Getting over the Generic City
Some initial notes towards thinking about relational aesthetics and architecture.
Over the next year, I will be posting a selection of 50 photographs of mostly single-story stucco commercial buildings along some of LA’s east-west thoroughfares: Santa Monica, Melrose, Olympic, Pico, Washington, and Adams. These photographs appear in 101 Stucco Façades, a self-published booklet that I referred to in On Blankness, my post of March 8th.
Getting over the Generic City
Repetitive, retail and commercial warehouse buildings are prototypical in LA. They form a seemingly neutral background to the flamboyant, noisier, more ersatz things that have often been associated with “Los Angeles Architecture.”
These buildings are ubiquitous in LA and yet under-valued. Like the dingbat apartment buildings that Quentin Tarantino used so frequently as interchangeable locations for his films, this is “the stuff” that LA is made of; something like the Southern Californian version of Soviet block housing.
Especially east of the 405 freeway, such structures are often located in lower-income and immigrant neighborhoods. Sometimes they are repurposed as community centers or small storefront churches. Other times they are converted for code-defying residential uses. Although the photographs included in 101 Stucco Façades are all in black and white, many of those structures are brightly hued, especially along Pico, Venice, and Washington Boulevards in LA’s Koreatown and Pico-Union areas.
Who writes LA?
The continental view of Southern California’s architecture too frequently ignores the beauty of such humbly made vernacular things and their meaning, their emotional significance, in human terms.
Reyner Banham, from London, and Rem Koolhaas, from Rotterdam, primarily used Los Angeles as a foil to attack some academic idea of what cities are supposed to be about, in some other place.
The Banham version of post-war Los Angeles was a city built almost entirely on those most un-British notions of “private gratification and self-realization.” Koolhaas preferred to fetishize LA as “no-place,” a foreshadowing of interests he later spelled out in essays like the Generic City and Junkspace.
I was once seduced by those ideas, because I was Koolhaas’ student. After I had consumed his numerous manifestos, poems, comics, charts and diagrams in the weighty, tome-like S, M, L, XL, I joined his ‘Project on the City’ graduate research program. Later as a young writer, I contributed a fair number of essays— an embarrassingly large pile of them actually— to an ever-growing body of dirty-realist, urban-grunge-porn-roman, styled after the Dutch architect’s detached deliberations on urban form.
My views have evolved.
Discomfited
As I noted earlier, these sorts of anonymous buildings formed the landscape of my childhood in Southern California. Too often though, my gaze as an architect has unthinkingly rendered buildings as “autonomous objects,” undervaluing the lives led in those spaces while avoiding the fundamental, economic reasons for their low-resolution appearance.
Recently, this realization produced a sense of unease in me, a discomfort situated in an emerging understanding: that the convenient reduction of buildings and cities to a series of blank canvases (or stage sets for aesthetic and intellectual games) is inevitably underwritten by an erasure of place, of identity, of subject-hood; a violent stifling of an ethics of difference.1
The more I meditate about my own experiences and attachments, the more I understand that terms of art like generic, banal, sameness, no-place, and predictability, especially when used academically, are pejoratives.
Other forms of Beauty
There are, undoubtedly, many human stories behind these façades worth telling— stories of struggle: migration, invisibility, impoverishment, and undocumented labor, but also stories of triumph: intergenerational mobility, collectivized action, self-determination, and yes, even that most Californian virtue, “self-realization.”
There is a form of beauty to be found in how “ordinary” buildings with specific uses can be appropriated and transformed for new, multiple uses that speak to the needs of multitudes.2 Ordinary buildings are beautiful in relation to the human connections they support and make possible. Their beauty is situated in less evident relational aesthetics. This is a form of beauty that is not a by-product of any obvious architectural feature or particular formal characteristic.3 This form of beauty develops with use and it accrues meaning over time, through repeated transformations.
Loss
There is something quixotic, hauntingly beautiful, and quite honorable in these modest storefronts. While I am hardly a preservationist, as new developments swallow these simple buildings, it is worth remembering that progress often comes with the loss of those other forms of beauty, even if what is destroyed seems, at first glance, ordinary or insignificant.
Here is the rest of the first set photographs, ordered from north to south, in no particular east-west order. They were all taken by Darin Vieira in the summer of 2009.
See Frantz Fanon, Postcolonialism, and the Ethics of Difference by Azzedine Haddour. Manchester University Press, 2019.
Multitudes or the Multitude is a political and art-critical conceptual framework based on Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt's book Empire. Negri and Hardt developed the terms to counter and replace ideas of “the people, class consciousness, or nation-states.”
Relational aesthetics is the art term for understanding how things take on meaning based on how they are used, how they sponsor human interactions and situations. The concept was developed by the French art critic Nicolas Bourriaud in the late 1990s in his book Esthétique relationnelle.
Although I have never carefully studied the architectural implications of Bourriaud’s now two-decade-old theory, some attempts have been made to locate an architectural framework that values human relationships before aesthetics, for instance, in artist Rirkrit Tiravanija’s “anti-object” installations.
The French duo of Lacaton and Vassal, who won the Pritzker prize for “prioritizing the enrichment of human life,” might be considered architectural practitioners of Relational aesthetics. They designed the adaptive re-use of the Palais du Tokyo in Paris, founded by Bourriaud and Jérôme Sans.