Place // San Diego, CA

Though there are few truly vital reasons to leave LA's urban soup for San Diego's relative towniness, there are a few compelling ones. Most of them involve fantastic CaliMex food, the insane Tijuana border--for which I had neither the stones nor the time to visit, instead choosing to guide my lovely female companions to relative safety/sanity--and NFL football, SoCal-style. But if you're a student of architecture, conquistadors, or just like the beach, it's worth a look. But first a little history...

The area was first explored by Spanish explorer Sebastian Vizcaino in 1602 and named for a Spanish saint, San Diego de Alcalá. In 1769, a group of Spanish missionaries established a permanent colony on a site now known as "Old Town" San Diego. Later, the colony transformed into a military outpost, displacing the missionaries a few miles to the east, and was the location of a few small skirmishes between Spanish soliders and the indigenous Native American tribe, the Kumeyaay. Mexico gained indepedence from Spain in 1821 and San Diego progressed under Mexican jurisdiction until the resolution of the Mexican-American War in 1850 (known as the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo) ceded the city to the U.S.

Photo // More Mobile Munchies

Where else is one supposed to eat at 2:30am after having an unnamed quantity of beverages at the local establishment? A Mexican taco truck, that's where. Restaurant on wheels = awesome. I mentioned before that food trucks, a form of "mobile architecture," were introduced in Atlanta but they are all the rage in Los Angeles. Here, food trucks are also cultural institutions, dishing out a taste of home for immigrants and providing a place where people of different ethnic backgrounds can gather and find togetherness through food.

And the bounty...mmmmmmmmm...

...and now, indigestion. I'm not used to eating Mexican food intended for Mexicans...can a white boy get some watered down chilies, please? Also, 3am Food coma / spice stupor is not good for writing, so apologies for the quality of the post ;)

School updates and other fun stuff to come soon once I have a bit more mental capacity, so stay tuned.

Lifestyle // Mobile Munchies...Modern!

To continue on the topic of gastronomic delights, we bring you the exciting news (at least among foodies) that the City of Atlanta has, at long last, granted its first mobile food truck permit to an outfit called Yumbii. Food trucks, which generally dish out local and ethnic specialties like tacos in Los Angeles or cheesesteaks in Philadelphia, are the hot trend in American culinary circles; the Atlanta variation serves southern-style Korean tacos (huh??).

The phenomenon of the food truck represents some ideas about architecture and urbanism that have been floating around in my head the past few days. The following little doodles sum them up pretty well. By no means are these ideas original, they simply illustrate the evolution of the archetypal American lifestyle over the past 150 years, with watershed changes occurring in increments of about 50 years or so with the introduction of a new tool - the car, the computer, etc. I'm channelling my inner Roger Lewis here...

1900: A New Century.

1950: Baby Boomers.

2010: The Internet Age.

 The first image shows urban life at around 1900: high density, near the urban core, with food, entertainment, and other necessities in close proximity. Your own two feet were your primary means of locomotion. By 1950, automobile and suburban culture had taken hold. The single-family detached house became the desired dwelling unit, and people traveled from their home in their cars to achieve their necessities - a "destination" culture. Today, the personal computer, along with a complex delivery infrastructure, allows us to summon our necessities directly to our McMansions, where we also work and find entertainment. The arrows represent the behavior of the consumer in relation to the flow of goods, and commodities; first, goods and consumers revolved closely around the home, then consumers extended directly outward from the home, and now goods come directly inward.

Food trucks are, in essence, symbols of the inward lifestyle. They become units of mobile architecture that bring goods (in this case wacky tacos) to wherever people request them. Social media websites like Twitter and Facebook facilitate this interaction.

It would be a good exercise to try and draw a diagram for the year 2050, the next step in the series.

(Top photo Christiane Lauterbach / Carson Young / Atlanta Food Carts blog)