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Voyeur-god vs. the Spatial Practitioner: Transcending Public
Space/Creating Public Space
The majority of
America's important skatespots are the products of redevelopment. And it
appears as though the firm with the most spots to its name is SOM (often
in partnership with William Wurster), a firm to which Le Corbusier
himself served as consultant. This list includes the Alcoa Building's
plaza; the Daley Center and the Sears Tower in Chicago; the Chase
Manhattan Plaza in New York; the Columbus, Ohio City Hall; and—through
their redevelopment plans—Justin Herman Plaza. SOM's most prominent principal, Nathaniel Owings, felt that
"Cities are the measure of our ability to be civilized" (1969,
142); and that the measure of a city, was its public space. This, he
argued in his book, The Spaces In Between, is "the ultimate
purpose of planning" (1973, 173). Owings was suspicious of the car
and the suburbs because they atomized people, eroding the public sphere
that he so wanted to foster. But the sincerity of his desire to improve
the ground-level space of the city was matched only by the
irreconcilability of his removal from that space.
To get a sense of
this removal, one can flip through Owings's beautifully illustrated book,
The American Aesthetic. About half of the two hundred or so images
are unpeopled aerial photos of cities, while the other half are sweeping
aerial photos of nature. This visual absence of street life is surprising
at first, given that Owings's writing displays an almost activist
commitment to urban public space. But this incongruent agglomeration—an
abstract bird's eye city perspective meets street-level social justice
meets pristine nature—is the very heart of Owings's philosophy.
In Spaces,
Owings describes how while walking the paths around his Big Sur cliff
house, Wild Bird, an epiphany shows him that "the high soaring, wide
view of the hawk gives clear judgment, with high perspective, on the
Earth and on the Being and on the Everything-Else-But-Me" (1973,
275). Owings believed, with Gnostic zeal, that it was this hawk's view
that would help him to combat the evils of the mechanized city (1973,
276). For de Certeau this perspective of the "voyeur-god"
(1984, 93)—looking down on the Earth and on the Being and on the
Everything-Else-But-Me—is a theoretical "fiction" which allows
the architect to remain "aloof"; it is a "lust to be a
viewpoint and nothing more" (1984, 92). The "condition of
possibility" of this "solar eye" perspective, "is an
oblivion and a misunderstanding of . . . the murky and intertwining daily
behaviors" (1984, 93) that de Certeau believed were the true
architecture of the city. The difference in perspectives here is between
the city as an uninhabited network of rational symmetries and the city as
a nearly illegible intermingling of the daily practices of people's daily
lives.
Owings's literally
'top-down' approach did cause him to misunderstand urbanites' daily
lives. After his hawk's view epiphany, he returned to San Francisco only
to learn that "an Afro-haired youth" had "emerged from the
gloom of the Mission District into the sunlight of Market Street, a
street which marks the edge of the business district," and
"sprayed bullets indiscriminately" (1973, 278). Shaken by the
story of this young man, Owings resolved that he "would try to help
the others of his kind to live within a tolerable habitat . . . and I
returned to the sanctuary of Wild Bird" (1973, 278). There he
pondered "calyptte anna" (humming bird) and a yucca plant, and
another epiphany showed him that he had to introduce the openness of
nature into the supposedly stifling density of the city (1973, 278). One
would hope that Owings would have responded to the shocking story of the
young black man from the "gloom of the Mission," by actually
going into the Mission and spending time on its streets. ("Must one
finally fall back into the dark space where crowds move back and
forth?" [de Certeau 1984, 92]). Instead he went to the sanctuary of
Wild Bird to ponder nature and fantasize about what the city should look
like from the perspective of God.
From this remote
height, Owings could not perceive the contradiction between his desire to
improve the environment of the urban dispossessed and his desire to
"bring suburban ease to downtown" (1969, 129). From the cliffs
of Big Sur, Owings was too far away to see that his humanism was radically
incompatible with his anti-urban belief that slums were "festering
sores" (1973, 117). Had he spent time in people's neighborhoods, perhaps
he would have argued that "the high rates of mortality and disease
among slum populations stem not only from contagion, poor medical
services and malnutrition but also from a kind of body despair. People do
take on the quality of their surroundings" (1969, 123). This
specious, degeneration theory-inspired logic seems to suggest that it
wouldn't make too much difference if these populations were provided
urgently needed and long denied social services. The obvious conclusion
is "that there are no wise solutions short of tearing it all down
and starting over" (1969, 99). From the cloistered perspective of
the voyeur God, Owings could not see that this program was anathema to
his most deeply held belief that "What we do must be done out of
love, not fear" (1973, 286).
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Keith
Hufnagel photographed by Gabe Morford. © Morford.
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Owings ends his
introduction to Spaces by declaring that
nonarchitecture—open spaces—will be the objective,
and the buildings will simply frame them. We can use the oldest of all
forms, yet one which is considered new today: we can reintroduce into our
crowded cities the open space—the plaza—where man can dance, celebrate,
and experience the joy of living in the spaces in between (1973, x).
It is not clear how
he intended to encourage this celebration of life by providing such
barren spaces, but he turned out to be successful in spite of himself, as
the above photo will attest.
This is another of
SOM's gifts to skateboarding: the AP Gianini Plaza at the Bank of America
building in downtown San Francisco. It is an enormously unpopular
corporate space, famous among urbanists for its disregard for sunlight
and for being generally inhospitable; the 1971 Urban Design Plan for San
Francisco uses the plaza as cautionary example (p 88). In keeping with
Owings's Gnostic, aerial perspective, the Japanese artist Masayuki
Nagare's massive black sculpture on the north end of the plaza is named
"Transcendence." But from the street level perspective, the
perspective of people's everyday lives, this sculpture is didactic and
pretentious; San Franciscans have always disdainfully referred to it as
the "Banker's Heart." Skaters see nothing so high-minded as
'transcendence' in this object; instead they see an opportunity to
celebrate the messy vitality of the street, a chance to reaffirm the
chaotic daily life that this object seeks to transcend. This space as a
whole instructs its users to briefly observe this sculpture commemorating
the rejection of street life, and move along. Like Situationist graffiti,
skating in such a space amounts to "'words of refusal or forbidden
gestures'" (Raoul Vaneigem quoted in Saddler 1998, 97).
The above photo of
Keith Hufnagel, taken by Gabe Morford, is one of the culture's best-known
images, and served to popularize the Banker's Heart as a spot. But when
Ken Kay gave the plaza a makeover in 1996, he obstructed the approach to
the sculpture with what he called a Japanese Garden—intended to
"thwart skateboarders" (Leccese November 1998, 80). Once again
the Banker's Heart was condemned to be almost universally unappreciated
by the public. In justifying the makeover, Kay stated that the plaza had
been "one of the most hostile urban spaces" in the city,
"a catalog of the design mistakes of the 60s" (Adams December
3, 1997). And no one argued with him. But in making the space less hostile, he has limited the
scope of its use. The design mistake that he has rectified is not
that of excluding the public at large, it is that of inadvertently
letting the wrong people in. Kay even ran architectural design workshops
titled "Banish the Boarders," advertised in the commerce-intensive
Downtown Idea Exchange (January 15, 1998; 4).
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Ken Kay’s
new Giannini Plaza, still one of the most hostile spaces in the city.
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Like many of SOM's
spaces, Giannini Plaza failed because no one wanted to be there—least of
all the white, educated office workers whom the design longed to lure
back from the suburbs. And urban critics have been unforgiving, lavishing
such spaces with descriptions like paranoid, cruel, wasteland, bunker,
citadel, fortress. But how to appeal to the office workers,
conventioneers, tourists, and potential business tenants without
simultaneously appealing to the undesirables? And how to deter the
protestors, restless young people, drunks, and underemployed without
simultaneously deterring the brown baggers?
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