A Drawing by Lebbeus Woods, at the SFMOMA Exhibition
The SFMOMA is currently hosting a retrospective exhibition of the work of architect Lebbeus Woods, who died in New York City last year during hurricane Sandy. This was one of the best exhibitions I've ever been to. There were loads of drawings and models, imaginative, speculative, fantastical, beautiful. This exhibit is a treat for anyone fond of architecture, illustration, sci-fi, movies and set design, and the politics of public space and urban post-war reconstruction. The drawings were big and plentiful, in pencil, ink, and mostly colored pencil, with a nearly air-brush quality.
His work was a predecessor to not only architectural movements like deconstruction, parametricism and topological design, but also to the animated forms and spaces of sci-fi cinema space, from Alien to Star Wars to 12 Monkeys. There were small sketches and big elaborate presentation drawings; some hard-line-drafted and some free-hand. Any ONE of these drawings was a world in itself, and could make a student or collector perfectly happy to stare at and contemplate for a good long while.
There are some drawings on the SFMOMA's related exhibition website (HERE) and many more on Google (HERE).
He was a classic paper architect who used drawing and design as a speculative exercise, to question existing orthodoxies, to dream, to propose alternate ways of occupying the world. He was a longtime teacher at Cooper Union in NYC, and as an architect executed a dozen installations and only one built project, an art type component within a larger project in China designed by American architect Steven Holl.
This exhibit on its own is reason enough to San Francisco.
In the last decade, Google Maps, Bing, and Mapquest have
brought aerial maps to every phone and computer, democratizing what was
previously the domain of governments. Aerial maps are endlessly fascinating,
and have incredible power - illustrating how we've changed the landscape, and
influencing how we might continue to do so, as discussed so eloquently in the
essay “Aerial Representation and the Making of Landscape” in Taking Measures
Across The American Landscape by James Corner and Alex S. Maclean.
The Postal Service is catching up with Internet. They have recently issued a
series of stamps called Earthscapes, containing aerial views of the country.
The views are divided into three types: rural, agricultural, and urban. The
photographs on the stamps are composed in such a way as to balance the beauty
of an abstract color composition with the literal pictorial representation of
the various earthscape scenes. The central-pivot irrigation in the Kansas
farmland looks like a new surface pattern design from Orla Kiley. The Manhattan
skyscraper appears like an intense textile pattern. The colors and patterns are
equally stunning in each of the three
categories.
From Upper left to lower right, the stamps depict:
The Bear Glacier of the Harding Icefield in the Kenai-Fjords National Park, Alaska.
The crater of the Mt. Saint Helens, Washington.
The Grand Prismatic Spring in the Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming.
The Castle Butte in the Monument Valley, Arizona.
Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge on Maryland's Eastern Shore.
Salt/seawater evaporation ponds near San Francisco, California.
Log rafts made of harvested timber float toward a mill processor in Idaho.
Central Pivit irrigation, of Kansas farmland, "false-color" image.
A cherry orchard in Park Rapids, Michigan.
A cranberry bog in Massachusetts.
A suburban landscape in Nevada.
Towboats in Houston, Texas.
Locomotives turntable, Steamtown National Historic Site in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
An apartment complex in Manhattan, New York.
A view of Interstates 95 and 395 crossing in Miami, Florida.
A further description of each stamp, with some further
links, can be found here.
The new stamps reflect and acknowledge a growing
awareness of maps, mapping, and the contrasts of natural and developed land
patterns. They help illustrate the scope and vast scale of human intervention
across the landscape of the earth, and the very close and ongoing working
relationship we all have with the surface of the earth, whether or not our
dayjob involves tractors or computer terminals.
On a return visit to Tucson at the end of December, I was reminded that modern San Francisco was born in Tucson, as the city’s western founder, de Anza, arrived from Tucson in the southwest, rather than along California’s Mission Trail, the El Camino Real.
Arizona celebrated its centennial last year. While the state has several neat smaller cities – Tempe, Flagstaff, and Scottsdale – the two main cities establishing the sun corridor mini region are Phoenix and Tucson. Along this two-hour corridor lie zombie suburbs, empty of houses but fully platted with streets and utilities and sidewalks. Over a million permitted dwelling units lay waiting for investors and buyers along this route.
Tucson is a vast, flat gridded city, set out along the Santa Cruz River, following the American Continental Grid township guidelines, with major arterials - all wider than San Francisco’s Market Street, every half mile or mile. The city is surrounded by mountain ranges, in each direction, which are almost always within view. New construction in the city is thin and beige, with occasional shades of light brown.
Tucson is home to the University of Arizona (almost 40,000 students) and a resurging technology industry. It has a long history of military settlement and occupation, most visible in the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base. My visit was bookended by two fascinating post-military facilities, marking the public face and memory of the region’s vast military industrial complex: The Pima Air and Space Museum (PASM), and the Titan Missile Museum.
The PASM, one of the largest aviation museums in the world, is a facility filled with airplanes covering the history of aviation, mostly military planes, including the Lockheed SR-71 “Blackbird”, sleek enough to look at home in the next Star Wars movie. The planes are displayed in four vast hangars and an 80 acre outdoor yard. Fighter planes, jets bombers, helicopters, even some presidential cruisers. The themes are military might and patriotism. The staff seemed to be mostly veterans who were knowledgeable, proud, patient, and enthusiastic. The planes expressed incredible and innovative design and machinery. My favorite part of the museum was that everything in the museum is full-scale, real, tactile, touchable, and visceral. A relief from my hours spent gazing at digital screens of all sizes. And appealing as an antidote to online representations and video war games. But the PASM is a miniature facility compared to the affiliated “Boneyard”, officially the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group (AMARG). The boneyard goes on for hundreds of acres, with thousands of retired planes. The PASM is a reminder that military R and D often filters down into civilian applications.
The PASM, a visual display of our evolving might and power in the skies, could be contrasted with the Titan Missile Museum, an invisible statement of American power. The museum is one of the last physical remnants of the Titan II missile program. It is a former launch site converted to a museum. This is the last remaining facility if its kind, outlasting the fifty-something sites gathered around Tucson, Little Rock, and Wichita that have been destroyed following US/Soviet treaties in the 1980s. This is where we kept 24-hour watch on our nuclear arsenal, following a strategy of “peace through deterrence”,that "kept the Cold War from turning hot". Due to a common belief in “mutual assured destruction” (MAD), no missiles were ever fired at enemy targets. Here’s the staggering data:
Titan II Missile: 104' h x 10'd
Warhead: Nuclear bomb to destroy a 600 square mile area
Range: 6000 miles, with accuracy to within 1 mile of target
Lifespan: the silo was a one-time use facility
Except for a small museum building and some miscellaneous components, the entire facility is underground, a window-less concrete bunker meant to survive a nuclear war, but not a direct hit.
The road leading out of Tucson to the southeast, towards El Paso and Mexico, lead to Tombstone, “the town that's too tough to die!” Tombstone is now the ultimate stage set of a town, but was before a real town, an original boom town of the 1880s that had a decade-long mining boom probably comparable to San Francisco in the 1850s. It was booming with prospectors and Texas cattlemen and Chinese laborers and showgirls and lawmen. It had its own archetypal western main street, its own Chinatown, and the County seat. Yes, this town lives in the past, its own real past, and you can be part of the experience – the gunfight at the OK Corral is reenacted five times a day.
Here are some pictures, beginning with Tombstone, then the PASM and Titan Missile Museum: (Note: you can scroll through the slideshow below, on this website; or click below to see them bigger at Shutterfly.)
