even temperature at Postopolis!?) So we move down downstairs from the rooftop at the earliest opportunity. This hurts, as the rooftop, mid-skyline location is as absolutely essential to this iteration of PostOps as the permeable Storefront was to the first, and the conference room at The Standard is just that - a conference room. But it’s warmer, and far more comfortable for all concerned.

Another great free-wheeling cascade of talks tonight. Ben Cerveny was great on new systems of urban scale inteventions through informatics (I would be interested in this, but the audience were too.) Gary Dauphin was great. I was fascinated by Austin Kelly’s comparisons of architecture practice in LA and Switzerland. Benjamin Ball, of Ball-Nogues, was also quite superb.

I thought Steve Roden’s performance was particularly fantastic. Within moments he had the audience wrapped around his little finger, engaging deeply through his slow, quiet, careful, distinctly Californian delivery. And featuring a short performance on a small xylophone that spell-bound everyone. In complete (LA-style) contrast, Mike the Poet brought the house down at the end.

Postopolis! LA, day two / Los Angeles

(Photos to follow)

Day two of Postopolis! LA. I now have a fingernail grip on the city, and the place is increasingly growing on me.

My friend Ben Cerveny took me for a drive around LA, not consciously trying to recreate Reyner Banham Loves LA but certainly not a million miles away. We did note that we were following Banham’s directive to “read it in the original” by driving, and in a convertible too.

Huge thanks to Ben for an amazing tour, with his DVD commentary turned on, of Downtown, along Wilshire Boulevard through a trace of Koreatown and Macarthur Park, La Brea, Beverly Hills, Hollywood, up into the hills and the Griffith Park Observatory, and down to Silverlake and Echo Park. While LA is clearly too vast and complex to comprehend in a few days, it is possible to begin to understand it through exploring, and in direct contrast to my usual and preferred way of exploring cities on foot, driving is the way to do it, at least initially.

Indeed Wilshire is essentially the first street in the world to be purposely designed to be understood from the car. The shift from Downtown through Wilshire Boulevard is particularly fascinating, as the ‘30s era deco shifts down the gears. Downtown is almost preserved - as LA had other centres to develop, its original downtown didn’t get turned over as most did - as are huge chunks of Wilshire, at least in form. The shift from Koreatown to Latino LA fascinating, particularly via the white enclaves of Beverly Hills.One thing is that the streets are bustling in the former, whereas no-one (save the odd housekeeper) is visible on the vast manicured streets of the latter.

There are too many reflections to write about here, and many that will fully form later. Equally I wouldn’t want this to become another wearisome tale of A European ‘discovers’ LA (akin to its contemporary companion, A Westerner ‘discovers’ China.) But let me jot down a few thoughts.

The constant reinvention is discernible in the architecture, at all scales and styles. In the richer parts of town - massive straight roads scored with giant palms, where each house is the size of a hotel - it’s a riot of architectural play. Taste has no place here. A crossroads with replica Tudorbethan on one corner, a replica French mansion on another, with a replica Spanish villa facing them. In a slightly lower-rent area before this (“Central LA”?) it’s denser, but equally odd. Apartment blocks with faux turrets etc. Some very odd buildings here, and yes, all perhaps a manifestation of the drive for reinvention. It’s complex. I remark to Ben that I feel like burning most of it down but having lovingly documented it first. Again, the contradictions. The irony is drenching everything at this point though, at least to the observer, and that’s not healthy. We can see why this side of LA appeals to architectural theorists and urbanists, but only as a preserved petri dish laced with irony. It’s fascinating and appalling.

I realise Australia is like America without the drive and ambition, perhaps. It doesn’t have this sense of invention, no matter how misplaced it is on occasion. The other difference is the obvious density of LA. Not in Beverly Hills perhaps, but everywhere else. Areas which would be quarter-acre blocks in Australia are apartment blocks here. There are few Sydney and Melbourne-style terraces, and obviously no European-style ones, but the pattern is dense nonetheless. Later districts in the tour, like Silverlake and Echo Park, are very tightly wound. In Brisbane, an obvious parallel given the same contours laden with small hoisted houses jutting out of tree-covered hills, these buildings would be on much larger plots of land, separated, and larger structures (a strange Australian quirk, as if inspired by the vastness of the island-continent, irrespective of the fact that the actual usable, liveable post-colonial Australian landscape is relatively small.) In Silverlake and Echo Park, say, they’re jostling next to each other, but quite beautifully. Jeffrey Inaba, in his talk the previous night, posited that LA is in fact the densest city in the country. LA, it turns out, is not only good urban form in terms of being poly-nodal, but also density. These are further contradictions in terms of LA, where its ‘traditional’ image has been of an irregular, uncontrollable sprawl, ill-suited to the future. It turns out it’s not that simple, and many medium to large cities are now trying to emulate this poly-nodal organisation, and attain density.

Even here though, this notion of density is complex, and possibly more than Inaba realises. See Kraal vs. McDonald 2008, parts one, two and three. This, from Robert McDonald:

“The “average” house in LA is in a neighborhood of 10-15 homes/ha; 20% of houses fall in this category. The “average” housing unit in NY is in a neighborhood with more than 80 homes/ha; 27% of homes fall in this category. This kind of statistic becomes extremely important when considering the feasibility of mass transit, which (for light rail) works well above 40 homes/ha. Only 8% of houses are in such a neighborhood in LA, versus 32.6% of houses for NY. Even better, this way of measuring density is relatively insensitive to changes in the boundaries of the urban region. To return to the “myth” of LA being denser than NY, there is some truth to it. The newer (far) suburbs of New York are indeed less dense than those in LA. LA has fewer really low density suburbs, and fewer high density neighborhoods. NY has some really low density suburbs, and some really high density neighborhoods.”

Ben points out that the shift from Beverly Hills to Hollywood is palpable and abrupt, visible over one crossroads. The trees and houses of the former instantly replaced by shiny malls and large, crumbling ‘30s buildings of the latter. The mall in Hollywood actually features the re-used materials of Cecil B. Mille’s Babylon, somewhat incredibly. Equally remarkably, it is virtually ‘transit-oriented development’ in its incorporation of a good Metro line. Almost. It is surrounded by a fair bit of Scientology infrastructure too though. Moving on, we stop at a great row of shops on Franklin Avenue, and take coffee at the Bourgeois Pig. (Why do Americans say ‘booo-jwah’? Rhetorical.) It’s a great coffee shop, a dark enclave after the bright street (as Australian ones often are - a cave-like interior is often a valid strategy in places like California and Queensland.) And this is a great little strip of stores: independent book-shops, record-shops etc. The kind of diversity, character and quality that malls can never reproduce (not that they aspire to).

The Griffith Park Observatory is a simply wonderful space, as many of you will know, perched atop scrubby hills that now remind me of New South Wales. In fact the eucalypts - also early migrants to California - are doing very well, by all accounts. But the terrain and soil is subtly different, and the vegetation - minus the eucalypts - completely different of course. LA is spread out before us in all directions, though it’s a hazy day, a combination of fog and smog fading the city out beyond Downtown. The ocean isn’t visible today - the vast flat plains of LA fill the eyes, eventually dissolving in mountains and sky as if a Qing dynasty-era painting. While the LA River can be seen snaking in from the left of our view, the city’s asphalt arteries sweep into the distance in dead straight lines.

Down to Silverlake and Echo Park. These are particularly appealing, with thousands of the aforementioned houses clinging to the hills. There’s a few particularly insane hills in Echo Park, where they imposed the grid irrespective the contours, following San Francisco’s lead. (San Francisco was bigger first and briefly an influence on LA, Ben relates). But most of the streets round here give up that game quite rightly, and instead wind up and around the hills in delightfully organic fashion. While there no pavements - and I usually take pavements to be an important offer to the citizen - here the traffic is so slow-moving due to the curves and narrow roads that it’s possible to walk anyway. With a few soft infrastructure tweaks and some more evenly distributed amenities, it would be very walkable.

One particular image is etched on my mind: an elderly Korean or Chinese woman on the crest of a hill, moving very slowly and staring into the middle distance of the opposite hill, doing what looked like tai chi. This, just after we’d inched past the beginnings of a Latino barbecue, a complex affair spilling out onto the street. We then drive past a few Neutra and Schindler houses. To my subsequent eternal regret my memory card filled just as we got to these neighbourhoods. My actual memory of them will persist fondly though.

By the time we’re back in Downtown, the traffic is building up and Broadway is a chaotic, honking mess of slow-moving steel. By this time, though, the city has won me over. Its constant contradictions - the very contradiction of it being here in the first place - have little negative effect now, only continually beguiling. Despite everything, this city continues to grow. As the Carey McWilliams poem from 1946 says:

”Here the American people were erupting, like lava from a volcano”

You still sense that, now as much as ever.

Before moving on to the more challenging approaches to architecture and urbanism that Postopolis! Is predicated on, it’s clear that even amongst this melange of vernacular architecture, beautiful Case Study Homes and professionalised eruptions of poor taste in the mansions of Beverly Hills, that experimentation and invention is at the heart of Los Angeles. But it’s a form of individual experimentation, in this case by householders. And even where I’ve discussed civic buildings like Walt Disney Concert Hall, Caltrans etc., you’ll note that they essentially stand alone, disconnected - atop a hill, or surrounded by parking lots or development sites. The only parts of Downtown that feel connected and coherent are Broadway and the Historic Core, unchanged in form since the ‘30s and unified through the accreation of shared history. But this individualism is at the heart of Los Angeles, as Hitoshi Abe, Chair of the Department of Architecture and Urban Design at UCLA, noted in his preface to a recent edition of A+U on the city's design and architecture:

“In different ways from Tokyo or Shanghai, Los Anglees is a city receptive to and actively nourishing many architectural experiments. The pursuit of explorations is evident across a broad spectrum. It can be found in kitsch roadside buildings, efforts by Frank Lloyd Wright, Rudolph Schindler, and Richard Neutra, the trials of Case Study Houses, John Lautner’s activities, and the work of contemporaries such as Frank O. Gehry, Thom Mayne, Eric Owen Moss.”

“Experimentation emerges from the city as a site of extreme individualism. In this sense experimentation in Los Angeles is about self-reflection and independent individuals striving to extend their own capabilities and the limits of possibilities. Individual pursuits are subsequently tested within the larger context of society. Today, globalization and interconnectivity are transforming the meaning of individuals, and consequently change the meaning of experimentation in Los Angeles.” (A+U #455: ‘The New Ecologies in Los Angeles - Design and Technology’)

That’s discernible in many of the projects we see at Postopolis! - In fact, some of the participants feature in that edition of A+U, such as Ball-Nogues. Others, such as Ben Cerveny, are looking at information systems that interconnect individuals to form a kind of social substrate for civic experimentation, not quite as Abe imagined but certainly exploring this idea of a civic glue “transforming the meaning of individuals” in cities like LA nonetheless.

Later that (Wednesday) evening, Bryan Finoki, Ben and I go for quick drive around LA Live, whose floodlights have been polluting the sky behind us every night. It’s not good, this place. A massive development which feels entirely out of step with the times. It should’ve been out of step with the city at any time, to be honest, but right now it feels particularly bloated, brash and broken. The so-called public space is crudely articulated such that there are no places to sit down or hang out, and over-lit to the point of absurdity. The laughable attempt at a piazza in front of the Nokia Forum is entirely empty as a result. It’s not in these disconnected mega-developments that Los Angeles will continue to experiment and connect but elsewhere, diffused amidst the distributed metropolis.

To Postopolis day two.

There are fewer people here initially tonight, though it fills up later, and by 7.30 the rooftop is full, so thanks again. It’s a bit warmer tonight, though the wind gets up later. The wind is a function of the design of the buildings around us, as if to rub in the themes of Postopolis! We sit 15 storeys up in a wind tunnel generated by the skyscrapers, such that a conference on landscape, architecture and urbanism is being slowly frozen by the city’s landscape and architecture itself.

The BLDGBLOG-powered Twitter feed for Postopolis! LA is going gangbusters. It’s a fantastic record of events, actually, whether you’re following in real-time or browsing retrospectively.

Tonight’s presentations are excellent. Geoff and I had noted that day one occasionally felt a bit tepid - great in parts, but a lack of energy in others - but day two really comes alive. A great variety to the talks, with stand-outs for me being the historian David Gissen, Robert Miles of Variate Labs and writer and photographer (and Morphosis architect) Ted Kane of Polar Inertia. Geoff runs a little interstitial interview with Jace and Joseph, during a break, which works quite well.

We now have lights, so the speakers are visible after dark, the Storefront crew improvising brilliantly as ever. Before that, early evening, the smell of dope drifts across from the hotel swimming pool behind us during Whitney Sander’s presentation, pausing proceedings temporarily. I’m not sure I’ve pointed out quite how spectacular the skypscapers around us look. Oddly, they’re not as present during the day, as your eyes instead drift to the hills in the background. Yet at night, with the lights on (rather too many lights on), they almost close in around the rooftop, creating a kind of canopy. There are more planes overhead tonight, for some reason, and a few helicopters later, the sound of their blades bouncing off the skyscrapers around us.

Notes to follow.

LA Art Weekend 2009 / ForYourArt (Postopolis! LA)

Just a quick shout to ForYourArt, who have been instrumental in bringing Postopolis! to Los Angeles. We literally could not have done it without them.

They've organised the LA Art Weekend 2009, which coincides with/includes Postopolis! LA, and it's on right now. So if you're in the Los Angeles area do have a look at the fantastic programme of events on ForYourArt's website, and get along to a few of them. It's a great line-up (with perhaps an underlying focus on discussion/work related to urbanism?) and neatly illustrates the diversity of art, architecture and design within the city.

ForYourArt / LA Art Weekend