MOPA Programming Document by Nicole Mater

MEMPHIS MUSEUM OF PHOTOGRAPHIC ARTS WILLIAM

EGGELSTON

NI COLE M ATE R

COLLECTION

TABLE OF CONTENTS DESIGN PHILOSOPHY PROJECT STATEMENT WILLIAM EGGELSTON..............................4 Biography................................5 Timeline..................................6 Process...................................8 Democratic Forest........................10 Influence................................19 CONTEXT........................................20 Memphis..................................21 South Main Historic District.............22 Site 1...................................26 Site 2..................................27 Cultural and Demographic Analysis........28 Climatic and Geological Analysis.........36 PROGRAM........................................38 Users....................................38 Programmatic Mission.....................39 Precedence Analysis......................40 Space Budget.............................44 Cost Analysis............................46 SOURCES........................................48

DESIGN PHILOSOPHY Architectural design cannot be based simply upon an artist’s aesthetic vision. It must be a synthesis of contextual information and a solution to a problem. Buildings are meant to be used, and while beauty is worth striving for, the building needs to operate functionally as well as socially. Architects have the ability to inspire real change within a community. A design that meets the needs of the people using it may become a catalyst for improvements on a larger scale. Small, critical changes can heal the system as a whole. Communities can be improved in a multivariate of categories by these interjections of creative, problem-solving design.

PROJECT STATEMENT MUSEUM OF PHOTOGRAPHIC ARTS IN MEMPHIS This project focuses on the creation of a 30,000 square foot museum that is framed with and supported by the context of the city of Memphis, Tennessee. It will feature permanent collections by local photographer William Eggelston, in particular, the works of The Democratic Forest. This collection currently does not have a permanent home, and these famed works of art that inspired a generation of photographers deserves to be presented in an honorable way. The environment must reflect the ideals of his work in order for them to display with ultimate potency. The project desires to break out of the traditional response of the prototypical museum, branching out into the realms of community center and learning environment. The spaces will be used to stitch together a community that has become physically segregated and will become a catalyst for change within the city of Memphis. The museum must not only address the issues of the immediate context, but become a magnet to patrons on a national and international scale. Eggelston’s work is more revered in Europe than in the United States, and the museum must invite them into the experience of the artist’s home town. In this way, it is especially important for the museum to represent a refined version of the architectural regionalism of Memphis.

WILLIAM EGGELSTON BIOGRAPHY FROM “WILLIAM EGGELSTON TALKS...” In the spring of 1994 William Eggleston visited Los Angeles to shoot a portfolio of Hollywood. Journalist Kristine McKenna escorted him around town, and they had several in-depth conversations, some in his room at the Chateau Marmont. These are excerpts from those tape-machine recordings, which are compiled in the new book William Eggleston For Now.

“I guess you could say my childhood was idyllic. My parents had a great respect for art, and two of the first things given to me as a child by my mother were books on Rouault and De Chirico. My parents always encouraged my interest in art, even though they thought a career as an artist was crazy. When I was growing up it was thought I’d be a concert pianist because I could play anything by ear, but a musician has to give his entire life to his work, and I have enough on my hands trying to get people to understand my photographs.” “When I was 15 I was sent to a private school that I hated, then I tried a few other schools before ending up at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. I was there for five years studying painting, and the painter I liked the most during that period was Franz Kline. I also liked De Kooning and Pollock. Abstract expressionism was the dominant thing when I was coming of age as an artist, and I went to New York and looked at a lot of that stuff. I was painting abstractions myself at the time, and although most people don’t know this, I’ve never stopped painting. I never got a degree because I couldn’t see any sense in taking tests. I didn’t mind going to classes, but taking a test? For whom? And what would I do with a damn degree anyway? Because I refused to take tests I had to talk the dean into letting me back into school every year, and that was hard because they didn’t think I was particularly talented. At the time I was doing the groundwork for photography, and photography was barely even taught then, much less considered an art form.” “When I was ten years old I was given a Brownie camera and I took some pictures of my dog, but they weren’t very good. That left me completely disenchanted with the idea of taking pictures, and I continued to hate it until the late 50s, when a friend in boarding school made me buy a camera. I began to get it. Then I saw a copy of Cartier-Bresson’s book The Decisive Moment, and I really got excited about taking pictures.” “I don’t see many movies, but there were a few films where the color was used brilliantly, and they made a big impression on me—Alfred Hitchcock’s North By Northwest and [Arthur Penn’s] Bonnie and Clyde are the two I’m thinking of in particular. Something clicked in me when I saw those films—maybe it was just one minute out of the whole movie. During the same period that I was thinking about those films, I had a friend who had a job working nights at a photography lab where they processed snapshots, and I’d go visit him because we were both night owls. I started looking at these pictures coming out—they’d come out in a long ribbon—and although most of them were accidents, some were absolutely beautiful, so I started spending all night looking at these ribbons of pictures. I was particularly struck by a picture of a guy who worked for a grocery store, pushing a shopping cart out in the late-afternoon sun. I figured if amateurs working with cheap cameras could do this, I could use good cameras and really come up with something. I had a natural talent for organizing colors—not putting all the reds in one corner, for instance. Essentially what I was doing was applying intelligent painting theory to color photography.” “People just hit the roof when my pictures where shown at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1976. That surprised me, too, because the work was in such a hallowed institution. Everybody screamed, “This isn’t art! Why is this in a museum?” I’d intentionally constructed the pictures to make them look like ordinary snapshots anyone could’ve taken, and a lot of that had to do with the subject matter—a shopping center parking lot, for instance. Because the pictures looked so simple a lot of people didn’t notice that the color and form were worked out, that the content came and went where it ought to—that they were more than casual pictures. People say I “shoot from the hip,” but that’s not really how I work. When I look at something it registers on my mind so clearly that I can be loose when I shoot the picture. I always take just one picture of something, and I’ve never staged a photograph in my life, and never needed to because there are pictures everywhere. If I’m ever in a place I think is impossible to photograph, I remember something Garry Winogrand told me. He said, ‘Bill, you can take a good picture of anything,’ and that’s always stuck with me.” “My work has been described as documenting a vanishing South, but that was never something I was conscious of. When I was taking the pictures those critics are probably referring to, as far as I knew those things were there for good. I didn’t know that five years later this incredible Coke sign would be replaced by a 7-Eleven. That possibility never dawned on me, because up until the 60s the South looked pretty much as it had during the Depression. But from the 60s on it became a different ball game, and it’s unrecognizable today from what it was. Have you been to the South lately? It’s not ‘interesting’ bad like LA—it just looks like a bunch of idiots put the place together.” “I’ve never understood why people describe my work as romantic, because I don’t romanticize the world. If you could turn back time and look at a place as it was when I photographed it, I think the picture and the place would look pretty much the same. I’ve never felt the need to enhance the world in my pictures, because the world is spectacular enough as it is.”

TIMELINE: HIGHLIGHTS

1959 Sees Henri-Cartier Bresson’s “The Decisive Moment” and Walker Evan’s “American Photographs”

1954 July 27

1939

Sent to boarding school at the age of 15

Born in Memphis, TN Primarily raised by his grandfather in Sumner, MS as he was the first boy born into the family, though his parents were alive and well

1958

Acquires first Leica camera while attending Vanderbilt University

1965 Begins to experiment with color transparency film, inspired by the work of William Christenberry

1974 First portfolio of dye transfer prints, called “14 Pictures” created

1973 Teaches at Harvard University

1976

1989

“14 Pictures” exhibited at the MoMA, Eggelston’s first show. Befriends Andy Warhol and participates in the pop-art party scene

“The Democratic Forest” is released

1984 Photographs Elvis’s home, Graceland

2008 Film “Stranded in Canton” released

1992 Travels the world taking photographs

2005

Returns to the States

PROCESS ONE SHOT “I always take just one picture of something, and I’ve never staged a photograph in my life, and never needed to because there are pictures everywhere.” Eggleston is able to simply capture moments, without being overly concerned with the why behind it. He takes one photograph and moves on. If he doesn’t get it the first time, he doesn’t go back to try to recapture it. The moment is over and he has moved on. His subjects are things most of us would consider to be boring, but he takes the everyday, often mundane objects in our lives and makes them beautiful. He turns them into works of art. If you look at each of his images and take the subjects themselves out and just see the color, shapes, and lines; seeing how it all fits together. That is art. From “Perfectly Banal: William Eggelston”

DYE TRANSFER Dye transfer is very different from other modern color print processes. No other process gives you so many ways to control the look of the final print. That is what makes dye transfer so hard, and it is also what makes dye transfer print so magnificent. Dye transfer provides the photographic artist with the tools to express extraordinary subtleties and nuances. Color prints can be fine-tuned to convey exactly what the artist intended. In dye transfer printing, rarely is the printer limited by the process; dye transfer allows so much control that it is impossible to completely master all its possibilities. Dye transfer dyes are much closer to ‘ideal’ than other photographic dyes. The colors are purer. For example, the yellow dye in a dye transfer print is very clean, while ordinary color prints have an orangish yellow which muddies greens and masks subtle variations in reds and oranges. A dye transfer print has better and more accurate color than any other color print. A dye print can have a brightness range of 500:1 or more; no other print, black-and-white or color, matches that. The dyes in a dye transfer print are very stable. Some conventional color prints now have a light stability better than dye transfer, but they also deteriorate in the dark. Unless you keep the majority of your work on lighted display at all times, dark fading or staining will prove more damaging than light fading. A dye transfer print has a dark-life expectancy, at room temperature and humidity, of over 300 years-- much better than even Ilfochrome. Dye transfers are printed on a double-weight fibre-base paper stock which is known to be stable and archival. Dye transfer printing resembles the mechanical printing process that magazines use to make color pictures. A color printing press uses four separate printing plates, one each for the three primaries (magenta, yellow, cyan) and one for black. Each plate is engraved with a halftone image for one of the colors, which is coated with a thin layer of oil-based ink. The four plates then transfer their ink to the surface of a sheet of blank white paper to make the color pictures. The final picture is not ‘created’ chemically in the paper; it is assembled on its surface from four separate screened color images. Dye transfer uses three continuous-tone sheet film plates called matrices. The matrices are soaked in water-based cyan, magenta and yellow dyes. The matrices are rinsed clean of excess dye and squeegeed against a sheet of gelatin-coated paper, much like regular photographic paper but without the silver compounds. The gelatin absorbs the dye from the matrix. The result is a continuous-tone dye image on paper. From “Dye Transfer: The Ultimate Color Print”

THE DEMOCRATIC FOREST

Written by Eudora Welty, annotated by Nicole Mater

The Democratic Forest, a most remarkable and beautiful book, is what is even rarer, and original one. Consisting entirely of the eloquent photographs of the American photographer William Eggleston, it begins as an autobiography might, with a setting for a life. The opening photograph shows us a quiet and cared-for breadth of meadow, field and pastureland, set back at an easeful distance from its road, led to through a line of wide-spaced trees in the leafing spring of the year, protected on the upper side by an arm of the old forest. A sentinel shade tree stands beside the open-doored barn. The caption reads: 'Early spring at Mayfair, my family plantation in Sunflower County.' The place has been photographed in its tender rural colours. No one is in view. I think with this we have received the first signal that this book of photographs--he has made it wholly his own--is a result of personal choosing, that it will proceed to form itself, as it opens out, into a personal whole. We won't expect the photographs to be fitted into the kind of sequence that would confine such a freedom; the order is, to my mind, the much more significant one of cohesion, of affinity with human values. The body of photographs before us might, with cause, be seen as the culmination of Mr. Eggleston's long and distinguished career. All the photographs have place as their subject. From Mayfair on, places appear to have loomed large for William Eggleston. Now a resident of Memphis, he has been spending his life making exemplary photographs of the world around him and thereby recording its ways. These photographs that begin with his home place, which is in Mississippi, radiate widely over the United States, touch on Europe, go as far as the Berlin Wall. He has called his book The Democratic Forest, a title to embrace all he shows us. The photographs range widely, they are highly differing, richly varying. In landscapes, cityscapes, street scenes, roadside scenes, at every sort of public converging-point, in dreaming long view and arresting close-up, through hours of dark and light, he sets forth what makes up our ordinary world. What is there, however strange, can be accepted without question; familiarity will be what overwhelms us. The extraordinary thing is that in all these photographs, wonderfully inclusive and purposefully chose as they are, you will look in vain for the presence of a human being. This isn't to say that the photographs deny man's existence. That is exactly what they don't do. Everywhere you find the vividness of his presence: Here's a close-up of an outdoor cooker and a bloody hatchet laid down up it, called 'Near the River.' Here's the already stripped and de-wheeled front end of a red sports car, at rest under a tree by the Interstate; its radiator grille bites the dust. It seems a personal artifact, like an upper plate of a set of false teeth that's been lost on someone's way between one place and the next. On a temporary hoarding at a construction site in Memphis, some hand wielding a stick dipped in soft tar has left a drawing of a big bridge spread like the wings of a bird over the chopping waves, and has tried to spell 'Memphis' and succeeded, to the last touch of turning the 'S' into a dollar sign. Here is a just-vacated counter in a fast-foods road stop. It is stacked with uncleared plastic plates, all dripping red, like a police scene-of-the-crime photo complete with its message to you ('Catch me before I kill again') written in tomato ketchup. But the camera tells us nobody is there. The indelible exception is the young child photographed standing alone on a desolate street corner in some city: he stares back at the camera with the gravity of the homeless. He, too, is tenaciously present in other scenes while remaining invisible.

Indeed, Mr. Eggleston's masterly photographs of places draw their strength and their significance from his never losing his own very acute sight of the human factor. The human being--the perpetrator of or the victim or the abandoner of what we see before us--is the reason why these photographs of place have their power to move and disturb us; they always let us know that the human being is the reason they were made. He has photographed every tell-tale thing we leave behind us, from leaking oil to spilled Coca-Cola. He has looked up and caught the emanations of the Great Smoky Mountains, and a mist very like a ghost that appears to be drifting over a graveyard and near Oxford, Mississippi. In photographing ivy crowding over a wall, in commotion as lively as a townful of Breughel peasants, he has got a picture of a country breeze. He moves his camera close upon a great worldly peony; our glimpse into that is as good as a visit: a bloom so full-open and spacious that we could all but enter it, sit down inside and be served tea. It was photographed, according to the caption, on the Boston Common across from the Ritz Hotel--which is the next thing to photographing an analogy. In effect, he can lay our own hand on texture and substance. He puts between our finger and thumb the slipperiness of a leaf only in that moment coming out on the budding tree. Indeed, this is what his skill performs: it makes what it shows accessible. But one photograph includes: old tyres, Dr. Pepper machines, discarded air-conditioners, vending machines, empty and dirty Coca-Cola bottles, torn posters, power poles and power wires, street barricades, one-way signs, detour signs, No Parking signs, parking meters and palm trees crowding the same kerb. 'Karco' (p.38) reaches the saturation point of sign-occupied space. His camera, held at weed level, shows us weeds close-to, shoving up their saw-toothed leaves through a crack in the pavement and, at a distance back in the same frame, Atlanta's skyscrapers on the rise too, proliferating and more rampant than weeds. Skyscrapers rear up like bullies planning to overrun the city, or running the city, from on high. He moves about the skylines of Miami, Atlanta, Pittsburgh. No last drop of humanity could come from what we've built as fortifications. He tests it with a view of the Texas State Book Depository in Dallas, indelible in the world's memory as the source of the gunshots that killed President John F. Kennedy. Indeed, when Mr. Eggleston photographs the tall and darkened shafts rising, vacated, from the emptied night-time streets, he brings to mind 'two vast and trunkless legs of stone' in the desert of the 'antique land' and the inscription that remain on their ruined pedestal: 'I am Ozymandias, king of kings. Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!' These extraordinary, compelling, honest, beautiful and unsparing photographs all have to do with the quality of our lives in the ongoing world: they succeed in showing us the grain of the present, like the cross-section of a tree. The photographs have cut it straight through the center. They focus on the mundane world. But no subject is fuller of implications than the mundane world! When you see what the mundane world so openly and multitudinously affirms, there is everything left to say. Mr. Eggleston's camera brings it forth. His fine and scrupulous photographs achieve beauty. All that they have to tell us, in all their variety, reaches us through the beauty of the work. There is especial beauty in his sensitive and exacting use of color, its variations and intensities. We see the celestial blue of burning trash, the golden cloak of sunlight, or blight; the slip of a tree trying to push its way up one more time through one more crack in the parking-lot pavement is a lyrical green. But particularly there is red: the banner red of Coca-Cola signs a hundred strong, the Sienese red of rust, further and further intensities of red, the deeper into the city we go: red caught in the act of spreading, hectic and alarming, collecting and running at large through the intersections like a contagion. Solid reds: the interior of a Memphis Krystal Hamburger house, furnishings and all, a creation entirely in ruby-red plastic. Throbbing reds, like vibrations being given off by the traffic.

Time in The Democratic Forest is the galvanic present, but as we were earlier made aware, the past, in its flickerings and shadowings, is also integral to the book. (I take it as the viewer’s standing privilege of turning back to the book’s beginning if the need is felt to re-visit it for freshly discovered reasons.) In the home place--any home place in the world--the long view is the one like memory’s view: it shows us everything at once. Turning again through the photographs of Mayfair, exterior and interior, we may apprehend and respond to the essential matters of human presence and human absence. Here is the Eggleston photograph of the family portraits set out on a library table top--a solid row of ancestors that’s as calming as an unrocked boat. And, in the attic now, his camera lifts close-up to the roof-beam, into which the hand that hewed it also carved--the camera lets us read them--the initials attesting to that mysterious thing, original ownership. But this book’s our portrait. We must see that. We should be prepared to see the portrait as a candid one, taken in a flash of inspired insight, at the psychological moment. It is a forthright and brave book; it is made with the bravery required of an artist. The autobiographical work, like much else that is autobiographical, can be taken as well for a set of visions. If only in this respect, the autobiographical approach to The Democratic Forest has engaged us all in its implication. Our own way of seeing may have recently been in trouble. These days, not only the world that we look out upon but the human eye itself seems at times occluded, as if a cataract had thickened over it from within. We have become used to what we live with, caloused (perhaps in self-protection) to what's happened to the world outside our door, and we now accept its worsening. But the Eggleston vision of his world is clear, and clarifying to our own. In his own country, we have always valued William Eggleston's work for its clarity, veracity, strength of intention. Perhaps we couldn't have known until we’d met it in this book, seen it at work, the strength of imagination that conceived it, shaped it, and consistently informed it all. Actually, what we have here is a set of visions. Like a magician, William Eggleston has raised them out of light colour, smoke and an absence of people. Visions or not, he remains a photographer who never trifles with actuality: he works with actuality, and within it--the self-evident and persisting world confronted by us all. The human being, unseen, remains the reason these photographs of place carry such power to move and disturb us-and, by the end, somewhat hearten us. A clear spring rises somewhere on the home place, for the human strain begins there for Mr. Eggleston, and we see it in what follows: it turns into a river that runs through, or underneath, every place succeeding it. Whatever is done to block it or stop its flow, it surfaces again. Pure human nature provides itself in likely or unlikely places. - Eudora Welty, From the Introduction to The Democratic Forest

THE DEMOCRATIC FOREST IN EGGELSTON’S WORDS

Annotated by Nicole Mater

I was in Oxford, Mississippi for a few days and I was driving out to Holly Springs on a back road, stopping here and there. It was the time of year when the landscape wasn’t yet green. I left the car and walked into the dead leaves off the road. It was one of those occasions when there was no picture there. It seemed like nothing, but of course there was something for someone out there. I started forcing myself to take pictures of the earth, where it had been eroded thirty or forty feet from the road. There were a few weeds. I began to realize that soon I was taking some pretty good pictures, so I went further into the woods and up a little hill, and got well into an entire roll of film. Later, when I was having dinner with some friends, writers from around Oxford, or maybe at the bar of the Holiday Inn, someone said, ‘What have you been photographing here today, Eggleston?’ ‘Well, I’ve been photographing democratically,’ I replied. ‘But what have you been taking pictures of?’ ‘I’ve been outdoors, nowhere, in nothing.’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Well, just woods and dirt, a little asphalt here and there.’ I was treating things democratically, which of course didn’t mean a thing to the people I was talking to. I already had different, massive series. I had been to Berlin and to Pittsburgh and completed huge bodies of work. From that moment everything from the boxes of thousands of prints made cohesive sense for the first time. All the work from this period from 1983 to 1986 was unified by the democracy. Friends would ask what I was doing and I would tell them that I was working on a project with several thousand prints. They would laugh but I would be dead serious. At least I had found a friend in that title, The Democratic Forest, that would look over me. It was not much different from Cartier-Bresson bringing the whole world from America to China to The Decisive Moment. I had picked up The Decisive Moment years ago when I was already making prints, so the first thing I noticed was the tonal quality of the black and white. There were no shadow areas that were totally black, where you couldn’t make out what was in them, and there were no totally white areas. It was only later that I was struck by the wonderful, correct, composition and framing. This was apparent through the tones of the printed book. I later found some actual prints of the same pictures in New York. They were nothing - just ordinary looking photographs, but they were the same pictures I had worshipped and idolized, yet I wouldn’t have given ten cents for them. I still go back to the book every couple of years and I know it is the tones that make the composition come across. I am afraid that there are more people than I can imagine who can go no further than appreciating a picture that is a rectangle with an object in the middle of it, which they can identify. They don’t care what is around the object as long as nothing interferes with the object itself, right in the centre. Even after the lessons of Winogrand and Friedlander, they don’t get it. They respect their work because they are told by respectable institutions that they are important artists, but what they really want to see is a picture with a figure or an object in the middle of it. They want something obvious. The blindness is apparent when someone lets slip the word ‘snapshot’. Ignorance can always be covered by ‘snapshot’. The word has never had any meaning. I am at war with the obvious. -- William Eggelston in conversation with Mark Holborn, Greenwood, Mississippi, February 1988 From the Afterword to The Democratic Forest 17

INFLUENCE Composition and color. Composition and color: the mantra of many photographers. This may be due in no small part to William Eggleston. Eggleston is credited with ushering in the era of color photography. His color-saturated images of daily life in the American South have had a profound influence on the world of art and documentary photography, and the Whitney Museum of American Art is showcasing his work in “William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008.” The scenes are familiar, almost homey, and the color is mesmerizing. It is easy to stare at picture of a green tub and tiled shower for 15 minutes. Somehow, Eggleston knew that there was something arresting in this most mundane of places. Like most art photographers, he is trying to find a certain moment, the moment that not only expresses what is heart-wrenchingly unique about the scene, but how it also manages to relate to us all. Eggleston manages to find the scenes and the moments that make you linger: the instant caught in a diner where we see the back of an older woman’s elaborate up-do, her hand seeming to grow from her neck as she holds her cigarette across her body. And while there may not be much intellectual contemplation involved, the art of his photos is that they create a stillness that allows us to see how beautiful these simple scenes can be. Whether it’s a photo of an oven, a bathtub, underneath a bed, inside a freezer, a dog drinking from a muddy puddle or a classic portrait of a woman sitting on the street, there is a serenity, as if the world had literally stopped. Eggleston has a rare ability to create a space and his photos are a bubble of perfection where the subject exists in a space that seems built just for it. From dusty Walker Evans inspired black and whites in the early 1960s to glossy city scenes in 2001, Eggleston accepts a subject as it is, photographing because of what he sees, not because of what he wants to create. He has said that in his photos “every detail is important,” so he’s giving it to us as it is; the image just might not be as perfect without all the minor details. In these moments, everything is perfect. The sunlight shimmers on the car’s hood just so and there is not a hair out of place. In this extreme clarity, we notice everything and everything feels right: Eggleston’s gift is in finding the small oddity and making it seem so incredibly normal, as if it couldn’t possibly be any other way. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Eggleston’s geography broadened to include Kyoto, Japan, and Berlin, and the large photos are stunning in their perfection. A face on a TV screen reflected in a window looking out over nighttime Kyoto conveys a familiar sense of isolation and loneliness and is as visually skillful as ever, but, something is missing without the nostalgia of the 1960s and 1970s. The new works are sleek images suited for the pages of a magazine and lack the scope and heart of his earlier works. Though this small criticism is of little impact on the overall body of work. Through snapshot moments, Eggleston has captured and continues to capture a time and a place so concretely and with such a depth of clarity and visual skill that few can argue with his place among the greats of photography.

From “William Eggelston’s Influence” by Sarah Rose 19

CONTEXT MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE

Living in this city my emotions are over-ripe, why I spill to you, why I often seem like a kettle on the boil. It’s the way Memphians know how to lay that organ ripple underneath a song as if it were something in your blood. It’s Booker T. It’s Jim Dickinson. It’s Reverend Al Green. Memphis Mojo. And I am just a pawn living in a city of soul, with a heart like a stuck accelerator. -Corey Mesler

SOUTH MAIN HISTORIC DISTRICT A lively, artsy neighborhood in the heart of downtown Memphis, the South Main Historic Arts District is home to some of the most important cultural attractions in Memphis. The National Civil Rights Museum, the Orpheum Theater, and historic Central Station are all in the area. Hip restaurants and boutiques as well as cutting-edge art galleries complete the scene, making South Main an attractive place to spend an afternoon. The South Main District is an area that is “coming back.” Coming back from boarded up and dark and deserted. This district grew up in the hustle and bustle of the boom era of the train stations – Union Station and Central Station. Most of the South Main buildings were built between 1910 and 1920. The area’s businesses catered to the railroad passengers and employees – hotels, bars, restaurants and other small businesses. But when railroad days ended in the 60s that marked the end of South Main. It became warehouses and empty buildings. In 1982 eleven blocks and 105 buildings were designated as an Historic District and the early 90s the district started it’s comeback. Today there are restaurants, upscale apartments, galleries, photographers, graphic designers and retail with more and more buildings being renovated for lofts, condos and apartments. The South Main Arts District attracts a diverse group of people who love the urban living experience. Whether you want to live in something old or something new, a period place or contemporary chic, lease or own, South Main has it all. The views of the Memphis skyline and the Mississippi River are breathtaking. Residents can enjoy downtown activities just a few short blocks away or take a stroll on the Riverwalk. Living and playing on South Main is a full time job and the sense of community among those living in the area is a strong attraction. From SouthMainMemphis.net

ORPHEUM THEATER

BLUES FOUNDATION

NATIONAL CIVIL RIGHTS MUSEUM

MEMPHIS FARMERS’ MARKET

MEMPHIS CENTRAL STATION/ TROLLEY AND RAILROAD MUSEUM

FORUM

SITE 1 Interests/Concerns: -Removal of small existing structure -Street corner allows for 2 main facades -Unobstructed northern light and views to downtown Memphis -Different zoning condition than the surrounding properties

SITE 2 Interests/Concerns: -Adaptation or removal of existing structures -Existing greenspace, called â&#x20AC;&#x153;Narniaâ&#x20AC;? by locals -Interesting/ challenging lighting condition with tall building to the North. This building also blocks views to parts of the city.

MEMPHIS ZONING

POPULATION DEMOGRAPHICS

Downtown Memphis is primarily and African American community. The population has been physically segregated by recent sprawl.

The age distribution throughout Memphis follows a pattern similar to the age distribution of the country, with a positive deviation in the 25-34 year age group.

The income distribution of downtown Memphis is again the result of the epidemic of sprawl, which is separating the wealthy from the lower-income population. Recall that a majority of the population in downtown Memphis is African American.

Note the high occurance of earthquakes in the Memphis region.

A majority of the popuation relies on automobile transportation because there is not a good system of public transportation available.

Average commute time is between 15-29 minutes, a short enough temporal radius to prompt the use of a new efficient system of public transportation.

DEMOGRAPHIC SPRAWL A study was recently conducted examining the structure and costs of urban sprawl in the Memphis metropolitan area. The results indicate that urban sprawl in Memphis has produced unintended side effects, including: • Physical separation of the social classes; • Abandonment of the old city infrastructure in favor of constant building of new infrastructure; • Functional segregation of residential life from commercial life; and • Increased dependence on the automobile for all work, shopping and leisure trips. Housing data indicate that the suburbs around Memphis are growing more rapidly than the city; they also attract white residents rather than black, have far less poverty and, generally, have higher incomes per household. The city of Memphis is majority African-American. It also is older, has lower per-capita incomes, and suffers from far higher crime rates than the surrounding suburbs. The suburban areas are becoming more desirable to people who can afford to move away from the city center. This sprawl effects the cultural, economic, and environmental diversity in the city. It also causes a need to devote more infrustructure to the automobile, as public transportation, bicycling and walking are not practical alternatives. In the Memphis area, over nine out of 10 trips are made by car. Adapted From “The Cost of Urban Sprawl in the MSA”

In urban areas, deep blue indicates that the population more than doubled, pure red means that everyone left, grey denotes no change, and the intermediate tones represent the spectrum of increases and decreases in-between. Below 5000 residents per square mile, these colors fade with the square root of density towards white, where no people lived in either year. From Data Pointed

These three comparisons are presented as a method of understanding the severity of the degredation of the urban core throughout the country. Out of all four cities, Detroit shows the worst population decline, but it is evident in all of these cities, as well as many others throughout the country. Perhaps this project can discover ways to reverse this pattern.

Saint Louis, Missouri

Chicago, Illinois

Detroit, Michigan

Memphis Crime Rate Map Dark blue areas indicate the safest areas, White areas indicate the most dangerous areas. Our site, noted by the red placemarker, is in a relatively safe area, but is adjacent to a very dangerous area. These safety concerns will need to be addressed.

CRIME STATISTICS

Memphis is ranked the 4th most dangerous city in the United States, right after Detroit, Saint Louis, and Oakland. 1 in 15 people are statistically the victim of property crime, and 1 in 62 people are statistically the victim of a violent crime.

CLIMATIC ANALYSIS AVERAGE TEMPURATURES Avg High

Record High

Avg Low

Record Low

Legend:

Record High

AVERAGE PRECIPITATION

Precipitation

Temperature (ºF)

Avg Precip.

Average High

Average Low

Record Low

12 in 10 in 100ºF

8 in

91 85

80ºF

81 74

73 64

60ºF 55

70 62

50 44

40ºF 37 33

20ºF

0ºF

HUMIDITY PER MONTH

-20ºF

6 in

73 65

63 54

4 in 52

3.98

4.55

5.16

5.50

5.49

5.25

4.59

5.74

3.98

3.63 2.88

3.09

2 in

44 35

Source: Weather.com