#34: The Backdrop City
The architect Robert Venturi, discussing public space, once suggested that "the open piazza is seldom appropriate for an American city today except as a convenience for pedestrians for diagonal short-cuts," explaining that "Americans feel uncomfortable sitting in a square: they should be working at the office or home with the family looking at television." That pessimistic observation, published in 1966, was a useful polemic against a modernist orthodoxy that Venturi helped to upend, but it obviously hasn't aged well, nor was it quite true even then. If "family gathered around the TV in the living room" was one dominant social arrangement of the mid-twentieth century, it remains so today due to inertia more than any recent cultural force.
The iPhone, of course, has probably dealt the biggest blow to Venturi's point: Going outside and consuming personal entertainment are no longer mutually exclusive. The inward-facing orientation of the TV-and-postwar-suburbia era, manifested as an abandonment of public space, has been inverted by the internet and the mobile device. We aren't stuck at home (or work) anymore, and the urban landscape is responding. Not only are we out and about, but we're taking pictures and recording video constantly, so that landscape not only must accommodate us, it has to look good too.
The visible result of ubiquitous phones, cameras, and internet has been called AirSpace: the sterile, globally-consistent minimalism of Airbnb and trendy coffee shops. Weirder, more colorful environments have also emerged to satisfy the demand for better Instagram backdrops, like the Museum of Ice Cream, a space consciously designed for that purpose. Many new kinds of public space, including these and more familiar examples like New York’s High Line, feel increasingly like stage sets for what happens in digital space, but that’s better than being empty, right?
Reads:
James Bridle's journey through the bizarre, nightmarish world of algorithmically-generated YouTube videos for kids. I couldn't stop thinking about this for days after I read it.
Geoff Manaugh on the British Countryside Generator, a procedural engine for creating "aesthetically recognizable rural British landscapes" in the game Sir, You Are Being Hunted (companion to the A.I. that learned to generate realistic British place names)
Until next time,
Drew