New Urban Renewal and Frank Gehry

Frank Gehry has long enjoyed, in my mind at least, heroic stature — a revolutionary, subversive architect. Growing up in Denver, a city dense with Mies-inspired glass towers, I came to see Modernist architecture as brutally utilitarian, practicality stripped of all art. So I latched onto Gehry's piscine structures, which might have swum straight out of his unconscious from the looks of them, as exemplars of architecture as art. And, as an ardent lover of public art, I have always felt that Gehry's influence can only be a good thing.

Now we seem to be entering a new age of urban renewal, and Gehry is poised to figure prominently in it. He has teamed up with Bruce Ratner to develop a complex of homes, offices, and an arena in Brooklyn, and he has teamed up with Related Companies to build a similar complex on Grand Avenue in Los Angeles (though the plans have yet to be reviewed by Los Angeles City Council).

The prospect makes me rethink my feelings about Gehry — and about urban renewal.

Wherever you grew up, whether in Denver or Detroit, you're likely to associate urban renewal with Robert Moses, the genius behind the vast development plans for New York City of the mid-twentieth century. A builder of plain stadiums and giant freeways, he seems to have little in common with Frank Gehry.

But in terms of community planning, Moses and Gehry don't seem so different. Just as Robert Moses's projects repudiate the city's architectural legacy, either reshaping neighborhoods entirely or striking off in a new and unrelated architectural styles, Gehry's buildings, despite his comments about "context," generally repudiate the prevailing architecture of their environs. They are monuments to themselves — art, in other words.

Perhaps there's nothing wrong with this. The reaction many of us feel against this is, as Jonathan Liu argues in an essay in n+1, largely a regressive impulse.

But, as Jonathan Lethem pointed out in a response to the essay, "a thousand different futures could be projected for that zone [the Atlantic Yards]." Being progressive doesn't have to mean this.

To get a sense of the possibilities, I took stock of some of the urban renewal projects here in Philadelphia.

If the stated objective of any urban renewal project is to bring tax-paying suburbanites back into the city, urban renewal has failed in Philadelphia. However, if the secondary objectives of urban renewal are to preserve and enhance a city's unique character, Philadelphia's urban renewal projects have succeeded in this, and can be counted more successful than New York City's.

To the efforts of Vincent Kling, one of the major architects in Philadelphia's urban renewal, we owe City Hall Plaza, a leafy, bench-lined plaza leading to the underground rail-system. More to the point, Kling was also responsible for the Bell Atlantic Tower. This building stands apart in a few ways. It is a beautiful building, probably more beautiful than anything Moses had a hand in. But it is also artistically relatively modest. Unlike a Gehry building, it doesn't seek to be unlike anything before it or to project the artist's unique vision. Instead, it seeks to project something of the company — Bell Atlantic — while coming to terms with its surroundings. Further, it rather humbly sits within the confinement of the street plans, without demanding any special accomodations.

I suspect that much of Gehry's future success with urban development will depend as much on his client companies as on him. An article in today's New York Times gives a promising description of Gehry's vision for downtown Los Angeles, and details his client's opposition to some of its critical components.

Reality by Any Other Name

Last week, sitting across from me in a room filled with cigar smoke, the executive producer of an online company here in Philly mentioned the possibility of business ventures in "Second Life," which is, he explained, a multi-user virtual world. There merchandise can be bought and sold in "Linden dollars" (which can in turn be sold for U.S. dollars), capital can be created, real estate can be bought. I had to confess my near total inexperience with virtual worlds and multi-user games.

So, after I saw Second Life mentioned in an article on social networking in yesterday's New York Times, I decided to give it a try.

I downloaded the software required, created an account, and signed up for a payment plan, which allowed me to get an initial sum of 250 Linden dollars free. Then, ignoring all directions and signposts, I headed in.

One of the first things you notice about Second Life is that there are quite a few other people around. In a true fantasy world, I might have been tempted to run after the shapely woman (as shapely as the somewhat clunky rendering would allow, anyway) who walked past me moments after I'd logged in. Or perhaps to start a fight with someone. But it's not easy to forget that, behind the woman — or "avatar" — there's a real human being somewhere, a real human whose face is dimly lit by a computer monitor. Moreover, that real human being might want to chat — about the banalities of his day at work or his recent slide into depression or his loss of a job. If it's fantasy you want in Second Life, it would seem you need to steer clear of the people.

Accordingly, I left the marked path, hit f (for "fly"), and took off over an expanse of water (an ocean?). I flew around the coast and dipped under the water to look at the sea floor. The rocky terrain below soon flattened into a simple blue plane, the scaffolding behind the movie set.

Today, of course, I've been thinking about business ventures. Real estate sounds too boring. Maybe I could start a theater company? But then I remember those clunky, expressionless avatars, and I realize that — however clever a virtual theater might be — eventually you have to accept the hard facts of virtual reality.

Movie Theatres, Newspapers, and Pay Phones

In an essay in the most recent issue of the New Yorker, David Denby discusses the possible demise of the movie theatre, and with it the movie as a public experience. No more will one enter a private world of fantasy in the company of fifty strangers in this possible future. Instead, one will watch movies on DVD players, iPods, and laptops, alone or with friends. There is a real difference. Of the movie-theatre experience, Denby writes:

We have just entered from the impersonal streets, and suddenly we are alone but not alone, the sighing and shifting all around us hitting us like the pressures of the weather in an open field. The movie theatre is a public space that encourages private pleasures: as we watch, everything we are—our senses, our past, our unconscious—reaches out onto the screen.

The movie theatre, along with the pay phone and the newspaper, seems to be a threatened garrison of the community. It has been, like the pay phone, a resource for the public. And, as the cell phone has virtually wiped out pay phones and the Internet threatens to wipe out newspapers, portable DVD players and the like threaten to wipe out the movie theatre.

These changes are probably not so much a threat to the community as a change in its shape, however. As Mark Taylor argues in The Moment of Complexity, we are moving from a culture of Taylorist assembly lines to a culture of networks. Where the industrialism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries necessitated well-defined, linear spaces, the information age depends on complex systems largely independent of space.

Whereas walls divide and seclude in an effort to impose order and control, webs link and relate, entangling everyone in multiple, mutating, and mutually defining connections in which nobody is really in control. As connections proliferate, change accelerates, bringing everything to the edge of chaos. This is the moment of complexity.

We conduct our business in teleconferences and online, we form social networks online, we watch the first part of a movie on our laptops in one city and watch the rest in another city. In place of physical spaces, we begin to inhabit virtual spaces, sometimes developing extraordinary feelings about these virtual spaces. Grady Hendrix writes, in an essay for n+1, about entire social lives formed within Azeroth, a fantasy world in a "Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game."

When Qiu Chengwei, a Chinese gamer playing “Legend of Mir 3,” a fantasy MMORPG, asked his friend to hold onto a virtual sword for him, the friend turned around and sold it. Qiu went to the police but they could do nothing – legally, the sword didn’t exist . . . . Enraged over losing what he viewed as a valuable possession, he stabbed his friend to death.

The advantages of a network culture are clear. In a network culture, we are relatively free of the constraints of place, we have vast amounts of information available to us, and the opportunities for artistic expression and innovation seem boundless. While we may miss the experience of seeing Citizen Kane on the big screen, we are able to watch it with scholarly commentary on DVD, and to see Welles's lesser-known works—works that would never make it to the theatre.

There is still the problem that we are physical beings who will always be dependent on our physical environment and local institutions, however. We live in cities, hamlets, and suburbs, and our quality of life is dependent on the state of these places. In a network culture, people move around like nomads, and no one feels any natural responsibility for their environs. What do I care about the degradation of our Watershed? I'm likely to move to New York, where the water comes clean and pure from the Catskills, before it gets bad. What do I care whether public education declines or improves in Philadelphia? If I ever have children, I'll likely raise them Massachusetts or New York.

Paper Layoffs, but in D.C., Circulation up by One

Layoffs began at the Philadelphia Inquirer today. Daniel Rubin described the scene. The layoffs have been expected for a while, but I was not aware that, at the same time, the paper has been increasing circulation. Katharine Seelye wrote in an article in today's New York Times:

Circulation at the Inquirer is already nudging up because of new marketing campaigns and a focus on the suburbs, he [Jay Devine, a spokesman for the Inquirer's publisher] said, calling it "the first step in getting advertisers interested."

At first glance, the fact that the focus of the attenuated paper will be removed from the city and dispersed to the suburbs seems to deliver a second blow to community. Not only is the new ownership hobbling a vital organ of the community, but it is also smashing the community's relationship to the paper, and sending its reporters off to the boonies. However, a paper that insisted on a Philadelphia community in the city would be ignoring the actual lay of the land. One can hope that as the demographics shift again, and people move back to the city, the notion of a vibrant community in the city will begin to seem natural.

Despite all the grim news about our nation's newspapers, there is some reason for hope, at least, if this Christmas-day article from the New York Times is to be believed. Apparently, President Bush has begun reading the paper.