document 01 street Aniket Shahane, Christopher Yost, editors Document is a new journal out of Brooklyn, NY. From its opening manifesto – Design magazines are critical agents of architecture culture. Most of the space in these maga- zzines is devoted to showcasing newly completed buildings, as depicted in professionally staged and doctored photographs. Like a celebrity on the talk-show circuit, a “hot” new building will make an appearance in all the major publications, confirm - ing current trends, and granting the architect immediate cachet. Not coincidentally, architecture remains an art form obsessed with its own photogenic capacities. The reality that immediately in- vades and compromises a completed building is of scant interest to design magazines, and plays lit- tle part in the conversations that make up architure’s broader intellectual territory. In the “field”, the designer’s expecta - tions collide with the spontane- ity, experimentation, and kun - predictability of individual and collective will. That collision inspires the launch of this jour- nal. Document seeks to promote the discussion of architecture as a temporal and adaptive medium evers susceptible to ordinary use and extraordinary appropria - tion. By privileging neither the new nor the old, the designed nor the accidental, the exceptional nor the mundane, Document aims to establish a multi-disciplinary record of observation, specula- tion, and interpretation centered on the interaction of people and the built environment. Who could ask for more? The type face, the small size, the plain paper, intense black and white photography: this issue, Street, ranges from graffitti messing with form, to the vertical villages of Shenzhen; from the micro-ownership that gives a street its life, to the shifting logistics of street use. Document is seriously global, as are its con- tributors, yet all have a foot in our own streets here. The back cover quotes Archigram from 1963: ‘When it is raining in Oxford Street, the architecture is no more important than the rain...’
Manners Vancouver Matters James Eidse, Mari Fujita, Joey Giaimo, Lori Kiessling, Christa Min, editors. Vancouver: Blueimprint, 2008
books and journals | urbanism by stephanie white
A little book out of the School of Architec- ture and Landscape Architecture at UBC, takes Vancouver keywords: water, trees, hedge, water, freeway, view – sixteen very short essays in all – to bring attention to a kind of hidden materiality usually irrelevant to Vancouver’s booster narratives. Some essays are very good: Courtney Miller, in ‘Heritage’, outlines the rise of Vancouver heritage as an amenity and den- sity transfers as instruments that protect under-developed heritage building sites and landscapes in a development-minded city. Heritage becomes a matter of linguis- tic, cultural and political definition; muta- ble and expedient. Kelty Miyoshi McKinnon, in ‘Sugar’, in- vestigates the BC Sugar Refinery, its con- nections to the CPR, the Port of Vancouver, the internment of Japanese Canadians in WWII, the shift from sugar brought from the wider British empire to Canadian sugar beets, farmed by the internees. The irony in this story is in the distance between the product: sweet, twinkling crystals, and the internment story where a thoroughly em- bedded people from the Pacific coast were vindictively dismissed to work in the dusty furrows of prairie farmland. Given the density of thought and research in such pieces, others such as Lindsay Sung’s photo-essay ‘Hedge’ are quite weak. Is ‘Hedge’ in this book (cut-out smiley faces put onto various cedar hedges around the city) as whimsy in an otherwise deadly se- rious collection of studies? Although the internment of Nisei is a deadly story, several of the essays have that faux-anthropologist tone of the surrealists when they looked seriously at some trivial bit of material cul- ture, but here without the underlying sense of the absurd. Stacy Moriarty’s ‘Blackberry’ comes to mind here. And, on the subject of being completely humourless, I would hazard that it is rubus discolor , the aggressive Himalayan blackberry that runs rampant through waste ground, not the shy native rubus ursinus .
Many of the studies edge towards thick description, only to veer away somewhere after 500 words to curiously limp endings that belie whatever enthusiasm started each project. Not sure if this is the editing or the original terms under which these studies were conducted. To my surprise I found one contribution that had appeared in On Site in 2007, Joey Giaimo’s ‘Veil’, but unac- knowledged as such. Kenneth Terris, in ‘Stucco’, identifies precedents for the Vancouver Special, a postwar boxy two-storey house type that exploits the limits of a 33’ lot and which was built to excess in Vancouver. It is one of those ghastly popular phenomena that through sheer ubiquity become beloved of designers. There have been many articles and photo-essays on the Vancouver Special over the years, but Terris serviceably puts it into a longer tradition of vernacular work- ing class housing. The best pieces, such as Hannah Teich- ner’s ‘Freeway’, look at Vancouver as a body politic with material consequences. Teich- ner identifies Vancouver’s historic resist- ance to the scaling of development to trans- portation trends, leaving it with a traffic nightmare but also with a lovely collage of fine-grained urban episodes such as Gran- ville Market sheltered by an uncommitted two-block long piece of freeway that hurtles across False Creek. Despite this, she calls for an ending of the civic inertia that looks backward rather than forward: it is time to develop what she calls Vancouver’s ‘freeway lacuna’. Although the tradition of ineffi- cient and regressive development calls up ‘unanticipated realities’, she appears to ask that this development become codified and practiced. A kind of Vancouver anti-devel- opment. Well now, this sounds familiar. *
www.documentmag.net
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On Site review 21: stormy weather
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