Discussion // BOOM & Street Art

BOOM!!!

I was astounded, shocked, appalled, surprised, inspired...a whole host of verbs...to see a proposal on ArchDaily for a new large, low-lying luxurious residential / resort complex in Palm Springs entitled "BOOM." Geared towards retirees from the LGBT community*, the project is a bold and creative approach to the standard American mega-development, and raises some fascinating questions about economy, sustainability, timeliness, sexuality and social living.

[*Palm Springs is a mecca for LGBT's on the West Coast / in LA]

The "fact sheet" is standard for recent models of  high-end, large-scale development in the United States: not-too-densely-packed apartment and condo units; unique internal "neighborhoods" each designed by a different well-known architect, in this case by boundary-breaking contemporary firms including Diller Scofidio + Renfro, J Mayer H, Joel Sanders, Surfacedesign, Lot-Ek, etc; and a variety of amenities including swimming pools, gyms, restaurants, nightclubs, and on and on. I've worked on a similar project, albeit of different scope and style (think: New Urbanist) that has collected dust on the drawing board for the past three years; landmark proposals of this sort are common, but not often built.

A quote in HuffPo from architect Mattias Hollwich, a principal of one of the involved firms:

"Each firm was given a piece of the 100-acre plot and total freedom to inject their personal style into the space. The only requirements for the architects were that their structures had to epitomize high design in order to fight the stereotypical look of retirement communities, and that none of the firms could have ever done work around aging before, so they could come to the project with fresh ideas."

The designs for each of the communities are interesting in themselves and can be viewed on ArchDaily or on the development's homepage. The chest-puffing from the developers about the efficacious collaborations among the various brilliant architects to produce stunning architecture is nothing more than predictable showboating; what I find more interesting are the social ideas about aging and creating new communities for specific demographics to which architects have never, to my knowledge, specifically catered. The economy of constructing a new resource-intensive development of luxury standard in the middle of the desert is  also questionable and worthy of discussion, and the policy of using social media to assimilate a broad range of ideas from all aspects of society into a project represents, I believe, a very large part of the future of architecture.

Hollwich and his partner, Marc Kushner, as a matter of fact, are very young and plugged-in (they started the architecture social networking site Architizer) but have also written and presented a number of ideas about aging--and perhaps more apropos, age discrimination--hat permeate their design proposal. The entire development, for example, is pedestrian-only to accommodate the pace of senior lifestyle, but is not exclusive to visitors who rightly view the community as a potential entertainment or social destination. Hollwich has also stated his intentions to use Facebook as a public forum for shaping the design. To that end, social media becomes a real engine of change. There are a number of interviews online in which he goes into a bit more detail: here and here, and also the firm's website.

[Proposed Plan]

 Will BOOM! succeed economically? The answer to this question is unclear. Palm Springs has a huge retiree and LGBT population, and I can only see a development like this attracting more. As a private development, donors will foot most of the $250 million price tag; I'm sure the financial philandering has already begun. I also don't know enough about the politics of Palm Springs and the surrounding communities to predict if the local administrations will allow a brand new development at this scale. From what I can remember, there wasn't a lot of new architecture to speak of in Palm Springs, at least in downtown, where preservationists have (amazingly) been able to successfully preserve the iconic mid-century aesthetic, but since construction is proposed in nearby Rancho Mirage, conditions may be different.

It does seem like a lot of money for a luxury community in uncertain economic times, but I appreciate the fact that developers and architects alike are pushing forward. I certainly wish no more harm on my professional brethren. So if the bills are paid, and let's hope they are, then all the better, especially if the money is coming from private sources anyway. Tax-funded status (like Atlantic Station in ATL, etc) would likely be out-of-the-question, even in Palm Springs. And with all the circus about social media integration and "high design," let's hope that the project includes an extensive sustainable component. Building in the desert, with its extreme temperatures and non-existence of local resources (especially water), is some of the most wasteful, if not done with an informed understanding of local ecologies and economies. The sustainable movement in Arizona, to reinforce the point, is supposedly the strongest and most advanced in the nation - but it HAS to be, right? There is no mention of sustainability on the project site yet that I can find; maybe it will show in the future. Anyway...

Street Art - No, Building Art

It's Oscar season (a particularly interesting-or should I say weird?-time if you live in LA), and with the release and subsequent critical praise of the Banksy film "Exit Through the Gift Shop," street art is once again en vogue. As a reminder this film does not highlight or the kind of impromptu calligraphy that owners of buildings and billboards fear and view as defacement, but rather the iconoclastic, premeditated murals with very pointed social messages. Street art is an attack on the established art community; it questions the purpose of the traditional museum as an isolated, exclusive, locked-away box of solid walls, and demands that visual art has a tactile, accessible, and emotional quality. These qualities can range from the beautiful and serene to the grotesque and visceral, much like all good art from human history, but what separates street art from traditional is its relationship to architecture and the political/economic structure that, in the views of many, seeks to sanitize urban life from creative expression.

Street art once again raises the question of aging, this time not in reference to people but to buildings. The "canvas" for street art is rarely a brand new building, as it will likely come under all sorts of public scrutiny for a number of years; rather, street art is almost always applied to old, derelict, broken-down edifices. These crumbling buildings are in themselves monuments or tributes to the failing of various aspects of society - poverty, neglect, financial ruin, etc. Artists, who rarely work on commission and simply given a blank facade to paint whatever they want (muralists are invariably directed towards positive / uncontroversial / equitable imagery), often target these buildings as they hold little value to the general public and thus, the probability of being prosecuted is minimal. These images give "dead" buildings new life. They can also make a dilapidated community more vibrant. They can inspire social change.

[Faces2Faces Project, JR]

As such, the bond between art and architecture is inviolable. It has been since the first cave paintings, long before there were even streets. But it's no longer about visiting museums, which architects have notoriously embraced as perhaps the ultimate opportunities for design. It seems more appropriate, however, to embrace the idea that existing buildings can also become museums, turned inside out, where the exterior walls become both the background and canvas at the same time. This spontaneous programmatic inversion isn't a new concept - not at all, for example, in plazas where movies are shown on a large blank wall - but to permit the permanence that occurs, at least for awhile, is not always something that sensitive people are willing to do.

I recall a recent example in Los Angeles where MOCA gave a street artist named Blu creative carte blanche on a large wall at the Geffen Center in Little Tokyo. As the museum is located across the street from a holocaust memorial, and perhaps for various other unsaid reasons, Blu painted coffins in dripping black with dollar bills strewn over the surface. I watched the painting as it was taking place with my arch buddy Aaron. I thought it was taste- and tact-less, and to be honest repulsive, so it goes to show that providing the kind of the freedom that was previously discussed is a double-edged sword. The next day, the wall was whitewashed, causing a furor among street artists everywhere. So, it can end badly.

But then again architects have been doing bad buildings - far longer lasting instances of "public art" - for centuries in this country ;)

Up next...images from upcoming mid-reviews.