_PRIMARY REFERENCES
_FIRST LOOK PRINTS
Los Angeles is a city of many identities. Once the vision of the future of the American city defined by the promises of personal freedoms in the form of the sprawl afforded by cars and suburbs, Los Angeles is now the paradigmatic urban symbol of late-stage capitalism; a city in peak denial. Consumerism, media, and tourism shape a hyperreality which can be likened to a Potemkin Village that hides the complex and gruesome truths underlying it all. A reality sustained by the careful choreography of ever-larger spectacles, image has come to constitute reality. Identity as commodity has forged a new sociopolitical landscape in which the real and the manufactured become indistinguishable.
As wealth disparities grow larger, the material conditions required to maintain the status quo grow more and more desperate. Bureaucratic technologies cultivated and tested abroad find their way back home to American cities. The constant drone of circling helicopters serve as the ever-present reminder of a society built upon an inherent distrust in others; surveillance filling the void of mutual care. Privatization and privacy grow increasingly at odds with one another and performance outranks substance.
Architecture, as an institution whose very existence depends upon appealing to concentrations of wealth and power, has always been complicit in service of structural inequality. As such, the materialization of manufactured consent, beyond media and political theater, was inevitable. Today’s image of LA relies on nostalgia, serving as a final bastion of the dying American Dream. Underneath the projected image exists a storied history of expropriation and a resident population obscured and unacknowledged in the city’s pursuit of “progress”.
LA, a city obsessed with and shaped by its illusions of itself, must eventually come to terms with disillusionment and the consequences of its own making. This thesis will serve as an anthropological critique of contemporary culture through the lens of Los Angeles’ urbanism- an urbanism formless in nature and tied together by experience and identity. MUKHERJEE + SKARPHÉÐINSSON
documenting_ASSIGNMENT
The purpose of this exercise is to document Los Angeles through our own lens and experience to begin to create an aesthetic exploration that weaves in and out of reality. By imaging LA we begin to bring a personal and embodied dimension to the archive that the lexicon begins to curate and organize. Using footholds in reality this exercise will orient us in the space of the city and create the foundations of a future composite storyboard/mapping
1_visit locations in LA loosely based on the consieration of Reyner Banham’s 4 ecologies
2_photograph/video record each location
3_digitize documentation
4_digitally manipulate images
5_translate sketches to 3d time-based software
A condensed list of readings and films essential to our research of Los Angeles and broader culture. The titles included here are key to our reading of contemporary Los Angeles and the provocations set forth in the premise of our thesis. The lexicon contains excerpts from a larger selection of texts that are also important in not only this project, but in our larger ethos as designers and humans.
MUKHERJEE + SKARPHÉÐINSSON
“Lewis Mumford, in the city in history, points out that with the advent of longdistance mass communications, the isolation of the population has become a much more effective means of control. But the general trend toward isolation, which is the essential reality of urbanism, must also embody a controlled reintegration of the workers based on the planned needs of production and consumption. Such an integration into the system must recapture isolated individuals as individuals isolated together. Factories and cultural centers, holiday camps and housing developments- all are expressly oriented to the goals of a pseudo-community of this kind... -Thesis 172”(122)
SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE
_GUY DEBORD of, by, for, or directed to the public; accessible to or shared by all members of the community
URBAN
in, relating to, or characteristic of a town or city
“Over and over I would hear residents of greater Los Angeles talk about the specific part of town they lived in being center of things...This ideal LA, it turned out, was an odd amalgam of the fluid and the fixed... As a result, it was perfectly possible for members of any group to share the same freeways and still imagine that their particular lives and acquaintances were what defined Los Angeles in 1990. As for everyone else, they were as shadowy as the neighborhoods one saw from the highway interchange. Back projection and little more.”(138)
LOS ANGELES:CAPITAL OF THE THIRD WORLD _DAVID REIFF
HYPERREALITY
an image or simulation, or an aggregate of images and simulations, that either distorts the reality it purports to depict or does not in fact depict anything with a real existence at all, but which nonetheless comes to constitute reality
Los Angeles “is stuck in this mid-nineteenfifties technological optimism, where social problems are gonna be solved through technologies of war.” He called it a “conceptual hangover” and suggested that the helicopters are more about the appearance of policing than about actually effective policing. “Something that’s been documented since the very beginning of federal funding for police helicopters,” he went on, “is the idea of being hyper-visible in the sky and their presence being known.” He called it “the performance of safety.”
WHY THE NOISE OF LA HELICOPTERS NEVER STOPS _EMILY WITT
PEAK DENIAL
the height of popular denial towards an inevitable truism
“The ones who paint a picture of global warming Armageddon then assure us that we can avert catastrophe by buying green products and creating clever markets in pollution. Half of the problem is that progressives, their hands full with soaring unemployment and multiple wars, tend to assume that the big green groups have the climate issue covered. The other half is that many of those big green groups have avoided, with phobic precision, any serious debate on the blindingly obvious roots of the climate crisis: globalization, deregulation, and contemporary capitalism’s quest for perpetual growth, the same forces that are responsible for the destruction of the rest of the economy.”
THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING _NAOMI KLEIN
HYPERNORMALIZATION
the societal acceptance of a “false” reality shaped by forces of corruption and concentrated wells of power as “normal” borne out of the lack of viable mitigations to a collapsing system.
“radicals invoke the need for revolutionary change as a kind of superstitious token that should achieve the opposite, i.e. prevent the change from really occurring – like today’s academic Leftist who criticizes capitalist cultural imperialism but is in reality horrified at the idea that his field of study might really become redundant.”(7)
THE COURAGE OF HOPLESSNESS _SLAVOJ
POETIC TECHNOLOGIES
technologies are designed adhering to the principles of new economic and political systems that are not yet in power.
“By poetic technologies, I refer to the use of rational, technical, bureaucratic means to bring wild, impossible fantasies to life. Poetic technologies in this sense are as old as civilization. They could even be said to predate complex machinery.”(141)
UTOPIA OF RULES _DAVID GRAEBER
BUREAUCRATIC TECHNOLOGIES
are capitalist technologies designed for profit maximisation and social control such as IT and pharmaceutical technologies
“There appears to have been a profound shift, beginning in the 1970s, from investment in technologies associated with the possibility of alternative futures to investment technologies that furthered labor discipline and social control”(118)
UTOPIA OF RULES _DAVID GRAEBER
The autocratic reign of the market economy reduces reality to an endless supply of commodifiable fragments, while encouraging us to focus on appearances
“The alienation of the spectator to the profit of the contemplated object is expressed in the following way: The more [the spectator] contemplates the less he lives; the more he accepts recognizing himself in the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own existence and desires. – Thesis 30 The more his life is now his product, the more he is separated from his life. – Thesis 33”
SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE
EXPROPRIATION
“LA was on the hunt for a major sports team to house and they were looking at the Brooklyn Dodgers. The Dodgers owner, Walter O’Malley agreed on the contingency that a new stadium would be built and they struck a deal where they purchased the area of Chavez Ravine, for a fraction of what the public housing authority had spent for the Elysian Park Heights. On May 8th, 1958, the city approved the referendum that would officially give Walter O’Malley ownership of the land and the next day, police arrived to evict the remaining families. The families were dragged out of their homes, cuffed and some were arrested.”
HISTORIAS UNKNOWN
_CRISTINA + CRISTINA taking property from its owner
DISRUPTION
an act of delaying or interrupting the continuity
“By the fall of 1990, even the development -minded Mayor Bradley had admitted that things had to change and that Los Angeles would actually have to impose limits on itself for the first time in history. A few months later, mandatory rationing was announced, an event as cataclysmic in its implications as any of the revolutions that had been transforming the world as of late- the fall of the Berlin Wall, say, or the rise of the nonwhite Los Angeles. Before too long, the lawns had begun to go brow all over greater Los Angeles.”(254)
MANUFACTURED CONSENT
UNPRINTED INTRODUCTION TO ANIMAL FARM _GEORGE ORWELL the conditioning of the public through effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a systemsupportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion
“At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.”
