Jackie wrote a great project description for our competition entry for a fence around the world trade center construction site: What makes New York’s skyline so powerful is not the skyscrapers themselves, but the void between and around them, the vibrant hues of sky that hug their every angle. Skyscape focuses on that negative space in a site-specific work that combines photographs of the space above the construction site taken from surrounding boroughs over the course of a single day. The idea is that, not only will our skyline change dramatically with the addition of the Freedom Tower, but the shape of the sky itself, the space it encompasses, and therefore, the relationship between the buildings, the sky, and us will change. We still recognize the buildings’ forms, but they become the void—the sky is now the subject.

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photographs via Faces4Reform by Robert and Robbie Bailey of baileyphoto.com

From earlier this fall, this was our “it’s bullshit that we don’t have health insurance in a country where we spend 7,290 dollars per person per year on health care, more than two to three times as much as every other industrialized nation on the planet, and yet our country’s quality of care barely edges out Slovenia.” It’s a lot to convey in one look, but I think we nailed it. See more of the other uninsured at faces4reform.com.

A furry font designed with max’s hair and fur modifier.

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Images copyright Robert Lemermeyer Photography

I’ve been diligently following the exterior construction progress of the AGA museum in Edmonton via the museum’s dedicated online webcam, and it looks absolutely wonderful, but unfortunately the spectacular interior spaces had been hidden from view until now. In my imagination and the computer and physical models I spent the better part of three years designing in while at RSA, I saw the public entry lobby as an expansive and light filled space that was confirmed by these first images taken from the museum’s facebook page. They were a joy to see and a welcome reminder that the days consumed by getting that projecting finger in the top left to look just right as it slid past the grand stair were all worthwhile.

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This website and my architecture portfolio were recently published as case studies in the newly released Designing a Digital Portfolio, Second Edition by Cynthia L. Baron.
There’s something great about being able to hold a physical object, and feel that tangible quality of a book which is so fundamentally different from a webpage. But as information jumps mediums it also often loses its dynamic qualities in becoming a static image with no frame of reference. But I think that’s what I like most about this book, the way it handles the appropriateness of online content in a printed medium. It’s less of a simple showcase of graphic design, like those ubiquitous, curatorial lists of 1-pixel deep images that dominate the internet (see Smashing Magazine lists, FFFFound, and everything else in my google reader). A book’s permanence is so contrary to the ephemeral nature of online content that a bound book of pretty images is just unnecessary, but here, in Baron’s book, the work is presented more from an analytical position that goes deeper and studies the underlying strategies and navigational framework of this website and the tangled web of connections as well as a broader overview of techniques for presenting an online portfolio. That, and, I’m all for anything that begins with the line: “Locke’s creativity is not debatable.”

See more images below:

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Rain, Jesus, pizza, subways and the Bronx Zoo; or, the last three days as seen through iphone’s shakeit app. Which admittedly turns the iphone’s terrible camera into something that occasionally produces great images by emulating the high contrast, over saturated look of the ill-fated polaroid.

The “Curve CP” node in Grasshopper allows a curve to act in a similar manner to a point attractor, but checks the distance for the closest points along the entire length of the curve as opposed to one single, solitary point. Here, the curves are generated from a text object. It basically becomes multiple attractor curves, something that could be used for super graphics or possible a glazing frit pattern. Things get a little hairy in the grasshopper definition (see below) when you start getting a lot of letters, so that needs to get resolved for this to work with an entire sentence, or anything longer than four letters. A script font that creates one continuous line would work perfect, but is something of a cop-out, so in the meantime I may have to consult the pros on the grasshopper forum.

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You can see that Donald Judd literally has his name all over the town of Marfa.

A simple test based on Sanghoon Yoon’s Grasshopper definition for using the new image sampler node, I swapped out a text image for an image image, because, well I just like fonts and 3D I guess. One of the things that’s cool is that the image is “live,” so as you change the text, the grasshopper definition updates. And of course you can also parametrically control the size of the pixels, the multiplication of the heightfield and the overall size of the surface. To get a random color on each polysurface, I modified Dale Fugier’s script located on the rhinoscript wiki page to include a function to assign the object color to the material color so it will render out in vray. See grasshopper definition and code below:

[[Edit: Added Link to download grasshopper definition and source image file. more »

White Sands National Park is located within the White Sands Missile Range. Meaning that during test launches the park is closed down to prevent any errant missiles from taking out a family sledding down the dunes. Luckily for Jackie and myself, the park was open all day and we had free range to explore the gypsum sand dunes. At the day’s finale we were rewarded with the clearest, most saturated sunset I had ever seen. Calling it a computer-enhanced, ray-traced image would be an understatement.

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I meant to post without comment, but I’ll say two things, briefly:

1) New Mexico, Land of Enchantment, is where the nuclear era really began. Specifically here at the White Sands Missile Range (WSMR), the country’s largest military installation. In the words of architect Nick Sowers, WSMR is the “massive tract of google-map-grey-space measuring one hundred miles north to south and forty miles wide. This is the ultimate war games playground.” And while the trinity shot heralded the birth of the nuclear world, New Mexico has also become the nuclear grave. With the Obama administration’s closure of Yucca Mountain in Nevada for storing hot nuclear waste, sites in New Mexico are being prepped for long-term storage (seriously long term, the U.S. Federal Court set the threshold that DOE needs to prove a site storing nuclear site will remain safe at one million years) of nuclear waste. As Scientific American points out in last months article “Is There a Place for Nuclear Waste?“, the politics of geography has changed. With a Texan in the White House, nuclear dumps in the Lone Star State were out of the question, and now that Obama narrowly carried Nevada on the promise to close Yucca, New Mexico is looking pretty tempting. Much like Turrell endlessly hollowing out the Roden Crater to transform the earth into a cosmological art experience, the Department of Energy is concurrently busily hollowing out mines around the Chihuahuan Desert near Carlsbad to bury spent nuclear waste more than 2,000 feet below the hard pan desert surface.

2) Again, as at the Titan II Missile Museum or the National Atomic Museum, what was once classified top-secret becomes a proudly public presentation, that is not so much a museum, but rather stands as a monument to American scientists and engineers ingenuity and abilities to construct the best missiles, sending the greatest payloads over the longest ranges. Walking between the towering missiles here, the best word I can think to describe the sensation is “creepy.” The security checkpoint to get onto the base only serves to heighten the otherworldly feel of the place, which doesn’t seem to deter a steady stream of families from arriving at the “park” and laughing and taking pictures in front of some of the more dramatic missiles. The Lance missile mounted onto a half-track was a popular destination. The landscape is charged here not only the cordite of 45,000 explosions, but with something intangible, that is no less real. Something that artist Patrick Nagatani has picked up on and used to great effect in a series of photomontages titled “Nuclear Enchantment.“

Nagatani’s wry sense of humor keeps his exquisite photomontages from coming across as too heavy-handed or shrilly political. His works, including Nike-Hercules Missile Monument, shows crowds of Japanese tourists holding miniature, souvenir-sized replicas of the Nike missile looming in the background in a scene that would be heartbreaking if it weren’t also hilarious. His painted blood-red or radiated yellow skies also best convey the eeriness and utter insanity that lurks in the background of all these real-life sites. Each piece is like an ironic ode to the facade of normality that we all go through, living our lives in shadow of not only these missiles but a world that accepts the existence of nuclear weapons.

The missile park is a museum in the sense that the military is showing their past work, but hinting at the greatness still to come. If you see a video of an invisible, airborne Advanced Tactical Laser burning through the hood of a car and disabling the engine block, this is where it was filmed. Few can dispute that tactical laser weapons are pretty cool, but I only mourn that new killing instruments appear outside the perception of the human eye, leaving future generations to walk through the WSMR and miss the tangible quality of standing in the shadow of an Athena missile, touching the metal and steel rivets, admiring the proportions of the radially arrayed fins. Then again, maybe future progeny will be just as happy without the instruments of war proudly glistening in the desert sun.

We were back in El Paso – again – for a few days, getting an oil change at the desert end. The warning sign states that “as part of the city’s water conservation efforts, this site is irrigated with reclaimed water. Do not drink water from irrigation system.”

“We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.” Marshall McLuhan

Twenty miles south of Tucson, buried beneath the desert hardpan, lies the most impressive of museums. The Titan II Missile Museum, the only ICBM missile silo open to the public, where groups of guided tours led by former U.S. Air Force crew members descend down into the underground structures and explore the facility comprising of the launch control center, the missile silo and the blast lock portal where you’re greeted with the 3-ton, 12-inch-thick blast doors. Inside is the Titan II Missile, 110-feet of riveted steel and technological precision. The absolute limit of technology, a nuclear-tipped missile created with the means to end not just war, but all existence, the world itself, at the push of a button. The most impressive thing about it is that the missile remains peacefully chambered in the silo, the launch orders were never received, and the missile never needed to fly. Peace through deterrence.

The oft-spoken mantra – “peace through deterrence” – occurs with such frequency throughout the retro-introductory video and the subsequent guided-tour, that one gets the distinct impression that the intonation references not just the geopolitical stalemate condition that was mistakenly labeled as “peace,” but also some kind of internal meditative state – an inner-peace – in the crew. No doubt a certain imperturbable composure is required for the type of person that volunteers for a job that requires a no-questions-asked-yessir approach to the command to destroy not just a far-off city but most likely civilization itself. After all, regardless of the technological brilliance in advanced airspace detection warnings and missile guidance technology, it all comes down to two guys, standing across from each other in an underground room agreeing to simultaneously turn their “fail-safe” keys, press a button, and launch an H-bomb-tipped ICBM. I asked our tour guide, who, by all accounts, seemed like an utterly reasonable, friendly human-being with a wry sense of humor, if he had undergone any especially rigorous psychological exams or maybe if he even had to undergo any false-positive drills by the military to test his mettle and ensure an unflinchingly appropriate response if the launch codes ever arrived. He responded that they were soldiers, drilled to take orders, but no extenuating psychological tests were necessary, because the overall “peace through deterrence”-ness of the mission guaranteed a clear conscious.

Granted, I didn’t grow up with the duck and cover films, the under the desk school drills, or the stockpiling of supplies in my backyard bomb shelter, so I feel so far removed from the general insanity of mutual assured destruction that the chasm of time renders the whole situation even more unreal and makes me feel even more skeptical than some of the older patrons on our Titan Missile Tour. And as futile as it probably is to try to find logic in strategic defense planning when nuclear weapons come into play, the whole “peace through deterrence” thing he’s clinging to screams of inconsistencies if you really think about it. Simply put, if the Soviets (or Chinese) launched a first strike, our deterrent capabilities were unsuccessful, so any second strike is simply retaliatory, launched in spite. The whole strategic defense mechanism was built around game theory – that a rational opponent wouldn’t call an ever-escalating series of bluffs. It gets interesting because deterrence doesn’t really require that anything actually functionally work – the missiles could just be a feint – but it’s the perception, the illusion that becomes reality, the truly frightening notion that the other side believes we’re crazy enough that we’ve got it in our collective disposition to throw down with World War III if the shit came down to it. That’s what makes “peace through deterrence” so reassuring. Not because of its paradoxical ridiculousness as a viable Cold War nuclear strategy (well, I guess it worked), but that it acknowledges that there is an inherent consciousness in our nation’s psyche. We needed it and this guy who worked the three-day shifts down in the silo needed it because, otherwise, you have to confront the reality that the whole thing is a deranged facade. Instead of looking into the terrifying abyss of nuclear weapons and seeing the end of the world, we managed to avert that by convincing ourselves that it was all for “peace,” a technological deterrent that let us off the hook, free to believe that a preemptive strike was antithetical to our very beings. Self-deception is generally assumed to be a bad quality. Here at the frontline of the Cold War it doesn’t seem like such a bad thing at all. In fact, I wonder if here it leads to a deeper understanding or revelation. That we’re the only nation to use atomic weapons against a civilian population makes it all the more heart-breakingly ambiguous.

Or, as the nuclear engineer states at the beginning of the Titan introductory film, “This is what it took to wage a nuclear war. And this is what it took to wage nuclear peace.”

It turns out that when Dr. Strangelove said that the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost if you keep it a secret, he could also have also been referring to obsolete, decommissioned doomsday machines. In accord with the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, the Titan’s blast doors have to always remain open, visible to Russian satellites. And in a testament to the resolution of orbiting Russian satellite imagery, the small yellow cutout in the missile head is large enough to reveal that the enclosure is devoid of any nuclear warhead. Of course, when the Titan II was equipped with a 9-megaton (the exact explosive tonnage is still classified) warhead from 1963 to 1984, it wasn’t really much of a secret then either. It was one of 18 other missile silos based around Davis Monthan Air Force Base that were visible to satellites. The more impressive-looking they were, the greater their deterrent value, and the more tempting a target they became. This also had the effect of turning the adjacent, sleepy town of Tucson into a strategic nuclear target, and the people that lived there knew it. The majority of visitors to the Titan Museum are locals. Having lived a good portion of their lives in the shadow of an ICBM, they now take advantage of being able to walk around the formerly classified, off-limits site and take as many photos as they can of Missile Site 571-7. This site has been reappropriated as an educational museum, where visitors can see and touch the surface and underground features of the complex. The rest of the decommissioned silos are another story, many of which are now hot real-estate investment opportunities.

There were a total of 54 Titan II missile silos, and, in addition to those around Tucson, there were others near Little Rock Air Force Base in Arkansas and McConnell Air Force Base in Kansas. The last of the Titan II missiles were decommissioned in 1987, the aging technological relics were updated with the more advanced Minuteman and MX Peacekeeper ICBMs. The new missiles required new silos, and the end of the Cold War was no impetus to the creation of even more complex underground ICBM silos that are now scattered across the Great Plains. But that left the outdated Titan II silos to slowly rot away while the military had to incur outrageous maintenance costs for obsolete installations. The thing about ICBM silos is that they were designed to survive a direct nuclear attack. So the walls are thick, like six-feet-of-solid-concrete thick. And all the floors are on a dampening suspension system, detached from the walls, so that in the event of any seismic activity, everything can flex and adjust itself independently. They’re an ageless, elemental example of security through entombment and they’re going to last forever. Built to survive an Armageddon that never came, the question now arises: what do we do with them?

They’ll outlive us by thousands of years as a monument to our own ingenuity, paranoia, and military superiority. These sinister void spaces in the desert landscape that comprise a vast network of underground ruins on par with the catacombs of Paris or the aqueducts of Rome – examples of other amazing feats of life-sustaining infrastructure. As told in Richard Rhodes thoroughly engrossing The Making of the Atomic Bomb, in 1939 when Danish Nobel-winning physicist Niels Bohr was asked whether he believed the United States could split the atom and create a nuclear explosion, he immediately expressed skepticism that the country had the will and determination to ever successfully undertake such a monumental task. He believed it could never be done “without turning the United States into one huge factory.” By 1944 Bohr was proven right. While touring the massive Site X at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and seeing the thousands upon thousands of workers toiling away in an instant city on projects that they didn’t have security clearance to understand, Bohr remarked to Edward Teller, “I told you it couldn’t be done without turning the whole country into a factory. You have done just that.” Even now, what was built then has not been surpassed. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill provided the layout for the town and the designs for the individual, prefabricated, modular homes, a town for 75,000 people that went up in less than two years. The K-25 Building, which was built to enrich uranium during the Manhattan Project, was the largest building under one roof in the world – still the largest in the United States – over a mile in length and sheltering 1.6 million square feet. It’s currently in the midst of demolition, in a time consuming process that is both more expensive and longer lasting than the cost and time it took to build it up. Which brings us back to decommissioned missile silos.

There’s probably a certain type of person that would want to live inside a former nuclear missile complex, and those types of people had their chance when the military, in an attempt to squeeze some profit out of the dormant underground bunkers and the adjacent land, put the silos up at public auction. In an ironically twisted rehabilitation program, end-of-times survivalists can now make their homes and wait out Armageddon in the former weaponized tools that were designed to bring about said end in the first place. The archetypal genesis of their paranoid fears turned out to be the only acceptably safe refuge. Other silos ended up as “swanky bachelor pads,” (“secret nerd lair” doesn’t have the same ring to it), which inevitably leads to questions regarding the success rate of taking women home, when home is a desolate, windowless, underground former missile silo. Walking through the underground chambers of the Titan Museum, a space so charged where the layers of history were so strong a presence and the air had a stillness that was broken up by unexpected drafts while the lighting system induced a claustrophobic sense of broken-time disorientation, I’m skeptical that any number of lava lamps and fruit bowls could dispel that haunted house vibe. Luckily, the housing market crash hasn’t seemed to affect the silo market, the awesomely named 20th Century Castles, will still sell you a Titan I missile silo for $2.8 million, and their website proudly shows images of happy middle-aged, normal-looking couples posing in front of their cableway, decked out with family portraits, house plants, and garishly patterned rocking chairs in place of decontamination suits, launch control consoles, and blast locks.

But none of that can match the excitement of the climax to the Titan II Missile Museum tour, what we’ve all been waiting for: the mock launch. Chuck, our guide, asks for a volunteer. A young kid, born after 1989, jumps up and hops into the commander’s chair. A siren goes off as Chuck, standing to the side, reads and validates the launch code orders. Target 2 is selected. Chuck holds his key and the kid does the same. On his mark, turn. Now the kid, sitting at the launch console, his hand on the key, waits for Chuck to give him the signal to synchronously turn his key. Suddenly he seems to feel it. There’s a hesitation in his movements, no longer the eager volunteer, uncertain if this is really what he wants to do. Chuck gives the signal, the kid limply turns his key. The button is pushed. The lights in the kiva-like command center change to red. A piercing air-raid siren starts up. “Ready to launch” becomes “launch enabled.” The missile batteries engage, liquid oxygen floods the missile chamber and activates the launching mechanisms, “lift-off” goes green, and 58 seconds after order received the missile is in the air. Thirty-five minutes after that, target strike. We’ll meet again someday. No one breathes, a certain calmness washes over the group. Peace through deterrence, peace through deterrence….

After watching the first installment of Ken Burns’ excellent National Parks documentary, I felt enjoined to post images of my favorite Park, Canyonlands in Utah. I visited seven National Parks over the summer, and Burns is better able to articulate in a more clear, concise manner than I ever could the rage of conflicting emotions one feels when visiting National Parks during the height of summer tourist season. I could never shake the feeling that there was something profoundly wrong about paying $20 to get into the Grand Canyon and waiting an hour in a Los-Angeles-level traffic jam just to walk along a paved path at the edge of the South Rim amongst a crowd of pedestrians that feels more like 34th Street than the wide open, untamed West. Again, the same principle from The Lightning Field applies—by our very presence, we as tourists spoil the previously unspoiled place we came to see. Lightning Field attempts to subvert this by imposing a six-person daily quota, which would be antithetical to the National Parks democratic mandate. Somewhere in between these two extremes lies Canyonlands, which is why I liked it so much. There was none of the technicolor brilliance that makes other parks such postcard opportunities. Here it was more subtle, but no less sublime. And it brought back a healthy respect for the dangers of landscape, where simple things like water, food and sun become such important, precious commodities when you’re alone, no one for miles, at mile marker seven on a fourteen-mile hike.

The view driving north out of Phoenix along I-17 is less than promising. With the rise in elevation, you leave the saguaros behind for a harder, rockier soil in a landscape of low desert scrub brush that has none of the varied beauty you can find in the hybrid desert/forest area further north around Sedona and Red Rocks. The turn off to Corder Junction is another picture of desolation, a washboard dirt road that passes a gas station, a sagging, clapboard house flying the Confederate flag, an abandoned Airstream, and then, finally, a six-foot diameter, circular metal sign leaning against a cattle guard: “Welcome to Arcosanti: An Urban Laboratory.”

Conceived in 1970 by Italian émigré and brief Frank-Lloyd-Wright-trainee Paolo Soleri, Arcosanti was a future vision of a heroic, hyper-dense, monumental city that would shelter 5,000 people in a harmonious coexistence of architecture and ecology; also serving as a reactionary alternative to the ubiquity of the sprawling suburbs that were beginning to crop up at the time. (And it should also be said, an alternative to Wright’s own Broadacre City plans.) 50,000 people each year make the drive to Arcosanti to visit the future.

What you’ll find at the end of the dirt road is a seemingly random assortment of concrete structures sighted along the edge of a gentle canyon that, taken together, have an almost mirage-like quality as seen in the waning evening light. The structures themselves are amazing, with balconies overlooking the canyon edge, a fascinating painted apse, soaring vaults above semi-circular amphitheaters, and multiple levels of stacked living cubes throughout. Each building is well-designed according to passive solar principles, which, coupled with ample shaded public spaces, make it an incredible place to spend the day. Concrete pathways and stairwells weave through the disconnected structures, and, along with the simple landscape plantings, start to connect the fragmented structures in a hierarchical sequence.

Even in August, the early evening in the desert was surprisingly mild and the canyon channeled a cooling breeze. You can stay overnight at Arcosanti, and for $40 a night (breakfast included), it sure as hell beats any roadside motel. And even if there was no A/C and we had to place the slight oscillating fan inches from the bed to little effect, seeing the full moon and stars a touchable distance away from our screen door/window made it all worthwhile. It was one of the most pleasant places I’ve ever enjoyed a drink.

The overnight rooms are located near the base of the canyon and connect to the main structures via a series of ascending walkways and stairs. The walkways provide glimpses of life at Arcosanti, from the half-empty construction areas, to the foundry where the Soleri bells are cast. But the laid back pace of Arcosanti belies the notion that this could be a manic urban city scaled up with 5,000 people. The echoes of Mesa Verde are unmistakable, but the monumental concrete structures also call to mind heavy traces of Logan’s Run and Predock’s Cal Poly Pomona Campus, serving to further reinforce the notion that you’re in a vision of the future that is firmly rooted in the 1970s.

The tour guides will tell you that “50,000 people a year come here, look at it, say, ‘Wow, isn’t that interesting?’ and then drive away, because it requires a total abandonment of what everyone has taken to be a given.” But how successful is the vision produced by Arcosanti? You’ll find a lot of fulminating references against “sprawl” in the Arcosanti literature and the vision of their city as a laboratory to present a prototypical alternative. Sprawl is an easy target, so no arguments here. I had just spent two days wandering around the empty, sun-bleached streets of Scottsdale, certainly one of the sprawliest and shallowest of urban experiments. So Arcosanti was a palette-cleansing salve that provided an alternative strategy.

This begs the question – especially in lieu of situations like Tijuana – that when one billion people live in slum-like conditions that are parasitically conjoined with existing urban centers, does bringing people out to the desert in a formerly unoccupied area seem like a viable option to combat the global housing crisis? It comes off more as a defensive position, dropping out and going off the grid in a state of self-exile. And while Arcosanti seeks to engage the entire world, their vision comes off less as any type of solution to sprawl and more of a segregated defensive fortification. Reyner Banham called this desert fantasy “pure creative will exercised against a defenseless landscape.”

But this alternative is still hypothetical. Granted the site is in a perpetual state of growth but Arcosanti has been beset by funding problems, lack of government support, and labor shortages that have left it after nearly 40 years approximately 4 percent complete. A city designed to accommodate 6,000 people, has completed facilities to house about 70. And while Arcosanti positions itself as a social utopia, it is also an architecture of techno-utopia, a place where advances in science and technology allow a hypothetical citizenry to exist in an ideal state where scarcity and suffering becomes anachronisms. But their technological infrastructure is still fairly standard. Arcosanti receives energy from a power company and water is pumped in from a nearby well. And while there are a scattering of wind generators and solar panels, this seems far less impressive than proposals being developed for China and elsewhere almost daily, where carbon-neutral buildings and cities make use of integrated solar panels, waste, and gray water reclamation, and thirty-story wind turbines that can create near zero-waste environments.

That may partially explain why the construction at Arcosanti happens in fits and starts—they’re advancing toward a future vision that is already anachronistic. There’s been some debate within the community, but the cult of Paolo (it’s always “Paolo”—never Soleri) holds sway, and instead of evolving organically as you’d envision a city would grow, they’re still building toward his singular 1970 vision. The whole place becomes more of a living museum where there is still a tenuous connection to the ’70s flower children, the liberal arts drop-outs, the turned-on desert commune dwellers, and the middle class revolutionaries. It’s still here, and you can detect the faint traces of hardcore believers in the air, still fighting the good fight. In this scenario, the filmic analogy would swerve more toward Godard’s Alphaville, where the inhabitants work toward the whims of one central, all-knowing computer.

Furthermore, what has been built by semi-skilled labor seems like it is partially in a losing battle with the desert. Areas look abandoned and unsafe. And that becomes the difficult part, having to resolve in your mind the dueling realities, on one hand the incongruous sight of a pristine Plexiglas-encased model of a future city, and on the other, to look out the window where you’re readily confronted with the reality of wonky steps, cracked concrete, and a wheelbarrow lazily and inexplicably swinging from a construction crane.

But so what? In the end, it’s not perfect but it’s not a failed project. It has stayed true to its initial vision of a heightened environmental and ecological consciousness and has resisted, by all accounts, being easily subsumed by the cold logic of capitalism. The gulf between vision and reality still seems too vast to reconcile.

I was once in an architecture seminar course in which the last hour of every meeting was devoted to discussion, with questions thrown out from students and the professor fielding them as best he could. For at least the first half of the semester this was one of the most awkward hours of the week. The nervous tension in the room was seriously thick as we all made poorly concealed, conscious efforts to look everywhere but at each other or the professor who stood waiting expectantly—and a little eagerly—against his podium. Not only are architects a pretty introverted bunch but, you see, it was still early in the semester and we hadn’t really gelled together as a group, which meant everyone was still too self-conscious and didn’t want to risk coming off as ignorant or poorly-read or whatever in such a large group of people that you don’t know all that well. But anyway, we could all breathe a little easier because there was always one guy who didn’t give a damn what anyone thought and would never hesitate to blurt out every random stream of conscious type association he made during the lecture. I should stop here and mention that ostensibly this course was about architecture and the city (it was really a survey of radical ’60s architecture which is coming back in popularity in a big way), and this particular session was centered around swinging London with requisite lectures on Blow-Up, Archigram, and Robert and Allison Smithson, amongst others.

Anyway, this particular student was upset—offended even—that we were “wasting our time” learning about the work of these guys when they hadn’t built any actual buildings. Well, the built output was either nonexistent regarding Archigram, or lackluster at best in relation to the Smithsons, and even more so in the case of the Smithson’s Robin Hood Gardens where you could convincingly make the argument that the project was both bureaucratically oppressive and spirit-breaking in a structurally defective and criminal-element-incubating kind of way. However, their theories and writings were everything their buildings weren’t: they easily captured the imagination in an egalitarian vision of technology and design-liberating humanity from the gray dullness of modern life. Their failures as builders were only exacerbated by their success as multifaceted thinkers.

But what this particular student tried stubbornly to resist was that architects don’t build buildings, they design them. The term “architect” is both one of the most heavily regulated (thanks NCARB) and also the most capriciously thrown around. (see: Turd Blossom) So there’s a lot of room for interpretation in there. Even unbuilt,Walking cities, streets in the sky, and a utopian city of 5,000 people in the Arizona desert are all inspiring architectural proposals that continue to drive the discussion. Architects work in electronic space—spaces that can capture the imagination on a greater scale than the physical. That mad desert messiah Soleri’s vision was more powerful than Arcosanti, where the image of the city of the future still lingers in the imagination long after you’ve driven out of the desert. Soleri imagined single towers housing a million people, floating cities on the ocean, and merged infrastructure of dams and factories. When thinking small was considered a virtue, he thought big. Soleri constructed a theory that sustains itself long after Arcosanti returns to back to desert scrub. His dream was for a better world yet to come, still waiting to be built.

Roden Crater is scheduled for completion sometime in 2011. This may at first seem a manageable goal but the proposition takes on more dubious overtones when you consider James Turrell has been consistently working toward completing this most audacious work of art since 1978. Beset by financial and artistic setbacks, even 33 years seems ambitious given the mind-blowing monumentality of the task at hand. He’s hollowing out a 400,000-year-old, dormant volcano that’s over two miles across, hauling countless tons of rock and soil out while pouring concrete in, to produce a labyrinthine series of tunnels and viewing chambers that allow the oculus of the cone to become a canvas through which light, sky and astronomy play out in an artistic embrace.

The crater’s exact location had been purposely shrouded in mystery, but with the advent of modern surveillance technologies, it’s no longer possible to be lost or to remain hidden in the desert. This has led to a number of renegade art lovers who hold loose definitions of trespassing to sneak onto and into the site. The recent uptick in unauthorized visitors has to be partially attributed to the ease at which you can get exact coordinates from google satellite maps. I had seriously considered trying to infiltrate myself onto Turrell’s property, and as cool as it would be to either preview Roden Crater or be able to say that James Turrell tried to shoot me, I understand where he’s coming from. I’d be none too pleased if some intrepid aesthete sneaked into my apartment to surreptitiously sneak glances at my half-finished life’s work. So I had to make due with this (much, much) smaller scale Turrell sky chamber at the Scottsdale Museum of Art. Hopefully, I’ll make it back out to the Arizona desert in 2011.

By all accounts the F-22 Raptor was the apex of aviation engineering – the finest fighter plane ever built. Stealth technology, high maneuverability at mach 2.25, and extreme air-to-air lethality against any potential threat made the F-22 unmatched in the field of aerial combat. Unfortunately for Lockheed and their cancelled $1.75 billion U.S. government contract, the F-22 was also unnecessary, wasteful and rolled out of the factory hangar obsolete. It was designed to counter a threat that no longer exists, manifest as a relic of Cold War thinking and a throwback to single combat champions – the hero pilot – who took to the sky to valiantly battle in defense of the U.S. against the Soviet aggressor. And while all that no longer exists, foreign policy is now enforced via aerial drones and suitcases of cash, the dogfights of our collective imagination still reassuringly play out in the Arizona desert at the Pima Air & Space museum.

Pima, and the nearby “boneyard” provide over 2600 acres of land for the display of thousands of surplus and decommissioned aircraft. The dry, arid desert, which can be so punishing to living things, here provides an optimal environment for the preservation of the military’s metal relics. The soil of southern Arizona has an especially high alkaline content, that coupled with the area’s negligible humidity levels, makes this desert an ideal location for storing last century’s war machines safe from corrosion, rust and the other damaging effects of moisture.

That Pima isn’t (and shouldn’t) be in the business of offering a critical history on the use and consequences of bombing campaigns engaged by the Air Force is ok. But Pima certainly does engage in a soft form of propaganda (see also: starring role of an F-22 in the Transformers movie) by harkening back to the mythical, nostalgia-tinted past where technical proficiency and American know-how led to an easily quantifiable military dominance of the skies. The whole site is a monument to American techno prowess. And while the museum does offer a perfunctory survey of novelty civilian planes (smallest plane, lightest plane, etc.), the star of the show is without a doubt the fields of fighter aircraft, including the A-10 and the F-5. Where the lone pilot and his trusty jet update the West’s archetypal portrayal of a solitary hero who abides by his own moral code, characterized here in a collection of popular culture references that stretch from Howard Hughes’ Hell’s Angels film of 1930 (see the Fokker DVII’s) to the fighter plane spectacles that popped up in the waning days of the Cold War: Tom Cruise and Top Gun (F-14 Tomcat) and Lou Gosset in Iron Eagle (F-16 Fighting Falcon). That there is something comforting in the black and white clarity of the conflicts of the past (we won!) is also played out in the museum’s crowd, which certainly skews toward the grayer end of the demographic spectrum, as do the museum’s volunteers, who can usually be easily spotted by their “retired U.A. Air Force” caps emblazoned with their numbered squadron insignia. On the day we were there, walking between row upon row of fighter planes, their cockpits painted over and engines extracted, we were treated to a flyby from four of the 183 F-22’s that the Pentagon had actually ordered, en route from Nevada. Their distinct silhouette traced a line across the sky. It was a beautiful sight.

Ok, so this is my entry to the Next Stop Design “competition” for a bus stop on the University of Utah campus. I’d just spent a fair amount of time in Utah so the setting piqued my interest. The boulders are recycled from national parks around Utah and brought into Salt Lake to form the shelter of the bus stop. Whatever, right, pretty straightforward and not bad for a lazy afternoon’s work. What’s actually much more pertinent for discussion is how NextStopDesign understands the application of the buzzword “crowdsourcing” in relation to the future of architectural competitions.

Wikipedia defines crowdsourcing as “the act of taking tasks traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people or community in the form of an open call.” Wikipedia is an example of crowdsourcing. Here’s another: Netflix uses an algorithm to recommend other movies you’d like based on your past viewing habits. This algorithm could certainly be improved upon so it becomes more accurate and stops trying to get me to watch The Benjamin Button movie. So to design a better recommendation algorithm, Netflix didn’t hire some movie-algorithm-predicter company, but rather put out an open competition – with a prize of 1 million dollars – with the idea that anyone out there can come up with a better algorithm that will more truthfully predict what kind of movies I’ll like. And anyone and everyone has tried: academics, laypersons, programmers, etc.

Now here’s how NextStopDesign competition organizer and researcher Daren Brabham defines crowdsourcing: “a company posts a problem online, a vast number of individuals offer solutions to the problem, the winning ideas are awarded some form of a bounty, and the company mass produces the idea for its own gain.” Sweet, so I can be compensated a nominal amount for my work, and then some other company reaps massive profits. Score! Where do I sign up?!?! But maybe the problem is that this dude’s narrow and cynical reading of crowdsourcing isn’t actually inaccurate, but actually pretty well describes the exploitive nature of crowdsourcing.

This is how NextStopDesign attempts to apply the principle of crowdsourcing into the design of a bus stop in Utah: Anonymous users post one to three images of their proposed design on the site, and other registered anonymous users rank said designs on a scale of one to five stars. When the voting ends, the highest rated design “wins.” What you win is completely undefined, but hidden deep in the bowels of the site is the statement that NextStopDesign will present the portions of the highest rated designs as possible qualities the Utah Planning Division could consider implementing in the future. In this scenario NextStopDesign acts an unnecessary parasitic gatekeeper. Now, since being highly rated is predicated on how others rank you, it is in each users own best interest to vote everyone else as low as possible as they jockey for a higher position. This leads to a cutthroat environment where everyone leaves absurdly irrelevant and overly harsh criticisms on other designs, and depresses the entire vote score. Out of around 200 designs the median score is a paltry 1.6 out of 5. Therefore, the highest ranked design is the one has garnered the most goodwill amongst a loose network of vindictive users that are each looking out for their own vested self-interest. Since all comments and ratings are anonymous you can’t trust anybody. This ultimately leads to the major misunderstanding NextStopDesign must confront regarding crowdsourcing and urban planning which is this: When Netflix crowns a winner they will be able to quantifiably judge that someone in the crowd has designed a more efficient algorithm. It can be tested, verified, and agreed upon by all. The design of a bus stop is different, and must address a whole slew of realities such as siting, fabrication, cost, etc. that are unable to be processed from even the most beautifully rendered image. On the other hand, what could make this competition interesting is if NSD were attempting an experiment to quantify the intangible qualities of architecture via a participatory network, or using the performative values of a proposed design (using program, energy, structural)as a means to rank and determine what’s “better.” But based on their repeated and simplisitic definition of crowdsourcing (step1_competition, step2…., step3_profit!) as simply a buzzworthy potential means to realize a new profit model it falls flat, and it is narrow and cynical. I’m torn here, because I think a lot of the submitted designs are really clever and inventive (I’m looking at you Bus-Shroom!). It’s the means to which they’re being used that bothers me.

There’s absolutely nothing groundbreaking about letting the general population participate in the results of an architectural competition. I’ve worked on at least two competitions where the voting results of the public became a factor in the jury’s deliberations. Also, archinect just ran a completely awesome competition for a Michael Jackson memorial where online contributors could rate and comment on the submissions. But here, the participatory aspect is but one component used in addition to a jury of experts in fields of design, architecture and engineering. And in lieu of this weeks amazing presentation by Usman Haque, in which he presented a survey of his projects that utilize a true participatory network in inspiring ways, NextStopDesign can’t help but come off as cloying and depressing.

In the end, though, it might be worth re-reading the Wired article that NextStopDesign quotes from liberally, and there, one can find the murky origins of NextStopDesign in the form of the earliest use of crowdsourcing, here in the interest of cheap, mass-marketed television programming: America’s Funniest Home Videos. Yes Bob Saget and ABC did make a fortune, but just because America voted for the hysterically zany toothless kid, doesn’t make him as great as the Simpsons. Maybe you really do want to look at reality show programming as the new paradigm for urban planning and architecture, but I’m pretty sure nobody wants more Wiffle Bats to the proverbial crotch.

Fire flashed in the pre-dawn New Mexico desert with the explosive force of 20 kilotons of TNT. Ground zero was 40 miles west of Socorro but the 7.5-mile high mushroom cloud was still seen and felt over 150 miles away in El Paso. It was the first successful nuclear detonation. Robert Oppenheimer witnessed this at the South 10000-Shelter, 10,000 yards south of Zero. And, after viewing the fireball he was led to famously state: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” For good reason the quote became iconic. Taken from the Hindu Scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita, Oppenheimer imbued the words with something mysterious, with some pretty damn ominous overtones that also obliquely hinted at his own uncertainty at his role as “the father of the atomic bomb.” Doubts which would of course lead to charges of communism, public humiliation and his security clearance being stripped at the hands of the McCarthy Commission in 1954. But on that morning in 1945, Trinity was a success, and Oppenheimer had reason to feel self-congratulatory. The atmosphere didn’t ignite, the oceans didn’t boil, the fabric of space-time remained untorn, and sure, one could argue that something nearly equally catastrophic was loosed upon the world that morning, and it’s certainly clear that Oppenheimer understood that. But it’s a good quote, and always makes for a strong introductory anecdote. What’s less known, but no less interesting, is what he said the night before, as he stood on one of the wooden observation towers, in the fading light of the New Mexico evening, preparing for the climax to three years of relentless work. He surveyed the Oscuras Mountains along the horizon and spoke the following to himself: “Funny how the mountains always inspire our work.” He said this to no one in particular, almost offhandedly, slightly above a whisper, but it was overheard and recorded by a nearby metallurgist. Scientific discovery is an artistic act of creation where what was imagined in the minds of men is made real. Coming from the creator of one of the most sublime spectacles that few have ever seen, one that leveled cities and changed the course of history, this is both incredible and terrifying.

There is Tijuana and there is a New Tijuana. Tijuana is easy. You don’t have to look very hard to find it. As soon as you walk over the border you’re in the thick of it, a dust-encrusted Candyland where you can buy a churro, pharmaceuticals, a miniature guitar, sit on a droopy-faced donkey painted to look like a zebra, all while being serenaded by a group of hungry looking mariachis-for-hire in loud pants. (Literally—there are bells clipped to their outer seams.) You’re on the Mexican side of the border, but here in Tijuana that palpable feeling of barely concealed, easily dischargeable, violent tension that was so strong in Juarez is missing.

Lest you be lulled into complacency, New Tijuana, on the other hand, is a different story. It’s everywhere to the east, in the pale masses of washed-out shantytowns and factory housing. It is more difficult than Tijuana – you have to go looking for it. It is where there are estimated to be over one million people living, comprising almost half the total population of Tijuana in a parallel zone primarily occupied by factory workers, migrants, and laborers. In Tijuana 95 percent of the city’s homes have a solid floor; in New Tijuana that number is closer to 25 percent. New Tijuana is where nearly 80 percent of people lack running water and an operational sewage system, but where simultaneously the unemployment rate is less than 1 percent (Mexico’s average national unemployment rate at the same time was 7.4 percent). The percentage of the population that works in New Tijuana is 10-15 percent higher than the rest of the city and it has been supposed that there are in fact more jobs than available workers. 35 perecent of New Tijuana’s workforce is employed in the maquiladora sector. The lack of an adequate workforce provides opportunities for immigrants from all over South America, who, in turn, comprise more than a third of New Tijuana’s population. Those people need housing. New Tijuana expands by five acres each day. New Tijuana is the future.

The growth of the Tijuanas in the last 25 years is unprecedented. It has been frenzied, loose, and extremely informal. No cohesive formal plan exists. It’s a new model of improvisational urbanization that requires neither long-term thought nor infrastructural support, but rather quick thinking, cleverness, and adaptability. Shit moves fast here. Speedy Gonzales isn’t some kind of crude cultural stereotype; he’s something to aspire to. City infrastructure can only try to keep up with the manic pace of construction. By loosening the bonds of city infrastructure, potential newly liberated schemes for urbanization arise. And moving in lockstep with the creation of the new is the decay of the old. Smithson’s Spiral Jetty introduced the concept of entropy into the constructed ecology of the West, and the settlements of New Tijuana provide another example of the productive, transformative value of reappropriation and entropy. The surplus piles of tires become walls and fences, discarded vinyl advertisements become weatherproof roofing, palettes, cinderblock and plywood are mixed at will. Like the Spiral Jetty rising out of the Salt Lake anew, New TJ is constantly reassembling itself into some new amalgamation with the remains of the old. Tijuana warrants a retroactive manifesto to parse and make sense of what has happened here in the last 25 years, a manifesto that will formulate a constructed argument regarding alternative future potentials for other built environment based on uncovered models that exist here in the border region. The argument would start with the speed of the informal settlements.

They build 20,000 houses a year in New Tijuana, constructed from whatever mix of available building materials and cast-off detritus that can be recycled and reconfigured into something that vaguely resembles inhabitable space. Here, the only demand is that it have a roof (and even that seems somewhat negotiable), and without regard for anything so outmoded as building codes or permits, they build wherever and everywhere they want, armed with only the most provisional of land ownership titles. In Tijuana squatting is considered an inalienable right. Architecture can’t compete with that. No way—it’s too slow, too dependent on ego and sponsorship. Tijuana is fast, self-determinate, and horizontal. This is why so many architecture schools love to use Tijuana as a site, every frustrated architecture student sees themselves in each resident of Tijuana, a place where the people daily recreate and then transcend the abstraction of the studio and provide a setting where it really is possible to dream something up and build it, with your own hands, devoid of those slow, un-fun things like budgets and engineering seals of approval that architects struggle with every day, but seem so oppressively foreign to a student in a studio environment. In Tijuana you don’t have to worry about any of that, it’s design/build without any formalist pretensions.

But don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to romanticize what are, in essence, dangerously unsanitary habitats lacking in many cases even basic, minimum quality-of-life essentials like light, clean water, sewage systems, and electricity. But that kid standing there in the dark, next to an open sewage canal, lighting a candle is wearing a Kobe Bryant Lakers jersey and blasting the Black Eyed Peas on a Panasonic boom box that was probably manufactured less than a mile away. You can’t help thinking about all the other boom boxes that were exported North, and all the people who then bought those same boom boxes, and the relief and comfort all those people felt at seeing the same everyday low prices they’ve grown accustomed to, and would probably angrily demand be provided back to them if somehow the torrential flood of cheap goods were suddenly cut off.

Anybody can see that manufacturing a crate of boom boxes for $15 makes more sense than shelling out $90 for a unionized, benefits-hogging American worker to do the same. I mean, I don’t begrudge the idealists and their inescapable feelings of First World Guilt. The twin cities of the border have always engaged in an exploitive economic embrace, one twin is bigger, the other is richer. But when confronted with the overwhelming realization that this situation is so inevitable, so completely entrenched and self-perpetuating, just bemoaning the North’s entitled status seems too passive and pretty boring. Anger is one way to go, and that typically arises from the sight of the slums, the Lakers jerseys, the Ford trucks, and the maquiladora housing all impossibly coexisting, and the urgent thought that can’t be resisted—that somehow, this is all our fault. And you have to deal with that in some way. Or, you can try to idealize the situation, in a getting-back-to-the-basics, “authentic” kind of way.

The North American communes of the late 1960’s tried this, but they were only self-consciously adopting some of the principles of informal developments and, not surprisingly, they quickly and inevitably collapsed. While the California communes, including Morningstar Ranch and the Whiz-Bang Quick City, were superficially similar, they lacked something like the desperation of New Tijuana. (I hesitate to use the word desperation, but I think what you see in New Tijuana is akin to something along those lines.) New Tijuana is less a home and more of a way station to compose a strategy for escape, which is a pretty desperate concept in and of itself. The other way to confront it is to approach it from a position of self-congratulatory benevolence. And when Architecture with a capital “A” does try to get involved, well, that way lies the madness of modernism. The oppressively bureaucratic, welfare-state housing policy approaches from the mid-20th century have unquestionably failed, sometimes explosively (or more excitingly: implosively, seePruitt-Ingoe).

Tijuana is bigger than all that, and I guess that’s what I find so fascinating about it, the tangled up mix of impossible ecologies that make a city like this seem on one hand so inevitable and yet strangely great and new, not in spite of, but because of the conflicts and paradoxes. Whatever your opinion on globalization and the exploitation of capital, the necessity of an interventionist or weak urban policy, the vagaries of national security, whether you’re pro one side or the other, you should spend a little time in Tijuana. You’ll come back convinced of the necessity for both, all at once, unable to formulate why this simultaneity of opinions is thoroughly inexorable.

But it is. So where does that leave architects? As an architect, I’m naturally disinclined to argue for my own field’s redundancy, but it’s hard to deny that the traditional top-down, architectural design process lacks the frenzied urgency that Tijuana demands. They’re building 1,600 houses per month because there’s a vacuum there where people need housing, and they have the ingenuity to fill it. But what’s being built now is really only serving the narrowest of stakeholders’ interests, whether that is a gated subdivision for upper-middle class families, migrants’ informal slums, or the maquiladora industry’s need for rows of factory housing. You have everything that runs the gamut from the rigidly planned to the totally out of control, and somewhere in there architecture can stake out a position, somewhere in that sweet spot between the formal and the informal, where architecture can interweave all the threads of rich and poor, old and new, individual and community. But anytime architects try to force their way through that hierarchy of competing interests, the initial vision becomes muddled beyond recognizability. For instance, I’ve seen amazing designs languish in the development hell of the “design review” process where every stakeholder from the mayor to the donors to the various owners each have to tweak something to their liking, which by themselves aren’t that big of a deal, but taken in aggregate begin to compromise whatever measure of integrity the architect believed existed in the first place. Trying to maintain any sort of unified creative vision in the face of that kind of opposition is ridiculous. And that’s in a normal situation.

There’s nothing normal about Tijuana, however, but if style is cyclical then you can’t help but notice that the answers the radical urbanists were playing around with in the late 1950s and ’60s were certainly prophetic in anticipating the urgent necessity for new solutions to housing the masses of displaced people and migrants caused by the second World War. And here, as in Tijuana, the solutions were cheap to manufacture, simple to transport, and infinitely variable.

But where it got really interesting was when these guys – especially the Israeli Yona Freidman – started thinking that the architect really wasn’t as important as modernists thought. Form became something that was undefined and primarily subservient to the needs of the inhabitants. In other words, a functioning city is not made up of the material buildings, but rather the infrastructural utility networks and systems of streets and walkways. The architect’s first responsibility is to ensure that these systems are in place, and this should precede all other formal proposals. The network of systems in play in Tijuana vastly exceeds the grasp of a singular architect. How could any one architect plan and design for an inhabitant whose needs are constantly in flux—especially in Tijuana where changes can be drastic, fast, and dirty, and thus impossible for an architect to foresee?

The answer lay in the realignment of the artist-spectator relationship. The user — the inhabitant — would become the creator of his or her own built object and the architect would provide the infrastructural support for the user to plug in to. Process becomes the paramount driver of creation, while the final result remains an amorphous ideal. In this way, Friedman sought to codify the unpredictable nature of human behavior. And in his holistic world view, the erratic nature of each user’s individual actions is allowed to disintegrate the false nature of central planning. However, a major contradiction is found within Friedman’s Mobile Architecture. Friedman, the architect, still designs the framework — the system — into which the user is granted a somewhat specious level of freedom.

Elemental Do-Tank actually built something along these lines in Chile with amazing results. In an evolution of Friedman’s “frame” and “infill” architecture, they took the minimum necessary program for a livable house and transformed that into the frame. The spaces between the homes are left as an open infrastructure for the people to infill with any program they may want. The infill accommodates everything from car repair shops to beauty salons, interwoven with another program.

But as great as these projects are, they are still something to be applied to Tijuana, not to be withdrawn and applied elsewhere. That’s where things get more difficult and have to remain open-ended. That the future is fast and cheap is unavoidable; that speed and ingenuity will supplant history and the starchitect; that the amorphous and accidental will trump the defined and planned has to all be taken as a given. In the end, we have to stop worrying and learn to love the best of Tijuana-ization while overcoming the worst. In a world where the existing urban environment is a prisoner of sorts to its own aging infrastructure, Tijuana’s notions of quickly composing and re-composing urban space in response to future events seems increasingly relevant. And the radical reimagining of the role of the architect, something rooted in modesty and a sincere desire for change in keeping with the possibilities afforded by technological advancements and popular participation, has to continue to provide new possibilities for a profession that suffers from a dearth of bold ideas.

Clockwise from top-left:
Interstate 25, New Mexico;
US-160, Colorado;
US-89, Arizona;
Badwater Road, California;
E Sahuarita Road, Arizona;
US-191, Utah;
Monument Valley Road, Utah;
US-550, New Mexico

The popular perception of the American Indian has to be one of the most malleable concepts in our history, adapting at will in parallel with the westward course of the U.S. empire. Wrapped up in fear and guilt, modern-day perceptions of the Indian have been everything from exterminable threat, to endangered “noble savage,” to hippie-like ecological warrior. It doesn’t matter that none of them were at all accurate, but at least the active placement of Indian culture somewhere in American thought has to be preferable to their current status as an invisible afterthought, a victim of apathy. Walking around on a ranger-led tour of the abandoned cliff-dwellings at Mesa Verde, I took a number of notes regarding history, construction, climate, etc., but the two big takeaways were difficult to reconcile: 1) as an archeological and architectural site this place is amazing, and 2) this is an incredibly empty and lonely place. The people who built it are gone, no one knows why, and no one knows how they lived.

To elaborate:

1) Architecturally and tectonically Mesa Verde is beautiful, Cliff Palace especially. The masonry has a wonderfully tactile quality and the seamless edge where the cut blocks meet and merge with the cliff face is incredible. The Pueblos were obviously master craftsman. It’s the stuff of science fiction, fantasy and legend. People built and lived in miniaturized towns, forsaking the wildly more accessible mesa tops, for an existence cleft out of rock on the side of a canyon.

2) But the sense of unreality distances the visitor from having any meaningful connection to the people who lived here. All historical artifacts that weren’t plundered in the late 19th century have been thoroughly removed and crated by the Park Service. This leaves a completely anesthetized space of pure architectural form devoid of any function. Also, original paths that were crumbling and inaccessible have been recreated into smooth concrete streets safe for tour groups (see picture here of Mesa Verde in 1891). This uncanny mix of new and old, without any clues to habitation makes the Pueblo culture seem only more remote and lonely. At least at Pompeii you can see the ash covered tables and plates and other trappings of quotidian life — the gulf of time doesn’t seem quite so vast because of its recognizability. But here, things are more enigmatic without any pat answers. It didn’t help that I towered over the cramped spaces. An average Pueblo Indian of 1200 was around five feet tall. This gives the whole place the feel of a scaled-down stage set where doors seem smaller than windows and it’s incomprehensible to judge how — or how many — people lived in a 120sf space. I could appreciate the abstraction of the piled-up stacks of cubes and cylinders as elemental architecture, but it’s difficult to leave it at that. Was this actually a successful way to live? If so, why did they leave?

The Park Service museum isn’t much help. The ’70s-era dioramas of Indian life in the museum were rendered pretty ridiculous by their blatant attempts to Westernize Pueblo life in the 13th century, making it more accessible to contemporary culture. (C’mon really NPS? Bar-B-Ques around the kiva and playing fetch with dogs…on a cliff? For shame.) I felt more removed from Indian culture than ever. The rangers were more knowledgeable and, in their mini-lectures, they rejected any definitive answers but proposed that everything had dual spiritual/function purposes. Kivas were used for religious ceremonies, but also for living in during the winter. Vents were cut to allow smoke to exit and spirits to enter. But in the end, it’s all speculation. The last Pueblo cliff-dwellers who left around 1400 assimilated into other tribes and weren’t big on keeping any type of written historical record. Their only references to Mesa Verde are proclamations that it was simply time to leave, which, to an archeologist, must be somewhat frustratingly inadequate. But the Pueblo see time as cyclical. Time matters less than location when a belief in continual or infinite time creates a casual air or disregard for the quantifiable number of years. Time is like the seasons, not Western linear time – where this event happened at this time which in turn caused this proceeding thing to happen – so conceivably Mesa Verde could be inhabited again.

I wish I could imagine that. But as the steady stream of buses unloaded another batch of brightly-colored tourists, nothing seemed farther from reality. I made the short hike back to the car, trying to beat the rush back to Highway 160. The 30-mile, winding, two-lane road out of the park can seem like forever if you’re stuck behind a mini-van.

Before you can walk down into the Double Negative, you have to drive up to Mormon Mesa. I’d been around a lot of mesas growing up, the lacerated mountains formed the backdrop for countless family excursions, but this was the first time I’d actually been up on top of one. The dirt road out of the nearby town of Overton, Nevada, is monotonously flat, until you reach the edge of the embankment where the road shoots up, a sight that when viewed through the front windshield of a four-cylinder Grand Am seems impossibly steep with dirt that is treacherously loose. But again, after cresting the ridge and arriving on the caprock, you find yourself in the midst of another flat expanse. Mesas form by the twin processes of weathering and erosion. The weaker types of rock are eroded away, while the more resistant types – like sandstone – persist, forming the flat top of the mesa. Geologists measure the processes that formed the Mormon Mesa in epochal time scales. The same geological history can be observed in a smaller, vastly accelerated scale as the once-crisp, man-made edges of Michael Heizer’s Double Negative deteriorate. The 1969 artwork becomes part of a tiny artificial blip in the geological history as the incontrovertible mass of the desert moves back in to reclaim the void which was removed.

Working with two bulldozers, dynamite, and a skilled crew, Heizer removed 244,800 tons of sandstone and rhyolite from the edge of the Mesa to create two trenches facing each other on opposite sides of the mesa cliff. The channels are around 50 feet deep and 30 feet wide, as well as approximately 750 feet and 325 feet in length, respectively. Double Negative comprises the cuts as well as the space between them, see MOCA’s description of the work as a 1500 x 50 x 30 foot sculpture (aside: how can something this remote and this huge, be considered part of a Los Angeles museum’s collection? And is that antithetical to the staunchly anti-gallery ethos espoused by some land art practioners?). Another pretty accurate description is “that old cut out on the mesa,” given by the waitress at Overton’s Sugars Home Plate Restaurant and Sports Memorabilia fine dining establishment in response to my query as to whether she knew where it was. I received the distinct impression that the folks of Overton had either: a) never been out to Double Negative, and/or b) didn’t hold it in very high regard. (I initially found this to be kind of sad and a little narrowminded, but the more I thought about it the more I started to equate their attitude as pretty analogous to how I feel when out-of-towners show up eager for a tour of Times Square.) Instead, the two other patrons enjoying an afternoon meal at SHPRandSM suggested I look at the “tank that is parked in front of the old post office” or the “house that looks like a castle” as being more interesting. Both of which I did indeed end up seeing (see photos here and here), but I have to admit I still found Double Negative to be far superior.

So, any time you’re going to talk about Double Negative, you have to start by mentioning that its power comes from being “an old cut,” or simply negative space. It’s there in the title and Heizer pretty much sums it up when he says: “There is nothing there, yet it is still a sculpture.” The destructive force loosed onto the desert was the act of creation. And, paradoxically, what was removed from the mesa’s edge, constitutes what is. At least from an architectural standpoint, what I find most interesting about Double Negative is how powerful the void space becomes, a place where a slit in the desert can hold and command your eye in the panoramic expanse of the desert. This was also the first place where something wasn’t sticking out of the desert scrub, but rather — as cliché as it sounds— it was bringing the sky down into the earth. Stephen Holl does this a lot (he even has a project called Void Space/Hinged Space), but also think about the Twin Towers (or even the Petronas Towers): what really made them powerful is the slot of void between them and the way the blue sky captured between them doesn’t seem the same as the blue sky around it. It holds the void the same way the two trenches hold space. It’s so powerful you can almost hear the light moving between the embrace. I’ve had professors who would call this a “charged void,” full of electrical tension running between the trenches. Unable to stand still, I had no choice but to run through them (even while panting in the brutal 110-degree August heat).

I think it’s a good thing that Heizer is letting Double Negative deteriorate, allowing it to erode to the point where the original intention of the artist is hidden and it becomes a further enigmatic, less differentiated, more primitive part of the landscape. The disintegration of the boundaries allow the softer indentation to achieve a greater continuity of experience from inside the event to outside — for example, from landscape to art. Or, to put it another way, it becomes a compound object, something language doesn’t necessarily give us the luxury to “know” well enough to describe, and opens the possibility of allowing the object to “just be.” And being uncoupled from the obligation of knowing allows the possibility to present itself for art (or architecture, music, painting, etc.) to transport us into an integrated realm of feeling where the experience of heat, dust, colors, textures, sand, and walls allow us a wonderful sense of completeness.

Ok, let me try to put it another way. In this paragraph by Ellen Douglas, the poet deals with loss and memory in a way that is plasticized, or architectural:

“Charlotte knew that her mother had listed and stored in her heart all the things she had not been able to do for lack of money, and that she sought for her daughters a fleshier bedfellow than that specter, Want, whose hard bones she knew so intimately, who had lain down beside her almost before the dent that marked her dead husband’s place in the feather bed had been plumped up and smoothed away.”

The void space of the bed becomes an architectural manifestation of a memory. The dent and terrible loss described provoke similar shared qualities in different readers. It is not a photography, it is a memory of actual space, it has an interiority. While each of us may respond slightly differently, there is still an undeniably common response to the depth of our feelings toward Charlotte. The sense of shared feeling is something Kant described as a community Subject with a capital “S.” Douglas and Kant are describing an architectural event that goes beyond representation to convey something both more abstract (loss) and more concrete (the dent) all at once. It’s another way to say that Double Negative is so powerful as architecture because it is an event that can take on so many meanings with a common interiority that we can all respond to, one that can provide shelter, destroy the land, hold space, offer protection, erode away, and criticize art — all of which is done through an architectural manner.

P.S. After all of my inquiring, this thing is surprisingly easy to get to, a little more than an hour from Las Vegas, and contrary to what some sites say regarding the necessity of high-clearance, four-wheeled vehicles, when I drove out there, I didn’t have any trouble in my compact.

The lowest point in America, literally, -282 feet below sea level.

Driving east out of Las Vegas, you know you’re getting close to Pahrump when you start seeing the roadside billboards offering prostitution and other “legal delights.” And, while granted the signs have a lo-fi late-’90s back-of-the-newspaper-strip-club-ad-aesthetic (think black background, lots of fonts, prominent use of the letter “x”) complete with stock photo image of a sultry(lazy-eyed) pouty-lipped(sleepy) blonde with a generic nom-de-sex like “Mandy,” the town of Pahrump itself is going for more of an ironic, self-referential tone. Evoking less the drugged-out seediness of Taxi Driver or the genre-defining, classic portrait-of-an-era HBO documentary Pimps Up, Hoes Down, Pahrump bills itself more as “The New Old West,” and seems to be shooting for something along the lines of a kitschy Wild West saloon re-enactment, complete with swinging doors populated by straight from central-casting whisky-swiggin’ cowboys and sweet-natured high-kicking gals. Which, I have to admit, is pretty much the definition of a “rollicking good time.” But it’s all rendered in a way that makes it seem like a more nefarious,Disney version of the actual West (see: public tours and souvenirs from the Chicken Ranch), but where, you know, actual sex is happening out back and the less said about the realities of mandatory HIV testing, condom distribution, bombed-out trailer homes and wage disputes, the better. The myth of the West is played out in the realities of this best little desert town where casinos outnumber schools, the number of brothels and street lights are equal (two), muscle cars have replaced horses, and everyone goes about life with a half-concealed smile because they are in on the joke. Reminding you that southern hospitality is alive and well is a sign dripping with innuendos thanking you one last time as you ride out into the sunset. That Michael Jackson lived and home-schooled his kids in Pahrump is one of the least interesting things about it.

(sitting as near as possible to the window mounted ac-unit, vainly seeking respite during a typically sweaty, humid New York summer thunderstorm, I find myself returning back to the basaltic Promontory Range along the Great Salt Lake.)

“If ‘monuments’ in fact exist today, they are no longer visible.”
Paul Virilio

I had left the Super 8 around noon and made the Golden Spike National Monument by two. I was constantly stealing glances down to my printed map, but it proved unnecessary. At the first nameless, dusty fork in the road there is a large printed sign hammered into the ground: “Spiral Jetty <-- 18.2 miles.” Once the road devolved from dirt to rock, I ditched the Pontiac and hoofed it the last, short ¾ mile. And then there it was. Less a jetty, the spiral is now landlocked, only touching the red waters on its outer, westernmost coil. I nearly broke my leg scrambling down the ridge, jumping from rock to rock, my jaw on the ground.

Here’s the thing about the Spiral Jetty, hyperbole crystallizes on it like salt deposits. (!) Canonized as the epitome of land art, Spiral Jetty is “the quintessential heroic gesture in the landscape.” Time and art history texts have relegated it to the status of masterpiece, unquestioningly titling it the iconic post-war artwork, classified as the ultimate embrace of the western landscape, with a direct link to the primal, pre-historic apologue of life and death. Robert Smithson, the essential iconoclast for rejecting the confines of the New York gallery scene for the freedom of the Great Outdoors. And so on. And, like everything in the West, you print the myth because the facts can’t compete; they’re too slow, too complex, not as easily digestible. As an art object, Spiral Jetty traffics in myth in spades, assuming legendary status in no small part due to two occurrences.

One, about two years after it was completed it was swallowed up by the waters of the Great Salt Lake, unwittingly creating a small cabal of people, those who had actually seen it, to fan the art world and spread its gospel. At the height of its popularity, it no longer existed as a physical object, but rather as an idea and media object that was disseminated through film, photography, drawings, diagrams and writing. Land Art (earthworks, earth art, LAND/ART, whatever) and Smithson faded from memory in the late 90s, but both experienced a resurgence in 2002 when MOCA and the Whitney debuted a major Smithson retrospective that was fortuitously staged simultaneously with the re-emergence of the jetty itself. After 30 years it rose again out of the lake like an Authurian legend, almost as if the waterline of the Great Salt Lake itself was under Dia and the Whitney’s command.

Two, Smithson himself was transformed into a mythic hero, due to his tragic death at thirty-five, only three years after completion of the Spiral Jetty. He was the cowboy Icarus art god who fell from the plane, clutching his camera while scouting sites in the Texas plains.

The problem is the canonical adorations become conventional; the cliché saps the object of its inherent strength allowing it to safely be categorized in a simple historical box, kind of like in an “Oh yeah, Spiral Jetty, that’s a masterpiece, what else is new” way. So the viewer is really left with one of two options when actually confronted with the object itself. The first is a vaguely discomforting, disappointing notion that the object has been rendered impotent to the point of dissolution. Again, think Sistine Chapel, Mona Lisa, the Grand Canyon. What you came to see is gone, disappeared in a mass of jostling Germans in short pants. The second is incredulousness leading to exhilaration. That thing is really real, it exists, Smithson pulled it off. The syntactic gaps between what you expected in your mind and the reality of what is sitting in front you are bridged, and something fires.

At least, those were the two options I predisposed myself for when I set out from Salt Lake City. Arriving at the jetty and Rozel Point I felt a mixture of what was certainly exhilaration, delight and disappointment. The one truth is that the facts are always more complicated. And as interesting as combing over the historical essays and theoretical exercises might be, I can say without equivocation, that whatever you may think, it will be better in person.

My reaction is as follows, but first an examination of those historical essays is in order (naturally). But only those penned by Smithson himself, because the artist’s own writings are incredible, they’re personal, banal, critical, whacked-out like a space age fever dream. Take this for instance:

“Following the spiral steps we return to our origins, back to some pulpy protoplasm, a floating eye adrift in an antediluvian ocean. On the slopes of Rozel Point I closed my eyes, and the sun burned crimson through the lids. I opened them, and the Great Salt Lake was bleeding scarlet streaks. My sight was saturated by the color of red algae circulating in the heart of the lake, pumping into ruby currents. My eyes became combustion chambers churning orbs of blood. Swirling within the incandescence of solar energy were sprays of blood. Perception was heaving, the stomach turning, I was on a geologic fault that groaned within me. I had the red heaves, while the sun vomited its corpuscular radiations. Surely, the storm clouds massing would turn into a rain of blood.”

It sounds like it could come from a pulp drug novel, and you’d be excused for thinking this guy is some kind of stoner rock god. He’s placed the spiral as a symbol of our primordial, antediluvian origins, where interior and exterior blur (“sun burned crimson through the lids”), man and nature entwine and merge (“geologic fault groaned with me”) and apocalyptic visions reign(“clouds massing would turn into a rain of blood”). From there his writing continues, oscillating from straightforward field note-ish accounts of the construction of the Jetty (“From New York City I called the Utah Park Department and spoke to Ted Tuttle”)-I would’ve liked to hear what Ted thought – back to scientific geological records of the site, segueing into 60s gonzo acid trip territory, then back around to ruminations on the nature of the picturesque and sublime in Enlightenment and Romantic travel narratives (he was really into Frederick Law Olmstead). The whole thing is definitely worth reading a few times.

Maybe it was the battered copy of J.G. Ballard’s Terminal Beach that was riding along in my backpack, but I found myself returning to what I saw as the most interesting of the many genres that Smithson quotes from – science fiction. In Lytle Shaw’s essay, “Smithson, writer,” Shaw argues that Smithson, by using such time cancelling phrases in descriptions of his Jetty such as “immobile cyclone,” a “dormant earthquake,” and a “spinning sensation without movement,” is associating the outdoor site with science fictions ecological apocalypse and is in effect stopping nature’s clock in the midst of its most dramatic productions. The frozen natural disasters are not just part of harnessing the sublime power of nature, but they are the actual genesis of the form of the sculpture itself – the Jetty is the physical embodiment of the forces Smithson found at the site.

Smithson’s freezing effect is but part of a larger thematic connection to the science fiction genre, one that includes time as a driving force. In “Entropy and the New Monuments,” Smithson goes through a number of rhetorical inversions to imply that first the monuments of his age will reverse the temporal baseline by shifting past and future, but then secondly, that those monuments will function as actual agents that cast doubt on the possibility of directional time itself:

“Instead of causing us to remember the past like the old monuments, the new monuments seem to cause us to forget the future. Instead of being made of natural materials, such as marble, granite, or other kinds of rock, the new monuments are made of artificial materials, plastic, chrome, and electric light. They are not built for the ages, but rather work against the ages.”

Not only an indictment of modern architecture, the essay brings up a crucial notion for Smithson, the one word that summed up his preoccupations with dissolution, degradation and the direction of time: entropy. The second law of thermodynamics, the rejection of Newtonian perpetuity, entropy codifies the inevitable disintegration of all matter. The universe will eventually fizzle out to nothing, the center cannot hold. Ruins are monuments to entropy, and the site around Rozel Point holds a number of examples. Smithson chose the site in part because of the preponderance of enigmatic wreckage. Your first view of the Salt Lake is also the first encounter with a jetty, not a spiral one, but an abandoned oil drilling station that has been overtaken by disrepair, frozen in a state of natural decay. And the Spiral Jetty itself ended up having a short half-life, disappearing under the salt water before emerging again with a new patina of white salt. The concept is pretty incredible, Spiral Jetty the sculpture is not just a representation of the concept of entropy, it is entropy. Simply put, it was ‘entropy made visible.’ You take nature and turn it into art. Nature can be the basaltic rocks and earth of Utah or an immaterial idea, while art can be a jetty or a building. All that matters is the transformation and the acknowledgment that what is built will in turn erode. Nothing is stable.

A hot topic in the architectural world right now is ‘emergence,’ a topic which is pretty vague (something about scripting), but I would argue that Spiral Jetty is part of the concept that process is more important that the final piece and time produces interesting and unexpected results that are outside the reach of the creator. The crystallization of the salt particles, the ever shifting water levels, the dissolution of the pure form to something a little fuzzier, the way the water gets all foamy as it laps up against the rocks are things that Smithson couldn’t have planned predicted. Object and site move forward together as something new. The site was revitalized, but the historical textuality of the site (the industrial ruins) was superimposed onto the bulldozed earth of Smithson’s object. He refers a lot to ‘collapsing time,’ in his writing, merging the stone age with the space age. Check out his film on the Spiral Jetty, Smithson trumps Kubrick’s celebrated 2001 jump-cut from bone-as-tool to orbiting spaceship, with his own lumbering dinosaur to rumbling dump truck. Kubrick was looking forward to technological evolution, Smithson portrayed the artist as mover of mountains, a primordial designer. Construction is also destruction, and the built-in obsolescence of the Spiral Jetty is paralleled and alluded to in the fate of the dinosaurs. Even at its conception, the time was ticking.

The space age/nuclear age allusions become even more explicit with Smithson’s later quote upon seeing the Spiral Jetty from a helicopter: “From that position the flaming reflection suggested the ion source of a cyclotron that extended into a spiral of collapsed matter. All sense of energy acceleration expired into a rippling stillness of reflected heat.” He links the Jetty to the spiral-shaped cyclotron developed during the Manhattan project that was integral to enriching uranium by speeding up and separating particles using electromagnets.

Smithson’s description of the sun burning crimson through his closed lids could also be seen as a reference to accounts from B-52 crewman, dropping the H-Bomb in the Bikini Atoll in the early 50s. The first invisible wave ejected from an explosion caused by nuclear fusion is a blast of x-rays. Pilots reported seeing the bones of their hands through their closed eyelids, while the rest of the crew appeared as walking skeletons. The military must have also picked up on the latent apocalyptic archetypes of the Utah salt flats. In 1944, 70 miles away at Wendover Air Force Base, the US Air Force began preparations for the use of the atomic bomb against Axis Forces. Paul Tibbets and the 509th Composite Group began running mock flight trials with the newly designed B-29 Superfortress, trials intended to simulate the precise deployment of one bomb followed by a sharp aerial maneuver to avoid the initial blast wave.

You can walk the spiral in less than five minutes, it’s smaller than you think (vaguely disappointing). And with the recession of the water level, you can cut back across the coils, leaving footprints in the white salt. It crackles and hums as the microscopic salt crystals break (delightful). And absorbing the bizarre atmosphere of the place, dangling my feet in the surprisingly warm water, the salt already crystallizing between my toes, while pondering the peculiar evening redness of the place (exhilarating), I thought back to Smithson’s quote that “a great artist can make art by simply casting a glance,” and I returned to Ballard, and Traven, the protagonist of ‘Terminal Beach.’ Left to wander the ruins of an abandoned atoll, once used for the testing of nuclear weapons, he makes his home among the decaying observation towers and mock bunkers. Gradually he succumbs to the same entropic devices taking their toll on the debris of science and civilization. Decaying physically and mentally, the structures of his mind become one with those of the island, until one day he sees two travelers, scientists, who came to conduct biological research in an empty, contaminated submarine holding pen. Smithson’s preoccupation with time and entropy, antediluvian history and science within the vortex of the inner workings of the mind find substance in this exchange from Ballard:

‘”Doctor,” he said, “Your laboratory is at the wrong end of this island.”
Tartly Osborne replied: “I’m aware of that, Traven. There are rarer fish swimming in your head than in any submarine pen’.

“In ordinary times … the center always wins. Its power grows with time, and that can’t be reversed”
Thomas Pynchon, Gravitys Rainbow

A slight deviation before I get to the Spiral Jetty. Any discussion of centeredness, the confluence of the natural and man-made, authority and entropy in Utah deserves a tangent into the realm of historically utopic Mormon Town Planning, which eventually everyone just called Standard Utah Town Planning.

Here’s a quick primer on Mormon urban planning in Salt Lake City and Utah in general (and this holds true from dusty one-blinking-light towns with generous cow to person ratios, to the shining Olympics-courting metropolises), streets don’t have names like “Crystal Cove Road” or “Misty Meadows Way,” no, here every road is a cryptic combination of number and cardinal directions. For instance, the Super 8 Motel Salt Lake City (excellent wifi by the way) is located at 616 W 200 South. In other words, after decoding, W 200 South is a location that is two blocks South and West of the central Salt Lake Temple of the Latter Day Saints.

Before cities were wrapped around a central commercial core, a common spiritual core bound the city together. The steeple, stretching to heaven, was the literal and spiritual focus of the town. Here, in Utah, the physical layout of the urban grid is still a manifest of the spiritual hierarchy and priorities of the community. In the City of Zion, the first order of Heavenly business is the consecration of a Mormon Temple at the city center. All street names defer to the center and subordinate their own individual identity for what is in essence a mileage marker to salvation. You could probably make a pretty convincing argument that here in Utah a singularly unique situation arose where urban planning occurred post-Industrial Revolution and allowed church and industrial core to mature in parallel. In other words, the business of Utah is the church.

I was concerned how this street-naming system could adapt around unavoidable natural barriers such as rivers or mountains and whether the town fathers had to throw in a winding “Joseph Smith Drive” that would have the freedom to snake around a stream or run parallel to the Wasatch foothills. There are in fact diagonal streets that cut through the rectilinear urban grid in situations that demand unorthogonal solutions, but these streets are appropriately enough simply named “Diagonal Street” or some other such functionally innocuous sounding name. In a city of Salt Lake’s size, there are multiple temples, so there’s also of course the issue of how, when you’ve crossed the threshold into the territory of a new Temple, someone knows which E 200 S you’re referring to – is that in relation to Temple A or Temple B. It is still unclear to me how this works, but one has to assume they’ve addressed this point as mass confusion is not ensuing.

The result of being in towns like this is twofold, on one hand it is extremely convenient (assuming you’re a Mormon – Utah is 62.5 percent LDS – so you probably are) to find and locate yourself in relation to a temple. This grounding must also be comforting on some level. Utah Mormons grew from exile, having been banished from Ohio and Illinois, they found their Zion in the desert and must still find peace knowing that a Temple is always an easily navigable route away. While on the other hand, it also feels like a somewhat grim, insidious and not-so-subtle means to reinforce the binds that the church exerts over the city, which you’re constantly reminded of while driving through any neighborhood, reading a map, asking directions, etc. Somebody out there has probably done an interesting study of whether there is a higher concentration of crime in block E 1500 S versus E 200 S.

Like all artists, the Mormons took the natural, the desert, and made it their art. And in so doing, the land became an integral part of their history and belief system. From the hardships of the desert came the notion of “Deseret,” whose meaning states that the welfare of the community holds primacy over that of the individual. Thus they were able to endure the harsh desert, and by what looks like to all accounts, prosper. The departure from Illinois became less a banishment and more a self-imposed exile. Where their desert Zion offered both a freedom to escape what they saw as religious and social persecution, and also as a natural barrier preventing outside interference and encouraging notions of self-sufficiency through isolation.

It’s eighteen feet tall. The vertical steel pylons are set closer together than the width of a truck to resist the force of direct a hit, thereby avoiding the possibility of any punctures or vents. The pylons are infilled with an anodized metal mesh, a mesh that flaunts heartbreakingly clear views through to the other side, which, however, is at the same time dense enough to prevent all but the smallest of fingers and toes from finding purchase. A man wielding bolt cutters was shot here by a Border Patrol agent eighteen months ago. (boilerplate response: “the Mexican government opposes the use of lethal weapons in situations that do not represent a proportionate risk.”) The concrete base is over three feet wide to withstand a potential rocket attack and extends six feet into the underground bedrock layer to deter any would-be tunneling. It cuts through the desert for 690 miles, heedless and ignorant of laws designed to protect and uphold environmental protection, endangered species reserves, migratory bird paths, antiquities, Native American graves and religious freedoms, among thirty others. To the U.S. Government it is not a wall, it is “tactical infrastructure.” And no one wanted it here.

Two neighbors are meeting at the terminus of their properties and inspecting a damaged rock wall that divides their lots in Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall.” The narrator is playful, almost goading and pushing the neighbor into articulating the necessity of rebuilding the wall. These are the last five lines of the poem:

He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

That second guy, the one moving in darkness, the recalcitrant and plodding neighbor, a blind slave to the cliches of the father, that guy is Michael Chertoff. As reported in the Washington Post of August 2007, El Paso Mayor John Cook stated: “Most people in Washington really don’t understand life on the border …They don’t understand our philosophy here that the border joins us together, it doesn’t separate us.”

The context of Cook’s statement was a lawsuit filed by the City of El Paso, El Paso County, the El Paso County Water Improvement District No. 1, and the Ysleta del Sur Pueblo, among others, against the Department of Homeland Security. In 2005, Congress tasked DHS with the “the expeditious construction of barriers” to construct the border wall and granted Chertoff power to void any federal law that would prevent that expeditious construction. Thirty-six laws protecting environmental quality, historical resources and native American sites were waived. El Paso believed the waivers were detrimental to the health of the region and found them unconstitutional. In September 2008 a Federal District Judge granted the DHS’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit. El Paso lost, and the fence was quickly rushed to completion before a January 31, 2009 deadline. With the damage already done, in June of 2009 the US Supreme Court denied the city and county’s appeal. The court upheld that Congress had legitimately granted Chertoff the power to dismiss any law that could potentially deny his given mandate.

Except in matters of national security, Mexico City and Washington, D.C., are remote and disengaged from the workings of the border. Today it is largely up to the local governments and organizations along the border region to resolve persistent local urban problems in the area, such as zoning and water rights. The border region has frequently been defined as a “third space,” with competing government agencies, and NGO’s occupying this new territory. However, the lawsuit showed that no matter how far removed, the Federal Government can still trump local concerns.

Even in an administration bursting with hubris, when defending the border wall Chertoff stands out as a fount with a number of choice quotes. Among them being, in defending security at the border from El Paso concerns: Chertoff claimed the city “had no idea how difficult it is here at the border.” And considering the detrimental repercussions a steel border would have for economic and cultural future of the conjoined twin cities of El Paso and Juarez, Chertoff stated that in response to DHS actions that, “We don’t want to destroy the border in order to save it.” (Even hearing a government official obliquely reference Bến Tre logic in a domestic setting is both ridiculous and pretty frightening.)
But in the end, Chertoff is no different than the neighbor in Frost’s poem, unable to comprehend the inane necessity, but nevertheless pushing forward with all expeditious concerns, all the while ignoring the difficulty of justifying its existence does not preclude actual construction. As an essential infrastructural component, the wall was rushed to completion and now stands as a thin monument to fear and paranoia.

Succintly summed up, and quoted in BreitBart, the border fence “is a political initiative meant to satisfy conservatives in Congress who have played to fears about all immigrants being terrorists, criminals, and living off the dole,” El Paso County Attorney Jose Rodriguez, the point man in one of the lawsuits, fumed.

Immigration had become a national security priority. Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez grow at an annual rate of 6.3% and 5.3%, respectively. Most of this growth is attributed to immigration from within Latin America. It is estimated that over 33% of the cities’ populations originated from outside the state of Chihuahua. Of those that emigrate from Tijuana and Juárez, 95% go north, to the United States. This has created a nomadic class of people, with aspirations for a better life elsewhere. The Mexican side of the fence is less a home, and more of a strategy for escape, which in turn creates an American side ‘under siege,’ – the U.S. builds increasingly higher walls and more gated communities.

A quick note about the second photograph: say what you will about Border Patrol Agents, they’re nothing if not efficient. Less than two minutes after pulling off the road, and about 30 seconds after taking a picture I was boxed in by two white trucks. A cursory glance showed that I was not a Mexican, and a more thorough glance showed that there were in fact no Mexicans stowing away in the trunk.

This would be one of many inadvertent interactions with the Border Patrol. They’re ubiquitous, most notably in the compulsory check points scattered all along the highways of the southwest. Typically they’re pretty casual, and I can’t help but think that there’s always some half-concealed disappointment at my glaringly non-immigrant, Caucasian-ness. And it’s important not to confuse the Border Patrol with their stern-eyed, grim faced cousins – the Custom Agent. Those guys don’t joke around. But the Border Patrol is different. Even odds are they haven’t been on the job that long – the number of active agents has doubled since 2001. What makes them even more interesting, and endemic of all border complexities, is that they’re typically Hispanic. Which means that statistically they themselves are less than two generations removed from being Mexicans living in Mexico. This is something I’d like to ask this guy about. I’d also like to ask whether they ever experience a sense of futility in what has to be a frustratingly obvious system that expends such vast sums of man hours, time and money just to briefly detain illegals in over-crowded processing centers, then deport them back across the border as part of a never-ending cycle of catch and release. And while they’re certainly fraught with complex issues of identity, nationalism and duty, issues that I can’t begin to understand, those are all of the things I wanted to ask about. But standing under the border wall floodlights along a dark, lonely road, I couldn’t muster the courage.