2011-09-19
#Preserving Modernism
I saw this video, a “love letter” to the modernist “wonders” of Toronto, the other day, and it reminded me of something I wrote this summer about the preservation of modernist buildings. It’s mostly about the preservation of Mission 66 buildings in national parks, but it reflects my thoughts on the whole issue.
Toronto1960-11 from davide tonizzo on Vimeo.
One of the aspects of the internship I’m doing that I struggle with is the concept of historic preservation. I get why you would want to to preserve Mt. Vernon or an old pioneer cabin. I don’t get why you would want to preserve a hotel built in the 1960s.
The Flamingo Lodge, Everglades National Park
Most of what was done for Mission 66 was not very good. It was a expedient and cheap way to meet post-WWII visitor demands on the park system, not some explosion of design exceptionalism and craftsmanship. I feel like the effort to preserve it is more about protecting the institutional history of the NPS than about preserving something important to American history.
It feels like the NPS has a much grander view of the time period than the general populace. They are looking at it from the inside, rather than from a point where they could accurately judge it’s true importance. Just because the NPS built something does not mean it should be kept, and just because it’s over 50 years old does not make it worthy of preservation. There are plenty of 50-year-old strip malls in America. Is anyone going to be sad if they all disappear? Move this timeline into the future. Are malls one day going to have a place on the National Register? Are we going to be preserving McDonalds? Or cheap suburban housing? We should not, and I do not want to be a part of an organization that does.
Once (or whenever) the NPS starts trying to preserve for preservation’s sake, they have lost touch. They should fight for what is worth preserving, and have the knowledge and willpower to let other things go. There should be a constant dialogue about the new vs. the old, and it should always be focused on the park visitor and their experience, not on preserving NPS institutional history.
Just because something is associated with the development of the Blue Ridge Parkway does not mean it is significant. Otherwise, how could the park evolve to meet the changing needs of the its visitors? If Bass Lake (at Moses Cone Memorial Park in Blowing Rock, NC) needs a bathroom, it should not take years to get it approved, not should it take even longer to get it built.
Society in general, and the NPS specifically, should be more focused on building things worth preserving and less focused on what they should preserve. If an opportunity exists to better serve the needs of the public and build them something worth cherishing, should that new building replace what is there? Obviously, there are places of national significance, and those places should be kept. But more often than not, I think the significance of a building should be thrust upon it. More often than not, the significance of a place should not be found in the place itself, but in the significance of the events around it - its story.
2011-09-17
#No Walkin’ in Memphis (Gardens)
So this is an outrage. Please read this story, pass it along, and contact the judge hearing the case. Here’s the email I sent him:
Judge Potter,
Though not a resident of Memphis, I have many friends that reside in the city, and I visit frequently. I am well aware of the troubles that Memphis faces, and a teacher growing a garden in his yard should not even remotely be considered a “nuisance.” Not only is he just gardening, but he is going the extra mile as a teacher to show some kids how to grow their own food.
In what universe would this ever be considered a bad thing? I would like to understand the thought process that went into charging this man. You have a city that is crime-ridden, with terrible schools, and this teacher is going the extra mile to show some kids a useful skill. You should be rewarding him and holding him up as a example, not trying to tamp him down. This is pretty unbelievable, and to charge him with a crime would be an outrage.
I hope you use this case to make a statement about what the real issues in Memphis are. Mr. Guerrero is part of the solution, not the problem.
Here’s some more info about the garden: Mr. Brown Thumb, Memphis Flyer.
2011-09-11
#Thoughts in the Presence of Fear
On this day, here’s a collection of thoughts a little different from the usual patriotic rhetoric. We’d be better off if more of us read this every 9/11.
Thoughts in the Presence of Fear, by Wendell Berry
Reposted from Orion Magazine (orionmagazine.org)
I. The time will soon come when we will not be able to remember the horrors of September 11 without remembering also the unquestioning technological and economic optimism that ended on that day.
II. This optimism rested on the proposition that we were living in a “new world order” and a “new economy” that would “grow” on and on, bringing a prosperity of which every new increment would be “unprecedented”.
III. The dominant politicians, corporate officers, and investors who believed this proposition did not acknowledge that the prosperity was limited to a tiny percent of the world’s people, and to an ever smaller number of people even in the United States; that it was founded upon the oppressive labor of poor people all over the world; and that its ecological costs increasingly threatened all life, including the lives of the supposedly prosperous.
IV. The “developed” nations had given to the “free market” the status of a god, and were sacrificing to it their farmers, farmlands, and communities, their forests, wetlands, and prairies, their ecosystems and watersheds. They had accepted universal pollution and global warming as normal costs of doing business.
V. There was, as a consequence, a growing worldwide effort on behalf of economic decentralization, economic justice, and ecological responsibility. We must recognize that the events of September 11 make this effort more necessary than ever. We citizens of the industrial countries must continue the labor of self-criticism and self-correction. We must recognize our mistakes.
VI. The paramount doctrine of the economic and technological euphoria of recent decades has been that everything depends on innovation. It was understood as desirable, and even necessary, that we should go on and on from one technological innovation to the next, which would cause the economy to “grow” and make everything better and better. This of course implied at every point a hatred of the past, of all things inherited and free. All things superseded in our progress of innovations, whatever their value might have been, were discounted as of no value at all.
VII. We did not anticipate anything like what has now happened. We did not foresee that all our sequence of innovations might be at once overridden by a greater one: the invention of a new kind of war that would turn our previous innovations against us, discovering and exploiting the debits and the dangers that we had ignored. We never considered the possibility that we might be trapped in the webwork of communication and transport that was supposed to make us free.
VIII. Nor did we foresee that the weaponry and the war science that we marketed and taught to the world would become available, not just to recognized national governments, which possess so uncannily the power to legitimate large-scale violence, but also to “rogue nations”, dissident or fanatical groups and individuals - whose violence, though never worse than that of nations, is judged by the nations to be illegitimate.
IX. We had accepted uncritically the belief that technology is only good; that it cannot serve evil as well as good; that it cannot serve our enemies as well as ourselves; that it cannot be used to destroy what is good, including our homelands and our lives.
X. We had accepted too the corollary belief that an economy (either as a money economy or as a life-support system) that is global in extent, technologically complex, and centralized is invulnerable to terrorism, sabotage, or war, and that it is protectable by “national defense”
XI. We now have a clear, inescapable choice that we must make. We can continue to promote a global economic system of unlimited “free trade” among corporations, held together by long and highly vulnerable lines of communication and supply, but now recognizing that such a system will have to be protected by a hugely expensive police force that will be worldwide, whether maintained by one nation or several or all, and that such a police force will be effective precisely to the extent that it oversways the freedom and privacy of the citizens of every nation.
XII. Or we can promote a decentralized world economy which would have the aim of assuring to every nation and region a local self-sufficiency in life-supporting goods. This would not eliminate international trade, but it would tend toward a trade in surpluses after local needs had been met.
XIII. One of the gravest dangers to us now, second only to further terrorist attacks against our people, is that we will attempt to go on as before with the corporate program of global “free trade”, whatever the cost in freedom and civil rights, without self-questioning or self-criticism or public debate.
XIV. This is why the substitution of rhetoric for thought, always a temptation in a national crisis, must be resisted by officials and citizens alike. It is hard for ordinary citizens to know what is actually happening in Washington in a time of such great trouble; for all we know, serious and difficult thought may be taking place there. But the talk that we are hearing from politicians, bureaucrats, and commentators has so far tended to reduce the complex problems now facing us to issues of unity, security, normality, and retaliation.
XV. National self-righteousness, like personal self-righteousness, is a mistake. It is misleading. It is a sign of weakness. Any war that we may make now against terrorism will come as a new installment in a history of war in which we have fully participated. We are not innocent of making war against civilian populations. The modern doctrine of such warfare was set forth and enacted by General William Tecumseh Sherman, who held that a civilian population could be declared guilty and rightly subjected to military punishment. We have never repudiated that doctrine.
XVI. It is a mistake also - as events since September 11 have shown - to suppose that a government can promote and participate in a global economy and at the same time act exclusively in its own interest by abrogating its international treaties and standing apart from international cooperation on moral issues.
XVII. And surely, in our country, under our Constitution, it is a fundamental error to suppose that any crisis or emergency can justify any form of political oppression. Since September 11, far too many public voices have presumed to “speak for us” in saying that Americans will gladly accept a reduction of freedom in exchange for greater “security”. Some would, maybe. But some others would accept a reduction in security (and in global trade) far more willingly than they would accept any abridgement of our Constitutional rights.
XVIII. In a time such as this, when we have been seriously and most cruelly hurt by those who hate us, and when we must consider ourselves to be gravely threatened by those same people, it is hard to speak of the ways of peace and to remember that Christ enjoined us to love our enemies, but this is no less necessary for being difficult.
XIX. Even now we dare not forget that since the attack of Pearl Harbor - to which the present attack has been often and not usefully compared - we humans have suffered an almost uninterrupted sequence of wars, none of which has brought peace or made us more peaceable.
XX. The aim and result of war necessarily is not peace but victory, and any victory won by violence necessarily justifies the violence that won it and leads to further violence. If we are serious about innovation, must we not conclude that we need something new to replace our perpetual “war to end war?”
XXI. What leads to peace is not violence but peaceableness, which is not passivity, but an alert, informed, practiced, and active state of being. We should recognize that while we have extravagantly subsidized the means of war, we have almost totally neglected the ways of peaceableness. We have, for example, several national military academies, but not one peace academy. We have ignored the teachings and the examples of Christ, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and other peaceable leaders. And here we have an inescapable duty to notice also that war is profitable, whereas the means of peaceableness, being cheap or free, make no money.
XXII. The key to peaceableness is continuous practice. It is wrong to suppose that we can exploit and impoverish the poorer countries, while arming them and instructing them in the newest means of war, and then reasonably expect them to be peaceable.
XXIII. We must not again allow public emotion or the public media to caricature our enemies. If our enemies are now to be some nations of Islam, then we should undertake to know those enemies. Our schools should begin to teach the histories, cultures, arts, and language of the Islamic nations. And our leaders should have the humility and the wisdom to ask the reasons some of those people have for hating us.
XXIV. Starting with the economies of food and farming, we should promote at home, and encourage abroad, the ideal of local self-sufficiency. We should recognize that this is the surest, the safest, and the cheapest way for the world to live. We should not countenance the loss or destruction of any local capacity to produce necessary goods
XXV. We should reconsider and renew and extend our efforts to protect the natural foundations of the human economy: soil, water, and air. We should protect every intact ecosystem and watershed that we have left, and begin restoration of those that have been damaged.
XXVI. The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before that we need to change our present concept of education. Education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries, either by job-training or by industry-subsidized research. It’s proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically, socially, and culturally responsible. This cannot be done by gathering or “accessing” what we now call “information” - which is to say facts without context and therefore without priority. A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means putting first things first.
XXVII. The first thing we must begin to teach our children (and learn ourselves) is that we cannot spend and consume endlessly. We have got to learn to save and conserve. We do need a “new economy”, but one that is founded on thrift and care, on saving and conserving, not on excess and waste. An economy based on waste is inherently and hopelessly violent, and war is its inevitable by-product. We need a peaceable economy.
