Literary Dose #47: Ada Louise Huxtable

Yesterday Ada Louise Huxtable died at the age of 91. Admiration for the influential architecture critic can be found all over the internet, on architecture and other websites reporting on her passing. In lieu of adding my own thoughts, which basically align with most of what has been written, I've transcribed a couple paragraphs from the introduction of Huxtable's 1986 book Architecture, Anyone?, the last collection of her essays from the New York Times, where she was architecture critic until 1982.

First, Huxtable gives a little bit of advice to would-be architecture critics:

"Obviously, I have enjoyed the work [at the New York Times], and I have also enjoyed the rewards. I was alone when I started—the first and only full-time architecture critic in the American press—a fact that is generally forgotten along with The Times's brave gamble on establishing the position, based on the belief that the quality of the built word mattered at a time when environment was still only a dictionary word. Now there are cover stories and full-color treatments of buildings and architects and state-of-the-art articles in the weekly news journals. Architecture has taken its hyped-up place on the world stage of celebrity journalism, and developers have discovered the market value of designer labels. There are legions, or battalions, of critics an would-be critics, with vision ranging from the flyspeck to the apocalyptic, in fashionable pursuit of architectural answers to questions that purport to address the hot topics of art and life. To them I say, with feeling, lots of luck."

And later she sums up her take on the postmodernism that was popular at the time, though some of the sentiments can be extended to the present:

"Unfortunately, much of the present theoretical and critical discourse has renounced [architecture's] public role for a cop-out definition of architecture as a formal object that bears no relationship or responsibility to forces beyond its own forms. There is talk of symbolism, metaphor and typology, and a great deal of genuflecting to history with a thin veneer of stagy style that mocks the history it pretends to recall. Still more serious, there is a general acceptance today, in architecture and elsewhere, of the obsolescence and abandonment of value judgments, and a concerted effort to fill the vacuum with a well-screened—one might even call it an elite—populism or pluralism. Bombarded as we are with every kind of message, evaluations of meaning or worth are more important than ever. It is only the judgments based on the wistful oversimplification and willful blindness to the realities of the human condition which so flawed the modernist ideal that stand condemned. It is pious simplicities and paternalistic prescriptions based on false premises that are obsolete. The desire to pit a limited and artificial academic order, whether historicist or modernist, against the disorderly inequities and gritty vitality of the real world, is a shallow, fruitless act."

- Ada Louise Huxtable from Architecture, Anyone? Cautionary Tales of the Builidng Art (University of California Press, 1986, pp. xiv, xvii)

Literary Dose #46

"I remember when I was about to publish my first book and I said to this friend of mine, Larry Rickels, that I had to get used to the idea of people reading it. He said no, you have to get used to the idea that people don't read books. I found that incredibly liberating. And I would say that with books it's the same as with exhibitions. The purpose of an exhibition is not to be seen, but to have a good party that will allow the people who are engaged to engage each other. It's the same with books. The purpose of books is not to be read. I buy books but do not read them. I own a lot of books. I write books, I collect books, I think about books, I copy books, I pay for books -- I'm in the book business. But I don't read books. Don't assume that exhibitions are meant to be seen, and that books are meant to be read. Buildings are by and large invisible, and that's to their credit."

- Mark Wigley, in Four Conversations on the Architecture of Discourse, edited by Aaron Levy and William Menking (Architectural Association Publications, 2012, p. 83)

Literary Dose #45

"While they would later be viewed as authentic, contemporaries dismissed brownstones as modern and artificial. Foreshadowing post-World War II broadsides against urban renewal and suburban architecture, critics in the nineteenth century decried the mechanical, dehumanizing monotony of brownstone rows. 'When one has seen one house he has seen them all,' wrote one writer, 'the same everlasting high stoops and gloomy brown-stone fronts, the same number of holes punched in precisely the same places.' 'The architecture is not only impressive, it is oppressive,' complained another critic. 'Its great defect is its monotony, which soon grows tiresome.' Still others, prefiguring 1990s dismissals of McMansions, lambasted the gaudy, overadorned stone fronts preferred by New York's brownstone nouveau riche: 'What we lack in invention, we can cover by "ornamentation" and hence we have miles of reiterated and unmeaning rope mouldings, filigreed jambs, and window-heads twisted into all sorts of conceivable contortions.' Some regarded Brooklyn brownstones as particularly fake. 'The majority are deceptive, fraudulent, pretentious -- mere shells,' complained a Washington Post writer in 1886 of the rows of small, boxy townhouses. '[They are] plated, so to speak, with a coating of brownstone in front and trimmed inside with cheap pine so that a poor man may boast a brown-stone house. And they have alcove bed-rooms and marble buffet niches and factory-made stained glass door panes, so that the clerk may live like the shadow of the millionaire.'"

- Suleiman Osman from The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity in Postwar New York (University of Chicago Press, 2011, pp. 29-30)

(Note: the illustration is the first hit in a Google image search for "brownstone.")

Update 03.10: The Museum of the City of New York is hosting the panel discussion The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn, moderated by author Suleiman Osman, with Eric Demby, Dr. Kenneth Patton, Amy Sohn, and Michelle de la Uz, on Tuesday, March 15. Mention "A Daily Dose of Architecture" and get your tickets at the member price of $6 each! Call 917-492-3395 or email programs@mcny.org.

Literary Dose #44

"What defines a good (architecture/design) book for you?

Ninety-seven percent is rubbish, I wouldn't touch it with a ... [sic] The rest is woth living for. For example Max Bill's Maillart. Lovely. Perfect. Not too thick. Super proportions. Fantastic typeface. Balanced. Nice bridges of course. Something contemporary? [...] Nine Swimming Pools by Ed Ruscha. It's old too, and an artist's book, sorry. Can't think of anything else. It's dreadful. No good Zumthor book, the one by Lars Müller just scrapes through. The book about Vals is a disaster [...] The Herzog & de Meuron book by Peter Blum, it's got something. [...] Honestly, it drives me nuts, all I can think of is rubbish. Even the Dhaka book I did for Louis Kahn, it was successful but I wouldn't say it's that good. [...] In short: Less is more. Little books, choice books, thin books, 'unpolished' books, normal books. Or an eight-pound door-stopper like the Valerio Olgiati for König, of which I'm a little bit proud."

- "Interview with designer Dino Simonett" in Birkhäuser's Complete Catalog 2010/2011 (PDF link), p. 13.

Literary Dose #43

"Huge, drab buildings suddenly started to pop up like mushrooms all over the place. It was if nobody had created them, as if they multiplied by themselves. Sometimes, when we visit other cities and countries, we ask ourselves where the beauty of the olden days has gone. In some places we get the impression that all buildings have been designed by structural glass manufacturers; all the roads by asphalt companies; and all the parks by lawn mower firms. It seems as though the architects sign on the dotted line but are excluded from the decision-making process. We ask ourselves why everything has to be planned in one go and built at top speed right up to the last minute. In our opinion, things only work if they are allowed to evolve -- and that requires time. Perhaps it would be practical to oblige all architects and clients to live for a time in the buildings they construct. If you don't like a painting, you can take it off the wall, or put it away, or even burn it -- but architecture stays standing for at least fifty years and it is impossible to ignore its presence. We should and must do it better."

- "A World Without a Manual" by Jan Körbes (REFUNC.NL) in Rematerial: From Waste to Architecture, by Alejandro Bahamón and Maria Camila Sanjinés (W. W. Norton, 2010, p. 183)

See Places: Design Observer for a slideshow of REFUNC.NL's "Return of the Fridges" and other projects in the book.

Literary Dose #42

"Architects have more to offer their clients and society than they realize. Integrating design morphology, material science, and environmental sustainability will undoubtedly inform everyone what is possible or achievable in the built environment, in a manner not previously seen. A focus on architectural science (distinct from building science) must equal our overwhelming obsession with form. It must become the foundation by which to certify a new architectural expertise -- comparable in breadth and scope to medical research. The National Science Foundation should be the logical choice to fund such research but -- incredibly -- it does not recognize architecture as a science! We must demand that our representative organizations, such as the AIA, lobby to change this.

Today's broad societal concerns -- global warming, greenhouse gases, resource depletion -- will focus greater public attention than ever before toward architects for answers and innovative solutions. Should they fail, such attention will quickly be redirected elsewhere. The US Green Building Council, Architecture 2030, and Architecture for Humanity all raised broad public awareness on these issues well before any of the professional organizations did. This is not a coincidence but a wake-up call. Talking about green design can only go so far. Metrics derived from controlled testing -- automobile fuel mileage or appliance energy ratings, for example -- enable those with ideas to speak above the fray. Those who now seek government-funded building programs but fail to address the opportunity for digital design process change will have missed the point."

- "The Digital Design Ecosystem: Towards a Pre-Rational Architecture" by Paul Selestsky (senior manager of digital design in SOM's New York office) in Provisional: Emerging Modes of Architectural Practice USA, edited by Elite Kedan, F. Jonathan Dreyfous, Craig Mutter (Princeton Architectural Press, 2009, pp. 44-45)

Literary Dose #41

"Consumption and affluence have increased in many parts of the world, and although they seem to form a baseline of contemporary society, some counter-movements are also visible within consumer society. Not a wholesale refusal but some level of consumer savvy, such as re-use, purchasing sustainable, 'ethically produced' or local goods. Here, the market finds a way to respond. When viewed cynically, that indicates that there is no 'moral' component to the market, but that profit is the only concern. While this may be true, if the public enforces a conscience upon producers by choosing to purchase some goods over other (and price being one of numerous factors in that choice), the results are not necessarily bad. The TV-program Extreme Home Makeover encompasses a number of different features of this debate. On the one hand, it presumes the desirability of an identity expressed in architectural terms (although primarily on the surface more than in the space). Bedrooms are turned into drive-in movie theaters, incorporate pick-up truck beds, have music-themed wall decorations, grass-covered floors -- anything is possible, as long as it is based on a particular hobby or interest of the room's occupant. It also offers a 'quick', and sometimes superficial fix: although wrecking balls and sledgehammers are used extensively, the fundamental structure of the space is not typically transformed. The houses remain recognizable suburban family dwellings. It offers a spectacle: extensive demolition and construction crews are working against the clock with the design team, and the pressure builds as the deadline nears. And it offers the satisfaction of the family returning, who will forget the troubles in their life as they walk through their beautiful new home. We could say: this form of sugar-coated home makeover is no more than a temporary placebo for their problems. Or we could also say: if there is a role for architecture to play in the everyday life of suburban families, this offers a caricature of what architects could be doing -- making the home back into a castle."

- Lara Schrijver from Radical Games: Popping the Bubble of 1960s' Architecture (NAi Publishers, 2009, p. 20)

Literary Dose #40

"'[Ric Scofidio] and I typically argue a lot,' [Liz Diller] says.
'Yes,' he says.
'We kind of beat each other up. He has his ideas, I have my ideas, and I think my ideas are better than his.'
[...]
'Early in our relationship, we really pushed it many times to be on [sic] the breaking point,' he remembers. 'I mean really be on [sic] the breaking point, and then 20 minutes later we're back together and everything was fine. And I think that that has enabled us to be totally brutal and honest with each other.'"

- "Portrait of a Working Marriage" in FLYP Issue 35, which features a couple videos with DS+R and an audio interview with FHL co-founder Robert Hammond.

Literary Dose #39

"My entry into the profession in 1972 coincided with a number of important architectural events, most dramatically, perhaps, the first energy crisis of the decade, which began with the oil embargo in October, the beginning of a long-term and severe increase in the cost of energy. Its immediate architectural effects were formally dramatic if somewhat short-lived -- the incorporation of solar panels, earth berms, Trombe walls, and a variety of other gadgets to create passive energy sources. Its long-term effects were more subtle bu more permanent -- a dramatic increase in the importance of the wall as a thermal barrier, resulting in not only a lot more insulation but also the decline or even disappearance of single glazing, uninsulated spandrels, exposed columns and beams, and thermal bridges. Whole architectural vocabularies -- the exposed steel frames of the Case Study Houses, the exposed concrete frames and mullionless glazing of the brutalist era -- declined or disappeared, and the structural frame retreated behind the building envelope. The wall, at least in large-scale buildings, had long ago lost most of its structural importance, and once the wall became primarily an environmental membrane, everything changed. The solid wall devoid of insulation was replaced by the multilayered multifunctional wall. It is no accident that the advent of postmodernism and the decline, if not the disappearance, of any interest in structural expression followed soon after, for it is difficult to express a structure you cannot expose."

- Edward R. Ford from Five Houses, Ten Details (Princeton Architectural Press, 2009, pp. 113-114)

Literary Dose #38

"For Pierre Restany it was the society founded on the eternal that was obsessed with the values of permanence and materiality; today, instead, we share the understanding, matured from the 1960s onwards, that what is real is not eternal. ... The danger of contemporary culture is not the freshness of the image, its here and now, but rather its freezing, mummifying it in a form that remains immutable over time. The obstinate hope for perrenial monuments in the end testifies to a headstrong obtuseness that we have dragged behind us since the time of the Egyptians, and which consists of wanting, at all costs, to exorcise death and refuse the deeper meaning of life, which is precisely that of mutability."

- Luigi Prestinenza Puglisi from New Directions in Contemporary Architecture: Evolutions and Revolutions in Building Design Since 1988 (Wiley, 2008, pp. 111)

(Luigi Prestinenza Puglisi's book contains a bibliography of "50 books, 10 of which are must-haves." I don't have all of the must-haves, but I do have 10 of the 50, pictured above.)

Literary Dose #37

Hans Ulbrich Obrist: You wrote in the Observer in 1997 a piece on airports and London where you said that, “By comparison with London Airport, London itself seems hopelessly antiquated. London may well be the only world capital—with the possible exception of Moscow—that has gone from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first without experiencing all the possibilities and excitements of the twentieth in any meaningful way.” And you carry on mentioning your admiration for the Hilton Hotel in Heathrow. Can you tell me why that building, and what relationship or dialogue you have in general with architecture or architects?

J.G. Ballard: The Heathrow Hilton designed by Michael Manser is my favourite building in London. It’s part space-age hangar and part high-tech medical centre. It’s clearly a machine, and the spirit of Le Corbusier lives on in its minimal functionalism. It’s a white cathedral, almost a place of worship, the closest to a religious building that you can find in an airport. Inside, it’s a highly theatrical space, dominated by its immense atrium. The building, in effect, is an atrium with a few rooms attached. Most hotels are residential structures, but rightly, the Heathrow Hilton plays down this role, accepting the total transience that is its essence, and instead turns itself into a huge departure lounge, as befits an airport annex. Sitting in its atrium one becomes, briefly, a more advanced kind of human being. Within this remarkable building, one feels no emotions and could never fall in love, or need to. The National Gallery or the Louvre are the complete opposite, and people there are always falling in love.

[Heathrow Hilton by Michael Manser, 1992 | image source]

Hans Ulbrich Obrist: And what is your favourite museum and why? What do you think of the evolutions undertaken by museums in the last few decades? In your view, what role do museums play today? And ideally what do you think their role should be?

J.G. Ballard: I like traditional museums, the less frequented the better. All the changes in the past fifty years have been for the worst. I remember the Louvre in 1949 when it was completely deserted, whereas today it is a theme park where you can enjoy “the Mona Lisa experience.” This isn’t only a matter of funding. Museum directors enjoy being impresarios, guru-figures manipulating the imaginations of the public. Museums shouldn’t be too popular. The experience within the Louvre or the National Gallery should be challenging and unsettling, and take years to absorb. The Italians had the right idea. Most of their paintings were in dimly lit churches, un-clean and difficult to see. As a result, the renaissance endured for centuries.

- An interview with J.G. Ballard and Hans Ulbrich Obrist from Hans Ulbrich Obrist Interviews, Volume 1 (Charta, 2003, pp. 58-68)

The above interview in its entirety is available at Abitare (via Archinect), though volume one of Obrist's interviews -- a nearly 1,000 page tome with 66 interviews with architects, artists, curators, filmmakers, musicians, philosophers, social theorists, and urbanists -- is worthwhile for those interested in this form of inquiry.

See Ballardian for obituaries and tributes on the author who has influenced architects (among others) with his unique form of science-fiction.

Literary Dose #36

[Geodesic dome over Midtown Manhattan | image source]

"I find Bucky [Fuller] more and more inspirational, especially for the freedom of his research. Two projects done with Shoji Sadao in 1960 make the point. The first of these is the much-ridiculed dome over Midtown Manhattan, criticized either as “impractical” (how to buff the glass, how to get the traffic through) or as simply a megalomaniacal expression of an environment overly controlled [as I did]. Such criticisms miss the project’s simple point: The membrane has a surface area approximately 1/64 that of the aggregated exteriors of all the buildings within it, and Bucky argued that the larger the dome, the greater the energy conserved. The Manhattan dome is simply rhetorical, a device to describe the environmental inefficiencies of standard practice."

- Michael Sorkin, from "Bucky lives! Why Fuller matters more today than ever before" in Architectural Record, November 2008, p.

LIterary Dose #35

"Supposedly the emperor [Hadrian] sent the plans for [the Temple of Venus and Roma] to the professional architect Apollodorus. Apollodorus, one of the great architects of Imperial Rome, had previously served Trajan, and known Hadrian for perhaps twenty years; the modern historian William MacDonald describes the architect as "a man of considerable consequence, a writer and a cosmopolitan citizen." When Hadrian sent him the plans for this new work, Apollodorus criticized the technical construction and the proportions of both the building and its statues. Hadrian reacted, according to later gossip, by having Appolodorus killed.

- Richard Sennett from Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization (W.W. Norton & Co., 1994, p. 97)

Literary Dose #34

"What [Karl] Marx was able to show was that these three necessary conditions of a capitalist mode of production [being growth-oriented, resting on the exploitation of living labor in production (i.e. a gap between what labor gets and what it creates), and being technologically and organizationally dynamic] were inconsistent and contradictory and that the dynamic of capitalism was necessarily, therefore, crisis-prone. There was, in his analysis, no way in which the combination of these three necessary conditions could produce steady and unproblematic growth. In particular, the crisis tendencies of capitalism would produce periodic phases of overaccumulation, defined as a condition in which idle capital and idle labor supply could exist side by side with no apparent way to bring these idle resources together to accomplish socially useful tasks. A generalized condition of overaccumulation would be indicated by idle productive capacity, a glut of commodities and an excess of inventories, surplus money capital (perhaps held as hoards), and high unemployment. The conditions that prevailed in the 1930s and have emerged periodically since 1973 have to be regarded as typical manifestations of the tendency towards overaccumulation."

- David Harvey from The Condition of Postmodernity (Blackwell, 1990, pp. 180-181).

Literary Dose #33

[Mannahatta Project's view of Mannahatta ca. 1609 overlaid with today's footprint of Manhattan | image source]

"When Dr. Eric Sanderson leads a tour through [Central Park], he and his flock usually pass Jagiello without pausing, because they are lost in another century altogether -- the 17th. Bespectacled under his wide-brimmed felt hat, a trim beard graying around his chin and a laptop jammed in his backpack, Sanderson is a landscape ecologist with the Wildlife Conservation Society, a global squadron of researchers trying to save an imperiled world from itself. At its Bronx Zoo headquarters, Sanderson directs the Mannahatta Project, an attempt to re-create, virtually, Manhattan Island as it was when Henry Hudson's crew first saw it in 1609: a pre-urban vision that tempts speculation about how a posthuman future might look."

[Mannahatta Project's view of Murray Hill ca. 1609 | image source]

"His team has scoured original Dutch documents, colonial British military maps, topographic surveys, and centuries of assorted archives throughout town. They've probed sediments, analyzed fossil pollens, and plugged thousands of bits of biological data into imaging software that generates three-dimensional panoramas of the heavily wooded wilderness on which a metropolis was juxtaposed. With each new entry of a species of grass or tree that is historically confirmed in some part of the city, the images grow more detailed, more startling, more convincing. Their goal is a block-by-city-block guide to this ghost forest, the one Erican Sanderson uncannily seems to see even when dogding Fifth Avenue buses."

- Alan Weisman from The World Without Us (Thomas Dunne Books, 2007).

Literary Dose #32

[Guantang Chuangye Sustainable Conceptual Master Plan, Liuzhou, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, People's Republic of China by William McDonough + Partners | image source]

"Nature, whose status as a norm of beauty or as an ideal form waned, has since returned as a condition for the sustainability of all built environment. As such, nature plays a role in the twenty-first century that is as central as it ever was in the past. The challenges are enormous and the markets and demands seem boundless. When Bill McDonough, the famous nature design architect in the United States, plans the construction, from scratch, of cities and villages in China, he connects with his starkly nature inspired buildings in the US -- the GAP headquarters in San Bruno, California (1997), the Ford Rouge Dearborn Truck Plant in Michigan (2004), with its half million square foot 'habitat' roof, the largest in the world, or the IBM office in Amsterdam (2004) -- and suggests that he will, figuratively speaking, put entire communities under a turf (or even a rice field) roof, which looks just the same as the landscape did prior to the construction of the city. Residential areas and workplaces will be mixed, energy will come from solar panels, and public transportation will be within easy walking distance. With the airport in the center and a 'Jade Necklace' of parks (Liuzhou), these visions mark a kaleidoscopic return to [Ebenezer] Howard's and others' concentric utopias of the early twentieth century."

- Sverker Sörlin in "Nature" from Crucial Words: Conditions for Contemporary Architecture (Birkhäuser, 2007), edited by Gert Wingårdh and Rasmus Wærn.

Literary Dose #31

"The creation of a new capital city is not only about the articulation of a new national identity, but also more importantly about the creation of the state itself. The state constructs itself by opening up new spaces, closing others, inscribing them with the marks and symbols of the nation and state power, and organizing urban space around foundational norms and principles. These are self-constitutive acts; the state constitutes itself as an agent of modernity vested with the power and authority to control space, dictate the meaning of urbanity, shape the evolution of the public sphere, and suppress contending ideologies. By constructing a city, the state becomes an agent of the nation, the author that inscribes the nation into space, hence creating the nation-state. Giving shape to urban space by monitoring the architectural styles, erection of statues and monuments, and placement of squares, parks, shopping centers, and public buildings allows the state to establish its power and authority in controlling and dictating the norms that guide daily public life. The arrangement and monitoring of public spaces serve the function of transforming ordinary city dwellers that, just by partaking in daily routine activity, are transformed into citizens. This is how, by creating the city of Ankara, the new Turkish state constructed itself as secular, national, and modern."

- Alev Çınar in "The Imagined Community as Urban Reality: The Making of Ankar" from Urban Imaginaries: Locating the Modern City (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), edited by Alev Çınar and Thomas Bender.

Literary Dose #30

"Even as the high priests of contemporary architecture set themselves up as visionary artists or seers in a throbbing celebrity economy, architecture frequently ignores or underestimates its civic influence. Architects certainly deserve admiration for what they, alone among us can do: create monuments of the built environment. When Howard Roark, the architect hero of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, points to a building and says, 'I don't care what anyone says about me; I built that,' one cannot but admire the material certainty of his pride. But one toxic result of recent 'starchitecture' culture is the steady stream of theoretical bafflegab that pours from architectural schools and journals. This is usually the result of what me might call 'philosophical backformation': finding some plausible-sounding theoretical cladding to hang on an already conceived, even completed, structural project. Self-respecting architects would not allow useless aesthetic decorations to mar their designs, yet they perpetrate intellectual design crimes by the week. This is forgivable pretension, perhaps, but only if architectural discourse allows itself to be penetrated from the outisde -- if it allows its boundaries to be crossed."

- Mark Kingwell from Concrete Reveries: Consciousness and the City (Viking, 2008).

Literary Dose #29

"Until we understand what the land is, we are at odds with everything we touch. And to come to that understanding it is necessary, even now, to leave the regions of our conquest -- the cleared fields, the towns and cities, the highways -- and re-enter the woods. For only there can a man encounter the silence and the darkness of his own absence. Only in this silence and darkness can he recover the sense of the world's longevity, of its ability to thrive without him, of his inferiority to it and his dependence on it. Perhaps then, having heard that silence and seen that darkness, he will grow humble before the place and begin to take it in -- to learn from it what it is. As its sounds come into his hearing, and its lights and colors come into his vision, and its odors come into his nostrils, then he may come into its presence as he never has before, and he will arrive in his place and will want to remain. His life will grow out of the ground like the other lives of the place, and take its place among them. He will be with them-- neither ignorant of them, nor indifferent to them, nor against them -- and so at last he will grow to be native-born. That is, he must reenter the silence and the darkness, and be born again."

- Wendell Berry in "A Native Hill" in The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry, edited by Norman Wirzba (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2003).

Literary Dose #28

"Verb > You argue in your essay [on Fresh Kills Landfill in Staten Island, in this issue of Verb] that architects have had little to say about Fresh Kills. Why do you think this has been the case?

May > ...little of substance to say, likely because the more you unpack a place like Fresh Kills, the more difficult it becomes to later repackage it in glossy optimism. No matter how sexy and natural it may appear in the various digital renderings, or how compelling its supposed rebirth may sound in the official statements, it is an absolutely horrible place, and it reveals horrible realities about our Modern American Lifestyles -- realities that are only growing more pronounced.

The fact of the matter is that these realities are not easily overlooked. It takes effort to ignore them. Unfortunately, all too often architects play a central role in this effort. Why do you think architectural competitions are held? Glance beneath nearly every major architectural competition and you will find a desire to recast the image of a particular place in the collective memory of a population. This is not to suggest that there is some sort of larger conspiracy at work, but rather that events such as the Fresh Kills competition are ultimately instruments for the extension of dominant moralities. Winning entries [PDF link] are always in total compliance with that morality. They ensure that the most powerful interests have the final say on the history of a particular location, and what lessons we may learn from those places."

- John May in "Technology, Ecology, and Ordinary Language; a Conversation with John May," in Verb Crisis, edited by Mario Ballesteros, Albert Ferre & Irene Hwang (Actar, 2008).