URBAN MEMORY LOSS

Mondrian

Everything before her was reduced to pattern and grid, squares and rectangles that repeated in slightly varied yet self-similar modular squares of steel and glass. The shifting proportions lent the surfaces a false difference, cloaking them in an architectural plaid that texture mapped the big, ungainly boxes with their bad bones and worse surfaces.

Skinned in reflective glass, punctuated by the verticals and horizontals that should have revealed its inner structure but which merely cloaked cinderblock, each rectangular subsection created its own mini-mathematical order. The total effect was flatness, the application of a cosmetic tartan that covered everything like urban kudzu and drew the curtain on history, the scale of the body, or the touch of the earth.

With age and mellowing these incursions might blend in and acquire a patina that would strip away the cheap newness. Or they could begin to resemble the huge decaying tracts of the global slum-cities, the nightmare of brutalism run amock, all stained concrete and dirty glass, the irridescent coating of the tinted windows worn off in patches leaving a dull and blistered blankness in its place.

Cacophany

If this street could talk it would speak in cacophony, with clashing voices—interrupting, speaking fast, loud voices drowning out normal conversation, layers of competing sound, with verbal sharp elbows—then in long periods of absolute silence. The analogue of these voices is the visual noise of clutter, loud billboards, bright neon, giant video and enviro-posters turning each surface into unintentional mediascape. Words detach themselves and float up to my eye, soliciting, arguing, cajoling. They have an instant to register, to be seen, and then replaced.

Within this semiotic wrapper, as people go about their business, the murmur of messages hums imperceptibly below the threshold of consciousness. The unconscious mind scans the competing voices, probing for meaning, tuning it out when the volume is too insistent. You can alternate between being sponge or hard surface, absorbing or reflecting the transmission. From time to time, bits of information coalesce into an image, then a field of images, then a fabric. The narrative surface vibrates like a living thing. It becomes wallpaper, but wallpaper that doesn't know its place on the wall. It is actor, not set.

The Horizontal

As I looked out of the bus window, my eye fixed on a series of following squares that shifted in size and proportion. I wasn't seeing the volume, I was skating the surface. The buildings lining either side of the avenue might have been paper thin; there was no feeling of anything beyond the corridor walls. The bus window reduced the solid volumes to a picture plane and the corridor of space became a shallow surface that paralleled my linear movement along the street. I had no sense of anything beyond the ribbon of images that unspooled as the bus headed east.

This passage reminded me of an old drawing I had seen in the window of a print shop. It was a schematic of the universe, neatly rendered as if a map of the cosmos could be made to fit on a dinner plate. Camille Flammarion's L’Atmosphère Météorologie Populaire included an image, of unknown origin that showed a medieval man sticking his head through a membrane that separated the hemisphere of sky and the heavens beyond and gawking at the workings of the universe.

That old drawing, seemingly so archaic, was really not so different from any of my mental maps—the Ptolemaic image where I am at the center of the universe and everything is seen from the perspective of a single point, the timeline in which I envision my day, the orthogonal projection or cut-away image that compresses several views into one image, or the memory map which became part of this bus ride or my daily walk down the street. It captured a primal desire: to escape from the banality of space, to peep behind the facade and see what was really there.

Framed

If the original reference point of space is the body, than the second point of reference is a doorway or window. The rectangle is an interface that frames and separates here and there. The edge creates the center by enclosing it, calls it to attention and provides the context, separating and framing. The carved, gold-leafed stucco frame on a 19th century painting asserts its value, the gothic arch of an Early Renaissance predella encloses the altarpiece images in a miniature church and the floating aluminum support of a photograph suspends the image in space, and creates a neutral floating window.

Looking up, I see the sky framed by a cubist retreat of planes, a vertiginous perspectival stepped pyramid of blocks that recede until the mass of the street attenuates into delicate towers pointing toward the sky. I shift position, and something else comes in to focus: a swatch of faded brick, the flaked painted lettering that spells out the name of the United Crankcase Machinery Company. Above, in faint gray, the almost invisible outline of a peaked roof reveals the ghosted image of a vanished factory. A sharp angle calls me back to the present, and I see myself mirrored in green glass and angular geometry, cool against the still-warm brick.

Skyscraper

“A wave of verticals. Its agitation is momentarily arrested by vision. The gigantic mass is immobilized before the eyes. It is transformed into a texturology in which extremes coincide—extremes of ambition and degradation, brutal oppositions of races and styles, contrasts between yesterday’s buildings, already transformed into trash cans, and today’s urban irruptions that block out its space” [Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life]

Like a text that reads from bottom to top, the progressively vertical elements create a narrative that attenuates and changes as it moves up or down. The old skyscrapers reserved their best whimsy for the upper floors, where far above the street, the magical details served the elite who sipped Manhattans and dove out the windows when times were bad. The lower floors often started with rustication, a roughness that spoke of stability and fixity to the dense crowds passed by. Above the crude base, the tower slowly refined in shape and scale to tight pattern that finally burst into ornament that flowered where few could see it, and was much more remarkable for that serendipity.

Tracking the vertical landscape, I noted the wedding-cake ziggurats, the decelerating floor heights, and the periodic resting at decorative bands or cornices. My eye stopped at the top of the stack, expecting a conclusion, but there was none. The old wedding cake towers were surrounded by new structures that faced outward, their rhythm mostly unchanged as the eye moved up from the base. They privileged the view from the greatrooms at their tip; they were there to look out upon, not to be looked at. The most you could expect was an iconic shape, or a little pattern as horizontals and verticals opposed each other on the way toward the sky.

Accordion

The past and present push and pull, jostling for position. At street level, overlapping messages compete, in text layered over text and image over image. The images come together in new messages, grafting unlike pieces together as if in a Surrealist exercise. then recombine before the last one can be understood. Clutter rearranges itself, swirling in the turn of a kaleidescope, foregrounding one compelling detail than another. An isolated fragment expands to fill my frame of reference, but is then ignored as something more compelling moves into the frame.

Endlessly accumulating complexity then stripping it away, we fetishize space with our relentless attention to surface. In video games, the idea of level of detail describes the polygon-saving technique of showing a rendered object in detail in close-ups and stripping the object of detail that can't be perceived in long shots. This is a process of economy in rendering, in reverse movement, you are rewarded with more information as you come closer. The large, glass modular structures that now line the avenues work in the opposite way; proximity reveals flatness, blankness and a lack of articulation. This reversal creates a space that is dominated by absence and is best observed from a distance.

Panorama

“What is an ideology without a space to which it refers, a space which it describes, whose vocabulary and links it makes use of, and whose code it embodies?” [Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space]

The photograph depicted a room that was nearly all windows, glass meeting glass at a 90° angle from floor to ceiling; outside a view of rooftops stretching to a far-off horizon. The room was both stage and observatory. From the street, with lights on, and the room full of people, the lighted box was a remote tableau with silent actors, remote and unknowable. From inside, it was a command post, and its perspective implied a mastery of the surroundings.

Stepping up to the panorama, the viewer felt omnipotent and elevated by the rarified view. At this remove, the jumble of confusion loses complexity as the density and confusion below forms itself into a mass neatly cut by deep channels of streets and avenues. The horizon was commodified as the viewer assumed ownership. The encircling view confers a feeling of ownership, and thus the horizon is commodified. The early panoramas of Chinese painting were considered so powerful that they were kept hidden from ordinary view, their subtle multiple perspective views containing awareness of space that couldn’t be glimpsed, only constructed in imagination.

Filmstrip

The interrupted striping of a moving train is seen from underneath the elevated tracks. The image stutters like the frames of an old film projector, the images flickering and interrupted not by scratches on the film, but by electrical wires and railroad ties. The slits between the tracks capture a series of images and sequences them into a movie.

I catch glimpses of filmstrips everywhere. They create an occult narrative, the stories that emerge from the fragmentary flashes are like the fleeting illusions of a zoetrope, as action comes from a rapid succession of static pictures. I see these momentary movies as I walk along a fence peering through the slits, or watch the vertical beams in a subway tunnel turn a graffitied wall into animation as the train speeds by. The power of the interval takes a static field and turns it into a story never to be repeated.

Epilogue

“A city composed of paroxysmal places in monumental reliefs. The spectator can read in it a universe that is constantly exploding. In it are inscribed the architectural figures of the coincidato oppositorum formerly drawn in miniatures and mystical textures. On this stage of concrete, steel and glass, cut out between two oceans (the Atlantic and the American) by a frigid body of water, the tallest letters in the world compose a giant rhetoric of excess in both expenditure and production.” [Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life]