-
Suppose I pay for the project myself, or an institution fund the project. How would that affect your opinion of it?
My current USA Artists Projects proposal is not the limit of my entire project. I would fabricate dead or distressed architecture based on buildings in Chicago and Cleveland as well, if the opportunity arises, all at the size of a dollhouse. Then I would move to fabricate distressed structures of the Western United States, where I have photographed structures for well over a decade.
-
I wish you good luck and an eventual resolution to your project Vincent. You raise a lot of interesting issues and your work evolves from a study of urban issues into awareness and potentiality. That is all good. I agree with you that the potential for a wealthy region to wake up is there, but the vision is really limited.
There is no better place than Detroit to find an utter disregard for architectural integrity. As you point out, it seems related to the throwaway mindset of the car culture. I have posted similar ideas on DetroitYes before and others have also. The lack of political will to diversify the industrial base, the apparent nonchalance of academe, the wholesale use of eminent domain in relatively recent times to further the Big Three's agenda are well documented impediments to civic cohesion.
It used to be that L.A. was the poster child for all that was wrong with urban sprawl, and the automotive religion.
But it seems Detroit has become the focus in the last little while, it was abandoned not only by residents and burban folk, but also by the rest of your nation. But then, if you look at the Clevelands and Cincinnatis, the St Louis', you find that the more charming examples of residential architecture in old neighborhoods are abandoned and relegated to historical insignificance. Waste equals wealth for too many people to effect an easy turnaround.
-
Canuck,
Thank you for your thoughtful and gracious comments.
Over the past decade I have spent a good bit of time both photographing and researching the history of Los Angeles, which I came to see was propped up by the Federal Government for decades, via the defense industry. Separate from this, LA also had the largest number of federal employees in the U.S. of any city other than Washington D.C. Much of this was dismantled during the 1990's. The San Fernando Valley lost 250,000 defense industry jobs at that time as well, which transformed a vast section of the LA region into a low wage earning sector.
At this moment LA ranks 16th in terms of convention business, up from 23rd [[when it was behind Reno, Nevada) only a few years ago, after a number of developers began to transform downtown LA by building condo towers for people who wanted an urban living experience in car obsessed LA. Downtown LA is where LA was founded, and it is where it is because when the Spanish founded it, they did not want to have to defend the coast [[where California's wealth is centralized). So this means that downtown LA is 15 miles from the ocean. It is 90 degrees in summer, not like the cool summer breezes on the coastal communities.
Urban planners have wanted to relocate downtown LA to the ocean for decades, yet this has yet to occur. Downtown LA still cannot bring the major hotels to its downtown, such as a Mandarin Oriental, like what you find in Chicago, Boston, several other cities. The recently built downtown LA combo tower of JW Marriott with Ritz Carlton residencies was given a 25 year tax break to induce it to downtown. Downtown LA has no significant shopping corridor, again, because major retailers do not perceive it as a positive market situation, despite there being a quarter million millionaires in Greater Los Angeles. Coastal Southern California is extremely dynamic, yet until about 3 or 4 years ago, about 2 million Angelinos, including myself, left town during every major holiday, because cities such as San Francisco are so refined and have such an amazing restaurant scene that to stay here meant to torture ones self for no reason. Its been just a couple years that LA has a handful of major nightclubs that would be able to compete in Vegas. I say this because Angelino's basically were working in LA and enjoying ourselves elsewhere, until the recent transformation of the dining scene here. The LAX Airport had sunk to such a low level that Asian air carriers said they would over overfly Los Angeles and land in Vegas or San Francisco if LA did not build an international air terminal that was at the standard the rest of the first world was operating at in international cities. So only when threatened with the loss of a huge tourist base did LA step up and commence construction of that airport upgrade.
If you go to San Diego and check out the Gas Lamp District, you'll see one of the most spectacular urban rescue/historic preservation districts on earth. Two decades ago the Gas Lamp district and the adjacent areas were completely derelict. Thousands of homeless persons lived in the area, and it was also dangerous place to visit. Somehow a group of developers, architects, urban planners, land and property owners came together, and with one unified push, transformed the entire Gas Lamp District into one of the most exciting entertainment districts in America. Every building on every street in the area has been brought back to life. It almost seems surreal when you're there. Multiple high end hotels have opened. Nearby the San Diego Padres baseball stadium area transformed the most down trodden part of downtown San Diego. Even with that the planned high end shopping corridor has not come into being.
This might be because of what is happening in Las Vegas, which has become the luxury shopping mecca of the Western United States. There is now such an exclusive selection of ultimate shopping in Vegas that even the wealthy NYC shopper flies out regularly to Vegas because of their being the only place in America to be able to buy world's most desirable goods.
The Las Vegas Strip as we know also added a layer of superior dining experiences to its roster of delights, which then attracted LA and NYC restaurants [[the former of which had never seen tabs at the Vegas level of spending). The Strip then decided to not generate new business, but take business from another part of the United States - from High Point, North Carolina, specifically, and its 200 year old furniture industry. Vegas planned a 12 million square foot design district corridor, featuring eight 1.5 million square foot buildings, side by side, to be built one by one as Vegas boldly and nakedly stripped away the furniture industry from High Point, after collapsing the furniture industry in San Francisco [[where its furniture mart closed) and causing the rest of the country's furniture industry, including LA, to wonder if they would all be working in Vegas one day. So in this instance instead of their being another country taking away business by producing a better commodity, Vegas used its new levels of shopping and entertainment to lure the major furniture conventions to its new World Furniture Mart.