grand entry in the grove

even in a car-based city as los angeles there are still some places people use their feet to go around. the venice beach boardwalk, parts of downtown and the farmers' markets are among those. another place designed for walking is the grove l.a. but even here you are forcefully reminded you are in la, the capital of car country.

the grove is basically a shopping mall urban development as there are so many of in the united states and canada (and more and more in old europe). it has a nice, old imported look on its facades so people don't feel at home; remember, for a lot of americans going to one of those big-ass shopping centers, like the west edmonton mall or the mall of the americas, is like going to paris or london for a lot of europeans. it's a special thing to do, so you better have a good time when there.

and to be honest, they did give it a try. you have people walking around, a wide array of shops, restaurants and a very, very, very big movie theater. there is even a little tram driving around on a track. i would almost buy it as being the real, unfabricated world, if it wasn't for the way you enter the area: through a parking garage.

there is no apparent pedestrian entrance, the streets inside the complex run into dead walls and as you can see, there is no real designing in the parking garage structure (although the apparently endless repetition of beams and columns could propably inspire some latter-day structuralists...). it is this transition from parking to walking that makes the grove so undeniably hollywood-ian. everything is fake, just a facade. and just like the moment you walk out of a movie theatre and realize that it was all fake, the moment you leave the luscious and friendly environment of the grove, you realize you are in la: the car is waiting.

add:
a friend told me an interesting thing about universal's city walk. since we're in la, everything you see and every image is somewhat from another place from around the world. hollywood likes to mimick the planet. but in citywalk, la actually mimicks itself. you have a piece of downtown, venice, hollywood and even compton. but most of all, a lot of universal.

since i have forgotten to bring my camera there (twice already; bad architect!), the photos here are not my own. photo 1 is by binaryla, photo 2 is by supermod. you don't know it, but thanks. next time i'll bring my own camera.

There is but one window left

If the 1960s brought the frontiers of the state from its political borders to the interior of our cities, then john carpenters’ 1996 film ‘Escape from LA’ presented us with a new kind of frontier: the city as a state, devoid from all sense of justice, common behaviour and moral laws. Besides a 100-minute orgy of violence, explosions and other Hollywood-generated fireworks, the movie offered viewers an interesting concept of control and interface in a not too distant future.

The ‘Big One’ has seperated Los Angeles from the rest of the United States and gave the fictional, fascistoid government the opportunity to create a new prison state on the LA island. Criminals are shipped in, much like the United Kingdom used Australia as a prison island in the 1800s. The main protagonists in the film are equipped with tracking devices that precisely tell the command center on the other side of the San Fernando Sea where they are and where they are moving to. Human being has been reduced to being nothing more but a bleep on a computer screen. Geographical scale and position have been terminated in a reductionist matter that leaves nothing but vectors and data. No interaction or visual information is transmitted to the operators; in this world of digits, it is not necessary.

Just like the military movements of Escape from L.A. have been rid of their aggressive impact, bullets and fleshwounds in order to make the order of battle comprehensible in the headquarters of the US Army – or United States Police Force – the ways of airtraffic are greatly being reduced and schematized before their instanteneous appearance on the air traffic controller’s preferably monochromatic screens. What we perceive as ‘the control tower’ is nothing more than a cinematic, impressive farce, designed to give the airtraveller the soothing feeling of safety they so much crave for before entering those flying tubes of potential death and destruction. The ‘windows’ of the control tower control and show nothing but taxiing aircraft, excreting their passengers onto the ground planes or absorbing other ones for another act of geographic displacement.

The windows are not the action. The action is one floor below or above, in an ironically windowless room. We are not to be distracted by real windows when we are watching our screens where a dramatic pseudo-three dimensional play of vectors in space is taking place, yesterday, today, tomorrow. This disconnection from the real and physical world, imposed upon us by technology and translated to us through the screen, or third window as Virilio calls it, both gives us a farstretching power and at the same time a strange distance from real-life events.

We are entering the world of the ‘participatory and pro-active panopticon’. There are already maps of Amsterdam and Manhattan that index the locations of surveillance cameras. It is not about being seen anymore, it is about avoiding being seen. We no longer just cast our vote for a presidential election or a environmental proposition, we now also vote for American Idols, the next personal assistant of Donald Trump or who has to leave Big Brother’s House. This dangerous intrusion in real life will take a new turn when the physical borders of this country will be replaced by virtual ones. A website showing us realtime video footage of the US-Mexican border will allow everybody to play his or her own private minuteman, securing America’s borders from behind the screen.

The original Windows of the World came down on September 11, 2001. Their intent however had long before been taken over by the screen. The destruction of the World Trade Center’s restaurant was more than anything else a symbolic act. It represented the demise of the physical window as a transmitter of images and content. In this world of the omni-present panopticon all is reduced to the screen. Whether its illegal immigrants crossing the border, airplanes in the sky or guerilleros in Los Angeles, all is represented on the screen. Virilio’s analogy of the three windows has proven true. It has overdone itself. We are no longer being commanded by the first window of the door, or the second window of the hole in the wall. They are no longer necessary for a world where geography and distance have already disappeared. We can live and let live, by the act of watching Virilio’s third window alone.

inspired by subtopia.

Defying gravity

With the arrival of the internet, of low-cost cariers and of global terrorism, the concept of distance has finally disappeared. What remains is a unified plane where everything is at the same place at the same time. Together with speed, gravity is disappearing as well. When Burt Rutan managed to launch a spaceship into the outer layers of the atmosphere, he defied the more classic ruleset of governments and countries defining the boundaries of space. He overcame gravity.

If we combine these two factors of transformation, we arrive at a crossroad in space and time Paul Virilio has been fascinated by for a long time. Since gravity is no longer anything more than a constant, only keeping us from floating away from the earth’s surface, we must redefine our own relationship with gravity and its messenger, the ground’s plane.

For long and oft architecture has been a tool to characterize places and spaces, to identify them and to give them value. Those values were often solely based on the opinion of the instigator of the architecture, less than on that of the creator of the architecture, the architect. Adolf Hitler wanted to create his vision of the world, not only by conquering and oppressing almost the entire European peninsula, but also by building a capital city, Germania, bigger and bolder than ever encountered by mankind before. The grotesque collection of buildings along the two axis of the plan not only defined space, they defined distance as well. To cross the north-south axis would mean to cross more than 300 feet of boulevards, trees and gardens. To walk from the southend to the northend of this axis would mean to cover a distance of more than four miles. More than that the spaces defined the extremes of this plan, it were the distances that were really the instrument of power, the tool to make a visitor feel small and irrelevant.

Commonday society is no longer based on distance or gravity. It has become nothing more than a variable in the bigger field of vehicular vectors, of speed. Virilio’s habitable circulation eagerly anticipated this move. It negates both distance and gravity by creating a continuous plane of movement, habitation and place. There is no distance anymore, since you already find yourself in the plane of destination.

Military technology, Virilio states, has made the distinction between object and distance, between vehicle and projectile disappear. The distinction has been replaced by a uniform entity or quality, the vector. In architecture, as well as in the field of military operations, vectors need a point of origin; they simply cannot appear out of nowhere. The cruise missile still needs a launch platform to begin its devastating crusade against the enemy, as much as architecture still needs the ground plane to reach for the stars. A student in Delft once designed a house, floating in the air, only kept upright by a single line, extending from a crane located on the balcony of that same house. Architecture as its own legislator and judge.

Structures of spatial repression and segregation in an age without distance are archaic in their ideology and yet crushingly modern in their effect. Like the wall around the West Bank, designed to keep Palestine terrorists from entering Israel, does not only redefine circulation in a spatial matter, it also redefines circulation on a social level. This wall is not only a barrier to counter the speed of terrorist intrusion, it is also a barrier to slow down the development of Palestine society. Like a self fulfilling prophecy, it is creating its own reason for existence.

In a city as Los Angeles, distance has already disappeared. It has been replaced by continuous place. You don’t have to leave the city to go anywhere. Anaheim is Santa Monica is San Fernando. This disappearance of distance and unification of place has primarily been caused by the automobile. Its ability to cover a considerable amount of distance in a short time allowed the cities to expand beyond classic boundaries, imposed by the man on feet. Compare the Los Angeles basin with the ‘Randstad’ in the Netherlands, and you will find two different metropolitan areas. Whereas in Los Angeles, distance has been gone completely, in the Randstad there still is a notion of it. One still has the feeling he is covering a certain distance traveling from, say, Rotterdam to Amsterdam, most notably because of the difference in backdrops one encounters during the travel. By obliterating difference and distance in the city, one automatically loses the ‘feeling’ for a city.

Manuel Delanda once said, “difference is the fuel of evolution”. Perhaps distance is the fuel of the city.