Fast, Cheap and Out of Control (without architects), or: Why Infrastructure Won't Save Us
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Transcript of Fast, Cheap and Out of Control (without architects), or: Why Infrastructure Won't Save Us
Where nothing is what it seems and everything makes perfect sense.
is research through observation: structures, installations, natural land-
forms, urban growth, and manipulated landforms constructed in the great
blank slate of the Southwest desert. A place where time stretches from
Planck’s constant—used to record the chain reactions that produce an
Atomic detonation—to Robert Smithson brushing up against the infinite
on the Great Salt Flats, all of which is tested and implemented under the
powerful spell of the Western landscape—a strange entity mixed in with
notions of nation and empire, bravery and myth, history and fiction.
The result of a six-week exploration in the form of a road trip lies before
you in an ambling, somewhat desultory first-hand narration of a nomadic
journey across the desert’s offensively vast spaces. Situated between the
region’s fragmented vignettes of activity, I attempt to resolve the disparate
nature of the desert’s strange, isolated events into a coherent narrative.
Hopefully.
Fast, Cheap, and Out-of-Control
(as I later found out), and hid a friendly smile underneath a well-manicured Pancho
Villa mustache. His name was Carlos, and I took his waving as a sign I could resist the
urge to hop into my car and quickly drive the 30 miles back to El Paso. I walked over
and, after brief introductions, we started talking about life in the Colonias —the unin-
corporated improvised settlements clutching to the eastern edge of the El Paso city
limits—specifically this one, named Dairyland after the nearby dairy farm.
I asked the obvious: “Don’t you find it difficult to live without running water?”
“No,” he responded. “You can get used to anything. But it’d be nice for my kids.”
He was short, born in Mexico
structures, abandoned plaster and tin. This is what affordable housing looks like in El
Paso County. Priced out of the middle class housing developments that are impos-
sible to tell apart and forever encroaching further out into the desert and up into the
Franklin Mountains, the Colonias—individually-erected and jury-rigged—perch atop
artificial plateaus. The homes themselves are fast, quickly assembled out of a mix of
cheap and readily-available materials. But to their owners, Colonias homes are the only
attainable slice of the American Dream that the region’s largely migrant population
can hope to afford.
The 2000 census put El Paso’s population at 563,000. A U.S. Department of Defense
study from July 2009 projects the county’s 2012 population to balloon to 994,000.
Some seem to welcome the implied reputability that a seven figure population affords.
“I can’t wait for us to hit 1 million. I think it will give us the respect we deserve,” native
El Pasoan Claudia Solis said. “I just hope we are ready for all the new people. I don’t
want us to be in trouble.” But the “trouble” that is bound to overwhelm El Paso’s
infrastructure can already be found in the Colonias.
Aging trailers, crumbling masonry
Water to the El Paso/Juárez region is supplied by two sources: the Hueco Bolson and
the Rio Grande River. Both sources are shared by both parties in a theoretically equal
partnership that overlooks issues of hyper-security and segregation between the sister
cities in order to coexist in a symbiotic, interdependent relationship. With unprec-
edented border growth though, the Hueco Bolson is predicted to dry up by 2020,
leading El Paso’s recent efforts to bring water in from the Antelope Valley 80 miles
to the east.
People in Dairyland get their water from only one place: a man with a truck comes by
every month and fills up their various containers with gray water. Adjacent to nearly
every home are industrial black cylinders with thousand-gallon capacity that store
water. They frequently fill with algae, require constant cleaning, and are inefficient in
a cost-per-dollar equation.
Drinking water is another issue, and has to be brought in almost daily from Horizon
City. It’s a tedious and often frustrating situation. But like Carlos said, you can get used
to anything. And it’s part of the inherent contradiction of the Colonias. He weighed
his options.
Home ownership outweighed the drawbacks.
Which brings us back to water.
Incongruous with the Desert Landscape but is Actually Perfect.
The VLA has to exist here. Sure, the satellites —which are constantly in motion, swing-
ing and traveling this way and that to ensure the clearest solar signals—necessitate
the flat, high landscape of the Plains of San Augustin. And, of course, the numerous
mountain ranges encircling the plains block terrestrial radio signals from interfering
with such delicate equipment.
The unlikely combination of radio astronomy and an otherwise untouched landscape
calls to mind Buzz Aldrin’s visual correlation between the high desert and the “mag-
nificent desolation” of the lunar landscape. But, not surprisingly, Cormac McCarthy
provides the strongest portrait of the landscape: “Below them in the paling light smol-
dered the plains of San Augustin stretching away to the northeast, the earth floating
off in a long curve silent under looms of smoke from the underground coal deposits
burning there a thousands years. The horses picked their way along the rim with care
and the riders cast varied glances out upon that ancient and naked land.”
Or: Weird Shit That In Theory Should Seem
This is how Walter De Maria intended The Lightning Field to be experienced. When you
go to The Lightning Field, you have plenty of time to think about The Lightning Field,
not only because the field certainly provokes and warrants rumination, but because 24
uninterrupted hours at the site are one of many conditions of admittance.
Equally important to the facts of the work (that is, 400 polished stainless poles mea-
suring 2 inches in diameter, plotted on a rectangular grid array measuring one mile
east-west, and one kilometer and six meters north-south, and arranged by height so as
to mimic the subtly rippling elevation and thus create a perfectly flat imaginary plane
at the tip of said poles) is the manner in which The Lightning Field must be viewed.
The Dia Foundation, per De Maria’s wishes, accepts up to six people at the site in
any 24-hour period just six months out of the year. That makes a maximum of 1,104
people per season. Following that logic, over its thirty year history, up to 33,000 people
have seen The Lightning Field. By way of comparison, every day 10,000 people walk
under the Sistine Chapel daily; which can’t even touch the 25,000 people who each day
make the trek to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina.
“Isolation is the essence of land art.”
by which one must abide in order to view The Lightning Field has been accused of
crossing the threshold into authoritarianism. Perhaps De Maria is too overconfident in
his work to demand such a pilgrimage from its admirers. This immense exertion for a
single piece of artwork leads one to expect a certain level of payoff and, some would
argue, thereby in itself, influences and unduly affects any objective response to the
work. It’s like a giant arrow pointing at “Art” with a capital “A” saying “you will have a
glorious response here!”
This is worlds away from a subway ride to the Museum of Modern Art and 30-90 sec-
onds in front of a Monet, which quickly devolves into a broader discussion about the
optimal setting for experiencing art, and the somewhat narrower concept of what role
the museum as a repository or archive of artistic achievements plays. Land art was cer-
tainly a reaction against the confines of the museum, and De Maria saw, well, land, as the
proper enclosure for art. Be aware though, what the museum also provides is access. So
the question becomes, is this central conceit of curatorial control something of a cheat?
For example, would your experience at the Sistine Chapel have been different if you
weren’t jockeying for prime positioning among literally 8,000 Germans in short pants?
Probably. So then shouldn’t all works of art demand isolation to be appreciated?
To paraphrase the late David Foster Wallace, by their very presence, tourists spoil the
previously unspoiled place they came to see. And make no mistake—whether high
brow Dia art-traveler or flip-flop-clad Midwesterner—you are a tourist. People aren’t
always discerning and can and will consume what they can’t control. And that’s why the
harsh arithmetic of 1,100 people per year makes sense. Any more and we’d be spend-
ing a mere 30-90 seconds taking the same picture of 400 poles as the guy next to us.
We need De Maria to force us to slow down.
Such precise control over the experience
as the sky in the East began to glow. The poles were rather building to a crescendo. A
chorus of subtle hues, constantly morphing pinks, oranges, blood reds. My back was to
the sun, but the field was exploding in front of me. At this point, the poles and landscape
were working in perfect harmony, playing off of each other. Inextricably linked, every-
thing belonging, I became the interloper, the solitary, ascetic figure in a Friedrich painting,
engaged in seemingly profound thought. At 6:14 the sun crested the ridge line and, as if on
cue, the silence was shattered by screaming and chortling from coyotes inside the valley. By
6:47 the sun was high enough that the poles were again fading as they were the day before,
silently waiting for the next group of tourists.
Oh yeah, and no, there wasn’t any lightning.
They came alive again at 6:02 a.m.,
like salt deposits. Canonized as the epitome of land art, it is “the quintessential heroic
gesture in the landscape.” Time and art history texts have relegated it to the status of
masterpiece, unquestioningly titling it the iconic post-war artwork, classified as the
ultimate embrace of the Western landscape, with a direct link to the primal, prehistoric
apologue of life and death. As an art object, Spiral Jetty traffics in myth in spades.
Case in point:
About two years after it was completed, Spiral Jetty was swallowed up by the waters of
the Great Salt Lake, unwittingly creating a small cabal of people—those who had actu-
ally seen it—to fan the art world and spread its gospel. At the height of its popularity,
it no longer existed as a physical entity, but rather as an idea and media object that was
disseminated through film, photography, drawings, diagrams, and writing. Having all
but faded from memory by the late 1990s, Spiral Jetty and its creator Robert Smithson
experienced a resurgence in 2002 when the Museum of Contemporary Art and the
Whitney debuted a major Smithson retrospective that was fortuitously staged simulta-
neously with the reemergence of the jetty itself. After 30 years, it rose again out of the
lake like an Authurian legend, almost as if the waterline of the Great Salt Lake itself
was under the museums’ command.
Hyperbole crystallizes on Spiral Jetty
right now is ‘emergence,’ a topic which, although vague, I would argue is inherent to
Spiral Jetty as the concept that process is more important that the final piece, and time
produces interesting and unexpected results that are outside the reach of the creator.
The crystallization of the salt particles, the ever-shifting water levels, the dissolution of
the pure form to something a little fuzzier, the way the water gets all foamy as it laps up
against the rocks—these are all things that Smithson could have neither planned nor
predicted. Object and site move forward together as something new. Construction is
also destruction, and the built-in obsolescence of Spiral Jetty is paralleled and alluded
to in the fate of the dinosaurs. Even at its conception, the clock was ticking.
You can walk the spiral in less than five minutes. It’s smaller than you think (vaguely
disappointing). And with the recession of the water level, you can cut back across the
coils, leaving footprints in the white salt. It crackles and hums as the microscopic salt
crystals break (delightful). And absorbing the bizarre atmosphere of the place, dangling
my feet in the surprisingly warm water, the salt already crystallizing between my toes,
while pondering the peculiar evening redness of the place (exhilarating), I thought back
to Smithson’s quote that “a great artist can make art by simply casting a glance.”
A hot topic in the architectural world
to Pahrump when the roadside billboards start advertising the “legal delights” that
lie ahead. The signs have a back-of-the-newspaper-strip-club-ad aesthetic (think black
background, lots of fonts, prominent use of the letter “x”) complete with stock photo
image of a sultry (lazy-eyed), pouty-lipped (sleepy) blonde with a generic nom-de-sex
like Mandy. But the town itself, located 50 miles east of Las Vegas, carries an air of
self-referential irony.
Pahrump bills itself as “The New Old West,” and seems to be shooting for something
along the lines of a kitschy Wild West saloon re-enactment, complete with swinging
doors populated by straight-from-central-casting whisky-swiggin’ cowboys and sweet-
natured high-kicking gals. It’s all rendered in an innocuous, Disneyfied version of the
actual West, never mind the fact that, you know, actual sex is happening out back and
the less said about mandatory HIV testing, condom distribution, bombed-out trailer
homes, and wage disputes, the better.
The myth of the West is played out in the realities of this best little desert town where
casinos outnumber schools, the number of brothels and street lights are equal (two),
muscle cars have replaced horses, and everyone goes about life with a half-concealed
smile because they are in on the joke. Reminding you that southern hospitality is alive
and well is a sign dripping with innuendos thanking you one last time as you ride out
into the sunset. That Michael Jackson lived and home-schooled his kids in Pahrump is
one of the least interesting things about it.
You know you are getting close
Double NegativeMormon Mesa, Nevada
was the description given by the waitress at Overton’s Sugars Home Plate Restaurant
and Sports Memorabilia fine dining establishment in response to my query as to whether
she knew the way to Double Negative. I received the distinct impression that the folks
of Overton had either never been out to Double Negative, and/or didn’t hold it in very
high regard. Instead, the two other patrons enjoying an afternoon meal at SHPRandSM
suggested I look at the “tank that is parked in front of the old post office” or the “house
that looks like a castle” as being more interesting (both of which I did indeed end up
seeing but I must admit I still found Double Negative to be far superior).
The dirt road out of the nearby town of Overton, Nevada, is monotonously flat, until
you reach the edge of an embankment where the road shoots up, a sight that when
viewed through the front windshield of a four-cylinder Grand Am seems impossibly
steep with dirt that is treacherously loose. Atop the Mormon Mesa one finds Double
Negative, where Michael Heizer removed 244,800 tons of sandstone and rhyolite from
the mesa’s edge to create two trenches facing each other on opposite sides of the cliff.
The channels are around 50 feet deep and 30 feet wide, as well as approximately 750
feet and 325 feet in length, respectively. The Museum of Contemporary Art describes
the work as a 1500 x 50 x 30 foot “sculpture”. (Aside: how can something this remote
and this huge, be considered part of a Los Angeles museum’s collection? Is that anti-
thetical to the staunchly anti-gallery ethos espoused by some land art practitioners?)
Geologists measure the processes that formed the Mormon Mesa in epochal time
scales, formed by the twin processes of weathering and erosion. The same geological
history can be observed in a smaller, vastly accelerated scale as the once-crisp, man-
made edges of Michael Heizer’s Double Negative deteriorate. The 1969 artwork is like
a tiny artificial blip in the geological history as the incontrovertible mass of the desert
moves back in to reclaim the void which was removed.
“That old cut out on the mesa”
what is most interesting about Double Negative is the power of the void—a place
where a slit in the desert can hold and command your eye in the panoramic expanse
of the desert. This is also singular in being the first place on my trip where something
wasn’t sticking out of the desert scrub, but rather bringing the sky down into the
earth. Think about the Twin Towers (or even the Petronas Towers): what really made
them powerful was the slot of void between them and the way the blue sky captured
between them felt different from the blue sky around it. It held the void the same way
the two trenches hold space. It’s so powerful you can almost hear the light moving
between the embrace.
That Heizer is letting Double Negative deteriorate and erode to the point where
original intent is hidden allows it to become a further enigmatic, more primitive part
of the landscape. The disintegration of the boundaries allows the softer indentation
to achieve a greater continuity of experience from inside the event to outside—for
example, from landscape to art. It becomes a compound object, something language
doesn’t necessarily give us the luxury to “know” well enough to describe, and opens
the possibility of allowing the object to “just be.”
Unable to stand still, I had no choice but to run through them—even while panting in
the brutal 110-degree August heat.
At least from an architectural standpoint,
has to be one of the most malleable concepts in our history. Wrapped up in fear
and guilt, modern-day renditions have been everything from exterminable threat, to
endangered noble savage, to hippie-like ecological warrior. Never mind that none of
these precepts are at all accurate, but at least the active placement of Indian culture
somewhere in the annals of American thought is preferable to their current status as
an invisible afterthought. Walking around on a ranger-led tour of the abandoned cliff-
dwellings at Mesa Verde, I latched on to two big takeaways. First: architecturally and
tectonically Mesa Verde is beautiful, Cliff Palace especially. And second: A palpable
sense of unreality distances the visitor from having any meaningful connection to the
people who lived there.
The Park Service museum isn’t much help. The ’70s-era dioramas of Indian life in
the museum were rendered pretty ridiculous by their blatant attempts to Westernize
13th-century Pueblo life. (Barbecues around the kiva and playing fetch with the dog?
For shame.) But in the end, it’s all speculation. The last Pueblo cliff-dwellers who left
around 1400 weren’t big on keeping any type of written historical record. Their only
references to Mesa Verde are proclamations that it was simply time to leave, which, to
an archeologist, must be frustratingly inadequate. To the Pueblo, however, time is the
answer. Time is like the seasons. Not Western linear time – where this event happened
at this time which in turn caused this proceeding thing to happen—but a circular, con-
tinual infinity. So, conceivably, Mesa Verde could be inhabited again.
I wish I could imagine that. But as the steady stream of buses unloaded another batch
of brightly-colored tourists, nothing could have seemed farther from reality.
The popular perception of the American Indian
Mount Christo Rey
El Paso, Texas
of the economic health of El Paso is found in the number of stores tucked into the Sun-
land Park Mall that deal in only one type of good (clothing) that, storewide, all ring up for
the same price (a price less than a student-discounted movie ticket in New York City); as
it stands that number is at least three. Think dollar stores. There’s the store where every
clothing item is $8.80 (but not $8.88!), the store that only sells Mexican-flavored cowboy
hats for $7 (where the arcade used to be), and the store that is basically Puff ’s $12 Zoo
but now has a different, less-cool name. Most of the national chains left the uniquely
predetermined claustrophobia that defines the enclosed-mall for the cheap, ample and
available land around the desert that was waiting for strip malls.
A better indicator of the economic health of this border town is found in census data
which shows that the city’s poverty rate tops 27 percent, and the median income hov-
ers significantly below the national average of $48,000 at around $35,600. El Paso’s
population is also over three-quarters Hispanic, while a quarter of the population is
foreign-born.
If you’re a fan of talk radio, or are familiar with the rancorous fulminations over the
very existence of legal and illegal immigration —part of that broader, more general
right wing fear of the “other”—it must come as a surprise that El Paso is one of
the safest cities in the country, not to mention the happiest. El Paso is the third saf-
est urban center (after Honolulu and New York) with only 18 murders in 2007 in a
city over 700,000, and was recently ranked by Men’s Health magazine as the second
“happiest” place in America. The title of number one happiest place in the country
went to Laredo, Texas, another border town north of the river. That El Paso is safely
ensconced in an embrace of jocularity across a shallow river from blood-soaked Juárez
is another indicator that, in spite of seemingly contradictory evidence, the border pro-
vides a delicate alternate model for economic growth, one that is beset by constant
danger by overblown concerns of national security and ever-higher barriers.
A pretty good indicator
When former Juárez mayor Gustavo Elizando stated that the only way “the cities in this
region can make it, is to forget that a line and a river exist here,” he was referring to an
economic co-dependence. El Paso and Juárez have generated a series of overlapping
economic and functional circulation realities between the cities that circumvent the tradi-
tional gatekeeper role of boundaries. Culture, family, and a never ending supply of labor
pass back and forth in an asymmetrical relationship of twin cities—one twin richer, the
other bigger—that leads to a mutual beneficence. However, there is a constant danger
that the pass will be choked off, the doors will close, and the cities will drift.
By 2050, racial and ethnic minorities in the U.S. will outnumber non-Hispanic whites;
one out of every four will be Hispanic. With population growth comes greater political
influence. El Paso provides a handicapped preview of what the future will look like in
political and cultural reality. One that is, and was, avoidable in the post-2001 rush to
close the borders. A premonition of the mutual benefit to be had in monetary well-
being that comes from accepting that culture, economics, and politics are entwined,
and nurturing the open, cross-pollination of people and ideas—that the lowering of
the wall—can allow everyone along the border to thrive.
That belief is losing. The wall is winning.
The wall is winning.
Two neighbors are meeting at the terminus of their properties and inspecting a dam-
aged rock wall that divides their lots in Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall.” The narrator
is playful, almost goading, and pushing the neighbor into articulating the necessity of
rebuilding the wall. These are the last five lines of the poem:
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well.
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.”
Immigration had become a national security priority. Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez grow
at an annual rate of 6.3 percent and 5.3 percent, respectively. Most of this growth is
attributed to immigration from within Latin America. It is estimated that over 33 percent
of the cities’ populations originated from outside the state of Chihuahua. Of those that
emigrate from Tijuana and Juárez, 95 percent go north to the United States. This has cre-
ated a nomadic class of people, with aspirations for a better life elsewhere. The Mexican
side of the fence is less a home, and more of a strategy for escape, which in turn creates
an American side “under siege.” So the U.S. builds increasingly higher walls.
The difficulty of justifying the walls’ existence does not preclude actual construction.
And a sign emphasizing the can in Mexican only becomes all the more inane when its
citizens add their own message: “No creo en el libre.” I don’t believe in freedom.
“No creo en el libre.”
Tijuana is easy. You don’t have to look very hard to find it. As soon as you walk over
the border you’re in the thick of it, a dust-encrusted Candyland where you can buy a
churro, pharmaceuticals, a miniature guitar, sit on a droopy-faced donkey painted to
look like a zebra, all while being serenaded by a group of hungry-looking mariachis-
for-hire in loud pants. (Literally—there are bells clipped to their outer seams.)
Lest you be lulled into complacency, New Tijuana, on the other hand, is a different
story. It’s everywhere to the east, in the pale masses of washed-out shantytowns and
factory housing. It is where there are estimated to be over one million people living,
comprising almost half the total population of Tijuana in a parallel zone primarily
occupied by factory workers, migrants, and laborers. In Tijuana 95 percent of the city’s
homes have a solid floor; in New Tijuana that number is closer to 25 percent. New
Tijuana is where nearly 80 percent of people lack running water and an operational
sewage system, but where simultaneously the unemployment rate is less than 1 per-
cent. It has been supposed that there are more jobs than available workers. The lack
of an adequate workforce provides opportunities for immigrants from all over South
America. Those people need housing. New Tijuana expands by five acres each day.
New Tijuana is the future.
They build 20,000 houses a year in New Tijuana, constructed from whatever mix of
available building materials and cast-off detritus that can be recycled and reconfigured
into something that vaguely resembles inhabitable space. Here, the only demand is that it
have a roof (and even that seems somewhat negotiable), and without regard for anything
so outmoded as building codes or permits, they build wherever and everywhere they
want, armed with only the most provisional of land ownership titles. The surplus piles
of tires become walls and fences; discarded vinyl advertisements become weatherproof
roofing; palettes, cinder block and plywood are mixed at will. In Tijuana, squatting is
considered an inalienable right. Architecture can’t compete with that. It’s too slow, too
dependent on ego and sponsorship. Tijuana is fast, self-determinate, and horizontal.
There is Tijuana and there is New Tijuana.
next to an open sewage canal is wearing a Kobe Bryant Lakers jersey and blasting
the Black Eyed Peas on a Panasonic boom box that was probably manufactured less
than a mile away. You can’t help thinking about all the other boom boxes that were
exported north, and all the people who then bought those same boom boxes, and the
relief and comfort all those people felt at seeing the same everyday low prices they’ve
grown accustomed to, and would probably angrily demand be provided back to them
if somehow the torrential flood of cheap goods were suddenly cut off.
Anybody can see that manufacturing a crate of boom boxes for $15 makes more sense
than shelling out $90 for a unionized, benefits-hogging American worker to do the
same. The twin cities of the border have always engaged in an exploitative economic
embrace. But when confronted with the overwhelming realization that this situation
is so inevitable, so completely entrenched and self-perpetuating, just bemoaning the
North’s entitled status seems too passive. Anger typically arises from the sight of the
slums, the Lakers jerseys, the Ford trucks, and the maquiladora housing all impossibly
coexisting, and the urgent thought that can’t be resisted: somehow, this is all our fault.
That the future is fast and cheap is unavoidable; that speed and ingenuity will supplant
history and the starchitect; that the amorphous and accidental will trump the defined and
planned has to all be taken as a given. In the end, we have to stop worrying and learn to
love the best of Tijuana-ization while overcoming the worst. In a world where the existing
urban environment is a prisoner of sorts to its own aging infrastructure, Tijuana’s notions
of quickly composing and re-composing urban space in response to future events seems
increasingly relevant. And the radical reimagining of the role of the architect, something
rooted in modesty and a sincere desire for change in keeping with the possibilities afforded
by technological advancements and popular participation, has to continue to provide new
possibilities for a profession that suffers from a dearth of bold ideas.
That kid walking down the street
out of Phoenix along I-17 is less than promising. With the rise in elevation, you leave the
saguaros behind for a harder, rockier soil in a landscape of low desert scrub brush that
has none of the varied beauty found in the hybrid desert-forest area further north around
Sedona and Red Rock. The turn off to Corder Junction is another picture of desolation:
a washboard dirt road that passes a gas station, a sagging, clapboard house flying the Con-
federate flag, an abandoned Airstream, and then, finally, a six-foot-diameter circular metal
sign leaning against a cattle guard: “Welcome to Arcosanti: An Urban Laboratory.”
Conceived in 1970 by Italian émigré and brief Frank-Lloyd-Wright-trainee Paolo Soleri,
Arcosanti was a future vision of a heroic, hyper-dense, monumental city that would shel-
ter 5,000 people in a harmonious coexistence of architecture and ecology; also serving as
a reactionary alternative to the ubiquity of the sprawling suburbs that were beginning to
crop up at the time—and, it should also be said, an alternative to Wright’s own Broadacre
City plans. Each year, 50,000 people make the drive to Arcosanti to visit the future.
What you’ll find at the end of the dirt road is a seemingly random assortment of
concrete structures sited along the edge of a gentle canyon that, taken together, have
an almost mirage-like quality as seen in the waning evening light. The structures them-
selves are amazing, with balconies overlooking the canyon edge, a fascinating painted
apse, soaring vaults above semi-circular amphitheaters, and multiple levels of stacked
living cubes throughout. Each building is well-designed according to passive solar prin-
ciples, which, coupled with ample shaded public spaces, makes for an incredible place
to spend the day. Concrete pathways and stairwells weave through the disconnected
structures, and along with the simple landscape, start to connect the fragmented struc-
tures in a hierarchical sequence.
The tour guides at Arcosanti will tell you that “50,000 people a year come here, look
at it, say, ‘Wow, isn’t that interesting?’ and then drive away, because it requires a total
abandonment of what everyone has taken to be a given.” But how successful is the
vision produced by Arcosanti?
The view driving north
but this begs the question (especially in lieu of situations like Tijuana) that when one bil-
lion people live in slum-like conditions that are parasitically conjoined with existing urban
centers, does going off the grid to live in a state of self-exile in the previously unoccupied
desert seem like a viable option to combat the global housing crisis? While Arcosanti seeks
to engage the entire world, the vision comes off as less of a solution to sprawl and more
of a segregated defensive fortification. Reyner Banham called this desert fantasy “pure
creative will exercised against a defenseless landscape.”
But the Arcosanti alternative is, after all, still just a hypothetical. Funding problems, lack
of government support, and labor shortages have left the utopia approximately 4 percent
complete after nearly 40 years. A city designed to accommodate 6,000 people, has com-
pleted facilities for about 70. Wonky steps, cracked concrete, and a wheelbarrow lazily and
inexplicably swinging from a construction crane reveal a community built by semi-skilled
labor that seems to be in a losing battle with the desert.
And while Arcosanti positions itself as a social utopia, it is also an architecture of techno-
utopia, a place where advances in science and technology allow a hypothetical citizenry
to exist in an ideal state where scarcity and suffering become anachronisms. That may
partially explain why the construction at Arcosanti happens in fits and starts—they’re
advancing toward a future vision that is already anachronistic. There’s been some debate
within the community, but the cult of Paolo (it’s always “Paolo”—never Soleri) holds
sway, and instead of evolving organically, as you’d envision a city would grow, they’re
still building toward his singular 1970 vision. The whole place becomes more of a living
museum with a tenuous connection to the flower children of the ’70s, the liberal arts
drop-outs, the turned-on desert commune dwellers, and the middle class revolutionar-
ies. It’s still here, and you can detect the faint traces of hard-core believers in the air, still
fighting the good fight.
Sprawl is an easy target,
Titan II Missile MuseumTucson, Arizona
buried beneath the desert hardpan, lies the most impressive of museums. The Titan II
Missile Museum, the only ICBM missile silo open to the public, takes tour groups, led
by former U.S. Air Force crew members, into the underground structures and explore
the facility comprising of the launch control center, the missile silo, and the blast lock
portal. Here, you pass through the 3-ton, 12-inch-thick blast doors that lead to 110 feet
of riveted steel and technological precision —a nuclear-tipped missile created with the
means to end not just war, but all existence, the world itself, at the push of a button.
But it is there that that missile remains peacefully cradled in the silo. The launch orders
were never received. The missile never needed to fly. Peace through deterrence.
That oft-spoken mantra —peace through deterrence—occurs with such frequency through-
out the retro introductory video and the subsequent guided-tour, that one gets the
distinct impression that the intonation references not just the geopolitical stalemate
condition that was mistakenly labeled as “peace,” but also some kind of internal medi-
tative state that allowed crew to function. No doubt a certain imperturbable compo-
sure is required for the type of person that volunteers for a job that requires a no-
questions-asked-yessir approach to a command to destroy not just a far-off city but,
most likely, civilization itself. I asked our tour guide, Chuck, whose wry sense of humor
and friendly composure gave the impression of an utterly reasonable human-being, if
he had undergone any especially rigorous psychological exams, or maybe if he even
had to undergo any false-positive drills in order to test his mettle and ensure unflinch-
ing compliance if the launch codes ever arrived. He responded that they were soldiers,
drilled to take orders. No extenuating psychological tests were necessary because the
overall “peace through deterrence”-ness of the mission guaranteed a clear conscious.
Granted, I didn’t grow up with the duck and cover films, the under-the-desk school
drills, or the stockpiling of supplies in my backyard bomb shelter, so I feel so far
removed from the general insanity of mutual assured destruction that the chasm of
time renders the whole situation even more unreal and makes me feel even more skep-
tical than some of the older patrons on our Titan Missile Tour. But as futile as it
probably is to try to find logic in strategic defense planning when nuclear weapons
come into play, the whole “peace through deterrence” thing he’s clinging to screams
of inconsistencies.
Twenty miles south of Tucson,
if the Soviets (or Chinese) launched a first strike, our deterrent capabilities were unsuc-
cessful, and any second strike would simply be retaliatory, launched out of spite. The
whole strategic defense mechanism was built around game theory—that a rational
opponent wouldn’t call an ever-escalating series of bluffs. It gets interesting because
deterrence doesn’t really require that anything actually functionally work —the missiles
could just be a feint. But it’s the perception, the illusion that becomes the truly fright-
ening reality that the other side believes we’re crazy enough to throw down with World
War III if the shit came down to it. That’s what makes “peace through deterrence” so
reassuring. Not because of its paradoxical ridiculousness as a viable Cold War nuclear
strategy (well, I guess it worked), but because it acknowledges that there is an inher-
ent consciousness in our nation’s psyche. We needed it and this guy who worked the
three-day shifts down in the silo needed it because, otherwise, we’d have to confront
the reality that the whole thing is a deranged facade. Or, as the nuclear engineer states
at the beginning of the Titan introductory film, “This is what it took to wage a nuclear
war. And this is what it took to wage nuclear peace.”
But none of that matters as we reach the climax to the Titan II Missile Museum
tour, the moment we’ve all been waiting for. The Mock Launch. Chuck asks for a
volunteer. A young kid, born after 1989, jumps up and hops into the commander’s
chair. An alarm sounds as Chuck, standing to the side, reads and validates the launch
code orders. Target 2 is selected. Chuck holds his key and the kid does the same. On
his mark, turn. Now the kid, sitting at the launch console, his hand on the key, waits
for Chuck to give him the signal to synchronously turn his key. Suddenly he seems to
feel it. There’s a hesitation in his movements, no longer the eager volunteer, uncer-
tain if this is really what he wants to do. Chuck gives the signal, the kid limply turns
his key. The button is pushed. The lights in the kiva-like command center change to
red. A piercing air-raid siren starts up. “Ready to launch” becomes “launch enabled.”
The missile batteries engage, liquid oxygen floods the missile chamber and activates
the launching mechanisms, “lift-off ” goes green, and 58 seconds after order received,
the missile is in the air. Thirty-five minutes after that, target strike. We’ll meet again
someday. No one breathes, a certain calmness washes over the group. Peace through
deterrence, peace through deterrence….
Simply put,
is where the nuclear era really began. Specifically here at the White Sands Missile Range
(WSMR), the country’s largest military installation. This is the ultimate war games
playground. Again, like the Titan II Missile Museum or the National Atomic Museum,
what was once classified as top-secret becomes a proudly public presentation, that is
not so much a museum, but rather stands as a monument to the ingenuity and abilities
of American scientists and engineers to construct the best missiles and send the great-
est payloads over the longest ranges.
The security checkpoint to get onto the base only serves to heighten the otherworldly
feel of the place. Almost welcoming, the base’s guards certainly don’t seem to deter
the steady stream of laughing families from arriving at the “park” to gleefully pose
for pictures in front of some of the more dramatic missiles. The sight of this crowd
walking along these pathways, stopping in front of Fat Man and Lance (by far, the
most popular photos ops) as if they were the Space Needle or the Mona Lisa would be
heartbreaking if it weren’t also hilarious. The eeriness and utter insanity that lurks in
the background of all these real-life sites is like an ironic ode to the facade of normality
that we all go through, living our lives in the shadow of not only these missiles but a
world that unquestioningly accepts their existence.
The missile park is a museum in the sense that the military is showing their past work,
but hinting at the greatness still to come. If you’ve seen a video of an invisible, air-
borne Advanced Tactical Laser burning through the hood of a car and disabling the
engine block, this is where it was filmed. Few can dispute that tactical laser weapons
are, well, pretty cool, but I only mourn that new killing instruments appear outside the
perception of the human eye, leaving future generations to walk through the WSMR
and miss the tangible quality of standing in the shadow of an Athena missile, touching
the metal and steel rivets, admiring the proportions of the radially arrayed fins. Then
again, maybe future progeny will be just as happy without the instruments of war so
proudly glistening in the desert sun.
New Mexico, the Land of Enchantment,
desert with the explosive force of 20 kilotons of TNT. Ground zero was 40 miles west
of Socorro but the 7.5-mile high mushroom cloud was still seen and felt over 150 miles
away in El Paso. It was the first successful nuclear detonation. Robert Oppenheimer
witnessed this at the South 10000-Shelter (10,000 yards south of Zero, that is). And,
after viewing the fireball he was led to famously state: “Now I am become death, the
destroyer of worlds.”
For good reason the quote became iconic. Taken from the Hindu Scripture, the Bhaga-
vad-Gita, Oppenheimer imbued the words with something mysterious, with some
pretty damn ominous overtones that also obliquely hinted at his own uncertainty at
his role as “the father of the atomic bomb.” Doubts which would of course lead to
charges of communism, public humiliation, and his security clearance being stripped
at the hands of McCarthyism in 1954. But on that morning in 1945, Trinity was a suc-
cess, and Oppenheimer had reason to feel self-congratulatory. The atmosphere didn’t
ignite, the oceans didn’t boil, and the fabric of space-time remained untorn. Sure, one
could argue that something nearly equally catastrophic was loosed upon the world that
morning, and it’s certainly clear that Oppenheimer understood that. But it’s a good
quote, and always makes for a strong point.
What’s less known, but no less interesting, is what he said the night before, as he stood
on one of the wooden observation towers, in the fading light of the New Mexico
evening, preparing for the climax of three years of relentless work. He surveyed the
Oscuras Mountains along the horizon and spoke the following to himself: “Funny how
the mountains always inspire our work.” He said this to no one in particular, almost
offhandedly, slightly above a whisper, but it was overheard and recorded by a nearby
metallurgist. Scientific discovery is an artistic act of creation where what is imagined in
the minds of men is made real. Coming from the creator of one of the most sublime
spectacles that few have ever seen, one that leveled cities and changed the course of
history, this is both incredible and terrifying.
Fire flashed in the pre-dawn New Mexico
to Marfa, when you see amongst the desert scrub, derelict oil derricks, and lonesome
cows, a squat, free-standing Prada store along the highway. An entirely unwelcome,
un-Texan site along one of the greatest, most hauntingly empty drives in the country,
the window display of this Italian couture outpost is stocked with bejeweled leather
handbags and four-inch peep toes. But this isn’t Prada. Rather it is a 2005 art installa-
tion, a wink-wink one-line joke that is trying to say something about the current state
of Marfa as a nexus of art and commerce. You see, art came to Marfa, and the Pradas
weren’t far behind.
The best story ever told about Marfa was written by Molly Ivins. Like all tall tales, it
hints at a deeper truth. As the oil-soaked West Texas towns were drying up in the reces-
sion of the early 1980s, poverty and unemployment were threatening the existence of
a region built on the outdated, newly-modernized, and moved-away twin pillars of
ranching and oiling. That is, except for Marfa. Thanks to a transplanted New Yorker,
the minimalist sculptor Donald Judd, Marfa had a back-up revenue stream—minimal-
ist art, and lots of it—that had begun luring a steady flow of nascent tourist dollars
into the town. Word spread through the region that people from miles around, all over
the country even, were showing up in Marfa with open wallets. And some of these
new visitors were sticking around, fixing up old buildings, maybe even adding a coffee
shop here and there. Before you knew it, Marfa wasn’t an old dying town, but a thriving
one. As Ivins tells it, West Texans all over were intrigued by these foreign visitors and
wanted more of them, and a familiar sight began to occur at town meetings: “some old
rancher is apt to stand up—big old rough hands curlin’ up the brim of his cowboy hat
with embarrassment over having to speak in public, of course—and inquire earnestly,
‘How do we get them gay people to come?’”
Now, some 25 years later, the proverbial other shoe has dropped with a resounding
thud. For practical purposes, everyone knows what gentrification is. But in Marfa, it
is far more complicated than what’s happening on the Lower East Side and in the
downtowns of Your City, USA.
You know you’re getting close
An original adobe structure is typically seen as difficult to maintain due to the poor
state of wiring, lighting, and eroded material efficiency. Most Marfa residents are much
happier in a balloon framed, wood-siding house, if not a simple prefab trailer, and
see the decaying adobe as a blighted nuisance. But, of course, to an outsider, adobe
is authenticity personified, a rarity and something to be prized. No one wants to tell
their friends in San Francisco that they own a clapboard house in Marfa. In the West
of the imagination, adobe is king, and homes that were appraised at $40,000 are selling
for upwards of $300,000. Priced out are the 36 percent of county residents who live
below the poverty line, which has led to low-wage workers commuting long distances
to Marfa, a town whose population hovers around 2,000.
It was inevitable that this juxtaposition of Marfa over time would lead to unavoid-
able and overly sentimental questions of the proper means by which to achieve civic
renewal. The neighborhood cafés, feed stores, and groceries that have been supplanted
by coffee shops, art galleries, wine bars, and organic co-ops are a manifestation of the
notion that locality begins with social life. And social life is run by the artist class.
This class, made up of vacationing residents, lifestyle tourists, and MFA interns, is a
group whose closest attempt at civic engagement came when they banded together to
stop a planned big box development that would be within eyesight of the Chinati Art-
ist Foundation. Never mind that this big box was an attractive, affordable residential
and commercial development that may have provided housing for some of that same
36 percent. In the case of Marfa, gentrification leads to an anti-development stance that
keeps the town in a perpetual state of acceptable rusticity, producing new neighborhoods
equally as shallow and homogenous as blighted one. It’s a tough equilibrium that has to
be maintained to prevent the town from slipping into the anywhereness from which
Marfa’s many monied residents are so desperately running. So many monied elites, in
fact, that one local cattle rancher succinctly described the current state of Marfa as “fill-
ing up with triple A’s—artists, assholes and attorneys.” This finally leads to the ostensible
focus of Marfa, the one man who altered Marfa to such a widespread extent, and was
neither urban planner, architect, nor developer, but rather artist: Donald Judd.
Take the case of adobe homes.
but he made an honest effort to assimilate into the secluded ranching community he
found in Marfa when he moved from Manhattan in 1971. He always hired local work-
ers and paid a good wage. But the gulf between outsider and local was too vast, and
even Judd himself, the harbinger of the aesthetes, was unsatisfied with what he had
wrought. In a continuing, and ultimately futile quest for the frontier, he left Marfa for a
ranch further south near Terlingua, Texas, where he spent the majority of his last years.
He could never own enough land or buy enough property to attain whatever plateau
of assimilation he strived for, and the Chinati Foundation was left to manage his vast
holdings and artwork in Marfa.
Here’s the thing: it’s all about how you experience the art , especially land art. Amidst
reports of 20th century museum-goers who had wept in front of paintings, art
historian James Etkins set out to objectively classify a number of factors that would
induce an optimal setting to produce “strong encounters with works of art.” Among
them are seemingly obvious admonitions: go alone, don’t try to see everything, take
your time, minimize distractions; as well as more vague concepts: be faithful, do your
own thinking.
The Chinati Foundation disregards all of these guidelines. Firstly, being part of a large
group is a prerequisite for touring the grounds. Perhaps there are instances in which
moving through a museum as part of a group of strangers is a good thing, but here, as
our 10 o’clock rendezvous for the day’s tours began, a woman and her two young chil-
dren’s inquiry as to “how long this is going to take” set the tone. Those optimal “strong
encounters” instead make way for harried herding and disapproving looks when you
slow the group down for that second look in the Dan Flavin rooms.
By all accounts Judd was an asshole,
to start the tour with their best—Judd’s 100 untitled works in mill aluminum (1982-1986).
The boxes have a certain refinement and elegance about them that is impossible to deny.
But it is the boxes’ mere beauty that, to me, denied them true power. Notions of the
sublime and picturesque were first codified in Edmund Burke’s 1756 essay in which he
set out to differentiate that which is simply beautiful as opposed to that which is truly
great or sublime. Beautiful objects are those that are “comparatively small,” “smooth and
polished,” while the sublime object should be “vast in their dimensions…rugged and
negligent,” “dark and gloomy…solid and even massive.” To put it another way, de Maria’s
Lightning Field is sublime, Judd’s boxes are merely precious.
It is standard to discuss the critic Michael Fried and his critique of minimalism’s per-
ceived theatricality when talking about Judd—specifically his aluminum boxes. In
Fried’s view, Judd’s use of such coldly industrial materials in a banal array denies the
viewer the safety of a recognizable ‘art’ object and therefore requires the physical
participation of the viewer to activate the work. Chinati would seem to be denying
this interpretation by regulating that groups tour the boxes at approximately 10:45
every morning. The summer sun in West Texas is still relatively low at that hour, and,
in rejecting the opportunity to experience the metal as it changes with the day’s light,
Chinati ignores the theatricality of the objects, instead reinforcing the notion that the
Judd boxes need neither viewer nor gallery. They need only the space—the golden
light of dawn and the harsh high noon sun are inconsequential to the reading of the
work. Again, a comparison to The Lighting Field is in order. Where de Maria required
the visitor to spend 24 hours with the work, Chinati asserts that 15 minutes in harsh,
unchanging light is sufficient, and one is left to only wonder at the brilliance that could
be seen in the golden glow of a Texas sunrise. Walking amongst the mute stainless
boxes, I was reminded of the sunrise in New Mexico, and Marfa can only pale in com-
parison to that powerful experience.
Chinati is smart enough
in the 15 large-scale concrete works scattered across a field of tall prairie grass at the
edge of the Chinati grounds. Here the viewer is free to leisurely move about (the cubes
are , inexplicably, not part of the official Chinati tour), alone in the landscape. The
cubes are varied, massive, and fighting a battle with the environment. The struggling
chutes of weeds peeking from between the joints of the slabs produce the feeling of
vulnerability and a more symbiotic relationship with the landscape. Alone on the iso-
lated West Texas plains, with only the architectural scale cubes for companionship, you
briefly forget that you’re in the middle of a small town full of people struggling to live
their lives. You suddenly have faith that art can be great. Judd said “art has a purpose
of its own,” and you can’t imagine it existing anywhere but here. And if a Wal-Mart
threatened to appear across the highway in this last untouched paradise, it would be an
abomination worth fighting against.
But Judd also said that “society is basically not interested in art,” and he was wrong.
The last 25 years in Marfa prove him wrong. Regardless of society’s interest, art is
there, driving the market. In the end, one is again reminded of another box, the box
of the Marfa Prada along the highway. Because the Judd boxes aren’t really empty, they
are selling another product for consumption. The product that is for sale within the
concrete structures or the cool, steel boxes aligned in a row like a showroom is no less
real than that which is imprisoned within the ersatz Prada store up the road. Only what
Judd is selling is less tangible, more elusive, but still real: a lifestyle imbued with authen-
ticity, good taste, and affluence. I could feel the pull, the easy choice, but ultimately it
was something I couldn’t afford.
Judd’s latent power comes to the fore
photos: ©John Locke
text: ©John Locke
editing: Jackie Caradonio
design: ©Jackie Caradonio
Fast, Cheap, and Out-of-Control