{"id":527,"date":"2009-07-07T01:20:22","date_gmt":"2009-07-07T07:20:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/?p=527"},"modified":"2009-07-07T07:21:12","modified_gmt":"2009-07-07T13:21:12","slug":"my-dreams-squashed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/2009\/07\/my-dreams-squashed\/","title":{"rendered":"my dreams, squashed"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you folks haven’t already seen it, I can’t recommend this article<\/a> on Will Allen, founder of Growing Power<\/a> and a ‘street farmer’ in Milwaukee, highly enough. \u00a0I’m not even going to pull a quote from it – just go read the whole thing. \u00a0Given a choice between having the career of Rem Koolhaas, or the career of Will Allen, I’m not sure which I’d pick – though I would argue that Allen’s work has a far bigger impact socially, and potentially ecologically and economically, in a given locale than Koolhaas’s (obviously this ignores the ability of Koolhaas and similarly distinguished members of the academy to shape theoretical discourse on urbanism – but now that the era of iconic city images<\/a> is drawing to a close, or at least shifting priorities, how much does this academic influence matter? \u00a0This is something I need to think on more). \u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Maybe the bigger issue here is that such a choice isn’t ever presented to young designers of buildings and cities. \u00a0Reading this reminded me of an experience I had when I was about halfway through architecture school. \u00a0As I was walking toward Thom Mayne’s new (at the time) Federal Building<\/a>, I passed a percussionist\u00a0absolutely shredding on a set of upturned buckets. \u00a0The street, for blocks in either direction, was alive with his soundtrack – it enveloped that corner of the city. \u00a0Coincident with this experience, I could see the top of Mayne’s building towering above the rest the city as I drew nearer. \u00a0The disparity in affect between the vibrant immediacy of the drumming and the iconic, static Federal Building was almost comical. \u00a0This guy with twenty bucks worth of buckets and old pans was adding more to the social\u00a0milieu\u00a0than a few hundred million dollars worth of contemporary architecture. \u00a0Contra Ouroussoff, I wasn’t even allowed into the lobby, nor were any government workers “mingling with the masses” in the plaza.<\/p>\n

There are a ton of counters to an argument which contends bucket percussionists are a more valuable addition to a city than contemporary architecture; by no means is this an argument I’m trying to make. \u00a0(An obvious one: when done tactically, with a sensitivity to the surrounding urban condition and a sound financial foundation, this sort of development can act as\u00a0precisely\u00a0the sort of anchor which attracts new shops and residences, and thus pedestrians, and thus drummers.) \u00a0I think where I was heading, before getting wildly off-course, was that I get incredibly excited by things like urban farming, which have all the excitement and\u00a0accessibility\u00a0of street performances<\/a>; combined with the social, ecological, and economic transformative potential of the very best traditional architectural and urban projects (‘traditional’ is meant here to signify projects which revolve around the creation of form and space, not an aesthetic style). \u00a0I wish<\/a> that strategies like these were awarded more credit in the upper echelons of architectural and urbanist discourse.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you folks haven’t already seen it, I can’t recommend this article on Will Allen, founder of Growing Power and a ‘street farmer’ in Milwaukee, highly enough. \u00a0I’m not even going to pull a quote from it – just go read the whole thing. \u00a0Given a choice between having the career of Rem Koolhaas, or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[17,855,82,110],"class_list":["post-527","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-urbanism","tag-farming","tag-finance","tag-incremental-urbanism","tag-vegetative-homesteading"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/527","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=527"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/527\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":535,"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/527\/revisions\/535"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=527"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=527"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=527"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}