nstoddard's blog

As I open my computer one last time before posting my thoughts, I sit in Washington Square Park with a new appreciation not only for this place, but for place in general. At the start of this semester, I would come to my laptop with a bit of anxiety over what to write in each of my weekly posts. Though I always found the readings interesting and for the most part valuable, I had such difficulty in determining how my own thoughts and experiences could translate to a phenomenological approach to space, or add to the sometimes crazed rant of James Kunstler.
 
It took me a while to realize that what interested me most about the readings was not the technical approach anyone took to writing about place, or even the technical history behind specific places, but the personal and social story of a place that can be gleaned from its current population by both people and objects.
 
Looking around the park on one of the first true days of spring, I appreciate the diversity in the top floors of the architecture peeking out from behind the newly dressed trees, but that view which frames this public space can not prevent the multitude of human activity giving the park a much more untamed spirit than some might like.
 
Dueling five piece bands mirror the contested nature of the space given to it by the Jane Jacobs vs. Robert Moses struggle. Small children playing with pigeons mark the interactions between groups of people that we may at times call two different species. The homeless men and chess players who have been here for years will let you know this in more ways than one, and provide nods to the dingy history of New York City parks. They’re not going anywhere, nor are the tourists. Do the monuments in and around the park determine who comes and goes? Does the layout of the park itself – the placement of benches, the central positioning of the arch and “fountain”- shape the means and depth of human activity? Of course. However, once these elements have been set, human acceptance of and resistance to them reveal, to me, a much more interesting story.
 
In our readings we have seen humans react to the spaces around them in many different ways. From Waldie’s stories of hoarding suburbians to Pollan’s feng shui exploration of his backyard and Sorkin’s apartment wars, we have seen people driven to all kinds of odd acts because of the places they find themselves in. I leave this class with a more fine tuned appreciation for the effects a space can have on a person and vise verse. This in turn has transformed my initial dread for documenting my thoughts of place into pleasure from writing about a place and what goes on within it.

(image is my own)

More photos at http://tompkinssquarepark.tumblr.com/

Though we may often hear complaints that there is not enough green space in New York City, the metropolis still has its fair share of parks. Most share the similar features of dog parks, playgrounds, and transient crowds, but each has a distinct crowd of regulars and unique primary usage. One other characteristic found in many New York parks is the fountain, arch, or other mix of monuments that work to create a feeling of grandeur in the space. However, there is on park downtown that is not home to a fountain or statue, does not have any boulders or expansive grass lawns, and is somehow made better for its lack of monumental anything. To me Tompkins Square Park is a small haven that many would describe as anything but. This small park is not made of the stuff of icons like Central Park or Washington Square, and it is maybe for these reasons I found in Tompkins Square my first slice of, with all the complications this word brings, real New York.
 
The story goes that in New York’s grunge age Tompkins Square was home to none but the most withdrawn and dangerous of cocaine and heroin addicts, and some of New York’s most derelict homeless. People who lived in the area anywhere from the 1970s through the 1990s say they did their best to stay away from the park and it certainly did not house the same excitement as Washington Square or Union Square. Walking through the park today, the blatant drug use and violence have largely disappeared, but the grunge attitude still remains and manages to stand its ground against young mothers and their children on the playgrounds, and sometimes the two even manage to mingle with pleasure. The anatomy of the park is conducive to these strange yet positive interactions, surrounded on all sides by low apartment buildings, with a sprinkling of coffee shops, restaurants and delis, and small retail stores. The park runs between 7th and10th Streets, from Avenue A to Avenue B. It interrupts St. Mark’s Place at the street’s eastern end, wrangling in the range of eclectic people idling down the street from its western side. But Tompkins Square is home to a largely local population. Neighborhood residents play basketball, baseball, and other makeshift games at the northern end, walk their dogs around the winding paths before and after work, and bring their children to the playgrounds dispersed along the walkways.
 
My experience with the park up until a few weeks ago was largely narrow, fragmented, and closed off. I have been to Tompkins Square Park countless times, but its use to me was mostly as a place to walk through on my way home from campus or a place to sit and read when I could not concentrate in my apartment. Walking up to the park from its southeast entrance at 7th Street and Avenue B, I usually hurry to the benches just to the left of the initial greeting walkway. This way I am far enough in to the Square to glean the feeling of being in a park, but I do not have to go far enough in as to explore the space or field any human interaction. I sit at the same section of the same bench every time. I know where to go not by counting, but by a paint mark on one arm rest that separates my section from the others. As I mentioned and this example proves, my view of the park has been narrow, fragmented, and closed. I open my book, and close my eyes to the world around me. Of course, to write firsthand about the look, function, and experience of a place, this would not do.
 
To push myself to explore Tompkins Square and what makes it unique, or not so, I turned to my comfort zones. My initial delve into the purpose and genius loci of Tompkins Square started right at my usual bench. I decided to look up from my books and really get to know the view from my well worn seat. I took some time to draw the view provided me if I just looked around from where I had been sitting. From this I noticed two things.
 
First, there was a beautifully framed shot across the park and through some row homes and trees to this stunning building of what looks like white limestone to the northwest. The trees in Tompkins Square create many of these framed vignettes as they reach from one side of a path to another, stretching their long limbs and overlapping with branches from other trees. These trees make the people under them feel comfortable in the sense of enclosure they provide, while still affording these people with the option of peeking out and seeing what is around them. Drawing the landscape from my frequented spot opened my eyes to the unique landscape of the rest of the park. Tompkins Square Park feels less open than most other parks, partly because of its abundance of trees, but also in part because of the layout on the ground. Pavement far outnumbers grass in terms of square footage in Tompkins Square. Fenced in garden areas break up the true concrete jungle, but most public spaces and the interactions that take place in them are on paved surfaces. This leads to another thing I learned about the uniqueness of Tompkins Square Park: its human interactions and sense of community.
 
The second I began to interact with Tompkins Square through some outward artistic activity, people were interested in interacting with me. As I sat sketching, the man playing his clarinet a few bench sections down looked over and nodded at me, and suddenly there formed this type of community. Moments later a group of small children hopped the fence from the playground and stood watching me, then congratulated me on what they thought was a job well done before moving on to interrogate the man with the clarinet. So our little eclectic community grew. Weeks later when I went back to the park to take some photographs, two men actually asked me if I would take their photo. Delighted, I finished my walk through the park with a new sense of community that the reassuring toddlers had given me weeks before.
 
Tompkins Square Park is an unassuming space conducive to genuine and visceral, if ephemeral, human bonding. The fact that there are no large attractions in or around the park, as well as its less than clean reputation from years past leave it a space that can really be shaped by the everyday lives of the population of the surrounding area. People are willing to interact with one another and interested in the activities going on around them because the park provides an unintimidating and informal environment for interaction. All of these things create a sense of community ownership of the place that remains honest and unable to be exploited: at least as of yet.

When reading Sorkin’s take on the controversy surrounding Richard Serra’s 1981 sculpture Tilted Arc, I could not help but laugh. It all just seemed a bit humorous in contrast to the doting account we read last week of Jane Jacobs’s struggle to save Washington Square among other parts of downtown Manhattan. In the fight for Washington Square Moses and the establishment were pinned as the bad guys, albeit with good reason, while in Sorkin’s description of a government commissioned work, the artist’s intentions are portrayed by the following quote:
 
“So here is an instance where an artist’s right of expression foundered on the permanent quality against the public’s right to conveniently use a public space.”(108)
 
It seems that Sorkin tries to describe the situation in a neutral manner (and maybe I am being overly sensitive because I happen to feel Serra was completely slighted in the drawn out controversy), but in this account Serra comes out looking like he deliberately destroyed a perfectly functional and well-liked plaza, when this was not the case at all. Not only was Serra commissioned by the government to create the site-specific sculpture, but when the work was finished it was even approved by the board that commissioned it. Therefore, if blame should be put on anyone for whatever negative reactions came from the sculpture it is the government and not the artist himself. This, however, was not what came to be.
 
Tilted Arc was actually received well by many people who lived and worked in the area surrounding the Federal Plaza. But when negative reviews made their way to Federal employees, William Diamond saw an opportunity to keep the negative attention on Serra, ultimately removing his sculpture and making a quick fix effort to transform the plaza that was the true problem in the first place.
 
One aspect of the sculpture itself that was not discussed in Sorkin’s text is the view from inside the buildings surrounding the plaza. From above, the heavy and impending structure was transformed into an elegant ribbon, maybe pointed toward the wrong audience, but beautiful and contemplative nonetheless. Regardless of the aesthetic or transcendent nature of the sculpture, however, the plaza itself was the problem that needed to be addressed. Before Serra’s sculpture was erected and subsequently torn down and replaced by a new piece with many aspects of what Christopher Alexander would tell us (and I would agree) make for a more inviting sense of place, the plaza was not the least bit inviting, and any features it had that may have made it so were not functioning. There was very little seating in the space, and the fountain in the plaza was not working. Had the plaza previously been a place where people felt comfortable socializing or doing any other activity, there may have been more opportunity for conversation about and understanding of Serra’s work, and the unfortunate and expensive removal of the piece may have been avoided.
 
Below are some links to articles about the controversy, and an interesting video (first link) of the hearing on the removal of the work:
http://www.sfmoma.org/multimedia/videos/90
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/cultureshock/flashpoints/visualarts/tiltedarc_a.html
http://www.cfa.arizona.edu/are476/files/tilted_arc.htm
http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/S/senie_tilted.html
http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/martin/art_law/tilted_arc.htm

In the epilogue of Flint’s “Wrestling With Moses” he says that Jane Jacobs never authorized anyone to write her biography (p 192). He also recounts multiple examples of honors bestowed Jacobs after her death that she may have scoffed at if she could see them. It seems possible a large reason of why this text is not sold as a biography is that Flint was trying to escape Jane Jacobs’s post-mortem scorn. Flint’s great admiration, though most likely well deserved, is so evident throughout his text that I have a hard time believing his opinion isn’t incredibly biased.

Even through Flint’s doting, there is enough fact in his text for someone who is very much a novice in the study of urban planning like myself to see that Jacobs did become a huge asset to the Greenwich Village community and New York at large in her activism. She saved her own neighborhood twice by using radical yet rational tactics and as she grew as an activist used more developed ploys to win the war against the Lower Manhattan Expressway. However, Jane Jacobs thought “progressive ideals meant turning ideas into action,”(p 16) and if Jacobs and Moses are compared based on the amount of good they achieved in the area of urban renewal, Moses seems to be the clear winner. Not only has he designed beautiful bridges like the Verrazano and art institutions like Lincoln Center, Moses has also conceived or improved a number of public spaces that act as places of community. I happen to love his Sara D. Roosevelt Park, and whenever I pass by the park it is perfectly populated no matter the weather, leaving it safe to say many others like the space as well.

For all of his demonizing of Moses, Flint provides a quote by architecture critic Nicolai Oroussoff that I found quite interesting, that Moses represented “an America that still believed a healthy government would provide the infrastructure…that binds us into a nation. Ms. Jacobs, at her best, was fighting to preserve the more delicate bonds that tie us to a community. A city, to survive and flourish, needs both perspectives”(p 189). In many ways, Moses and Jacobs were trying to accomplish the same thing. Not only did they both have what they thought was best for New York in mind, but even many of their thoughts on how the city could and should be improved were similar. Jacobs and Moses both wanted to see the city flooded with housing, specifically housing for people at many different income levels. Both also stressed the importance of public spaces. Their different backgrounds produced differing views and approaches, but was Moses all that evil, or does he deserve a spot in Flint’s love letter as well?

“It is the prisitine moment that became- and remains- the all-important one for modern architecture: the day the finished but not-yet-inhabited building gets its picture taken, freezing it in time.”(273)
 
In Michael Pollan’s last chapter, “Finish Work: A Punch List,” he brings to light a huge problem with a lot of modern architecture. The needs and lifestyles of the people who will be using buildings are often not taken into account, and these buildings are planned to remain as barren as when they were built. Certain architecture has been considered art for some time now, but buildings that follow the phenomenon that Pollan introduces defy the definitions that many people would give to art.
 
In a series of courses I took on art theory, we discussed a common characteristic of something that is good and something that is art to be that whatever the object, or in this case the building, may be it serves the purpose it was intended to serve from the start. Depending on the type of object, this purpose may not have to be utilitarian and could include the fact that it inspires though or evokes a feeling. A house then, may have the purpose of providing a means of shelter to its inhabitants, but it cannot fully serve its purpose without instilling in its dwellers a sense of home.
 
This is precisely the opposite of what much of modern architecture looks like, specifically with regard to houses. The architects of these buildings who, as Pollan gives examples of, do all they can to minimize the effect of the homeowner on their buildings. Frank Lloyd Wright described his work as painful “after the clients moved in and, helplessly, dragged the horrors of the old order along after them”(273). What makes this problem worse is that the architects are right- modern interiors are often “designed to look their best uninhabited,”(274) straying further from rightfully being called art or good objects because they do not fulfill the purpose of allowing a house to become a home.
 
So how can a house be built to allow this purpose to be served? Pollan’s house, though maybe not a work of art, certainly meets the needs of its user and surrenders itself to this user, authorizing him to complete the building by adding his possessions and modifying it as he sees fit. As Pollan discovers when he is nearly finished building, it looks empty and unfinished without all of his books. Pollan’s Writer’s House is therefore a small scale answer to the modernist problem.

Pollan’s account of his journey from contracted childhood tree house to self-made backyard escape seemed oddly familiar to me. Though I never had a tree house of my own, nor do I consider myself a writer, I found myself drawn in and completely relating to a lot of the discoveries and struggles Pollan had in the process he details in this text.
 
The process Pollan went through to determine the site of his building introduced him to similar issues that we come to each week in reading, writing, and thinking about what makes a sense of place. Instead of making intuitive decisions to pick the perfect site for his sanctuary, Pollan took to heavy reading from multiple schools of thought, including art, transcendentalism, and mysticism in the practice of feng shui. I think this relates to our class in that instead of thinking about a sense of place as something intuitive, we often seek to examine the qualities and characteristics of different places through the lens of someone else’s camera, this week’s through Pollan’s lens. He found meaning by looking to the theory of others, but also further confusion.
 
 “As Thoreau pointed out in Walden, there’s freedom in deliberation (literally “from freedom”); once that’s over though, things start looking a good deal more fatelike”(37).
 
Pollan liked the idea of the physical structure that he was soon to start building, but the reality and permanence of the thing once he settled on a space scared him. I likened this to wanting something and working hard toward it for some time, but then backing out and questioning yourself once it looks like it may actually come true. This is something I find myself doing often, and I find I really have to push to realize the goal in the end. Pollan’s uncertainty is summed up well in the following thought he comes to after having done his extensive reading on how to pick a site that has the best sense of place: “I found myself beginning to doubt…whether I could even say what a place was any longer, what it was that made a place a place”(38). Luckily, Pollan moves beyond his doubts, trusts the intuition he had all along, and builds a house from which he is able to continue this story.
 
Pollan allowed his idea of a good place to be in some ways informed by what he deems science, art, and mysticism, but he formulated and built the more tangible aspects of the idea on his own. This seems an important reminder to be made throughout the semester as we see places we once loved or still loved torn to pieces one week and celebrated the next.

(image is my own)

The town is equal parts white and Asian, with black and Hispanic minorities. Every year about thirty young adults are sent to the Ivy League, many of them just across town to Princeton. The other graduating seniors can rattle off the names of the chosen ones without hesitation, because bragging about how many of your friends are going to Cornell and Yale is important stuff.
 
This is a town people come to for the academics. You move here when your oldest child is in 3rd or 4th grade, and leave when the property taxes are more than you can bear (when your last child goes to college).
 
My Nonna had her three children in Princeton Hospital. My Nonna’s three children each had their two children in the same hospital. I attended the same high school as my mother, aunt, and uncle, in the same graduating class as my cousin. My entire extended Italian family lives within ten miles of my house, else they are still in Italy.
 
My house sits on an acre of land. This is about the only connection it has to the bigger, newer houses around town. Every few years as I grew up, the house cut further into the front or back yards as additions were built. First it was to accommodate my new brother, then- well I’m not quite sure why. But each time it morphed, I felt a bit more detached from its walls and the memories I kept between them.
 
One week in 1999 it rained so much we had off from school. My parents were at a doctor’s appointment and I was being watched by my less-favored grandparents. I put on a bathing suit and set up buckets under leaks in our aging home and outside to catch water to play in. For years I held onto a fabricated memory of having gone swimming in the retention basin across the street.
 
I used to think I would live here forever. I used to adamantly defend my town as the best place to raise a child. This past year, AOL NeighborhoodScout agreed with my previous insistence in naming West Windsor “The Number 1 Best Neighborhood to Raise Kids.”
 
My favorite childhood ice cream place was a drive-(or walk) through that was the one place I was allowed to venture alone with my best friend. Before we got to high school this shop was replaced with the seventh bank to be built on the same road.
 
In West Windsor there is rumor that a recession started a few years back, but most are not fooled by this joke.
 
Mr. M lived down the street and kept his dirty big secret on our far edge of town until he couldn’t keep it anymore and my father’s cop friends showed up to seize Mr. M’s computer and take him to a jail in Wisconsin.
 
I didn’t gain a sibling until I was nearly nine years old. I had been living in an odd world that had grown too pink for my liking, a princess in my parents’ eyes. I blame the long wait on my mother, as I do most things. I should blame the wait on the township, whose refusal to run its water pipes down our street resulted in my mother’s four miscarriages.
 
Please do not take these rants to mean I think this town is a bad place. In truth, I have not done it justice.

(image is my own)

Check out the rest of my photos at http://anatomyofablock.tumblr.com/


Walking east on Houston Street can feel a bit disconcerting at times. The wide, auto-dominated street is lined in some places with nothing but chain stores like Dunkin Donuts and Blockbuster with no sense of a local identity. However, turning just off of Houston can immediately dispel the alienating feeling and foster a completely different environmental relationship. Clinton Street between Houston and Stanton, a small block on the Lower East Side, is the place I call home. 

“Man, out of his intimate experience with his body and with other people, organizes space so that it conforms with and caters to his biological needs and social relations.” Tuan, 34

This quote from Tuan describes the type of design that Kunstler is looking for in an environment that he can deem to be a good place, where the built landscape is reflective of man’s relationship with his environment, and structures are built to the scale of a human. In many of Manhattan’s tall, modern buildings or large commercialized squares these notions have been lost, but Clinton Street exemplifies the idea put forward by Tuan and provides a refreshing sense of community in a sometimes faceless city.

Clinton Street possesses many of the qualities that Kunstler looks for in a successful living arrangement. The street itself is built with parallel parking on one side, and a bike lane on the other. These provide the pedestrian barrier Kunstler discusses in his text, and lessen the need for parking lots. The block is also lined with trees (albeit sort of wimpy looking ones) to give the neighborhood a touch of green as a break from all the concrete surrounding it.

The buildings on Clinton Street subscribe to the human scale and satisfy the needs and social relations of its residents. No building is above seven stories, and most are about five or six stories. The brick buildings foster a sense of sameness and equality among residents of the block, but each has its own character. Some have blue trim, others are fitted with large glass doorways, and the many different shades of brick provide an aesthetically pleasing scene. The buildings are a mix of old architecture with one or two thoughtfully constructed newer establishments. The trees on the sidewalk create a sort of forested ceiling, and in the summer they provide shade for residents walking down the street. If Kunstler is to be believed, these elements are what created the resulting formation of a community on Clinton Street.

The street boasts such quirks as a mural of gnomes and a restaurant playfully named One More Thai, but is also the site of more upscale establishments such as a high end wine seller, a gallery, and a men’s dress shirt shop. A mix of cultural and spiritual establishments refutes the notion of hierarchies of space introduced in Tuan. The Hispanic barbershop next to the synagogue is typical of the melee of establishments and general diversity on the block. The long established Hispanic community is still very much a part of the up and coming Lower East Side, as evidenced on Clinton by the barbershops, restaurants, murals, and public spaces. This relationship between the old and the new, continuing to develop together, creates the oddly cohesive community feel.

If any of this seems a bit contrived or a bit lost, it may very well be the case that in some ways it is. I have had such a difficult time writing about places because there has never been a place I felt a strong connection with, or even one that I really strongly disliked, at least not because of its physical features. Whether or not I can stand to be in a place has always been defined almost solely on the human interactions I have had within it, on it, or surrounding it. I may be more comfortable standing in the middle of a crowded intersection than sitting in a public park, depending on who is by my side. Maybe this is why I have felt at home on Clinton Street. The crowds of tourists that swarm midtown, Canal Street, and even SoHo now, are absent on Clinton. There are school children here who walk safely home in small groups, young parents push their babies in strollers, elderly people carrying small bags of groceries, and students and young professionals who have started to give the neighborhood its edge. This is where Jackson’s writing comes in.

Though my block does meet many of Kunstler’s criteria for a good place, I am certain he would have no trouble finding some fault with the lack of local foods at the corner deli, or the graffiti tags on the storefront gates. However, the familiarity of these things and the people behind them would interest Jackson, just as the trailer park culture sprouting around him did. It is not so much the perks of the built environment I find myself consciously appreciating in my neighborhood as the people I find in and around the various establishments.

Cocoa Bar, a coffee shop, wine bar, and chocolate shop (sounds like heaven, right?) became my standard study spot soon after I moved into my apartment, as Bobst is a bit of a trek for me. The same three people have been working there since I started going, and they always play personalized music, keeping their spirits up at work and allowing them to engage patrons in discussions about it. The barista is always pleasant, but not in the manufactured way that Starbucks employees are so they seem like humans instead of machines. When we lost internet connection in my apartment for a few weeks, the owner would give me their wireless password past normal hours to let me finish my work and send out emails, a small gesture, but a much appreciated one.

The corner deli, Angelica’s was another place I got to know quickly. The operation is family run, and the man behind the counter on weekdays always asks how you are doing when you walk in. He knows the faces of the neighborhood, and is eager to talk to us and to share knowing glances about the inebriated fools who are finally leaving after minutes of incoherent remarks. The weekend cashier, Bubbles as we like to call him, has the same eager smile and is ready with witty comments made all the more humorous by his thick accent.

These places I have described are in buildings close to the street, in an area filled with culinary, clothing, and recreational storefronts and apartments above them. The stores and homes themselves occupy spaces Tuan, Jackson, and Kunstler may very well all agree are good, but I have come to feel at home in them because of the people they are populated with. Maybe these people have come here because of the line of trees and the localized built environment? This may be a question of the chicken or the egg…

My first and only trip to Disney World was in the spring of my senior year of high school. Every year the graduating class hogs an entire terminal at Newark airport to fly to the most magical place on earth for a few days. The trip is something to look forward to as a bonding moment for your class from freshman year. When I finally arrived in Disney World, I wondered why we were there, and in reading Kunstler’s thoughts on the parks, I sort of wonder why they were built and for whom?
 
Many of my fellow classmates spent the trip consuming the contraband they had snuck with them on the plane and trying to pass as twenty-one year olds so they could forget their parents had sent them to reconnect with their inner child before going off to college. My own experience of Disney World consisted of walking around with my art teacher and a small group of friends laughing at the cartoon versions of bad architecture, and at the real bad architecture (sorry, Michael Graves).
 
Disney World embodies many of the polemic thoughts Kunstler has about the rest of America. To start, it is a perfect example of what Kunstler refers to as Americans being “as addicted to illusion as they were to cheap petroleum”(169). Kunstler says that Disney “pretends so hard to be wholesome”(226) and that we follow this grand illusion because it makes us feel better about our lives in the places we call home. But behind this façade is an exploitative commercial scheme to ring visitors of their money. Kunstler gives examples, from Disney Dollars taken home as souvenirs and never spent, to Mickey Mouse ears that children “feel naked and ashamed”(224) without to show what a ruthless trap Disney World actually is. I really felt this trap through Kunstler’s point that Mainstreet USA opens half an hour before the rest of the park, so visitors are literally trapped in the pleasant little fake town of souvenir shops. This feeling of being corralled was something that I noticed while in the park, but reading Kunstler has magnified the feeling in retrospect.
 
So why are adults addicted to the illusion of Disney World? If they are not interested for their own sake, then maybe for the sake of their children. But Kunstler gives examples of children throwing fits and being bored by lines to dispute this claim as well. Disney World is constructed in the same artificial way of many American towns, just with a little more pastel and many more creepy life-sized cartoon characters- it seems to be a sterilized caricature of our everyday life.

Since it is hard to think positively about much of anything after reading the first half of Kunstler’s text, I will adopt his spirit in describing Washington D.C. To visualize the city, Kunstler says “picture a linked series of spiderwebs imposed over a checkerboard”(32). As you can imagine, this is quite a difficult street plan to navigate. Avenues named after US states intersect streets of the alphabet, which in turn are intersected by numbered streets. To get from one place to another often requires a confusing combination of twists and turns, and sometimes trips through not so lovely parts of town.
 
Largely to blame for the unfortunate layout of Washington D.C. is the intense focus and spotlight put on certain buildings and landmarks. Kunstler sees some good in this, for example the placement of “the Capitol building on a hill, affording it visual grandeur”(32) which helped distinguish the city and give it a feeling of power I its early years. But mostly the city’s plan serves to confuse and even alienate its navigators. Sprawling, intimidating structures define the city’s blocks and their overwhelming presence is imposed upon tourists and inhabitants alike.
 
Kunstler also asserts that “the arrangement as a whole resulted in too many oddly shaped and awkward building sites that hindered property development and tended to disorient the pedestrian”(32). I found this quote particularly powerful in defining Washington D.C.’s sense of place as inherent in its political structures, and not as something constructed or felt by its residents.  The streets defined by political buildings make the spaces left for residential buildings awkward and in many ways an afterthought. Any attempt to carve out a place of public space or culture is easily overshadowed by the government buildings and monuments that the city is built to force your attention toward.
 
I had this feeling of disorientation starting with my first trip to Washington D.C. and in some ways it grew worse as my trips continued. The National Mall is easy enough to navigate, a large rectangle with a few blocks of pure grid surrounding it. A sense of place, though not necessarily a pleasant one, does exist. However, as you travel from the Mall and its surrounding oversized neoclassical buildings, the spiderwebs ensue and they bring with them nondescript buildings with little personality or character. The first time I went to the Phillips Collection, only two or three blocks from the Dupont Circle metro stop, I exited the circle at the wrong state avenue and ended up on a much longer journey than expected.  Washington’s central focus on its government buildings impedes upon the culture of the city, and even something as fundamental as its navigation.

(image is my own)

In Jackson’s section on Landscape as Seen by the Military technology plays a large part in the development of his thought. By technology, I mean to include mechanical and computer advancements that first pop into our heads when we think of the word technology today, but I also would like to include in the definition of technology a sort of broader scope of anything that aids a human function or changes the way we do something. This definition and Jackson’s passage both relate to an essay by Walter Benjamin titled, “The Work of Art in the Mechanical Age of Reproduction.” The essay was written in 1936 and in it Benjamin grapples with the developing art forms of photography and film, and war itself as well as the effects of photography and film on war play a large role.
 
Jackson writes, “and I still find myself wondering if there is not always some deep similarity between the way war organizes space and movement and the way contemporary society organizes them; that is, if the military landscape and the military society are not both in essence intensified versions of the peacetime landscape, intensified and vitalized by one overriding purpose which, of necessity, bring about a closer relationship between man and environment and between men”(135).
 
This quote is somewhat discomforting at first, as I think most people would not hope for war to define their every day lives. However, we can draw some similarities between a cultural landscape in peace and at war. There is always in society a struggle for progress and a great effort to achieve and maintain order. War has this effect on what Jackson calls the political landscape, in a similar but much more direct and excited way than a peaceful landscape does.
 
This is where I think Benjamin’s article fits in to define the role of technology in relation to war and defining our political landscape. He writes “war is beautiful because it creates new architecture, like that of the big tanks, the geometrical formation flights…” The reader recognizes that Benjamin does not think the aspect of destruction in war is beautiful, as he later notes that the damage of war occurs because of man’s misuse of the process of production, but the idea is there in both Jackson’s and Benjamin’s writing that war creates an order of things, albeit forced, and often both produces and is aided by technological advancements.
 
“The destructiveness of war furnishes proof that society has not been mature enough to incorporate technology as its organ” another quote from Benjamin explains how we have allowed technology to define our landscape, instead of using it to develop something better. Since these texts were written technology has played an even larger role in shaping society and it seems we have lost more control over our own vernacular landscape.

“Chickens, eggs, and tomatoes are commonplace objects on the farm. They are to be eaten or marketed; they are not aesthetic objects. Yet they seem to have at times the essence of wholesome beauty, and they can console.”(143)

In Chapter 10 Tuan explores human relationships with places and objects and our perception of these objects as beautiful or ugly, utilitarian or pieces of art. A large part of the chapter grapples with these opposing views of object and place as they define the spaces in which we live. The above quote speaks to an integral part of an art theory class I took, in which we took great pains to come to the true meaning of the word beauty. In the pages surrounding the quote, Tuan uses different people’s attitudes toward defining objects that create spaces so familiar to us we often do not even really see them. In this quote, objects are discussed which we generally may not think of as beautiful.

If we all lived on a farm where chickens, eggs, and tomatoes were a common element of our every day lives, we would often look past them and may even discount their importance. However, this does not change the nature of the objects themselves, and as we used the work of Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson to explain in my art theory class, by the fact that these objects perform the function they were made to do, they are beautiful. Because the farm crops and livestock can be eaten and sold they are beautiful. This gives them the ability to console that Tuan mentions in his quote.

On the next page, there is a quote from Wright Morris that discusses an array of objects set on a bureau. He describes them as holy, but is not sure why as “for holy things, they were ugly enough”(144). Wright Morris does not find aesthetic pleasure in the commonplace objects, and therefore discounts them, saying “there was not a thing of beauty”(144) among them. This is in contrast to the view of Tuan on the previous page, in confusing beauty with aesthetic value.

The beauty of the commonplace objects set on the bureau is that they create a sense of place. We have discussed in class that often planners and architects work hard to create a sense of place, but it usually feels quite forced. Objects that we place throughout our homes and other places we familiarize ourselves with create a more organic and personal sense of place. In the same light as the chicken, eggs, and tomato on the farm, a good book, a memorable photo, or a souvenir from a fondly remembered trip can create a sense of place and console. How could beauty be lacking in that?

(image by me)

Throughout much of the first seven chapters in Tuan’s text, feeling and senses are a visceral theme of the conversation. Inanimate objects and concepts are often even given human characteristics. Chapter four, Body, Personal Relations, and Spatial Values, sounds like a place for further exploration of these feelings and senses through the body, but I find it to be the most emotionally removed part of the text so far. Instead, in this chapter Tuan raises connections between the body and its parts with less tender associations, such as high and low, future and past, front and back. Why is it more comfortable to describe our physical selves as objects with meaning, rather than beings with meaning? I won’t pretend to be able to answer this question at all, let alone in a blog post, but what follows is a slightly more organized version of my thought process as this topic developed in chapter four and each of the chapters following it.
 
At the beginning of chapter four, Tuan writes, “the word ‘body’ immediately calls to mind an object rather than an animated and animating being. The body is an it and it is in space or takes up space”(34). This quote and the remainder of the reading brought a few themes or bits of reasoning to mind such as possession, discomfort, and familiarity.
 
With regard to possession, I was thinking about the objectification of human bodies and how this is often experienced as a desire or need to commodify someone else’s body. Tuan relates to this in chapter five in writing, “a rich man is surrounded by servants, yet they do not crowd him”(59). To this man the servants do not seem like people, but rather objects performing tasks for his benefit, and therefore they seem to him to be personal possessions.
 
Almost in contrast with this notion is the idea of the body as a topic or source of discomfort, and therefore something we would rather see as a thing than a living being. I experienced this in my first drawing class, when our first nude model came to be stared at and imitated on paper for hours on end. At the beginning of class the room had a great feeling of discomfort, so myself and the other students all seemed to start to regard the model as an object, something we did not need to interact with or acknowledge as similar to ourselves.
 
To solve this problem we can develop a feeling of familiarity with other humans, sometimes to the point that they are felt as things. On page 40 Tuan describes the relationship between front and back with regard to the body. We associate good things with the term front, because it is more familiar to us than the back. He talks about the front as a largely visual thing, something that we see a lot of and therefore can associate with or make generalizations about. He builds on this idea in chapter six with the phrase, “when space feels thoroughly familiar to us, it has become place”(73).
 
Humans are beings that we feel largely connected to, but when we refer to our own body or to someone else’s, we often turn the body in question into an object. The space within which we can explore each other’s personalities and idiosyncracies becomes a place as we desire to take power of it, as it becomes a source of too much discomfort, or as we are overexposed to it.

(personal image)

I have never found Washington D.C. to be a particularly interesting or entertaining place. In fact, in my two years spent at the University of Maryland, I came to associate the city with all of the things I didn’t like about the University, which lies on the outskirts of the D.C. metro system. However, like the University of Maryland itself, parts of D.C. began to grow on me, and even became places I considered small escapes. One of these places is the National Portrait Gallery.

The building stands awkwardly in the middle of D.C.’s small Chinatown, across from the Capitals home rink and next to a row of fast food restaurants. The Portrait Gallery is tucked into a small corner of the building it shares with the Smithsonian American Art Museum. To get to it, first you have to walk through pristine hallways filled with pieces of American history quite selectively placed on either side. Coming to the gallery by mistake, one might feel uneasy and confused by the stark change in mood, but any time I visited I felt the excitement and fun I could not manage to find elsewhere in the city.

Walking into the National Portrait Gallery feels like walking out of D.C. and into an oddly but inherently familiar world. The faces of the portraits seem as though they are longing to make a connection with you. The open space is divided only by small hints of wall, creating a dynamic space to walk through and explore. It offers an engaging environment in which its viewers can spend time with one work, or take in the feeling of a group of portraits at once. The portraits themselves are easily put in conversation, connected by the theme of the exhibition, but also by the placement of small clusters, or two pieces that stand out across from each other.

For me, the Portrait Gallery was always a place I could go to connect with something, to feel more a part of the world around me. The nature of a portrait is often to give rise or voice to some larger issue, but a portrait always offers its viewer a glimpse into the person it portrays. In a place where I often felt constrained or alienated by people I may not have found too interesting, or just did not feel I belonged with, this gallery would allow me to forget the larger issues and make simpler connections with whatever surrounded me.

(image source)