The Most Architectural Country on CNN

Another post-Soviet, Eurasian state that has both built iconic architecture and made these landmarks the central focus of advertisements shown on CNN is the Republic of Georgia. There are several advertisements for the Republic of Georgia that have appeared on CNN over the last few years. Recent iterations (many viewable, but not embeddible from the Invest in Georgia website) such as the one titled Why Georgia is Different showcase the country's recently completed glass halls and gilded towers. Another, not posted to the site, shows one the country's 80 newly-constructed, glass-enclosed police stations, and underscores this architectural metaphor as part of the state's commitment to transparency and anti-corruption.

Georgia is fairly unique as a small, developing country without any particular resource boom that has undertaken a nationwide construction of new public facilities. While this might make the pages of the Financial Times, that the Republic's recent buildings feature the stylish attempts at avant-garde form-making from such celebrity firms as UNStudio and J. Meyer H. make this fertile eye-candy for the light-speed semi-pro architectural blogosphere, the universe of DesignBoom and its siblings.

Police Station in Mestia, Georgia. 

Designed by Jurgen Mayer H. images via this website, April 2012.

 Terminal Building for the Airport at Mestia, Georgia. 

Designed by Jurgen Meyer H. Via Dezeen, November 2011.

This has given the leading architecture blogs a little geographic variety in their usual line up: The Fox Is Black recently featured a rest stop along a Caucasian highway designed by J. Meyer H., and last November FastCo Design decided on titling a post: Georgia Builds the World's Wackiest Border Crossing (the childish title is actually better than the horrid copy of the rest of post), which featured another JMH design of what is certainly rather delightful for a border crossing, although it adheres to the cookie-cutter mold look that makes JMH's buildings more punny than clever.

Border Checkpoint at Sarpi, Georgia. 

Designed by Jurgen Mayer H. images via Dezeen, January 2011.

 The 'Georgia' geographic tag on Dezeen in particular is an easy reference for Georgia's new landmarks. That Georgia's remote airfields have luscious terminal halls worthy of Wallpaper, thought up by some of Europe's most popular architectural talents, is remarkable by itself. Less celebrated is the Ministry of the Interior, situated outside of the capital on the way to the airport, with a half-hearted attempt at showmanship via its undulated glass, looking like a new-built office park anywhere, but proudly displaying its gesture of government openness and accessibility via its shiny exterior.

 

Ministry of Internal Affairs, Kakheti Highway, Georgia, by Michele de Lucchi.

In a similar way to Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, this whole effort, which must be expensive, comes across as a whole lot of marketing. Georgia is working hard to attract investment, with a website and a series of CNN commercials that seem designed solely to increase the country's standings in the World Bank's Doing Business Rankings, a phenomenon that has grown in the last five years to a bizarre fixation. Georgia isn't, ultimately, a wealthy country, and sits in a troubled region. This is before considering the fact that an autonomous region of the country declared its independence, with Russia's encouragement, and the country was invaded and humiliated by its giant former ruling power just as the first of these projects was commissioned.

Renderings for the Border Checkpoint at Ninotsminda, Georgia via Dezeen, July 2012.  

So, rather than giggle at why a border post is in the outline of a giant squiggle, one might start raising critical questions such as why Georgia needs such a monumental pile guarding the borders with Turkey at all, or whether its remote corners of the Caucaus need air terminals which look nicer than first class lounges at major hubs. Its unquestionable that Georgia's infrastructure budget might have been put to use elsewhere, perhaps more generally in providing services to its citizens. There has been some investigation into how one of these new architectural designs comes about and why realizing one will cost 66% more than the Ministry of Agriculture's entire budget. 

Speculatively, it is easy to imagine that Georgia's leadership is focussed on investment-fuelled growth, and that blog-ready infrastructural projects might have a singular ability to brand Georgia as a progressive, cool country. But these undertakings are also surely profitable for national construction companies  and land developers. Exactly who in Georgia truly benefits from this is not obviously, and as the above-article makes clear, the answers are not forthcoming from the various government entities which have suddenly taken an interest in awarding jobs to hip architects from central Europe. Whether this is all the worthy endeavors of strengthening a young, weak, isolated state, or another iteration of cronyism is not currently clear, but what is lucid from Georgia's current architectural infatuations is that Georgia may not, in fact, be different and that it takes more than a curtain wall of glass to make democracy and development more transparent.

Schöne Windkraftanlagen

Earlier this year, the Fast Company Design blog featured NL Architect's proposal for Power Flower wind turbines, "Can Beautiful Turbines Help Critics Embrace Wind Energy?", among other purported innovations, the post promoted the new design as an aesthetic improvement over existing wind turbine products.

Above three images courtesy of NL Architects via Designboom

I tend to avoid arguing about architectural beauty, in part because tastes are ultimately subjective, and also I like a lot of buildings that other people consider to be ugly. But in this case, I strongly question not only the assertion that the above proposal is really any more attractive than a regular wind turbine, but that the standard wind generation apparatus is, in the scope of what we install on our landscape, at all worthy of demerit.

Image courtesy Flickr user Swerz

As the FastCo. post mentions, the expanded utilization of wind power technology has been hampered by aesthetic arguments. Turbines are deemed by a large segment of the public to be hideous: a disfigurement of our bucolic countrysides. This argument is especially prominent in the United States, no more so typified than by the vicious, decades-long fight over the Cape Wind project in Massachusetts, which has been the subject of much press, including a book published about five years ago.

Image courtesy Flickr user dtsomp

Image courtesy Flickr user Bob West

Image courtesy Flickr user Lutmans

Why is it that individuals have singled out wind turbines as the scourge of our contemporary landscape? Although strip malls, parking lots, and McMansions certainly have their detractors, none has been deemed so repellent that their introduction into our built environment was in any way seriously disrupted, compared to the insane histrionics associated with wind projects.

From this bizarre anti-turbine story.

Original Caption: "From his kitchen table of his Falmouth [Mass] home,

Neil Anderson holds the calendar where he and his wife record

their daily reactions to the wind turbine located nearby."

How scientific!

Images @Jess Bidgood/WGBH

While certainly wind turbines create noise, and stick up out of the ground in a noticeable manner, its mysterious how they invoke such fervent vitriol. Even when just considering the infrastructure of our power utilities: transmission lines, stretching to the horizon, upheld on the shoulders of humungous metallic skeletons, have been with us for close to 100 years. Has there been any public debate of this? Perhaps so, before my lifetime, the appearance of the monuments to distributed power across the country was challenged valiantly.

Image courtesy Flickr user theclyde

Like wind turbines, the fossil-fuel powered generation stations pierce the skyline in their own way. In the Cape Cod community of Sandwich, in the same county as the Cape Wind project would be, is the decades-old Mirant power plant, sitting right on the ocean, visible for miles along the beach, its stacks rising above the scrub pines and sand, and looming in the background of the multimillion-dollar views, pumping out emissions.

Image of Mirant oil-fired Power Plant, Sandwich, MA

courtesy Flickr user MRTGT

If there was any resistance to the initial construction of this belching behemoth, evidently at some point the population came to accept their own needs for reliable energy, and accepted this visual intervention, with all that the wind carries to their property.

But this has all happened in less-enlightened times, perhaps. Maybe these hideous necessities have built up the resistance to further visual reminders of our technological requirements, with contemporary society just not taking it any more?

Image courtesy Flickr user poplinre

Yet, these recent times have been an era in which an entirely new technology has spread around the globe, requiring the installation of countless points of infrastructure on the land: the adoption of mobile phone technology, which has bequethed upon our contemporary landscape the cell tower.

Image courtesy Flickr user Mark Sardella

Not that aesthetic complaints have been absent from this profusion of transmission towers. However, this has bizarrely resulted in the new typology of the faux-tree cell tower, with its subspecies, the faux-palm and faux-cactus tower. Outsized plastic evergreens, welcomed into our communities; deemed acceptable.

Image courtesy Flickr user The Pug Father Ohio

Actually not a real cactus. Image courtesy Search Net Media

Image courtesy of Flickr user rust.bucket ©David Baker

If wind turbines are not entirely welcomed, neither are they universally loathed. Despite the resistance within the United States to their appearance, they are becoming increasingly common here, and are widespread in many parts of Europe. A symbol of progressive ecological sensitivity, turbines have been cleverly employed by marketers to signal environmental responsibility and cultural cool to certain consumer segments.

Starwood's Element Hotels uses the wind turbine prominently

in its branding and advertising,

including animated web ads featuring spinning blades.

Global Parcel Shipper DHL's "Go Green" PR campaign features

wind turbines prominently in its literature.

Without ignoring the real detractions of turbines, with certain auditory and visual shortcomings, or being naïve to the stronger political and economic influences that support resistance to cleaner energy technologies, a reality that was brilliantly mocked recently by the Onion, I remain astonished at how unpopular wind turbines are among certain constituencies, and the aesthetic arguments used to support them.

If I were to argue on the aesthetic merits of the wind turbine, I would assert that they are sublime, romantic, and soothing, bringing an elegance to human electrical-production. Their metronomic cartwheeling, the blades pulsing like the beat of the human heart, openly evince the harnessing of clean electrical current from nature.

Aerials

©Christopher Gielen

BETWEEN THE IONOSPHERE & THE BLOGOSPHERE.

Last September, BLDGBLOG's Geoff Manaugh paired with German-born, New York photographer Christopher Gielen, wrote his first piece for the NYTimes.com Opinionator blog. "The Geometry of Sprawl" is an awestruck essay on Gielen's helicopter perspectives of American housing subdivisions and prisons in the southwestern United States. This article was the first in a series of internet writings from this past Fall that looked down on the surface of the earth, whether by aircraft or via satellite.

©Christopher Gielen

As Google Earth passes its fifth birthday, its impact on our visual comprehension of our society's spatial manifestations is still nascent. Just as the landscape of visual comprehension is shifting between aerial photography and this newly-ubiquitous satellite imagery, so has the American built environment rapidly altered in past five years of economic and construction expansion. This imagery, criss-crossing the internet this autumn, is engendering a reflection on this recently-passed era.

While the pictures are interesting, this is a game you can play by yourself for free with Google Maps. And if you use Google Maps, you can do it without the anti-suburban bias skewing your viewpoint (literally and figuratively). You can then do things like compare Arizona's communities with their California or Mexican neighbors. I am no fan of the suburbs or of AZ, but this is a venomous depiction that should have been toned down.

--quilt, chicago in NYTimes.com Opinionator comments.

Christopher Gielen's work, and his statement as an artist, combined with Manaugh's typically earnest yet academically disengaged prose, sparked several pages worth of comments under the NYTimes.com entry. Certain questions of politics and economics are implied and revealed by Gielen's photos and the way he presents them. (and apart from the very important and real issues of sustainability and dehumanization). In the monochrome of their xeroscapes, they indeed make bleak images, and Gielen emphasizes their sprawling horizontality in contrast to "vertical urban centers."

This and above, Untitled ©Christopher Gielen

Yet more than one commenter recognized the rather efficient use of land and space depicted in these neat organizations of housing. Gielen and Manaugh's exhibition, and many of the New Yorkers' comments on them, struck many as elitist and derogatory. This attitude was even more on display when the Infrastructuralist reposted the story, titling his entry "The Tragic Artistry of Sprawl" and employing the words "Horrifying" and "terrifying" in his post, which sparked at least one comment on the use of hyperbole in talking about views of the homes of tens of thousands of Americans.

Gielen and Manaugh do a beautiful job of capturing a horrifying landscape. Completely dehumanizing and utterly void of any earthly appeal, is it any wonder this is the land of Sharon Angle and Ben Quayle? A place so artificially constructed that serving as the staging ground for predator drone missions on the US-MEX border and robot warfare against remote mountain villages in NW Pakistan is hardly a surprising byproduct of this psychologically toxic environment. See you at Costco : ) . . .

Jonathan L, Kauai, HI in the NYTimes Opinionator comments.

Jonathan L, I was anticipating a snobbish, political comment like yours. An aerial view of Manhattan would look just as "horrifying" and "dehumanizing", perhaps even more so due to the extreme population density. If living in a suburban house is "psychologically toxic", then I suppose being crammed into a high rise apartment building is the path to sanity?

--Frederick Singer Huntington Beach, CA, in NYTimes Opinionator comments

Hyper documentation, criticism, and offerings of interpretation. Its the "CABINET" generation of Rococco Post-Modernism. Speculating how it got that way or how "evil cool" it is (the horrifying and dehumanizing land of Angle and Quayle, really? How exactly?) when held at a distance for a hyperbolic tut tut.

--Bob Hinter Earth, SD in NYTimes Opinionator comments

In November, CNN.com summarized the Manaugh/Gielen article and assembled a slideshow. At least 125 comments followed. Gielen sounds even more aloof and detached in all this press, and in the 125 comments that follow the CNN post, he is often panned as a European New Yorker helicoptering above fly-over states, a judgement which his quotations make hard to counter.

"Sprawl is a really careless use of new land. I want people who look at my photos to start a reconsideration of how they live through art," Gielen said.

Does it bother Gielen that he is completely contradictory in his views? On the one hand he claims that urban sprawl is a waste of land, then he shows pictures of tightly-packed houses and complains about how crowded and uniform it is. His pictures are completely ordinary-- mildly interesting but hardly art and not at all original or provocative.

That said, I would enjoy flying around in a plane taking snapshots and claiming to be an artist/deep social critic. Well, I would enjoy flying around and taking snapshots. --badcyclist, commenting on CNN.com story

More than his method, its important to realize that Gielen, reportedly working for five years, is merely a newcomer to a very long line of aerial photographers, stretching back at least to Charles Lindbergh himself. Gielen doesn't appear to have any architectural training, which is in contrast to one of his pioneering predecessors, Massachusetts-based Alex MacLean, who holds an architectural degree from Harvard. MacLean wasn't mentioned anywhere online this fall.

©Alex MacLean

©Alex MacLean

©Alex MacLean

©Alex MacLean

©Alex MacLean

MacLean's photographs encompass a much wider range of built environments, reflecting several decades of piloting his own plane across America, including the concrete steppe of the endless parking lots of downtown Houston, to the hidden fields of auto chasis graveyards, to photos which much more provocatively evince the wanton and wasteful use of precious land in America's suburban frontiers. In many instances much more successfully that Gielen, they reveal true sprawl: that is, the use more land and space than is necessary to build and expand our cities.

Manchester, NY ©Alex MacLean from his book Designs on the Land

Gielen has other contemporaries working in the same realm and from the same altitude, which likewise made the rounds this autumn, including super-photographer Edward Burtynsky. Burtnysky's and McClean's images contrast Gielen's overstuffed subdivisions, capturing empty planned communities, revealed to be future neighborhoods only by the grid work of roads and the few structures that have thus far been built.

Salton Sea ©Edward Burtynsky

As with so many aspects of contemporary lives, the tools and technologies of the internet are encroaching on the rarified space of artists and aerial photographers. Not least of this is Google Earth, which allows any internet user to view any corner of the earth from on high at a moment's notice.

It's amazing how so many artists prefer to live and emote in their abstract little boxes, instead of educating themselves, in the long history of urban form. What modern writers and artists like this completely miss, is that there's an ocean of knowledge in traditional urbanism and building, that the modern designer, developers...and the modern architecture and arts academy...have thrown out the window...and built a wall against. They leave the impression that they are making new and cool discoveries. In fact, their "tabula rasa" thinking is the well spring of their mystified musings...as well as their dumb-as-dirt, historic ignorance. Yes, sprawl is bad and unsustainable. Find out why.

--Rich Pennsylvania, in NYTimes Opinionator Comments

A spectacular example of how this tool can play a role in our understanding in a new way came about by a unique and intriguing engenderment: an installment of the terrific radio podcast Planet Money, from NPR. The Planet Money team crafted an episode around toxic assets, and in so doing visited the frontiers of America's subprime housing bubble, in this case the newly created residential developments of canal-and-cul-de-saced southwest Florida.

Rotanda West from Boston.com originally from Google Earth

Lehigh Acres from Boston.com originally Google Earth

Fort Myers from Boston.com originally Google Earth

Big Marco Island from Boston.com originally from Google Earth

This, in turn, inspired Boston Magazine to assemble a series of startling Google Earth images into a superb photo essay. More than 350 respondents posted comments, far more than Manaugh's and Gielen's NYTimes entry.

The Boston Magazine photo essay, which is simply a series of Google Earth screen shots, is every bit as arresting and enlightening as Gielen's work. Its also telling that Boston.com includes Rotanda West, a Fort-Myers area development that Gielen photographed.

An aerial photo by some predecessor to Mr. Gielen would have shown the devastation of logging, raw cuts in the hill where streets were constructed, some houses and a few shacks. At the present time the neighborhood is filled with mature trees and much of the earlier uncontrolled slopes have been terraced or otherwise stabilized. It is a good neighborhood. My point is that much housing development (perhaps nearly all) can be looked at from viewpoints that are unflattering, even "horrifying". It's what is done to house human beings. Where would Mr. Gielen have us live? the pictures are arresting and beautiful but I think his admirers grant a profundity to those images that is illusory.

--Kieth Nissen, Seattle, in NYTimes Opinionator comments

The collection is made up of both huge agglomerations of densely-packed geometries and forlorn, regrown wastelands of never-completed communities. The verdancy here is striking, and recalls some of the debate in the comment sections of the other Gielen articles, as to whether our dryland communities are unsustainable due to a lack of nearby water, or if our greenbelt boom of housing is destroying a more precious environment.

A less-recent development than Google Earth, but which nonetheless encroaches upon the professionals' realm, is that fact that America has become a "flying public" and therefore nearly anyone can be an aerial photographer, without a pilots license or even professional camera. This popular tradition is often presented with enthusiasm, not for the fear at what it reveals but for the general thrill of the opportunity to peer down at the earth.

Such is the case of NOTCOT's somewhat prosaic Operation Window Seat project, which is filled with a gee-whiz wonderment in simply angling a camera over an aileron. There are at least six books for sale on Amazon.com with the title Window Seat, several of which speak of inspiration, reflection, and philosophy. Looking down on our planet may be the last romantic aspect of contemporary air travel, and thus far one of the few aspects of flying that airlines can neither take away entirely nor figure out how to charge for.

Taking this all in, its clear that more is required of an artist than a helicopter and a hipster's detachment. An ingenuous and gorgeous example of a more provocative alternative was also on display this autumn, featured in the both Urban Times and Northcoast Zeigeist.

©Ross Racine

Hickoryglen Estates ©Ross Racine

Highland Acres ©Ross Racine

Sunshine Acres ©Ross Racine

Canadian-born New York artist Ross Racine is not a photographer. Racine's work, despite looking like photocollage, are in fact drawings, using Illustrator and Photoshop, and according to the artist, contain no elements of photos at all. Racine takes the geometry of the cul-de-sac past its logical end-point, working out subdivisions that are completely disconnected and insular, which a rational impossibility. Likewise, he riffs the gimmicky, wasteful patterns of house-and-yard developments by making a patterns of overly haphazard, over-paved, under-occupied clusters of residences. Equally his appellations seem to match those of the actual locations of the Boston.com photsurvey: Sunshine Acres, Highland Acres, Hickoryglen Estates, as in contrast to Gielen's series, with individual photographs of southwestern suburbs apocalyptically called Untitled X.

When are we going to dig in, get busy, quit treating our 20th century cities like "horrifying" butterflies on pins in a case and start projecting better (or at least current) urbanisms?

This is all so tired, flying around and shooting it montgolfier style as a way of "criticizing" it. This sort of stuff is easy and already well done. The hardest thing about it is not getting in quasi-legal hassles with the prison people.

I for one can't wait until Geoff and the "Cabineteers" turn the corner and grow past this era of self-aggrandized curation where they mistake wit and novelty as a creative act and they turn their energy, skill, and intelligence towards projecting rather than collecting.

--Anonymous response in NYTimes Opinionator