Not in the Brochure: Cherry Street

Ok, here's two ways to look at a scene in downtown Columbia, along Cherry Street, in that area the promoters are wanting us to call The District:

This, 

and this, 

Neither of these sinks (or rises, depending on how wrong you want to be), to the austere modern, like those Soviet remnants we came to recognize in Berlin (can't find my own pictures just now), 

Berlin 

But I did find these, those hideous Turkish apartments in Northern Cyprus; the Turks, of course, do build the same demoralizing structures in their own homeland.  Driving past Izmir, close your eyes...

nor what Roger Ebert scorned in his own, much better attended blog, as reported by someone else in 2010:  "Roger Ebert is giving a big thumbs-down to modern architecture...and what he calls the children of Mies van der Rohe,"  He says,

Much modern architecture has grown tiresome to me.  It does not gladden the heart.  It doesn't seem to spring from humans," but rather "seems drawn from mathematical axioms rather than those learned for centuries from the earth, the organic origins..., the reach of hands and arms...."  Instead of harmony, "it holds the same note indefinitely."  It is "totalitarian in its severe economy." (There's apparently even something called "brutalist architecture"--there's so much I need to know about built environment, that I’d almost, to the amusement of friends, do another masters in architecture, if I could just do the theory/philosophy, and not have to be bound to a pointless apprenticeship of pencil sketches, right angles, erasers, and catalogs of material strengths.  Alas.)

Other folks take a leap in technology to talk about how we are shaping space.  There seems to be a whole realm of discussion about 'cell phone subjectivity.'  In The Atlantic, 2012, we find “Cell Phones as Meeting Points in aFeatureless Landscape” , which asks, 

Might cell phones have become so ubiquitous at least in part because they help us to orient ourselves to spaces that, in their endless repetition of national and international chain retailers, transform America into Generica and leave us too few unique identifiers of where we are in the universe? In Generica, cell phones orient us primarily not to place but to one another -- which, perhaps, and to be fair, has its benefits.

Hmm--who should I read to learn more about how cell phones affect not only our sense of place, but the places we are willing to build and inhabit?

Far afield, we hear more concerns about what happens with planning-triumphant:  “Monotony Exposed – Finnish Cities Plagued with Overly Standardized and Worn Building Designs” .

I'd speculate that some of the negative reaction from such built realms might link to why we object to the uncanny in contemporary creations.  Hmm--here's a bit on "the uncanny valley": 

The uncanny valley is a hypothesis in the field of aesthetics which holds that when features look and move almost, but not exactly, like natural beings, it causes a response of revulsion among some observers. The "valley" refers to the dip in a graph of the comfort level of beings as subjects move toward a healthy, natural likeness described in a function of a subject's aesthetic acceptability. Examples can be found in the fields of robotics and 3D computer animation, among others.

Further,

A number of films that use computer-generated imagery to show characters have been described by reviewers as giving a feeling of revulsion or "creepiness" as a result of the characters looking too realistic.

Such as

In a review of the 2007 animated film Beowulf, New York Times technology writer David Gallagher wrote that the film failed the uncanny valley test, stating that the film's villain, the monster Grendel, was "only slightly scarier" than the "closeups of our hero Beowulf’s face... allowing viewers to admire every hair in his 3-D digital stubble.

[However,] the uncanny valley may be generational. Younger generations, more used to CGI, robots, and such, may be less likely to be affected by this hypothesized issue.

I'd link that repulsion to environments that are too successfully managed, that is, that too much control all aspects of not only planning and maintenance and commerce, but down to the very way that people are "allowed" to take in any vista.
And Columbia? An awful lot of civic excess, in lawns, with roosters, pedestrian respect, bike worship, skateboards, muddled tolerance of beggars...and well, I have a great deal of criticism of recent construction downtown, 

which are not modernist slabs, but they so wish they could be...What was that old image of engineers, wishing for a world as smooth and featureless and unproblematic as a billiard ball? I couldn't find it; some old saws get lost to pop wisdom, or perhaps are just built over.
The District itself?  Its official goals:    

1.  Encourage a centrally located, live/work/play neighborhood
2.  Create an authentic, dense and sustainable urban space
3.  Cultivate a creative and innovative culture of diverse enterprises
4.  Maintain the local and eclectic flavor of the area

These, too, sound great, but somehow, this all gets so tinged with the demand to be progressive, that...Well, Master Plans require a Master, and progress is a harsh god.  Consider Macaulay's sarcastic scorn of the poet Robert Southey (whose poetry we don't much read now, but who did write the original Goldilocks and the Three Bears story), a poet who does not delight in the aesthetics of the Industrial Revolution:

Here is wisdom.  Here are the principles on which nations are to be governed.  Rosebushes and poor rates, rather than steam engines and independence.  mortality and cottage with weather stains, rather than health and long life with edifices which time cannot mellow.  We are told that our age has invented atrocities beyond the imagination of our fathers; that society has been brought into a state compared with which extermination would be a blessing; and all because the dwellings of cotton-spinners are naked and rectangular...  [in A Review of Southey's Colloquies]

[More Macaulay:  "Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind." I don't like this man...] 

Progress.  I guess people aren't even close to agreeing on that. Whether that means an ever-increasing order, a steady rise in the GDP, or something altogether less tangible than orderliness and immediate, uniform maintenance.  Columbia, of course, has a web page just for sidewalks, and I've seen city workers very seriously measuring the spaces between slabs of concrete on those very sidewalks.  No doubt there has been a University paper put out on the ideal gap.

In any case, here are different ways to see a bit of The District, in three blocks of Cherry Street to start with:  

Scene

Cracks and Stains

  

  

  

  

 

And my favorite, this window into the cobblestone past...

Odd Fixtures

  

  

 

  

Human Tracks (graffiti, litter, gum)

  

  

   

The scars of gum, where kids wait in line to get into Harpo's...

This odd, glittery chemical formula, also outside Harpo's...

And a shirt I probably should have snagged...

Signs of Life

  

And this, my favorite little guy, struggling in this odd, impossible space

Favorite Place

 

This the wall where I "rested" during my 40-minute collapse last week...

Just to clarify, I'm not making a cynical appeal for "civic improvement."  If Columbia "improves" much more, it will only be fit for Terminator operatives.  For a human landscape, we need the cracks and the desperate tufts of grass.

later, bob