Skating as an Adaptaion of Space

The built environment is made up different systems and components (roads, factories, residencies, shipping yards, restaurants, tunnels bridges, etc.) which functions as avenues and settings for the people, activities and mechanics of a city. As the activities and demographics of a city change over time, elements of the urban fabric are used differently: some are retooled and redesigned to accommodate the changes, others are destroyed forever and still others are abandoned as they are. Abandoned urban spaces can take the form of empty, derelict factories, underpasses and outdated service tunnels but can also be empty plazas, back alleys, scraps of space in-between buildings and expansive parking lots which have, for one reason or another, fallen into disuse. Before long, these spaces, ignored by the city and it’s intended users will attract new users: scavengers of space.
Street skating is rooted in the reapportion of urban spaces like these. Skateboarders use the armature of the city, which once served a bureaucratic or civic purpose, and utilize it for it’s physicality: exploring their very floors and walls (as slopes, ledges, curbs, dips, gutters and steps) and their street furniture (like handrails, benches, trashcans, tables, etc.). While skateboarding is often looked at by city officials and property owners as a public nuisance and frequently banned in public spaces, street skating as a civil act is integral in the adaptation and reuse of spaces which have become obsolete.

Reforming the Hell-Hole Home

Dark, dank and crowded a small child shares a bed with her 8 siblings. In the morning she will continue her work making fake flowers for hours on end with these same siblings. Making pennies a week, she contributes to large the family’s small home. Like many lower-class families of the 19th and early 20th century, tenement housing was a necessity that sacrificed comfort simply because they had no alternative considering their class, income and in many cases ethnic background. Tenement living in the 19th and 20th century had acute equivalency to that of a death trap. Along with over-crowding, lack of necessary utilities, was the threat of infectious disease and overwhelming structural danger. With the crowding that came with robust immigration, and an industrial upturn was the absence of a planned and moral way in which to house these masses. Eventually recognizing the error in the living conditions of the poor, reform was afoot, but never quite successful as it set out to be.

Unwelcome West: The Dust Bowl's contradiction of frontier prosperity

In 1936, John Steinbeck visited squatters’ camps in California. His observations of this population of refugees from the Great Plains Dust Bowl vividly depict the horrors of their living conditions:

The next-door-neighbour family, of man, wife and three children of from three to nine years of age, have built a house by driving willow branches into the ground and wattling weeds, tin, old paper and strips of carpet against them. A few branches are placed over the top to keep out the noonday sun. It would not turn water at all. There is no bed.

Such was the life for dispossessed farming families who fled the desolation of the Dust Bowl. However, theirs was the popular choice. During the decade of what historians have said was this country’s worst prolonged environmental disaster, two thirds of the population of the southern plains never left their homesteads despite the drought, and then the unrelenting dust that overwhelmed their lives. All told, the Dust Bowl cut a swath of despair that spread from Texas to California, a direct affront to the ideal of the American West. The Dust Bowl and subsequent Californian migration was too much for any western American resourcefulness to handle. In the 1930s, the ideal of the American frontier is firm was still firm in the nation’s psyche. Reactions to the living conditions of Anglo-Americans in the Dust Bowl and the migrant camps of California, notably the journalistic documentation of them, clearly illustrate that power.

Be Seen

BE SEEN

 

            Every year thousands of people in New York City wait anxiously for the month of September to arrive so that they are blessed with the presence of that year’s fashion Bible (Vogue September issue) and the masses of fashion designers that make their way to the tents of Bryant Park for New York’s Fashion Week. This much-anticipated phenomenon seems to be only taken seriously in New York and because of this, it has been labeled as one of fashion’s iconic cities.  In order to understand how this city has been able to attain this label, it is important to understand how consumerism has shaped the built environment of New York City. Examining the investments that people made in order to create shopping malls and other shopping venues and their goals behind supporting the idea of ‘consumerism’ is critical to understanding the way in which people ultimately look at fashion as an investment and a way to be seen within this city. Within the built environment, being able to analyze the motives and creative processes behind the designs of the buildings and the accessibility of main streets and commercial areas is important in order to promote and facilitate commerce and institute a desire for people to be there. Zoning in on Fifth Avenue, Soho, and the Meatpacking district will show how fashion has shaped consumerism to improve these areas, and simultaneously launching New York into a fashion city that is known to the entire world.  

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meatpacking district

Soho-prince street 1971

Bergdorf Goodman luxury display window 

Charleston and the Falsification of the Old South

"I'm going back to dignity and grace. I'm going back to Charleston, where I belong." (Rhett Butler, Gone with the Wind) Rhett Butler's statement is often the way people imagine Charleston, South Carolina to be today; a decadent historical southern city that has not changed since prior to the Civil War. However, this image is very misleading. It is through efforts of historical preservation in the twentieth century that Charleston has been able to emulate a pre Civil War historical appearance. This preservation movement began in the 1920s as a response to the destruction of historic structures in order to accommodate automobiles. Thus, the historical preservation movement lead Charleston to economic stability as a means of “sell[ing] the city... to the outside world” and creating tourism as its main industry.

Figure 1: This image is a plan of Charleston in 1704 during its first settlements. The map will be later useful to describe the development and layout of the city and how Charleston expanded and what of the original structure still remains today.

Figure 2: This is a map of Charleston's Historical Preservation Plan. The dark red area represents the existing historical district and the other colors are those the city still proposes to preserve.

Figure 3: The rainbow Row Section of East Bay Street in the early 20th Century.

Figure 4: The Rainbow Row Section of Charleston today.

Figure 3 and 4: It is interesting to compare these two images as both of the images are of the same area. One can see that the Rainbow Row Section resemble early 20th century industrial architecture whereas figure 4 although it is the image of today shows a more dated version of Figure 3.

A dream debauched: The decline of individual as homemaker in suburban America

Update: Image uploading seems to be working now so I will add images.

America, since its first settlement by Europeans, has developed an intense cult of individuality. In many cases the new settlers were those whose individuality was too strong to allow them to remain comfortably in Europe. They set out to the New World as individuals. Upon arriving, they strode into the woods and individually carved sites for themselves, and, perhaps most importantly, they rolled up their shirtsleeves and began building their own individual houses. This notion of the heroic individual-builder played a major role in establishing another great American ideal, that of the utopian pastoral community. For the first 250 years of European settlement in America, development and expansion were seen as a social panacea. If deserving and upright Americans could acquire their own homes, the thought was, they could surely achieve the ideal of Protestant morality to which the country aspired. Yet gradually this aspiration fell apart. By the 1960s and 70s Americans were starting to see the shortcomings in their grand suburban dreams which had somehow fallen short of the ideal community they were supposed to foster. And while there are certainly numerous factors behind the gradual debauching of the American suburban ideal, the diminishing of the individual’s role in home selection and construction can be traced along a parallel trajectory.

Horace

Images: I couldn't figure out how to add captions so I guess I will describe them here. 1: Architect's model for suburban house. Even simple "undesigned" vernacular architecture (which is intended to derive from the inherited styles that had been designed by homeowners themselves) now adheres to prescribed models. 2: Aerial view of defense housing (i.e. for returning GI's) in Vancouver, WA. Shows the anonymity and homogeneity of post-war suburban housing.

3: Page from Federal Housing Administration pamphlet advising subdividers on how to properly arrange lots. The act of carving one's space out of the wilderness, previously a very individual and independent act (see next image) also becomes ordained by corporate or government authorities.

4: "Among the Pines/A First Settlement" Currier and Ives Lithograph; ca. 1850's.

This image is in contrast to the previous 3 as it shows the early rural ideal of the American settler making it on their own in the wilderness.

The Museum As Art and Philosophy

Visual art is often defined by the space in which is found. It can be contained, protected, and kept captive by the space; or it can be let free into the open air to truly be experienced, and the organic nature of its presentation becomes part of the viewing itself. The emergence of the public museum in the American city was a physical manifestation of the shifting national attitude towards art. Art was once a thing restricted only to the educated upper classes. But the museum movement beginning in the early 19th century introduced the idea of art as a public commodity, something that should not be hoarded away in dark halls but displayed for the education and betterment of the general population. This philosophy of art made available for the greater good is made plainly apparent by the multitude of public museums now present in American cities, and in the design philosophies of the architects contracted to build them.