placespace

Tanzania - welcome to the tourism board

Masai Boma #1, Tanzania

Little touched by tourists.  Traditional houses made of cow dung and (obviously) whatever can else can be found along the way.  Women are the 'constructors' here.

Cue tourism bureau: people come to Tanzania on safari and want to see 'the locals', especially the famous Masai, so they spruced the place up a bit.  Turns out, despite what the young, English language trained guide will tell you from his 'script' (he was lovely, by the way, and doing the best for his community) very few Masai likely live in this model village (as in sleep here).  They work here showing and selling 'Masai culture' to tourists. 

Paradise, USA

In Travel and Leisure this month Karrie Jacobs proves once again-- far more elegantly than I've ever read before-- that "New Urbanism" is absolutely confounding. I remember one particularly heated argument about Celebration, back in 1997, just as the town opened-- an argument I would have won if I knew this, even if it was obvious!:

Everyone I meet along the way tells me the same story: Disney actually has less and less to do with Celebration. In 2003 the majority on the Celebration Residential Owners’ Association shifted from representatives of the Disney-owned Celebration Company to the home- owners. According to the locals, Celebration—à la Pinocchio—is on its way to becoming a real town. On the other hand, in early 2004, Disney sold the entire business district to a company called Lexin Capital. The fact that downtown Celebration can be sold in its entirety—18 acres, 16 shops, six restaurants, some office space, and a number of apartments—explains a lot about why it doesn’t feel real.

Make sure to read through to the part about the "Third Place Pub & Grille." (link)

photo of downtown Celebration by Martha Camarillo for Travel & Leisure

You Are Here

The most basic premise of this blog is that we're writing about places in the non-place of the web; its most basic conceit is that doing that somehow makes the web less of a non-place and more of a place. Because we're human. (After all.)

I don't know what Plazes does to all that, but I definitely like it. Can we all do it? I think it'll work to have a little individual map for each of us down the right side of the page. Here's how to do it: register, track your location, then click on "share location" and "integrate your map in your blog." Set the size to 200 x 200, choose your colors, then email me the html that shows up in the box. (I don't think you can get into the "typelist" with your "guest author" privileges. The one catch is that I think everyone's map will say "I AM AT..." -- but then it's all about collective identity, right?

Waking Buildings

One of the more obscure aspects of my underexplored irish heritage that I have often appreciated is the ability to use the verb form of the noun "wake," as in, if Pearson's Terminal 2 to have its own wake, we are waking it -- reminding it to remain with us, alive, awake, until its final hour of departure? I'm not quite sure how that mythology works; not many of us sit through the vigil of soon to be departed buildings (although several did do so for this week's implosion of the Coliseum in my current home town). In any case, in contrast to the excited ease with which we celebrate the production of new lovely or wonderful spaces (such as Pearson's Terminal 1), it does seem suitable to celebrate the attachments we form even to airworld spaces we attempt to rush through, tend to be irritated by, or fail to notice.

I've always been fascinated by the deconstruction of buildings anyways, and am (somewhat skeptically) impressed by the prospect of recycling something like an airport terminal (or the coliseum). The massive destruction involved in dismantling steel beam and concrete structures presents a modern sublime, the kind of maudlin reflections over which (overlaid by the wailing as the concrete bits fly into your eyes) are just the thing to pass the time while waking.

And the requisite "time I had with" story: on my first visit, Terminal 2 hosted just the sort of bureaucratic helpfulness that became so endearing about Toronto: the Air Canada check-in desk attendant barked that I would JUST make it if I RAN. (I was late because the TTC was running an hour behind.) So I RAN across the whole terminal, a feat of athletic prowess highlighted by the technological magic created when "sticky rubber" soles meet industrial carpet. (Imagine instant meld of plastics, inertia of would-be passenger.) Breathless, with rather rugburned knees, I arrive at my gate to discover -- that the plane hasn't landed, that it's unlikely to make it back to Boston tonight, and, that, no, I may not have a band-aid because I interrupted the gate attendant while he was *speaking* to another gate attendant.

I missed the family party this afternoon ("Employees of Air Canada have already paid their respects after holding a goodbye party for the terminal"), but I'll raise my whiskey from the Coliseum rubble.

Temporary Immunity

Last week was a great week because I finally, nearly, was able to stop being sheepish about obsessing over Apple: the rest of the world was obsessing too. Momus takes it another step (and nearly sounds like Jameson, no?): 

I'm a very modern person. I don't have any affiliations to traditional religion, and I don't really feel any national loyalties. I was born in the U.K., but I've lived in cities like London, New York, Paris, Tokyo and Berlin. It's become clear that if I do have a religion, it's a humanist one -- a profound reverence for human creativity, for example. And if I do have something like a consistent homeland, it might as well be the Mac OS. Because wherever I am physically, that's where I spend most of my time. So you'll see why, for someone like me, an Apple keynote speech is much more than a new product announcement. It's a sermon, a series of miracles and a rousing patriotic oration about the homeland.

Green Urbanity

My story about the green Toronto offices of HOK-- one of the largest architecture firms in the world-- is up on the Metropolis site. The Torontonians in the group will enjoy it, but I'm more excited about the fact that the concept of what makes interior design 'green' was extended to the urbanity of the office, not just its fixtures-- particularly given the fact the project was chosen as part of the International Interior Design Association's/ Metropolis Smart Environments Awards program. Here's the urban analysis:

The location is at Toronto’s hipster heart, near both the boutique-lined stretches of the King West neighborhood and the clubs of the Entertainment District. “I hate to call it gentrification because it’s still got a nice edge to it,” Stratford, who lives in the suburbs, explains a bit sheepishly. Two streetcar lines intersect outside the door—worth a single LEED point, one of 36 toward a Gold rating for commercial interiors—and the regional commuter rail is within walking distance. A recent office survey shows that 82 percent of the employees who live in the city said they either take public transit, walk, or bicycle to work; 67 percent of employees living in the suburbs use public transit. Bike parking and showers are available in the building—earning another LEED point. As in many design firms, a sense of urbanity is embedded in HOK’s culture; with this space the firm was able to embody the feeling in its office. “We’re thinking about the community of people who work in our studio and how we can design a great space for them, but we’re also in a location that really feels like a part of the broader community we live in,” Stratford says.

Photo for Metropolis by Christopher Wahl. And make sure to check out the infographic on the office's commuting patterns.

LANDSCAPE OF IDEAS: MODIFYING AND SHAPING NATURE

Announcing the opening of a Landscape Exhibition at McGill University's McLennan Library

LANDSCAPE OF IDEAS: MODIFYING AND SHAPING NATURE

Featuring selections from the rare and special collections of the Blackader-Lauterman Art + Architecture Library, including items housed in the John Bland Canadian Architecture Collection.

McLennan Library Lobby (3459 McTavish Street, Montréal)

10 January--30 March 2007

Placeblogging

Well, apparently this whole place blog business is now a Thing. Or, so says Toronto's Globe and Mail newspaper.
Download Globe_placeblogging.pdf

Catalogues, not the holiday kind

I've been reading Nicole Krauss's novel The History of Love, which has made me want to re-read Italo Calvino's dream Invisible Cities, which only primed me for the one-two of these articles-- about Russian airports and boring towns in the Maritimes-- both owing something to the master. 

First, Calvino:

Diomira: The special quality of this city for the man who arrives there on a September evening, when the days are growing shorter and the multicolored lamps are lighted all at once at the doors of the food stalls and from a terrace a woman's voice cries ooh!, is that he feels envy toward those who now believe they have once before lived an evening identical to this and who think they were happy, that time. 

Then Edward Riche writing in The Walrus:

Cranstock cannot even assert that it is the most boring town in New Brunswick, a title held for many, many, many years (too many to bother counting) by Addleby, the historical museum of which displays a copy of the 1968 phone book, the last year a separate edition was issued for the county. Frestover, Nova Scotia, situated at the mouth of the turbid, sluggish, and meandering Western River, on the featureless Northern Shore, was long considered one of the most uninteresting places in all of Canada, let alone the Atlantic provinces, until, in 2001, a fair-sized sinkhole appeared near the municipal boundary and a hobby farmer nearby acquired a llama.

Finally, an apparently un-bylined article in The Economist

Irkutsk: Five hours ahead of Moscow, in eastern Siberia, Irkutsk is the nearest city to Lake Baikal, the world's largest body of fresh water—water so clear that it induces vertigo in many of its visitors. The drive to the lake leads through vast forests, past the roadside shamanistic altars of the indigenous Buryats, under an enormous Siberian sky. In the 19th century Irkutsk was home to many of the so-called Decembrists, and the wives who followed them into exile after their 1825 revolt against the tsar: men and events that might have changed Russia's history, and the world's. Alexander Kolchak, a diehard White commander, was shot in Irkutsk in 1920; his body was thrown into the icy Angara river.

Planes descend into the city's airport over identikit Soviet apartment blocks and rickety Siberian dachas. The current arrivals terminal is a hut on the apron of the tarmac. Passengers wait in the street until the baggage-handlers feel inclined to pass their bags through a hole in the hut's wall. The bags then circulate on a terrifying metal device apparently borrowed from a medieval torture chamber. The nearby departure terminal is chaos, though by ascending an obscure staircase passengers can find an interesting photographic display on “minerals of eastern Siberia”.

The hut, however, is only temporary: a new, modern terminal is being built. It will be needed if the local authorities attract all the tourists they are hoping for. Lake Baikal, the awesomely beautiful main draw, was threatened by a new oil pipeline—until Vladimir Putin ordered its route moved away from the shores of what Buryats call the “Sacred Sea”.