Life Without Buildings

Life Without Changes

2009-06-22T03:12:16Z

[The Yale School of Architecture. Paul Rudolph.]

Things have slowed down here on Life Without Buildings as I’ve been preparing for another major move. I’ve lived in San Francisco for three years now and it has been an absolutely incredible time. The city is impossibly beautiful and the people I’ve been lucky enough to meet are impossibly intelligent and insightful. A lot of opportunities have resulted from living here and I’m grateful to everyone I’ve met during the past three years. So thanks guys.

Next up for me and Life Without Buildings is a six week jaunt in New Orleans, my erstwhile home for seven years. Plans are pretty scarce at this point, but whatever happens, I’m sure there will be a lot of amazing and bizarre things to write about. And if you happen to be in New Orleans this summer, chances are you’ll be able to find me at The Saint. (961 St. Mary St. Bring your friends.) Of course, I’m telling myself there’s also a more academic reason for the trip as I’ll be documenting the city and researching post-Katrina recovery efforts for when my real work begins in September.

As alluded to by the above image, I’m starting at Yale University this fall. Specifically, in the Masters of Environmental Design program. I’m sure that as the date draws near more details on my thesis will emerge on this site as I figure out exactly what the hell I’m doing. Maybe Life Without Buildings will change. Maybe there’ll be a new blog. or some sort of Google Map mash-up. There’ll be something. I just don’t know what it is. But I’m sure as hell looking forward to finding out.

If you’re a new reader, a couple things. 1) hi. I’m Jimmy Stamp. Thanks for reading. 2) Why not take this time to get up to speed with a few of the most popular posts on Life Without Buildings: It’s been my pleasure this year to work with Bruce Tomb and Ant Farm on their Media Van, currently in France for the Nantes Biennale. Learn everything you never needed to know about the violent history and perversion of urbanism that is Gotham City. Still curious about superheroes? A real life Spiderman sheds a new perspective on the scale of skyscrapers. Not to be outdone, Rem Koolhaas has his own ironic spin on the building typology. Interested in science fiction? Discover the connection between Otto Wagner and Han Solo. And what happens to those giant starships when they’re retired? Like something from a Jules Verne novel, the grandson of a not-so-famed inventor built a subterranean telescope from London to New York.

And finally, as for the aforementioned friends in San Francisco, please continue reading for a list of their websites and blogs. The shear talent and creativity that I’ve encountered here is truly humbling.

Curbed San Francisco,

If you live in San Francisco, you need to be reading The SF Appeal

Dwell and Sarah Rich

A huge thanks to Sarah Hromack (.com)

Sally TV

Bruce Tomb

Buy something from KLM Prints

Hire/commission something from CMO Works

ArcCa Magazine and the California AIA

Look I Made That!

Premise Practice

Inventing Green

Mark Horton Architecture

too many @’s to mention.

On Influence: Batman, Gotham City, and an Overzealous Architecture Historian With a Working Knowledge of Explosives

2009-06-01T04:14:26Z

[Looking west from across the Gotham River, by Anton Furst]

New York, Dubai, Tokyo, Moscow, Gotham. Every city in every atlas—real and fictional— has a unique character shaped by history and geography. More than a mere sense of place derived from architecture and planning, cities have a feeling that pervades the consciousness of those who live there until they they themselves become a a piece of the urban fabric, a fractional embodiment of the city itself. Perhaps more than any other person—real or fictional—Batman is integrally linked to his city, the city he has sworn to protect. In every sense of the word, he is a true avatar of Gotham. And Gotham City itself is an avatar, not only of the dreams of its fictional architects, but of our collective urban paranoia.

One of my favorite plots in the Batman comics—for reasons that will be painfully obvious— was a storyline titled “Destroyer” published in 1992. Written by Alan Grant, the premise is sure to please any disgruntled architect or uncompromising disciple of Howard Roark: an overzealous architecture historian / Navy SEAL bombs abandoned and derelict “soulless concrete” buildings that obscure the Neo-gothic architecture of the city’s original designer, Cyrus Pinkney, on whom the Mad Bomber wrote his thesis. While carefully planting explosives, our antagonist’s inner monologue is rampant with polemics decrying the conformity induced by the contemporary architecture of Gotham. “Live in a box, shop in a box, die in a box. Robots, that’s what they want. Not people. Robots that consume. Straight lines - sharp angles - square boxes. No wonder the city’s gone mad.”

[Panel from LOTDK #27]

As the world’s greatest detective begins to uncover the motives for the seemingly random guerilla demolitions, he discovers another Gotham, “an older city, of improbable curves and angles - a city forgotten, that had been overshadowed and buried, suffocated by the towers of the 20th century.” Suddenly, in the type of realization that can only be expressed with thought bubbles, the Caped Crusader understands the bomber’s motive. “He’s doing it…for art!”

Although it works quite well as an independent story, “Destroyer” is perhaps most notable as lead-in to Tim Burton’s first Batman film. By aggressively redesigning the skyline of Gotham, the Mad Bomber was conveniently creating a cityscape more comparable to the Gotham envisioned by Tim Burton. Thus, when new readers, attracted by the movie, pick up a Batman comic book, the Gotham City they see on the pages resembles the Gotham of the movie. The story was really all about attracting new readers and selling more comics. And this wasn’t the last time Gotham was redesigned. Later, when the fictional city was destroyed in an earthquake, it was rebuilt as a modern glass-and-steel metropolis, paving the way for the Chicago-inspired Gotham of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, as noted by Charles Holland in his excellent article, and the inspiration for this piece, Dark Knight / White Heat: The Architecture of Gotham City.

[Covers to Batman #474, LOTDK #27, Detective Comics #641]

The cover of each issue in the “Destroyer” series features a traditionally drawn Batman swinging in front of a harsh, black & white charcoal drawings of Gotham City. Drawings that channel the spirit of famed architectural delineator Hugh Ferriss, filtered through the Carcerci etchings of Piranesi. Where Ferriss eschews detail for monumentality, the renderings of Gotham City by Academy Award-winning production designer Anton Furst, are bursting with a detail and chiaroscuro that put the “goth” in Gotham, creating an unmistakably Burtonesque world: shadowy Neogothic spires dripping with gargoyles and danger. Its populace on the brink of insanity.

Since its inception, Gotham City has been presented as the embodiment of the urban fears that helped give rise to the American suburbs, the safe havens from the city that they are. Gotham City has always been a dark place, full of steam and rats and crime. A city of graveyards and gargoyles; alleys and asylums. Gotham is a nightmare, a distorted metropolis that corrupts the souls of good men. In the excellent book, Woody Allen on Woody Allen, the famously nebbish auteur discusses his moody, Brechtian comedy Shadows and Fog, which takes place over the course of a single night in a vaguely European village. “Once you get out in the night, there is a sense that civilization is gone. All the stores are closed, everything is dark and it’s a different feeling. You start to realize that the city is just a superimposed man-made convention and that the real thing that you’re living on is a planet. It’s a wild thing in nature. All the civilization that protects you and enables you to lie to yourself about life is all man-made and superimposed.” In other words, civilization ends at night. And in Gotham City, it is always night. In Nolan’s newest Batman film, The Dark Knight (the dark night) the Joker exploits this weakness in man, the eternal fear-of-the-dark where all our self-imposed rules and behaviors are worth nothing; where man returns to a more primal nature. He wants to prove that our civility is a superficiality imposed by the constructs of society and the safety of our buildings.

[46th St. Promenade looking South to the Gardner Overpass, by Anton Furst]

In the “Destroyer” storyline we learn that the religious fanatic architect Cyrus Pinkney was hired by the equally moralist Judge Solomon Wayne, ancestor of Batman’s alter-ego, Bruce Wayne. For Solomon Wayne, a city should be a sanctuary, a fortress protecting culture and civility from the “godlessness of the wilds.” For Pinkney, Gotham needed structures to defend itself from the evil spirits responsible for corrupting man. Through a mystical epiphany, the Mad Bomber came to believe that Pinkney’s buildings literally kept “the demons” at bay. Cities have the power to effect the consciousness of its inhabitants and the ubiquitous gargoyles of the “Gotham Style” were intended to frighten people onto the path of righteousness.

[The Science Center, by Hugh Ferris. via.]

Ferriss himself acknowledges such emotional and behavioral effects of architecture, saying in his book The Metropolis of Tomorrow, “it has been our habit to assume that a building is a complete success if it provides for the utility, convenience and health of its occupants and, in addition, presents a pleasing exterior. But this frame of mind fails to appreciate that architectural forms necessarily have other values than the utilitarian or even others than those which we vaguely call the aesthetic. Without any doubt, these same forms quite specifically influence both the emotional and the mental life of the onlooker. Designers have generally come to realize the importance of the principle stated by the late Louis Sullivan, ‘Form follows Function.’ The axiom is not weakened by the further realization that Effect follows Form.” Ferriss’ iconic and much sough-after renderings were specifically designed to communicate the emotional influence of architecture - not necessarily what the building is, but the power it has.

Through the filter of the bomber’s insanity, Batman is, ironically, seen as one of the demons corrupting the city. Indeed, as drawn in this series, Batman is a kind of expressionist demon; cloaked in shadows and violent movement of swirling of cape and cowl. But is he a demon, or is he a living manifestation of Gotham’s gargoyles? Of its stone protectors? A man shaped, perhaps unconsciously, by the gothic vaults and flying buttresses and monstrous sculptures of Cyrus Pinkney. A man who, like the city he protects, frightens the citizens onto the path of righteousness.

[Still from The Dark Knight]

With his psychological origins linked to the rampant criminal behavior of Gotham, Batman is inarguably a product, an expression, of the city he lives in. But is he its demon or its savior? The duality of Batman’s effect on Gotham has been frequently debated in comics, and recently in the Nolan Batman films. Despite his noble intentions, it’s entirely possible that Batman is in fact one of the major causes of Gotham’s problems. In dressing up as a bat, he may have succeeded in instilling a primal sense of fear into the citizens of Gotham, but he’s also inadvertently inspired a new breed of criminal. Through his actions, through his very existence, he has directly influenced the rise of some of the city’s “super-villains.” Batman Begins makes this threat all too real in the final conversation between Jim Gordon and Batman:

Jim Gordon: What about escalation?
Batman: Escalation?
Jim Gordon: We start carrying semi-automatics, they buy automatics. We start wearing Kevlar, they buy armor-piercing rounds.
Batman: And?
Jim Gordon: And *you’re* wearing a mask and jumping off rooftops…

In its sequel, The Dark Knight, the Joker is constantly likening himself to Batman, showing that there may be an all-too-thin line between the criminally insane and the supposedly heroic; a duality expressed literally in the good-guy-turned-bad Harvey “Two Face” Dent and in a series of conversations between the Joker and Batman.

The Joker: Oh, you. You just couldn’t let me go, could you? This is what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object. You are truly incorruptible, aren’t you? Huh? You won’t kill me out of some misplaced sense of self-righteousness. And I won’t kill you because you’re just too much fun. I think you and I are destined to do this forever.
Batman: You’ll be in a padded cell forever.
The Joker: Maybe we can share one.

and later

Batman: Then why do you want to kill me?
The Joker: [laughs] I don’t want to kill you! What would I do without you? Go back to ripping off mob dealers? No, no, NO! No. You… you… complete me.
Batman: You’re garbage who kills for money.
The Joker: Don’t talk like one of them. You’re not! Even if you’d like to be. To them, you’re just a freak…like me!

To the Joker, and probably to many people in Gotham, Batman is just the opposite side of the same coin.

[Looking East from the top of the Wayne Building, by Anton Furst]

“Destoyer” closes with The Mad Bomber, ex-student / historian / Navy SEAL Andre Sinclair, surrounded by police and demolition crews, shooting defiantly at a wrecking ball swinging towards him. A futile, final act in defense of the individual dream against the unstoppable assault of society’s progress. As the wrecking ball rushes towards him, his earlier thoughts echo across the scene, “man is such a temporary thing. He lives, he sins, he dies. But a city can stand a thousand years. And a dream can last forever.”

Unfortunately, the issue’s closing narration casts little hope for the nightmare that is Gotham City. “Cyrus Pinkney’s Gotham - gargoyles, to frighten people onto the path of righteousness - rounded edges to confuse the malevolent beings - thick walls to lock in virtue. The work of a madman!”

In fact, Gotham City really is the work mad men. First, a fanatically religious architect and his equally radical benefactor, who by shear force of will and moral certitude willed Gotham into existence in the hopes that the city would, in turn, will morality into its citizens. Then, years later, the Batman has his influence. Shaped by the perverse forms of the city itself, Batman has had as much effect on the psyche of Gotham as the spires and gargoyles of the city’s architect. Like Gotham, Batman is an indeal, a force of nature, an effect. But what effect is he having? Bruce Wayne’s ancestor realized too late that he may actually be responsible for the criminal fate of Gotham City. “I wished to lock evil out of men’s neighborhoods and hearts,” Solomon Wayne lamented on his deathbed. “I fear that instead I have given it the means to be locked in.” Let’s hope that his descendant doesn’t have the same regret.

So what came first, the city or the crime? the hero or the villain? The architect or the city?

In closing, another quote from Hugh Ferriss seems appropriate:

“The contemplation of the actual Metropolis as a whole cannot but lead us at last to the realization of a human population unconsciously reacting to forms which came into existence without conscious design. A hope, however, may begin to define itself in our minds. May there not yet arise, perhaps in another generation, architects who, appreciating the influence unconsciously received, will learn consciously to direct it?”

previously:
· A Little Perspective From Spiderman and Renzo Piano’s New York Times Building [LWB]

“You killed the car.” Cameron’s House Now on the Market

2009-05-29T20:20:08Z

[image via luxist]

As seen in the 1986 movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, the modern home of Ferris’ best friend Cameron is now on the market. 370 Beech Street, aka The Ben Rose Home, in Highland Park, Illinois was designed by architect A. James Speyer. After a traditional Beaux-Arts education, Speyer traveled through Europe in the 1930’s, cultivating a new, ornament-free Modern vocabulary. As you might be able to tell from the glass-and-steel glory that is the Ben Rose Home, Speyer returned to the states to study with Mies Van der Rohe at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he also later taught. Almost as much a piece of eye candy as the 1961 Ferrari it rather unsuccessfully protected, Cameron’s house was also an incredibly savvy setpiece.

[image via luxist]

In Ferris Bueller, the modern building was perfectly believable as the sterile home of the uptight Cameron, reflecting a nurtured numbness and his isolation from friends and family. What better metaphor then for Cameron’s social and personal evolution than the climactic shattering of the perfect glass box? completely surrounded by the woods of Highland Park; its two buildings perched precariously above the hillside. For a beautiful piece of architecture that played such a pivotal role in film history, $2,300,000 seems like a bargain. Just be careful when you pull into the garage.

[image via luxist]

· The Ben Rose Home [Realtor.com]

Architecture Blogs Take on The Fountainhead

2009-05-22T03:06:46Z

[image via Strange Harvest]

So now that we’ve seen The Fountainhead as interpreted by America’s favorite cartoon family, The Simpsons, it seemed like it might be a good time for a more…informed take on Ayn Rand’s book and the resulting 1949 film. Recently, Fantastic Journal, Strange Harvest, Lebbeus Woods, and Things Magazine have all shared their thoughts on the black-and-white world of Howard Roark and Ellsworth Toohey. Despite their various perspectives, everyone seems to agree that it is one of very few—if not the only—film that is actually about architecture. As Woods puts it “architecture is not merely a background, but is the central issue in the narrative, around which the lives of the characters revolve.” Outside of that central agreement, each architect has their own take on the film. Charles Holland’s compares Ayn Rand’s interpretation of Modernism with that of From Bauhaus to Our House author Thomas Wolfe’s interpretations of Modernism to Wood’s ruminations on ethics and aesthetics in architecture. Sam Jacob, meanwhile, looks at The Fountainhead’s representation of architecture as an emotional landscape and ponders who the modern-day equivalent of Howard Roark might be. Richard Rogers? Daniel Libeskind? Or maybe it should be someone like Cameron Sinclair? Not a starchitect per se, but someone with an incredibly strong, almost righteous perspective on the power of architecture to impact lives. After all, doesn’t “Design like you give a damn” sound like something Howard Roark might say?

· Spouting Off: Some Thoughts On The Fountainhead [Strange Harvest]
· The Fountainhaus [Fantastic Journal]
· Ayn Rand and The Fountainhead [Things Magazine]
· The Fountainhead [Lebbeus Woods]
· Mediocrity Rules! The Simpsons & The Fountainhead [Life Without Buildings]

God is in the Details, Ellworth Kelly is in the Courtyard: Sculpture Garden Opens at the SFMOMA

2009-05-22T03:06:21Z

Over at the SF Appeal, I’ve written a brief review of the new sculpture garden at SFMOMA. Here, an excerpt from that post.

Afters three years of competition, construction, and even a little controversy, the new sculpture garden at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art made its public debut on May 10th, Mother’s Day. Designed by Jensen Architects with CMG Landscape Architecture, the new rooftop addition is almost Miesian in its elegant simplicity: glass and steel boxes surrounding an artfully composed open-air courtyard. In fact, the design specifically recalls Mies van der Rohe’s Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. There too, a glass facade opens out onto a walled sculpture garden; a respite from the sparseness and propriety of the formal Modern Art Gallery. But here, instead of natural growth poking out above the surrounding walls as it does in Berlin, it’s the urban landscape of San Francisco high-rise towers. As has been noted by many a critic and visitor, the emotional effect of the garden is that of an urban oasis.

Indeed, from the new sculpture garden, the sounds of traffic merge with the whirrs and hums of nearby HVAC units into an almost ocean-like white noise. The occasional police siren rings through the air like a proxy gull call. Grab a latte from the Bay Area’s own Blue Bottle Coffee, provided by the kiosk prominently installed at the head of the museum’s addition (the high-design, local equivalent of a Starbucks inside Barnes & Noble?), and sit at one of the well-designed benches or cafe tables and forget your concerns and obligations to the surrounding city. What better way to spend an afternoon or a lunch hour than admiring work by noted sculptors like Kiki Smith, Louise Bourgeois, Barnett Newman, and Ellsworth Kelly?

Read the entire review at the SF Appeal.

Mediocrity Rules! The Simpsons Takes on The Fountainhead

2009-05-12T07:50:42Z

Last night, The Simpsons finally got around to sending up The Fountainhead. Yes, Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead: the superficially architectural Objectivist manifesto so often given to incoming architecture students everywhere by their well-meaning relatives. The book that can have the unfortunate side-effect of brainwashing said first year architecture students. In typical irreverent form, the “Bible of Right Wing nutjobs” (Lisa’s words) is transposed to Maggie’s preschool, a preschool presided over by that staunch proponent of the prosaic, Ellsworth Toohey. In her defiant self-expression, Maggie Roark uses blocks, sugar cubes, and tinker toys to produce familiar structures ranging from the Taj Mahal to the Bird’s Nest. Toohey, staying true to his literary equivalent, is clearly enjoying himself in finding increasingly creative methods of destroying the block buildings, culminating in a sledgehammer redesign of Frank Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim (an ironic reversal of how the Simpson’s previously depicted Gehry’s “process”). Continue reading to view the full story, including Maggie’s version of Roark’s speech. UPDATE: Thanks to square for pointing out that Hulu is US only. A Youtube version of the clip has been added, but I’m not sure for how long it will stay online.

The Living Light Illuminates Air Quality in South Korea

2009-05-08T17:42:51Z

[image via The Living. Click to expand.]

“In the future, buildings will talk to one another.” So say The Living. Founded by David Benjamin and Soo-in Yang, New York based The Living have a practice that could perhaps best be described as techno-utopian open-sourced design. Seriously. That’s the best way to describe it. Their recent project in Seoul proves that, yes, it is possible to create forward-thinking architecture that is more useful and much more elegant than the multi-formal Prada Transformer in the same city. Living Light is a public pavilion that merges architecture with media and the graphic representation of data. In this case, the specific data relates to air quality in the South Korean Capital.

[image via The Living. Click to expand.]

The dome-like structure is made from transparent luminescent panels etched with a street map of the city. When air pollution levels improve in one area, that neighborhood’s corresponding panel is illuminated with LEDs. The casual passerby, therefore, begins to understand their city on an entirely new level - a largely invisible level. The same system that controls the illumination of the panels is also connected to a SMS hotline, so the “users” of this piece of architecture can essentially text message the building to get information about air quality. A building that talks to you.

[image via The Living. Click to expand.]

The Seoul project relates back to The Living’s earlier work, Living City, in which the firm equipped buildings with exterior air quality sensors that could communicate with one another via the internet. The Living develop their ideas through a process they’ve dubbed “Flash Research.” Flash research is “an architectural project that involves: 1) a budget under $1000, 2) a duration of less than three months, and 3) proof-of-concept through the creation of a full-scale functioning prototype. Previous Flash Research projects are River glow, which asks the question “What if architecture produced it’s own energy?” and Living Glass: “what if architecture responded to you?” But The Living don’t just want us to sit back and watch them answers these questions, they ask that we seek our own answers as well, and even improve or repurpose their work. Participatory Design. Open-source architecture. To this end, they’ve published Life Size, a two volume set that essentially acts as an instruction manual for their Flash Research projects. Curious about breathing buildings? With Life Size you can make your own gilled glazing.

Their architecture is siteless. Their ideas universal. The Living aren’t so much concerned with a building’s form, as with how the building work. Or perhaps more importantly - how they could work. The architecture of the future won’t have a singular style, but it might just share a . The Living’s techno-future isn’t far off and their series of cheaply-made prototypes serve to show that not only are their ideas possible, but within our ability to produce at larger scales. They’re designing the future. We just need to catch up. Luckily, there’s a instruction manual.

· The Living [website]
· Living Cities: From Sci-Fi to Sentient Buildings [Design-build Network]
· More Than Meets The Runway: The Prada Transformer [Life Without Buildings]

Save the Eames! Modernism Burns in Santa Barbara

2009-05-08T07:03:24Z

· Thousands flee as fire burns Santa Barbara homes [SF Gate]
· Moving Beyond Modernism in 6 easy steps [Life Without Buildings]

Steve Jobs’ Mystery Mansion Revealed

2009-05-04T21:12:55Z

[image via Apple Insider. Click to expand.]

Ok nerds, this one’s for you. American technomessiah Steve Jobs has had some problems with the 17,250 sq ft mansion he bought in Palo Alto, California. In effort to spare you the boring real estate details, here’s the jist: Jobs wants to destroy the home to build Tony Stark’s house - or something much like it. Unfortunately for Jobs, local preservationists oppose the plan, arguing that the 1925 mansion represents one of the area’s few remaining examples of a Spanish Colonial Revival style and is therefore too historic to tear down. Legal hijinks ensue. But these photos taken by Jonathan Haeber tell a different story. The tale of the eccentric millionaire’s haunted mansion, perhaps? Haeber snuck into the property a few years ago and found an overgrown abode full of disintegrating drapes and corroded chandeliers. More photos after the jump and get the complete low-down at AppleInsider.

[image via Apple Insider. Click to expand.]

Postcard Architecture Disseminates the Future of U.S. Infrastructure

2009-04-30T05:58:40Z

["Bridging Parallel Infrastructures"]

One of my greatest frustrations with architecture is how inaccessible it is to…well, everyone. All too often architecture is something reserved for the backgrounds of car commercials, the occasional feature of a weekend paper, and the interiors of glossy magazines relegated to their own little corner of bookstores. That’s why it’s such a relief to see an exhibition like Friends of the Future. FoF is a the result of an advanced studio at the Rhode Island School of Design taught by Anthony Acciavatti, Infrastructural Reserves: Spreads and Densities along the Northeast Corridor, that investigated the formal and spatial potential of rest stops, intermodal stations, and other infrastructural interventions along I-95. The exhibition will travel to venues located along the Northeast Corridor and distribute 36,000 postcards promoting speculative futures of regional transit systems. It’s this populist aspect of exhibiting that is especially exciting. Starting May 25, the postcards will be available at rest stops, gas stations, welcome centers, and even McDonald’s restaurants across Connecticut - bringing design to people who might just be stopping off to walk the dog, use the bathroom, or buy a McFlurry.

[Friends of the Future opening exhibition at RISd]

From the Friends of the Future Press Release

The projects presented serve to foster a discussion about new design strategies that can start to re-organize the expanse of residual spaces throughout the interstate, in order to accommodate a wide variety of programs that can serve a new social and economic future for the I-95 corridor, and consolidate an array of urban edges into a new infrastructural network.

Throughout the winter term, the students cultivated a series of well attuned strategies that envision the introduction of rail within the interstate system. The purpose in doing this is to conceive a diverse body of proposals, which provide an assortment of alternative futures for these contrasting sites that are unique for their exceptional cultural and ecological value.

[a portrait of the US via the Interstate Highway System]

The exhibition couldn’t have come at a better time, as it coincides with the recent announcement by the Obama administration of a new high speed rail plan for America. The Northeast Corridor and a continuing route that follows almost the entire length of I-95 is a primary focus of the new plan. After the election, there was a lot of discussion about the future of architecture and urbansim as the US welcomed its first urban President. Could we realy be entering a new Golden Age of infrastructure, creating new infrastructure to physically unite the nation as we begin what will surely be a slow economic recovery? The government, President Obama said, “will act—not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth.”

Projects like the RISD exhibition can help start the discussion that precedes this “new foundation.” As the average citizen becomes more aware of good design, it becomes possible to see a future where educated voters actually support innovative architecture and massive intermodal transit zones along high-speed rail lines. But that’s not all. We love our cars in America and we love road trips with mix tapes and crossing state lines with the sun setting behind us. As rail lines becomes more prevalent and new stations become necessary, these intermodal zones could potentially change the nature of the road trip by reconsidering what it means to travel by car and, as the projects brief states, reorganize the vast expanse of residual space between our cities. Can we create an ecologically sound, architecturally innovative infrastructure? As much I’d like to use the familiar “yes we can” refrain, the best we can hope for right now is a resounding “maybe.” But at least people are talking. And the next time you stop to grab a double cheeseburger on your way to Myrtle Beach, look for the RISD postcards and send a few to your family.