Something, Something, Something, “Something, Something, Something, Detroit”

In this month’s Vice Magazine, Thomas Morton dares to say it: Detroit is done, finito, a lost cause, so dead even the dead are leaving. Because of crime you might ask? No. The automobile industry? Nope. The city’s crippling debt? No.

Detroit is infested…

with washed up journalists…

Over-produced, over-played, old-fashioned, or, as Morton coolly quips, “like it’s the journalistic version of cutting a grunge record,” Detroit pieces have been dealt their final blow. White flight, global economic restructuring, factory closures, crack-cocaine, global warming–Detroit was too good to be true–an American Dream–ruined … and then came the journalists.

Hi, here I am in front of the landscape that photographers always use to illustrate the jarring contrast between poverty (as represented by a desolate alley) and wealth (as symbolized by the fancy GM skyscraper in the back). That white building on the left is one of Detroit’s most successful grinding plants. Photo by Joseph Patel

Hey nice to meet you too. Yeah, there’s not a whole lot to report on besides ya know, the usual. So you want abandoned factories? And abandoned houses? Abandoned anything. Got it. What about this place? What? That weirdo from the Times was here yesterday? Take you where? Oh, I don’t know if that’s a good idea. What? Yeah, I know. Metaphor. Poetics. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I heard you the first, second, and third time. Woah you don’t look so good. Are you okay? What? “Garrrggghhhaarghh!”Ahhhhh! Zombie photo-journalist on the loose. Keep one eye on the lens one eye on your surroundings or you’ll turn into one too… (from 28 Words Later and the hit sequel A 24 Roll Later).

Ok.   So Detroit is actually a real city with real people who do normal things–not just photograph abandoned buildings. Let us not objectify, exoticize, speculate as if the future was of our own creation (oh wait…). I get that–I really do, but Morton also suggests that blogging about Detroit gets you blog hits-galore so I’ve got to try it out.

So I worked out an equation

Detroit = = fordism = advanced industrial economy = American made = American Century = propagandizing the American dream = film industry = hollywood = simulation of reality + reality = LA = fragmentation = abstraction = visual metaphors = movie sets = abandoned buildings = Roger & Me = urban revanchism = disneyfication = imagineering = media conglomerates = Time Magazine = journalism = objectivity = new subjectivity = nostalgia = memory = fun = leisure time = amusement parks = today’s museum = capital = speculation = recession = intervention = federal government = “New New Deal” = jobs = subsidies = investment = action = acting = schizophrenia = capitalism =Warren Buffett = Burlington Northern Santa Fe = blast from the past = redevelopment = development = prophecy = manifest destiny = history = vacant plots = search for meaning = make money = cheap land = Detroit!

What if Detroit could profit from its objectification, sublimation, and romanticization? Imagineer its own history? Its own future?

What if a plague of journalists precedes a new form of tourism? A new platform for speculation where you create your destination before you arrive.

What if Detroit became Detroit!, the world’s largest open-air museum. No need to advertise, there’s plenty of media coverage already. Admission is a congestion tax you pay when your vehicle crosses into Detroit! city limits, subtle enough that people rarely realize they are in Detroit! Visitors arrive anyway they please, but most come by car for the authenticity’s sake.

Informed Tourist: I don’t know Detroit! but I know Detroit if you catch my drift. I’d like to visit, but I dont want the “typical” experience.

Hey no problem, stay at one our many dilapidated rentals, or, try a homestay, with one of Detroit!’s lifetime residents.

In a surprise move the Obama Administration drafts the city’s unemployed to “stay where they are as proud residents of a great American city”  Actors in a great urban drama, Detroit! residents receive generous subsidies to live typical Detroit! lives with plenty of space and few worries.  Reborn and reimagined, Detroit! beckons Americans to live life to the fullest, as if any day could be your last.

 

Antoine Predock / Death Star / World Mammoth and Permafrost Museum.

Antoine Predock’s work and I go way back. When I was a kid, my friends and I used to meet after dark and play capture the flag in what most Davis locals refer to as the “Death Star,” formally known as Predock’s Social Sciences & Humanities Building (1994). Social Sciences & Humanities Building by day, Death Star by night. Long before I began to pursue architecture as a discipline, the Death Star was my fortress, a twisting, turning dreamscape, as if it was designed precisely for hiding, spying, sneaking, and climbing.

framed views of Davis from tower

intentional view corridor

aerial view of Social Sciences & Humanities Bldg (1994)

Death Star close up

My playful reprogramming of Predock’s Death Star as it sits empty at night attests to the success of Predock’s practice in cultivating a distinctly American dreamscape. Predock’s aesthetic and spatial logic are rooted in the American sublime, a Baudrillardian mish-mash of sci-fi imagery, fetishized vista points, internalized circulation, and the application of light and shadow. Context is drawn out of a collective dream, a victory for innocent play over the drudgery of the everyday.

concrete wrapping

Clay model of the Social Sciences & Humanities Building

Though Predock would likely cite clay modeling, tectonic striation, motion studies, and the desert Southwest as primary sources, I can’t shake the Star Wars association, especially after seeing his recent competition entry for The World Mammoth and Permafrost Museum in Yakutsk, Russia. (On another note I think the world may have reached its museum limit. Check out Earth, the New Museum of Museums.)

strangely familiar rendering of the "WM&PM"

this is what Predock cut out from the rendering. don't want any Cold War reminders.

interior rendering of the "WM&PM"

illustration of Hoth Rebel Base interior

sculpture of Hoth rebel base w/ Millenium Falcon!

Clay model of the Mammoth and Permafrost Museum

more after hyperspace…

Chris Woebken – Animal Superpowers

Q: What’s it like to be an ant?

A: Fun!

Woebken’s Animal Superpowers allow humans to get past their human-ness and enjoy the sense-stylings of their inner spirit animal. Or something like that.  I would call this a great present for the holiday season. Not yet available at Toys R Us … but in the meantime pick up a pair of stilts and see what its like to be a human-trying-to-be-a-giraffe or maybe a kaleidoscope to be a human-trying-to-be-a-fly.

As aesthetically pleasing and design-y as Woebken’s work might appear, my own subjective-inner-spirit-body-human can’t get past its relation to another project of similar calibur:

 

 

John Baldessari photoshops Mies.

 

Kunstmuseen Krefeld to read the exhibition abstract and see more photos.

via Archinect

The quickest way out of a Richard Serra.

Two systems collide!

Infrastructure Overload

Flaking and inchoate, this overrun Görlitzer Bahnhof facade begs to be excavated.

Insufficient street cleaning services and an overabundance of promotional advertising offers residents a new building material, or perhaps merely a lucid glimpse into the recent past.  Next to such a hub of activity, the stern triptych composition (last post) appears stagnant.

Urban Time Capsules

Promotional advertising in Berlin contained within a triptych composition.

Though a fresh layer conceals the dates and times of an eventful past, the angle of the late-afternoon sun reveals a contoured surface, suggesting a thick buildup of advertising beneath. In this case of contained promotional advertising, a visual and cultural history can be extracted from a dense, sticky, stratified, rectangular mass.  Much as the study of tree-rings reveal yearly growth cycles, so too do these structures explain an urban ecology: the frequency of formal and informal flyering, local events, and poster-removal services.

 

James Rojas

Model of Rotterdam for Interboro's "Community: The American Way of Living" at the IABR

 

James Rojas constructs scale models of cities made of found objects and kid-friendly building blocks. Interaction, revision and vertical expansion are encouraged–all pieces are movable. Imagineer a new mega-project, aim for accurate representation, or add a flourish here and there to make your own mark. Any which way, Rojas’ models offer citizens a glimpse into the abstract world of city planning and power brokering. Low-tech party toy or high-brow think piece, James constructs a colorful platform for dialogue and community empowerment.

On Loneliness – Werner Herzog

Recently finished reading Werner Herzog’s Of Walking in Ice (Munich-Paris, 23 November-14 December, 1974), which, to borrow a term from one of his later entries, depicts Herzog in a “dialogical rapport with [him]self.” There are two characters; Herzog the storyteller and Herzog the man. Early entries yield flourishing slices of daily life, each small observation written to contain the entire past, present, and future of a moment recorded candidly by Herzog’s lucid gaze.

He cannot be a farmer, being almost blind. He is the innkeeper, yes. The lights go on inside, which means the daylight outside will soon be gone. A child in a parka, incredibly sad, is drinking Coke, squeezed between two adults. Applause now for the band. The fare tonight shall be fowl, says the innkeeper in the Stillness. (3)

As he traverses the German countryside the weather grows exceedingly cruel and Herzog’s deteriorating physical condition prompts his transgression from public observer toward brutish survivor.

The man at the petrol station gave me such an unreal look that I rushed to the john to convince myself in front of the mirror that I was still looking human.

In France, nearing his destination, human relation boils down to grunts and symbols, dogs sniffing each others’ butts.

Just past Piney I was stopped and checked by astonishing patrolmen who wouldn’t believe a word I said and wanted to take me with them right away. We only came to an understanding once the city of Munich was mentioned. I said, “Oktoberfest,” and one of the policement had been there and remembered the words “Glockenspiel” and “Marienplatz”; he could say this in German. After that they became peaceful. (58)

Written just after the debut of The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974) retitled from the original Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle, meaning “Every man for himself and God against them all,” Herzog’s portrayal of his journey seems to borrow from this concept.

And to end without ending, every usage of lonely in Of Walking in Ice…

When I looked out of the window, a raven was sitting with his head bowed in the rain and didn’t move. Much later he was still sitting there, motionless and freezing and lonely and still wrapped in his raven’s thoughts. A brotherly feeling flashed through me and loneliness filled my breast…

A little further on, in the loneliest spot, the very loneliest spot, I saw a fox…

Very pronounced loneliness, also…

Is the loneliness good? Yes it is. There are only dramatic vistas ahead…

Out of sheer loneliness my voice wouldn’t work so I merely squeaked; I couldn’t find the correct pitch for speaking and felt embarrassed…

Beside the main road to Charmes there was an exhibition of campers and mobile homes which, now that it’s wintertime, were lying lonely and forsaken behind a chain-link fence…

The loneliness is deeper than usual today. I’m developing a dialogical rapport with myself…

I threw the apple core against the tree, and the apples fell like rain. When the apples had grown still again, resting on the ground, I thought to myself that no one could imagine such human loneliness. It is the loneliest day, the most isolated of all. So I went and shook the tree until it was utterly bare. In the midst of the stillness the apples pummeled to the ground. When it was over, a haunting stillness grabbed me and I glanced around, but no one was there. I was alone…

The loneliness today stretched out ahead of me toward the west, though I couldn’t see that far as my eyesight let me down…

Scale

Just a humble little souvenir shop on top of…

The plants add a nice touch!