INTERMEDIATE UNIT 1 - A NEW MIRACLE IN THE DESERT Mark Campbell and Stewart Dodd
Richard Miscrach, Stranded Rowboat, Salton Sea (1983)
‘The Salton Sea offers the good life in the sun. It’s the place for you to take charge of your future, you can come as you are — no reservations required.’ (Real Estate Advertisement, 1958) The Salton Sea is the result of a massive engineering mishap in which the Colorado River was accidently diverted into California’s Imperial Valley during the early-1900s. Before the flow could be halted over 350 sq. miles of desert had been flooded. This ‘accidental sea’ soon became a tourist attraction, however, and an opportunity for rampant architectural speculation. Resorts, marinas and suburbs grew up almost overnight and by its height in the 1950s members of the cultural elite – from Jack and Jackie Kennedy to Frank Sinatra and his booze-addled Rat Pack – visited to drink martinis and race speedboats. Unfortunately the ‘California Riviera’ was fed with chemically enriched agricultural run-off and the promise of modern architectural haven — ‘a Palm Springs with water’ — faded with the toxic reality of 140 deg. summers and apocalyptic wildlife die-offs. This year Intermediate 1 will continue to examine the architectural extremities and cultural oddities we discover through our research. We will explore the notion of ‘accidental architectures’ and investigate the outsider communities who continue to live among its residues — in defiance of any discernable reason or logic. Throughout these investigations we will act as ‘archaeologists of the immediate future’ (to paraphrase Reyner Banham) and our forensic examinations will include found artifacts, architectural precedents, images of both the past and future, and speculative and spurious research. ‘America’ — Jean Baudrillard once noted — ‘is the original version of modernity. We are the dubbed or subtitled version.’ Taking this statement as a provocation, we will begin by exploring the questions of ‘faked histories’, architectural promise, and cultural appropriation through such works as Gordon Matta-Clark’s ‘Fake Estates’ and the filmic explorations of America in La Jetée (1962), Alphaville (1965) and Zabriskie Point (1970). Our fieldwork is vital and this year we will visit the abandoned suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona, the airplane graveyards of Tucson, the desert suburb of Palm Springs (the apotheosis of California modernism), and the ‘Californian Rivera’ of the Salton Sea. In response to this research and such architectural precedents as Archigram’s ‘Instant Cities’ and Ant Farm’s ‘Inflatables’ series, the unit will be asked to design a new miracle in the desert — a temporary resort, or an airborne floating city — which is playful and disconsolate, a sly ruse, a deliberate falsity and a critique of our architectural intransigence.