A belated tribute to the writer John Updike, who died in January:

«She was the friend of a friend, and she and I, having had lunch with the mutual friend, bade him goodbye and, both being loose in New York for the afternoon, went to a museum together. It was a new one, recently completed after the plan of a recently dead American wizard. It was shaped like a truncated top and its floor was a continuous spiral around an overweening core of empty vertical space. From the leaning, shining walls immense rectangles of torn and spattered canvas projected on thin arms of bent pipe. Menacing magnifications of textural accidents, they needed to be viewed at a distance greater than the architecture afforded. The floor width was limited by a rather slender and low concrete guard wall that more invited than discouraged a plunge into the cathedralic depths below. Too reverent to scoff and too dizzy to judge, my unexpected companion and I dutifully unwound our way down the exitless ramp, locked in a wizard’s spell. Suddenly, as she lurched backward from one especially explosive painting, her high heels were tricked by the slope, and she fell against me and squeezed my arm. Ferocious gumbos splashed on one side of us; the siren chasm called on the other. She righted herself but did not let go of my arm. Pointing my eyes ahead, inhaling the presence of perfume, feeling like a cliff-climber whose companion has panicked on the sheerest part of the face, I accommodated my arm to her grip and, thus secured, we carefully descended the remainder of the museum. Not until our feet touched the safety of street level were we released. Our bodies separated and did not touch again.» — from Museums and Women

Initiated by artist Adrian Kondratowicz, the project is as simple as it is poetic: in selected city blocks, normal black plastic rubbish bags are swapped for colourful polkadot versions, effectively turning whole neighborhoods into bright urban sculpture gardens on rubbish collection day.

This is one of those ideas which makes you ask basic questions about the familiar. Why are rubbish bags black, for example? What happens to a place, and people’s sense of place if they’re pink polkadot? And will people think differently about rubbish, and the amount of rubbish they produce daily, by drawing attention to the bags on the street? I’d love to think so.

One man and his dog

Protagonist Robert Neville’s own personal ground zero is of course Manhattan, which has been repeatedly and gleefully destroyed on film on numerous occasions: When World’s Collide (flood), Ghost Busters II (paranormal slime), The Day After Tomorrow (tidal wave and megablizzard), Godzilla (angry reptile), Armageddon (slight meteorite damage), Deep Impact (tidal wave, again), Independence Day (aliens) and the upcoming Cloverfield (some indistinct entity) are just a few examples. New York Magazine’s entertainment blog «Vulture» recently posted the 10 Best Movie Destructions of New York complete with video clips, which helpfully reduces each film to its money shot.

I am Legend was a must-see: after all, the trailer promised scenes of Will Smith harvesting corn in central park, and hunting antelope on 5th Avenue. These sequences were fascinating, and didn’t dissapoint; unlike the film’s ending which was a predictably heinous turd. The thing which sets this narrative apart from the others though, is the timescale. Deep Impact’s kilometer-high tidal wave obliterates New York in 30 soggy seconds, but Legend’s depiction of gradual ruination progresses at an unperceivable bio-geological pace: fungus spreads, weeds grow taller, wild animals reclaim territory and things fall apart very, very slowly. It is a gritty reminder that what holds our towns and cities together is not just great feats of engineering, but boring daily maintenence.

Today, your place of work. Tomorrow a «vertical ecosystem» [Source: The History Channel]

Anti-architects with access to The History Channel will have some fun on the 21st Jan. with the premier of Life After People, a 2 hour «TV event» which asks «What would happen to planet earth if the human race were to suddenly disappear forever?» Apart from fish, whales and dolphins profiting enormously from the absense of human life, the effects on buildings are studied. Video clips on the programe’s website show university professor Ray Coppinger talking of «vertical ecosystems» when pondering the fait of abandoned skyscrapers.

This all puts me in mind of Mike Davis’ splendidly morbid essay «Dead Cities: A Natural History» published in 2002, in which the author references the 1886 novel After London: or, Wild England by Richard Jefferies. In it, Jeffries expounds his vision of the capital city, semi-submerged by a county-sized inland sea blocked by huge dams of debris piling up against the crumbling structures of «ancient bridges» crossing the Thames:

Thus the low-lying parts of the mighty city of London became swamps, and the higher grounds were clad with bushes. The very largest of the buildings fell in, and there was nothing visible but trees and hawthorns on the upper lands, and willows, flags, reeds, and rushes on the lower. These crumbling ruins still more choked the stream, and almost, if not quite, turned it back. If any water ooze past, it is not perceptible, and there is no channel through to the salt ocean. It is a vast stagnant swamp, which no man dare enter, since death would be his inevitable fate.

Scene from Flood, a 2007 British film, based on a novel by Richard Doyle.

Amidst this fictional example of creeping urban decay, Mike Davis reminds us of the aftermath of the bombing of Berlin in World War II. He recalls the words of poet Gottfried Benn who observed nettles as «tall as men»; signs were put up on the Autobahn warning of wolves; 50 strong heards of wild boar «ravaged» the city’s periphery and British troops helped an emaciated population by hunting three species of deer who had moved into the Spandau forests in search of food.

Central Berlin: a swamp waiting to happen

Berlin’s few remaining bomb sites, such as SLAB’s oft mentioned inner-city prairie, are stark reminders of just how close an urban environment is to spiralling back to a wild natural environment. Gottfried Benn’s man-high nettles are no joke; last summer I was fascinated by a thistle in a nearby green spot which grew to a majestic 1.5 meters before it was mown away. According to the Senate Department for Urban Development, Berlin is home to almost 30.000 different plant and animal species, making it more biodiverse than the surrounding countryside. Without the constant efforts of this cash-strapped city, Berlin would return quickly to the swamp on which it was built.

Further decay:
Pripyat.com – Fascinating website about the abandoned town of Pripyat, not far away from Chernobyl. It’s been uninhabited for 20 years, and trees have taken over.
Detroit Public Schools Book Depository – in a building next to Michigan Central Station in downtown Detroit stands the rotting remains of a huge storage space for educational books. Gutted by fire and open to the elements, hundreds-of-thousands of textbooks have been left to decay.
Sweet Juniper – Blog post accompanying the Detroit photos.

Inner city life: it’s sepia-toned

This got me thinking about the word “urban” and its relationship to music. It’s roots in the US go back to 1970s HipHop and R&B, but in the last few years it has become strongly tied with London’s underground music scene. Artists such as Wiley, Dizzee Rascal, Lady Sovereign or the Roll Deep Crew, all from East London, are typical proponants of a British urban sound and are usually lumped together in the genre “Grime”. On his 2004 track Wot Do U Call It?, Wiley pokes fun at the need to label music with simple catch-all terms: “What you called it? Urban? / What you call it? Garage?” he rhymes ironically.

The garage he’s referring to here isn’t where he parks his car, but rather the genre “Garage” – or more specifically, UK Garage – a British spin-off of the kind of dance music which got played in New York City’s Paradise Garage club in the late 1970s to mid 1980s. A close relative is of course “House” music which developed out of Disco, and possibly owes it’s name to The Warehouse, a Chicago club of the same era. The relationship between music and architecture in a post-industrial urban setting is clear, however odd such terms might sound.

Last week a friend introduced me to the numbingly addictive last.fm. This website is a depository for vast amounts of music which is searchable via artists names or, inevitably these days, user definable tags. Music matching your search is streamed to you via an in-browser player, but once your song is over, the software kicks in and automaically loads the next tune out of a relational database. The result is a stream-of-consciousness meander through a collective sense of “genre”.

So I’ve tried something out. Take a look at the sidebar and you’ll see a last.fm widget configured to play music tagged with the word “urban”. Give it a whirl. Next week I’ll reconfigure it and try out “Garage” or “House”. But I’ll have some fun too. In a rural parallel universe maybe there’s a Pastoral dance music scene which has spawned a plethora of sub-genres called “Shed” or “Barn”. I’d like to know what “Haystack” music sounds like, or how you might dance to the stuff people are calling “Silo-Style”. I’ll try these and other tags out, and see what happens.

But what I’m really looking forward to is a future breed of minimal-brutalist Brazilian HipHop called “el Slab”.