Yule Heibel’s Post Studio © 2003-2008

Could “localism” help dilute “narcissism”?

Update, see end of post.

Ok, ok, I know it’s not a question I (or anyone) could possibly answer in a short blog post, but consider the discussions around the Emily Gould phenomenon (here, here, here, or a million other sites online). Fast Company’s Laura Palotie column, How Emily Gould Turns Us On, closes as follows:

…we like to equally spit on fictional New Yorker Carrie Bradshaw, traditional celebrity Denise Richards and the newest, self-made breed that Gould represents. We scarf down the private, aggravating realities of each with equal appetite, and let the resulting schadenfreude provide a soothing distraction from our own neuroses.

Well, um, maybe. Except that until someone in my Twitter stream tweeted about Gould’s NYT piece, blissfully ignorant me didn’t know who she was — except of course that I had heard of Gawker.

Yes, I did on one or two occasions glance at Gawker, but never really read it and certainly didn’t “follow” it. Why not? Because I don’t live in New York City. Call me naive, but I thought Gawker was all about New York — rather a long ways away from this (literally) “neck of the woods.”

And until reading Palotie’s piece, I didn’t know who Carrie Bradshaw was — I had to reread one sentence to understand that she doesn’t really exist and is in fact one of the characters on …um, a TV show? Something called Sex and the City?

Why would I not know who the Sex and the City characters are? Um, well, …I don’t watch TV. I have a TV (I have sex, too), but I have no access to TV channels (antennae don’t work in Victoria, and I refuse to pay money to the cable company). All I ever watch are DVDs — I don’t have a clue what’s on actual TV this season.

Instead, I know a lot about what’s going on in my local space — some of which overlaps with my online spaces. Not to sound too colloquial, but I’m totally about keeping my eye on the pulse of trends, seeing patterns emerge, knowing what’s coming up in terms of technological innovation. My interest lies in figuring out how that can apply to where I live, to the local.

Neither Carrie Bradshaw or Emily Gould have a locality in my world. Maybe that makes me sound backwards (or just really old) in pop cultural terms? Or perhaps if I were a psychiatrist, I might be interested in one or the other as an emblem for some sort of mental disorder; if I were a professional sociologist, I might be interested in one or the other as a specimen of forensic interest. But I’m not.

From what I recall of Emily Gould’s fantastic (and probably fantastically paid) 8,000 word ramble, there wasn’t anything that I could pattern-match in any useful sort of way to anything I’m interested in figuring out here.

Reading some of the commentaries on Gould, and the underlying assumptions they make that, exuding Schadenfreude, we must all be greedily “scarfing up” each breaking scandal, I can’t help but think that a passionate interest in your locale, in where you are, is a kind of vaccination against the narcissism that serves as a prerequisite to keeping the culture industry humming along.

Technology is making narcissism easier, but it would be wrong to blame technology just because it’s used by what appear to be the terminally narcissistic to amplify their ends. After all, that same technology is also making possible a renaissance of localism, enabling a community’s place-making voices to emerge from under the choke-hold of broadcast media.

It all depends on what you choose to focus on. Obviously, if you focus on the Goulds or the even more fictional Carrie Bradshaws, and you lose your place. Your life is where you make it.

Update, May 30, 7:30am: So, this is ironic… As it happens, I checked our local paper’s “Arts” section this morning — something I usually never do because this paper rarely reports on local arts happenings, instead typically filling this section with pop culture “news” I can easily pick up just about anywhere else. I don’t get why they (the paper) don’t get that I wouldn’t bother looking in my local paper for stuff I can read anywhere else. But I digress…: what did my bleary eyes see on the “local” paper’s “Arts” pages this cloudy a.m.? Not one, not two, not three, but four (4!) “stories” about …yup, you guessed it, Sex and the City. The movie and the TV show. And all of them, save one, were recycled filler from the feed of Canwest News Service. The one that wasn’t from that outlet was a cut and paste job of critics’ snippets cobbled together into an “article,” entitled”From the sublime to the ridiculous, the critics’ take on Sex and the City,” by “Special to the Times Colonist.” It’s enough to make you weep.

And some people think the bloggers are unprofessional or shallow or full of crap, and that those in official media are the professionals. Well, if that were true, one would have to rethink the whole notion of “professional.”

(Oops, my bad: I just now realized that I hadn’t actually included a link to Gould’s NYT piece, and just added it, above, and here.)

Diigo Bookmarks 05/15/2008 (p.m.)

Nomads at last | Economist.com - Annotated

Published on the same date as The new oases (which I bookmarked at the time), I missed this story the first time around (April 10). Saw it now via Wendy Waters’s blog, All About Cities. Like “The new oases,” this article is also about mobile computing, and its effects on our social worlds/ lived lives.

It’s odd this topic should have popped up for me today, as the other article (The new oases) was one I thought of as seeming apposite to a discussion around video commenting, taking place on Fred Wilson’s blog. The conversation there is about Disqus and Seesmic, which have joined forces to enable users to leave video recorded comments (vs. text scribblings) on blogs. Somehow, when I read about this (also on Dave Winer’s blog as well as Wilson’s — I left a comment on the latter’s, albeit straight text, no video), I immediately thought of The new oases and its points regarding isolation. Disclaimer: my “ruminations” have nothing to do with the conversations taking place on either blog or their comments boards. I’m thinking about this from a more abstract angle, although the question, “what’s the point of video comments?” did come up again and again on those blogs, too.

What is the point? More information? More immediacy? More …more? If it’s more more (immediacy, intimacy, contact), then you really do have to wonder. Can the technology can ever produce or recreate “nest warmth,” that sense of communal belonging, or isn’t each instance of technological mediation just another way of giving us yet another perspective view on our own selves? Another perspective, which is a slice but hardly an integration, a whole?

It’s not the case that “communal belonging” or what the Germans call “Nestwaerme” (nest warmth), which is a kind of fusion, is a good thing; nor is it a question of whether getting a perspective (let’s call that slicing or parsing) is a good thing. They’re both good things in their appropriate times and places. It’s more a question of not confusing one for the other, and I got the impression from reading responses that there’s a lot of confusion — and confusing of the two. On Wilson’s blog there’s much discussion of whether or not the Disqus-Seesmic joint venture (video blog comments) will produce better comments/ comments streams/ understanding. I don’t think it will. It will just refract whatever understanding exists or is able to be seen into yet more facets. That’s all. Whether or not those slices and perspectives will be pulled into a new whole will depend on who’s doing the pulling.

• tags: the_economist, nomadism, mobile_technology, mobile_city, technology




Colourful banners to light up city (Vancouver Sun)

Wouldn’t it be great to have something like this (based on a virus invading the artist’s computer) be digital/ computer-generated, instead of in the same old technique of …?screen-printed banners? C’mon, so it’s a nice pattern — but if it derived from “a virus that invaded [artist Bratsa] Bonifacho’s computer,” why not make it viral in form?



tags: vancouver, bratsa_bonifacho, art, art_projects, public_art

“Techne” and “Arte”: Qualities.

It’s one of those long-buried texts in the back of my mind: Adorno’s dissection of techne and “art” (both of which he of course spelled in Greek letters, so tough luck for you if the Greek alphabet wasn’t something that tripped off your eyeballs easily…).

I won’t embarrass myself by trying to recapitulate what he wrote, but I’m certain that Martijn de Waal’s blog post from May 12, Is GPS-navigation turning us into ‘Men without Qualities’?, relates to the questions Adorno asked in the texts collected in the book, Aesthetic Theory:

The Dutch Daily NRC Handelsblad published a highly interesting interview with retiring law-professor Egbert Dommering. He enters the current debate about new media, personal development and cultural authority by expressing his fear that the dominance of cultural systems for information retrieving like Google or GPS-Navigation will turn us all into ‘Men without Qualities’ (after the Robert Musil book). Are we becoming blank subjects, servile obedient to the instructions that our computers conjure up for us? (…)

Dommering fears that rather than building personalities with an extended intellectual and cultural substance, the current media system encourages us to rely on algorithms like that of Google, Satelite Navigation etc to provide us with the right information when we think we need it. This might be handy, but will we still be able to paint a bigger picture out of all these fragmented tidbits. Will we still be able to evaluate them critically? Can we still place the facts into a bigger cultural context? GPS-Naviagtion tells us exactly how we can get somewhere. But do we still know where we are? What is the history or culture of the places we are travelling through, what issues are at stake here? Dommering fears that we might loose the interest in and capabilitie to answere these questions. (source)

Sounds like just another negative culture critic, doesn’t he? And yet, consider the profile of Piotr Wozniak by Wired Magazine’s Gary Wolf: Want to Remember Everything You’ll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm. Wozniak is the driven genius behind SuperMemo, his program that teaches proper “spacing” so your memory will be able to absorb and recall everything. The catch? You have to surrender to the algorithm.

Hmm, what do I want? Superhuman powers of recall (but nearly servile dependence on an external clock that brooks no escapades of artistic whimsy)? Or…?

Just what do you call the alternative, anyway? “Normal” is so …well, 90s. Or 80s. Or something altogether unhip.

After running through alternatives to what looks like a pessimistic cultural perspective on Dommering’s part, Martin de Waal closes his blog post with some excellent questions:

So what should locative designers or theoreticians take from this discussion? Is it an attitudinal problem, where people get used to not look beyond the first 5 results that Google produces on any search? And is that attitude promoted by the technology itself or the way it is presented? Is it an algorithm-cum-interface problem, where the strength of an algorithm plus the design of the interface might promote deeper understandings of local contexts? Can we design locative media in such a way to promote a richer experience of place, rather than just getting us where we want to go as efficienly as possible? [see complete article here.]

I think those questions — and Piotr Wozniak — prove the need for arte coupled with techne. Wozniak is an artist in his way — but I bet his technique would suffer in “mass” deployment. It works for him, it works for many people. Which doesn’t yet mean that many people should use his techne, his technique. Not everyone could keep hold of “qualities” in the face of such algorithmic rigour.

That same day, Kazys Varnelis coincidentally posted a brief and cryptic-seeming post about Bruno Latour’s book, We Have Never Been Modern, entitled On distinction:

I’m rereading Bruno Latour’s We Have Never been Modern. (…) What’s striking me right now about this seventeen-year-old book is that it’s predicated on an argument against the modern sense of distinction between spheres. In the intervening period, it seems to me (please feel free to shoot me down …better now than later), the postmodern process of “blurring boundaries” has been made obsolete by a thorough loss of distinction in society and culture. The Enlightenment project of modernity, it seems to me, is increasingly something that our generation cannot even conceive of. [see entry here.]

Back to Adorno and his belabouring of the “distinctions” between techne and arte?

Part of Adorno’s point — if I recall correctly (and I should probably follow Kazys’s example and re-read the text, instead of producing a new one off the cuff) — is that the distinction between the two is itself artificial. They are in fact interwoven and are perceived as antitheses or separate endeavours because we learned to parse them that way.

In reality, neither exists without the other — which is obvious when you think about it. You can’t make art without technique, and technology or technique without some sort of art (most highly and refinedly practiced by the best technologists) isn’t particularly compelling, either.

So anyway… to bring this ramble (so precariously close to artlessness and certainly not polished in technique, either) to a close: we are in the thick of rethinking the distinctions between art and technology — albeit too often at the expense of art. During the Enlightenment (as Adorno correctly deduced) people believed the distinctions were clear, and that it was possible to move ahead without further hiccups. Then, when technology was used (artfully, or not) to carry out irrational projects (the world wars, the genocide, other atrocities), that belief was shaken to the core. Now we’re “cynically enlightened“: hip to the fact, perhaps even resigned. But I bet those old distinctions will be back to haunt us yet.

File under: Shameless reposting of a locally reported story

An article in our local paper just caught my eye: Belmont student’s edgy speech sparks complaints, by Louise Dickson. Now we all know that the official paper never does what the bloggers do (ow!, where’s my tongue? heck, I think I dislodged it!), and naturally all headlines are to be taken at face value …sure. But as the Times-Colonist is not the National Enquirer, I had to click through on this one because there had to be some kind of story there.

Apparently, a smart, creative 17-year old named Brandon Rosario, full of all the usual energy that comes with that age, competed at one of our area schools, Belmont High School, for the post of class valedictorian. A day later, Brandon Rosario was called to the vice-principal’s office — and yowza, one has to wonder if VPs don’t have enough to do these days.

His speech had become an object of inquiry: was the boy giving offense? Could someone — anyone? — be offended …by his humour?

Thank gods for Youtube, because of course his speech is viewable here: Valedictorian Nominee — Brandon Rosario, so you can decide for yourself.

(An aside: I went to see a play called The Violet Hour at the Belfry Theatre last week; one of its many facets is that it’s about an early 20th century publisher who, together with his assistant, is given books from the future to read — courtesy of a strange machine that arrives uninvited. At some point in the play, the publisher and his assistant begin to “assume” the manners and speech of the future, often stopping themselves self-consciously to wonder, “where did that come from?” The best example is when the assistant gives a little speech about being “offended,” which he announces is the highest form of late 20th-century moral outrage…)

So Brandon Rosario was called to the vice-principal’s office because …why?

“As I understand it, [his speech] had racial slurs and some homophobic type of conversation,” Warder said. “And the school is investigating whether or not there needs to be discipline.”

“Some of it is biting. It’s attacking,” Brandon said. “I don’t think people understand satire these days. But investigating? Like I’m a serial killer or something?”

In his speech, Brandon tells his classmates he doesn’t have much going for him in pursuit of the valedictorian nomination. [Times-Colonist article]

I’m guessing the paper printed this good story to stir the pot — there are more people out there than not who will side with Brandon. The question is whether the conversation will do anything to rein in the sort of over-cautiousness exemplified by “managers” or “rulers” of voices-within-the-box.

Seriously, at this point I think prison inmates have more rights to, and expectation of, free speech than school pupils do — perhaps because it’s at least publicly acknowledged that the former are in jail, while we pretend the latter are free.

Update: Be sure to view the Facebook Group, Support Brandon Rosario’s fight for Free Speech.

“Creepy treehouse”

I think the phrase “creepy treehouse” needs more traction, which is why I’m blogging it.

Read about it on Flexknowlogy.  Here’s a brief excerpt, but you must click through and read the whole entry by Jared Stein.  It’s excellent!

creepy treehouse

see also creepy treehouse effect

n. A place, physical or virtual (e.g. online), built by adults with the intention of luring in kids.

Example: “Kids … can see a [creepy treehouse] a mile away and generally do a good job in avoiding them.” John Krutsch in Are You Building a Creepy Treehouse?”

n. Any institutionally-created, operated, or controlled environment in which participants are lured in either by mimicking pre-existing open or naturally formed environments, or by force, through a system of punishments or rewards.

Such institutional environments are often seen as more artificial in their construction and usage, and typically compete with pre-existing systems, environments, or applications. creepy treehouses also have an aspect of closed-ness, where activity within is hidden from the outside world, and may not be easily transferred from the environment by the participants.

n. Any system or environment that repulses a target user due to it’s [sic] closeness to or representation of an oppressive or overbearing institution.

n. A situation in which an authority figure or an institutional power forces those below him/her into social or quasi-social situations.

With respect to education, Utah Valley University student Tyrel Kelsey describes, “creepy treehouse is what a professor can create by requiring his students to interact with him on a medium other than the class room tools. [E.g.] requiring students to follow him/her on peer networking sites such as Twitter or Facebook.”

adj. Repulsiveness arising from institutional mimicry or emulation of pre-existing community-driven environments or systems.

Example: “Blackboard Sync is soooo creepy treehouse.” Marc Hugentobler

In the field of educational technology a creepy treehouse is an institutionally controlled technology/tool that emulates or mimics pre-existing technologies or tools that may already be in use by the learners, or by learners’ peer groups. Though such systems may be seen as innovative or problem-solving to the institution, they may repulse some users who see them as infringement on the sanctity of their peer groups, or as having the potential for institutional violations of their privacy, liberty, ownership, or creativity. Some users may simply object to the influence of the institution.

I’ve been observing this phenomena increasingly, as instructors push down hot Web 2.0 technologies, while students push back with vocal objections or passive resistance. I call this the creepy treehouse effect.

Oh, this is very very good.  Do read the whole thing.  Hat-tip to Netwoman for “creepy treehouse” — thanks!

Daily Diigo Public Link 02/09/2008

The Artful Manager: What’s ”authentic”? Annotated

tags: authenticity, branding, culture, culture_industry, folklore, ideas, ideology, marketing

Read the entry, “What’s ‘authentic’?,” by Andrew Taylor, but then read the first comment that follows, by Bill Ivey. Taylor, writing from an arts manager perspective, observes: “Since arts organizations are often perceived (or perceive themselves) as havens of authentic expression, it might be worth a moment to define, exactly, what that means.” Ivey, donning his “folklorist” hat, contrasts the “authentic” barn-raising, say, with the construction of a pre-fab barn — or “authentic” blue jeans and their history of being workwear, with the “brand” of “authentic” designer jeans. Apples & oranges, and the oranges, it seems, are watery — or “thin,” as Ivey puts it: they offer “the illusion of purchasable membership in networks defined by exactly the history and shared values that in modern society are available to very, very few.”

Willem-Jan Neutelings: “how to Design an Icon” (Archinect : Features) Annotated

tags: archinect, architecture, icon, interview, theory, willem_jan_neutelings

I found this via http://www.ceosforcities.org/conversations/blog/, and have had it open in a tab for DAYS now, wondering how to annotate/ sum it up, and I can’t seem to do it justice. Here’s Archinect’s introduction: A conversation with Willem-Jan Neutelings about the tradition of architecture and the way iconography should be applied in architecture.” Just that bit: how “iconography should be applied in architecture” is amazing. Who speaks of such things cogently these days? Dares to? At the same time, I find myself in agreement with commentator Ivo, at the end of this blog entry, who writes: “I don’t know about Neutelings-Riedijk. It’s too simple for me, almost cartoonish. A harbour college that looks like stacked shipping containers, an earth-sciences building that looks like covered in dirt, a TV and media centre is clad in blurred tv images. No offence they make nice sculptures, but I expect my architects to come up with something more than the first (obvious) idea that springs to mind while being faced with a client/project.”

Disney comment on Victoria: “you would swear you were in England”

It seems the Canadian Pavilion at the Epcot Center (in Orlando, Fla.’s Disney World) has a new version of “O Canada,” the promotional film for this country. According to an article in today’s paper (Ottawa feeling underexposed in Disney’s new Epcot film), Ottawa is ticked off that it rates barely a mention.

But how would you like to be Victoria, narrated along the lines of “you would swear you were in England”?

There are two YouTube clips available to view the “First Official Screening” of the new & improved version of “O Canada”:

Part One (nearly 10 minutes, with the first 5 1/2 minutes taken up by an intro; at around 6 minutes the actual film starts, with Martin Short): this link to view
and
Part Two (another 10 minutes, this time all film, except for a few seconds at the end): this link to view

What I find interesting is that Martin Short starts by explaining the origin of the name, Canada, as deriving from the native word for “village” or “settlement,” but then the film spends at least 5 minutes going on about how Canadians practically live outdoors, in the wilder wilds of nature. Did you know, for example, that ice skating is apparently our national mode of winter transportation…? No? It was news to me, too.

Aha, but then, after many views of bear & caribou & so on, Short adds this: “Most Canadians live in cities.”

What follows is a quick cross-country city tour, with each locale highlighted for something or other. Victoria is cited for its architecture — incidentally the only city to be distinguished for that aspect. Yet only our relatively slim pickings of wow! buildings (the Empress and the Legislature, both designed by Francis Rattenbury) are part of that highlight. We are not commended for anything new and recent.

And I say “relatively slim” not to disparage the magnificence of the buildings exposed in the film, but to point out that once you’re in the downtown neighbourhoods of Rock Bay or Harris Green or North Park, those buildings will mean little to you, because what you’re dealing with instead are the rather uninspired uglinesses on either side of the street…

So, in context, the “you would swear you were in England” remark is actually part of this statement: “The architecture of this charming city is so inspired by its British heritage that you would swear you were in England.”

I guess the question might then be, “How long can we continue to live off inspiration alone?” Even Disney gives it up to innovation, often and repeatedly…

Keep flying…

It’s busy around here, which is why posting to the blog is sparse (to put it kindly).

But the other day — really in passing, the way a bird might fly past the window, and the window is your life as you’re standing there and living it, except I was moving and the window was holding still, so I’m kinda wondering about what my life is up to if it’s not the window, and …oh, well never mind! — anyway, the other day I heard about a bird called the godwit (what’s in a name, you ask? …sometimes everything, perhaps?), a female godwit named (as it were) E7, which was electronically tagged and proven to have flown from New Zealand to Alaska, where it almost certainly hatched out some young during its 5 week “lay-over,” after which it took wing and flew non-stop, from Alaska, all the way back to New Zealand.

I don’t know about anyone else, but this just floors me. Brings me right down to earth. Clips my wings, in a manner of speaking.

We’re talking about a bird — read: relatively tiny creature — capable on its return trip of flying 11,500 km …non-stop. As in: without a single touch-down anywhere, without stopping for food or water, without skipping a single (wing)beat… For eight days straight. For eight days, this bird didn’t stop. It puts a whole new spin on the old “she eats like a bird” comment…

Here are quotes from a couple of articles on E7’s migration:

“The Bar-tailed Godwit is one example among hundreds of migratory bird species which undertake awe-inspiring journeys every year,” said Dr Vicky Jones, BirdLife’s Global Flyways Officer. “Migrant birds rely on chains of traditional stop-over sites at which they can re-fuel and rest before embarking on the next leg of their journey.”
http://www.birdlife.org/news/news/2007/09/godwit_records.html

What’s interesting is that this particular godwit didn’t use any stop-overs, so perhaps this one is an exceptional athlete. Whatever, it underscores the need for countries to cooperate, to make sure that stop-over sites are available and not degraded beyond use. Whether non-stop or with lay-overs, migration is amazing.

On the way from New Zealand to Alaska to breed, E7 did use a lay-over, but not on the return from Alaska to New Zealand:

Ecologist Phil Battley, of Massey University, told the New Zealand Herald the bird, known only as E7, first flew 10,200 km to the Yalu Jiang Nature reserve in China’s Yellow Sea where she spent five weeks refuelling before flying another 7,300 km to breeding grounds in Alaska.

He said she spent two months at the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, where she was almost certainly breeding, leaving about mid-July before going to mudflats on the edge of the Yukon Delta where she refuelled again, ‘getting nice and fat’ until the end of August.

Battley said her southward flight from Alaska to New Zealand was thought to be the longest non-stop migration of any bird.

‘She had the option to fly down to the Alaskan peninsula and take off from about 500 km further south but she didn’t do that,’ he said. ‘This indicates the long journey is not such a problem to her.’

http://science.monstersandcritics.com/news/article_1354214.php/Godwit_flies_record_11500_kilometres_non-stop

E7 did all this without eating or drinking anything during the actual migration:

“We were pretty impressed when she did 10,200km on the way north,” says Massey University ecologist Phil Battley. “And the fact that she can now do 11,500km… it’s just so far up from what we used to believe 10 years ago when we were thinking a five or 6,000km flight was extremely long. Here we’ve doubled it,” adds the New Zealand coordinator of what is an international study.

For researchers, tracking the second leg of E7’s journey was a bonus - her implanted satellite tag kept working well past its expected cut-off date.

“If you’re trying to confirm how far birds fly and whether they are making stop-offs, it’s only now with the technology being small enough, you can do this remotely. Otherwise we’d still be using educated guess work,” Dr Battley says.

And that means the researchers now know that the godwits really are the champions of avian migration. Unlike seabirds, which feed and rest on their long journeys or swifts which feed in flight, the godwits make their long journeys without feeding or drinking.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6988720.stm

It’s still a real mystery how E7’s young — and the young of all the other godwits who came to breed in Alaska this past summer — will manage to find their way to New Zealand once they’ve matured. Yes, like salmon, these comparatively tiny beings have to cross incredible distances to fulfil biological destiny, as it were, and like salmon, they do it without “parental” or “adult” supervision or guidance. So what is it that shows them the way? Electro-magnetic fields in the earth? Navigation by astral maps? Some homing signal you or I can’t hear, but they can?

This New Zealand newspaper editorial asks the question, too, and sums up by concluding that maybe the tiny godwit — by not yet revealing all its secrets — can take our hubris down a notch, too:

The study of that admirable bird is essential. First, because it is endangered. Over millennia the rich mudflats of predator-free New Zealand has offered an abundant sanctuary. Human habitation, with its cats, dogs and stoats, has taken its toll. We need to understand the bird to ensure it survives.

Second, if we unravel the secret that not only sends and guides the godwit back and forth but also sustains it on its epic flight, it may be to our own benefit: We may have much more to learn from the birds than flight technology.

And last, the study of the godwit gives wing to the imagination. The contemplation of the unknown or unknowable (part of us may wish the bird’s magic is never revealed) is a necessary antidote to earthbound life. That we are able to be confounded, humbled and inspired by a tiny bird that can do so much that we can’t, is worth appreciating for itself.

http://www.hbtoday.co.nz/localnews/storydisplay.cfm?storyid=3748072&thesection=localnews&thesubsection=&thesecondsubsection=

It’s kind of interesting to think that getting shifted from the centre of things by a small critter (a bird), we deconstruct hubris and reconstruct imagination. Just a bit, just enough for a slight leap into some perfectly working creature’s flightpath…

PS: On a related note, an article by the always terrific Jonah Lehrer, Eggheads: How bird brains are shaking up science, in the Boston Globe.

“We don’t want to be another Vancouver”: Some thoughts on the Victoria mindset…

My scribble today is more in line with thinking out loud than with any kind of sustained effort toward an essay, but Joan Wickersham’s article, Bricks & Politics — What gets built at Harvard, what doesn’t, and why, in the latest (Sept./Oct. 2007) issue of Harvard Magazine really provoked my thinking — including thinking out loud.

Who knew such parallels existed between Bostonians and Victorians? (And I include Canterbridgians as Bostonians here.)

I actually always suspected the parallels, knowing full well that Boston, with its long history of indigenous (made in Boston, home-grown) “solutions” and its prudish, old-fashioned and often anti-modernist ways, has a chip on its shoulder compared to New York, just as Victoria does compared to Vancouver. The parallel extends to moralisms, in the sense that NYC is seen as a money-grubbing and shockingly flashy capitalist heartland, while frugal (and somehow “more authentic”) Bostonians wear last year’s — nay, last decade’s! — frumpy fashions because they, of course, are above the sort of superficiality that passes for meaning in “the big city”… But I’ll save the pop psychology for another day — suffice to say, the observation of parallels has its valid points.

Wickersham makes several arguments that set my heart racing, the key ones being: first, the story of neighbourhood opposition to Harvard’s plans for development — an opposition that dates back to the 60s when Harvard built the Peabody Terraces (which sort of parallels Roberts & Orchard House in the James Bay neighbourhood of Victoria, a catalyst for anti-modernist opposition to “skyscrapers” and densification); second, the contentious process of neighbourhood consultation, which sometimes goes against intended outcomes, leaving the proponents with mediocre designs; and third, the question of “branding.”

Branding was perhaps the most electrifying point, but it’s better understood if you understand the history of neighbourhood consultation (in some cases interference) first.

Peabody Terraces created mistrust of the university, a culture which in turn was groomed by the neighbourhood. (See page two of the article for details: Peabody Terraces is comprised of three 22-storey modernist towers on Harvard land, abutting a residential SFH neighbourhood.)

Approximately 35 years after Peabody, James Cuno (Harvard Art Museums director at the time, and himself a Harvard-trained art history PhD) proposed developing a Harvard-owned strip of land next to Peabody Terraces along the River Charles, on the non-riverbank side of the road. At the time, the site was leased to a nursery and garden shop. Harvard hired Renzo Piano — arguably a “starchitect” — who designed an ultra-low-key, wood-frame, two-storey building to accomodate two new museums. One was for contemporary art, and the other was supposed to contain ancient, Islamic, and Asian art. The building was effectively hidden by a screen of trees, so that driving West along Memorial Drive, you’d see the bike and walkways along the Charles to your left, while on your right, the new art museum would discreetly hide behind a wall of greenery. Very bucolic indeed.

The neighbours flipped. They were “concerned about traffic” and suggested that the University simply turn the land into a public park.

In a sense, the neighbours were nursing a 35-year old grudge (about Peabody Terraces) on the one hand, and on the other they were spinning with anxiety over Harvard’s new developments on the other side of the river in the neighbourhood of Allston. So in a sense, it was a classic case of misdirecting concerns away from what actually was on the table (the Piano proposal), using it to leverage other concerns instead.

We don’t have anything even approaching the kind of scale that Harvard builds with, but I can’t help seeing some similarities in dynamics.

Wickersham writes:

Eventually, a compromise was announced. Harvard decided not to build a museum, and new zoning was put in place that would allow housing between three and six stories tall on the site. As a concession to the neighborhood, Harvard agreed to build approximately 40 units of affordable community housing nearby, and to donate $50,000 to neighborhood groups.

The neighbors had done what they’d been powerless to achieve 40 years before with Peabody Terrace: they had stopped Harvard from building what Harvard wanted to build. (…)

“Exhilarating,” one Riverside activist told the Globe in 2003, after the compromise was announced. But had the neighborhood really benefited? Instead of a two-story museum in a park-like setting, they ended up with taller student dorms and a small public park adjacent to heavily traveled Memorial Drive. (source)

Wickersham astutely continues (page 3) to discuss perceptions of “the public good.” Neighbourhood and university disagreed about what was “a public good.” Kathleen Leahy Born, an architect who was a Cambridge councillor when the Renzo Piano/ Harvard Art Museums proposal came forward, gives an example I can recall:

“When I became a city councilor, there was controversy about a supermarket chain wanting to build along the river. I thought the idea was appalling, but you couldn’t argue for the beauty of the river without sounding elitist. The Riverside group saw this supermarket as food for poor people. So for them, defeating a museum and getting some units of affordable housing is a victory of their definition of civic good.” (source)

If she’s referencing the supermarket I’m thinking of, I can only concur: it’s a stupid use of space. At the same time I could automatically recapitulate the populist arguments for putting the market there.

As Wickersham continues, with observations that sound only too familiar:

In the opinion of Pebble Gifford, a longtime Cambridge activist, “Those people don’t care about Renzo Piano, they don’t give a damn who designs a museum down there. It’s not about architectural taste. It’s about ‘You already destroyed half our neighborhood, and now you want to destroy the other half?’” For his part, Northeastern’s George Thrush—himself a Cambridge resident—points out that Harvard’s neighbors often fail to acknowledge the benefits of living near a large and thriving university: “Never have people whose property values have risen so much complained so loudly.” (source)

But now let’s move into the other really juicy issues around contextuality and branding the city. These start to unfold more fully with the failed project for Mount Auburn Street, a center designed by Hans Hollein.

(A note: the intersection of Brattle and Mt. Auburn Streets represents the communal commercial heart of Harvard Square, which in turn is in the heart of Cambridge, which in turn is Boston’s literal & metaphorical left flank. You can’t get closer to contested territory than this. If Harvard Square is the university’s territory — a kind of “university-only, hands-off” symbol — then Brattle & Mt. Auburn is the people’s linear agora. Mt. Auburn continues from Harvard Square, past Brattle and on to the Charles. It’s a key street.)

So: what happened on Mount Auburn? Wickersham explains:

The story began in 1999, when Harvard Planning and Real Estate announced it was going to tear down a couple of old buildings on Mount Auburn Street between J. Press and the Fox Club. The retail tenants—the Harvard Provision Co., Skewers restaurant, and University Typewriter—left cordially, but they were the kind of quirky small retailers whose passing dismays Cambridge residents (and Harvard alumni) who’ve lamented the gradual loss of the “old” Harvard Square to glossy chain stores and banks.

Because one of the buildings on the site, an undistinguished clapboard triple-decker, dated from 1895, the University could not demolish it without permission from the Cambridge Historical Commission. Furthermore, the site was within a conservation district, so any new design would have to navigate a narrow Scylla-and-Charybdis set of requirements encouraging “creative modern architecture” that must also “complement and contribute to its immediate neighbors and the character of the District.”

Harvard hired Austrian architect Hans Hollein to design an office building for the University libraries. Nazneen Cooper, assistant dean for campus design and planning for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, was involved with architect selection. “The University wanted something visionary,” she says. “This was a building with no pressing criteria. The scope was small and the risk was small, so we thought, ‘Great! Let’s get someone we otherwise wouldn’t get.’” (source)

As Nazneen Cooper elaborates, of the three internationally known architects Harvard considered (Rafael Vinoly, Toyo Ito, and Hollein), Hollein was the most conservative.”

One would think this would fly, right? What could the neighbours object to here?

Well, what did happen sounds like something straight out of one of Victoria’s Advisory Design Panel meetings or some community Land Use Committee meeting, only taken to the Nth factor:

For the Mount Auburn Street site, Hollein designed a five-story building whose façade was a sloping, undulating metal mesh screen overhanging recessed ground-floor shop fronts. He presented his design at a hearing before the historical commission in April 2001.

Lee Cott, whose firm Bruner/Cott was affiliated with Hollein on the project, remembers the evening as “awful.” Cooper calls it “embarrassing.” The commissioners grilled Hollein on basic issues of aesthetics and functionality. Why did the building curve? What was the “goal or intent” of the sloping façade? Had he thought about the snow that would collect in the screen? Did he understand what Cambridge winters were like? Hollein, visibly tired and jet-lagged, replied that he had considered all these issues, that he’d made many models and used his judgment in the design process, that he had designed buildings in the mountains of Europe where there was far more snow.

When the meeting was opened to public comment, a Cambridge resident stood up and gave a lengthy lecture and slideshow about contextual architecture. “Hans Hollein is one of the world’s leading experts on contextual architecture,” Cooper says. “He doesn’t need someone to explain to him what ‘contextual’ means.”

In a memo to the commissioners several days earlier, the commission’s executive director, Charles Sullivan, had called the building “inappropriately scaled” and “incongruous because of its aggressive indifference to its surroundings.” At the hearing, after a brief discussion, the commission voted 7-0 to reject Hollein’s design because it did not “complement and contribute to” its urban context in Harvard Square. (source)

In Victoria, too, design advisory panels or community activists have scuttled what were relatively innovative or daring designs, forcing the architect either to tone down outstanding elements or questioning their legitimacy outright. Most recently, I witnessed this myself at a meeting having to do with the artist Xane St. Philips’s “living wall” design for a new office tower.

As for the demand (which some Victorians also often voice) that “contextuality” should mean simply replicating existing building materials, Nazneen Cooper has an apt retort. Recalling that Harvard Square’s historical buildings are all done in red brick, she asks, “Is context in Harvard Square a big parking garage which has no architectural merit but is red brick? Is that context?”

Here in Victoria, certain community advocates would recommend cladding everything in faux “Tudor” half-timbering, just because that’s the way they built ‘em back in 1920. Failing that, we can always slap on some fake “river rock” for that “genuine authentic” feel…

Yikes.

But if — horrors! — a new building is glass and steel, it’s alleged to be a “Vancouver building,” and this brings out all the local anxieties. It also brings us to …branding.

I guess Vancouver has, in these parts, cornered the “steel & glass brand,” so to speak, and when people here say they don’t “want to be just like Vancouver,” what they’re really saying is “Vancouver has that brand game all sown up — how can we compete??”

Only they think that’s not what they’re saying, because they can’t admit to themselves that this is what it’s really all about: how can Victoria (sort of like Boston vis-a-vis the much more significant NYC) assert its brand, when — let’s face it — it hasn’t had an update or makeover in almost a century?

In fact, I’d almost argue that we’re in the throes of an update right now, which is why the issue is so pressing.

Boston/ Cambridge/ even Harvard: they struggle mightily with this question, too (even if it’s less of an issue for them at the end of the day because they have more than the tourism industry egg in their more commodious basket). As Wickersham puts it:

There is also the question of a building’s symbolic and visual importance within the larger urban scene. Kathy Born says, “In a place like Harvard Square, you need buildings that fit in, but you also need punctuation. Some of Harvard’s greatest buildings are the oddballs: Memorial Hall, the Lampoon.” How does one decide whether a certain site needs an attention-getting “object” building, or a well-mannered backdrop? (source)

Here in Victoria, we can’t seem to want to decide, and yet at the same time, if someone decides for us, there’s hell to pay.

Writes Wickersham:

Ultimately, arguments about context boil down to taste. For everyone who says, “Yes, it’s contextual,” there’s someone else who says, “No, it isn’t.” In the case of the Hollein building, the power to decide rested solely in the hands of the Cambridge Historical Commission, which originated in 1963 partly in response to Harvard’s modern building projects (notably the Holyoke Center, whose “harsh exterior contrasted sharply with the comfortable brick vernacular of Harvard Square,” according to the commission’s website). Again, a public regulatory process trumped Harvard’s ability to build on its own land—and again, the public process had grown up partly in reaction to what and how Harvard built in the 1960s, the University’s single most explosive period of growth. (source)

And a designer adds, “There’s now so much community review that it’s hard to build a building that hasn’t been pushed and massaged and changed.”

Design by committee

Now, down to cases: can “brand” be a committee project?

This is an interesting question since the person on Harvard’s team who argues for a “Harvard brand” is arguably (my argue) building stuff I’d rather not see getting built — neo-Georgian replicas. For the record, I adore Georgian architecture, I really do: a huge part of New England architecture’s ability to compel and enthrall derives from a vernacular interpretation, from the late 18th century and well into the 19th, of Georgian style. But I’m not impressed by neo-Georgian when it’s really neo, i.e., designed and built in the 1990s or later.

It seems to me that part of the problem in Victoria stems from an inability to think honestly (flexibly) about brand and think about how far or deep brand’s reach should be allowed to go; and, following from this, to tackle the question of whether or not committee work can in any way fix a problem that hasn’t even been articulated (namely, see the first point: how far or deep should branding go).

(When I write “hasn’t been articulated,” I mean intelligently articulated. I’m not interested in the hand-wringing by silly people who worry that the tourists will stop coming if they don’t find what essentially boils down to a Potemkin Village upon arriving in Victoria. Those “arguments” are beyond idiotic — real brand thinking has nothing to do with fake whimsy. Tourists want to go someplace vibrant — a Potemkin Village is not vibrant. Sure, every tourist may be his or her own czar and all that, but eventually the lustre tarnishes if there’s nothing but a rotting corpse underneath.)

Wickersham’s last section, “The politics of branding: Who gets to define a ‘Harvard building’?,” focuses on The Spangler Center, which is part of Harvard Business School. It looks for all intents and purposes like something built during Longfellow’s tenure in Cambridge: all neo-Georgian brick and white columns, and of course — looking like that — it fits right in (back to the “contextuality” issue). It was designed by Robert A.M. Stern, one of whose fat tomes (the last volume) on New York City I own and admire. But my dear Mr. Stern, you are the scourge of modern architects with your perfected anachronisms, regardless of their efficacy in terms of establishing brand identity.

Writes Wickersham, with a directive from Stern that sounds like an amalgamation of our local heritage, community, and tourism industry advocates:

In his speech at the Spangler’s dedication in January 2001, Stern argued that a university needs to have its own brand, just as a corporation or product does; and that in an era when competition for students and resources is fierce, Harvard’s venerable red-brick-Georgian look is an important marketing asset which the University ought to be perpetuating. In other words, the brand already exists and it ain’t broke, so don’t try to fix it. (Interestingly, Stern’s speech fudged the issue of whether he was advocating for the future of brick neo-Georgian branding at Harvard as a whole, or just at the business school. Stern is currently working on the new building at the northwest corner of the Law School—a modern Beaux-Arts-influenced design whose façade calls for pale limestone.) (source)

Joan Wickersham wisely lets Larry Summers (past president of Harvard) follow with an observation of his own, which points to the foolishness of one-track-pony branding:

“With the exception of the business school, Harvard architecture has tended very much towards eclecticism, with many different styles juxtaposed in close proximity. Reasonable people differ, but I think Harvard has in general erred more on the side of variety than on the side of coherence in its architectural choices.” (source)

That, dear Victoria, is exactly right and it’s why we should have an honest conversation about branding, tourism, economic nuts-and-bolts, architecture (by committee and otherwise), and the need to move ahead (vs treading water or moving backwards).

“We don’t want to be another Vancouver” is a lame cop-out. Tell me instead what you think Victoria’s brand is — and then tell me why and how Victoria can move past the alleged historical brand of faux Tudor half-timbering (or “Tudorbethan,” as we also sometimes call it). Let’s instead talk honestly about how eclectic Victoria is.

And while we’re at it, can we tell those community advocates who are nursing decades-old grudges over towers built in their neighbourhoods ages ago — towers no one today would consider replicating — to stop confusing issues from then with issues of now?

Finally, just like Boston will never ever be New York, there’s no reason to fret in such a silly manner that we’ll ever be Vancouver. Just as Boston is dyed in the wool Boston, so Victoria is Victoria. It’s a question, as Larry Summers might agree, of leveraging our eclecticism. Our “brand” is variety — and it even includes modernism and modernity, right up to the vibrant present.