Through June and the start of July, I undertook some travel made possible by the Byera Hadley Traveling Scholarship awarded by the NSW Architects Registration Board. We travelled through parts of the USA, Europe and Egypt looking at monolithic landscape and architecture. The following series of posts will summarise the trip in some fashion.
We leave Los Angeles by road.
Previously we drove to San Diego to visit the Salk. On our first full day in California, a negotiation with the freeway south is a sound introduction to the state’s primary infrastructure. We are told by the (admittedly incompetent) hire car rep, that we have set out at the right time, and that we should make our appointment in San Diego in time and surprisingly, the roads run smoothly. Returning to Los Angeles that evening, a friday before the Memorial Day long weekend, we witness the full force of LA’s legendary traffic facing us, in the other direction, a city loosening its trousers, relieving itself onto the coastline.
In between, we visit the Salk Institute. It is as expected, incredibly tight. Not a wasted move. It grows more compact and dense with memory, the weight of its laboratories intensified by the famously photogenic courtyard between. Anti wishes we bought our roller blades. I wish we owned roller blades. The courtyard pulls the Pacific Ocean (which is in fact some distance away) into the building while a hang-glider drifts across the horizon. The tour of the institute taken by local architect (and fantastically named) Scott Magic, includes a walk through the service spaces between the laboratories. A space that we are told has bought mechanical engineers to epiphanic tears. Although I wonder if, given the same space in every building, mechanical engineering as a profession would lose its one endearing challenge — the science and art of packing more and more into less and less.
Thank god for GPS. It renders Los Angeles accessible, and aids the outsider in amongst other things tracking down the local comic book stores. The search for a comic book store yields results. Looking for a comic book shop to satisfy the serialists urge, I read about Secret Headquarters, a funnybook store in a building that once served as a meeting point for undercover agents or somesuch. If you are that way inclined, I can recommend Secret Headquarters highly, if only for the revelation that a comic book shop does not need to pretend to be a toy store. There are no toys on the wall, no A Nightmare Before Christmas branded Monopoly boardgames stacked in a corner. Just comic books, all the standards and a good collection of local independent publications, on timber shelves. A good amount of time was spent trawling through their stock and I found a few trades of Stray Bullets that I had been looking for (I know that these things may be found easily on ebay and most likely amazon, but the game is partly in the hunt, and the online shortcut holds no thrill) so I left happy.
Happily, in the immediate surrounds of Secret Headquarters sat a collection of shops and restaurants where we were treated to amazing gelato at Pazzo and a brilliant fresh buffet style dinner at Forage and perused a bunch of great stores selling locally designed and manufactured clothing and goods. Later we are told, via Twitter, that we were in Silverlake, west of West Hollywood.
With this evidence we form a theory that comic book stores form governing points for interesting districts globally. It is a theory that is soon disproven elsewhere on the trip, with evidence quickly mounting that the comic book store is generally located in the slightly depressed areas of a city’s downtown. So much for that.
We leave Los Angeles a few days later making our way to Texas through Arizona and New Mexico. Again, we are leaving at the right time, the masses returning from Las Vegas after their long weekend.
We make three quick stops on this leg. Two worthwhile, one horrifying.
Stop one – Diamond Bay High School by Morphosis. This project has long been a favourite of mine and while it is difficult to know its success as a school being as it is a public holiday and empty save for a few maintenance staff, it does make a complex and intriguing enclosed public space. The classrooms are arranged off a central open courtyard spine which is bounded by a folding corrugated iron form. Cuts in the folding form focus out onto the expansive landscape below and beyond and give access into the classrooms. It seems a relatively inexpensive job given its formal complexity, but the detailing is straightforward and with the bulk of the budget appears to have been been directed at the courtyard space with the classrooms and administrative spaces left fairly low key.
Four stars.
Stop Two – In’n’Out Burger. My goodness, this is perfect fast food. For a start it is not that fast—meals are made to order—but then it also not that slow. A simple menu condenses the fast food experience to its essence; chips, burgers and soda. And cooks them well. The internet has invented some kind of east coast west coast battle between In’n’out Burger (California only) and Shake Shack (New York). I could care less, and won’t take sides, but will say that both are very good.
4.5 Stars
Stop Three – Some Discount Warehouse on the Side of the Highway. Wiped from memory.
0 Stars
Then to Las Vegas, which disappoints. A certain tackiness was expected of course, but the tackiness in vegas is not casino-sleaze (ironic, good) but rather mall-sleaze; Vegas is essentially an outdoor shopping mall for adults. Fittingly, Daniel Libeskind has a building there, nearly complete which is an actual shopping mall, without any pretense of having a casino attached. It seems suitable endpoint for this brand of architecture.
Central to the disappointment of Vegas is its antipathy to walking. Civic walkability may be an absurd request to make of a place like Vegas, but it seems that if this city has anything to offer, it is an implementation of the American promenade. After all, everyone is drunk here and in no state to drive. And it excels as a continuous strip of visual spectacle ready for an ambling consumption, but you cannot simply walk down the strip from casino to casino – at every intersection pedestrians are forced up escalators, across bridges, and back down an escalator on the other side of the road. But then perhaps this elevator-fest is the American promenade realised as a mechanised appreciation of the primacy of the motorcar.
We are here to see the Luxor Pyramid, located at the forgotten end of the strip away now from the intensity of Ceasars Palace and the Belaggio, and the first monolith on the road trip.
Vegas’ casinos and hotels are intensely interior—with their surveillance protocols and suicide proofed guest rooms—and have a porous engagement with the strip; one enters these buildings through tunnels, on monorails, on pedestrian bridges, through restaurants. Only cars drop people at the front entrance. And while this crab-trap interiority is an invenitable byproduct of the building type, all make some pretense of civility with their immediate environment, through lightshows, restaurants, rollercoasters, music tracking fountains spectaculars, and sinking pirate ships. The Luxor makes no such attempt. It is blunt in its overture to passersby, the extreme confidence of its formal gesture seen as enough to draw you in, tax you with its games. I don’t think you are meant to walk to it, access is certainly simpler by car or monorail, and once inside, the interior is vast and gloomy and where the rest of Vegas has moved on to Westfield as a model of interior organisation, the Luxor is remains resolutely Portmanesque.
As a facsimile of the pyramids of Egypt, the Luxor Pyramid has the distinction of being a more pure pyramid than the original with regards to form. At Giza, weathering, neglect and looting has stripped the structure of its polished stone surface, revealing the tectonic of its construction as a giant pile of blocks. At Las Vegas, the designers of the Luxor Pyramid have chosen to represent the pyramid as it was in antiquity as opposed to how it sits now, and so it is seamless and pure (save for service buildings and entry portico attached abruptly where required). The glazed facade is impressively mute up close, it is difficult to grasp this featureless surface receding into the sky.
The next day is the longest day of driving on the trip, with twelve hours on the road from Las Vegas to Monument Valley. It is here, that I understand the impact of Starbucks; deep in the Arizona desert (not sure if it is technically a desert, but it is certainly empty) between Las Vegas and the border of Utah, you can find an serviceable espresso coffee. I find this remarkable as America has only a short history with espresso coffee (a good explanation of why here) previously favouring filter coffee, an (insipid) alternative.
Monument Valley approached slowly in the last few hours of the drive, the earth turning red, the mountains slowly splitting into smaller and smaller clumps until they eventually stand proud in the valley, and we find ourselves in a western.
The next day is spent driving through the valley on a dusty, rocky road; the kind of road you reserve for driving hire cars on.
Monument Valley is pre-packaged for cinemascope. I have always liked Fritz Lang’s quip in Contempt that “the only thing Cinemascope is good for is filming funerals and snakes.” Horizontality and linearity are driving parameters in the Western—landscape and caravan.
Where, say, Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photographs of the horizon draw our attention away from the horizon focussing instead on the variations in the sky and ocean, Monument Valley focusses our attention on the meeting of sky and land, like a zipper’s teeth.
Back at the hotel, they project John Wayne films on the walls at night.
Moving on, we make stop near Page to view Upper Antelope Canyon. The canyon is only accessible on a guided tour, and as a result of the canyon’s extreme good lucks, the tour guides have all become de-facto photography experts. They point out the best angles, shoo people out of frame, yell at people taking photos of areas with hotspots and advise on light metering.
It reaches a point of sublime absurdity with the guides stopping the groups while they run ahead, hide behind a corner and throw sand into the air, so that everyone can capture that magic ray of sunlight in the clouds of sand.
Flagstaff is a great town. No need to resort to Starbucks here, Macy’s European Coffee House surpasses.
On the way out of Arizona through Winslow, we drive via the Painted Desert and Petrified Forest National Park. The USA is like that. The landscape condensed to a series of intensely different experiences within hours of each other. Another point in case, between Flagstaff and Winslow is the unambiguously named “Meteor Crater“, the “best preserved metoeor crater in the world” and the result of an impact roughly 50,000 years ago.
Our next stop is Quemado, New Mexico where we are following directions to meet at the white two story building on the main street, from where are picked up and driven out into the New Mexico wilderness to view Walter de Maria’s 1977 artwork the Lightning Field, a grid of four hundred stainless steel poles one mile wide by one kilometre deep, and roughly six metres tall.
We are not sure what to expect and initially, there is an element of the emperor’s new clothes to the artwork insomuch that it can actually be very difficult to see. In some light the poles disappear completely, only to slightly emerge as a series of vertical scratches on the landscape.
Within the field it is an endless space, the parameters of which are difficult to determine. Walking through the field I kept attempting to walk to another pole, to get a better view, only to find that the view from here is exactly the same as the view from there; a dreamlike sensation where you never make progress, never arrive at your destination. The artwork is impenetrable in this way, no matter how far you walk you get no closer.
Just before sunset, with the sun low in the sky, it is as though a switch has been thrown and the work lights up, supercharged, an intergalactic sentinel transmitting its message back home.
Viewing the artwork requires an overnight stay on the property in a picturesque log cabin straight out of a storybook. We were lucky to find very good company with the three other guests visiting with us and even luckier to find delicious mexican on the boil and a set of poker chips in the kitchen drawer; essential components all in viewing large scale installation art.
After being picked up the next morning we stop for some very good green chilli burgers and curly fries at Largo’s in Quemado, under the watchful gaze of head of bison and head of elk. I had expected food to be terrible in America, and some of it was, but most of it was very very good. The burgers in particular shone greasily—as mentioned before, In’n’Out in LA, Largo here, and Shake Shack in New York all proved that there is a very wide gap between these offerings and their fast-food chain cousins.
The final stop on the road is Marfa in the far west of Texas.
On the outskirts of town is the Prada, Marfa installation by Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, a mock Prada store. It is cute, but would be far more compelling were it a functioning Prada store practicing high end luxury commerce alone on the highway in the desert.
In 1971 Donald Judd moved from New York to Marfa set up shop and began purchasing property in which to house his and his contemporaries large scale installation artworks.
Today the town’s major art sites are handled by the Chinati Foundation, which Judd set in place and curated, and the Judd Foundation which manages his personal estate.
The Chinati Foundation is based in the old army Fort D.A Russell site and is the location of Judd’s Aluminium Boxes, Concrete Boxes and other works, as well as works by Richard Long, Dan Flavin, Carl Andre and Roni Horn among others. A satellite site in the centre of the town houses works by John Chamberlain.
The extreme serialisation of the 100 untitled works in mill aluminium is mesmerising. Box after box of razor sharp geometry each a variation on the other into the distance. The polished faces of those along the edge of the space melt into the desert beyond. There is an unsettling sensation that you are walking through a future kitchen showroom, where the elements of cookery have been honed to a culinary perfection.
The Dan Flavin installation, one work consisting of six lighting installations in six u-shaped buildings, is exhaustingly pop. Each room provides a respite from the 40 degree heat of saturated coloured light. Fluorescent tubes of complimentary and contrasting colours placed back to back throw intense washes of light
In the field sit Judd’s 15 Untitled Works in Concrete, again insane serialism, but this time in concrete. The rectangular boxes must have at least two walls, a roof and a floor; the works explore these parameters, making rooms, quasi buildings, compositions and follies.
In town, Judd’s estate, managed by the Judd Foundation, includes his home, library, pool, chicken coop, collection of ‘firsts’ and his bagpipes. The library is exhaustive making clear the depth of the artist’s reading and the thinking present in his minimalist work. Part of the library is categorised by country. I locate the shelf housing his books on Australia and adjacent sits the book (yes, singular) on New Zealand.
Also of note are the monastic furniture, gridular chicken coops and veggie patches and Judd’s Jeep—kitted out by his metal workers with a series of stainless steel compartments integrated into the interior.
Two other institutions make Marfa a wonderful end to our road trip: The Thunderbird Motel and Food Shark.
The Thunderbird Motel is a refurbished motel, typical of the type, U-shaped around a parking lot and pool (on our way out of town, we meet the son of the builder of the original Thunderbird, now running the mechanic workshop next door). The new owners have left much of it as it was, choosing to update the furniture and furnishings carefully while leaving the rest of the place bare. A new screen of steel rods gives each room privacy and the pool fence is wrapped in a thorny windbreak. It is a clever revitalisation of what is a widespread and somewhat neglected typology.
The Food Shark is a stainless steel bus that pulls up in the town market place every lunch time and serves excellent, fresh food for a couple of hours until it drives away for the day. The shady undercover market is kitted out with Judd’s outdoor furniture and the day we arrive is taco day, which has the locals excited (with good reason). It is here too, that I discover why Mexican Coke Cola like Australian Coke, tastes so much better than Coke in the States: in the US they use high fructose corn syrup instead of sugar. Important Facts, yes.
From here drove back to el Paso and flew to New York and from there on to a bunch of other cities, and that is for a future post.
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