#65: Heaven or Las Vegas
Robert Venturi died this week. Learning from Las Vegas (which he wrote with Denise Scott Brown) is the architecture book that made me actually want to read more architecture books, and while most of Venturi's buildings weren't that great, his way of seeing the world was revolutionary, finding redeeming qualities in the 1970s commercial landscape (best exemplified by Las Vegas) that modernists simply wanted to tear down and replace wholesale: "Architects have been brought up on Space, and enclosed space is the easiest to handle." Enclosed space—that is, traditional public space, modeled on the Italian piazza—remains an urbanist obsession even today, but one of Venturi's gifts to the world was his observation that now, for most of us, public space usually looks more like a mall or a hotel lobby or a Starbucks than the Piazza San Marco, unless we're encountering the latter in Vegas or at Disney World. In reality, there's not all that much Public Space but instead many overlapping layers of private and semi-private space that usually work well enough as a substitution.
One reason the distinction between public and private space matters today is that so many of the activities historically located in physical public space have moved online. While Facebook has always been a patchwork of private networks, Twitter gradually emerged as a global proxy for the town squares where public "stuff" happened in the mythologized past. And now, unfortunately, we're learning that an entirely open, world-spanning forum doesn't quite work, because people. The pendulum is swinging away from openness and publicness. Warren Ellis summarized this burgeoning paradigm recently in his newsletter while discussing his experience using Mastodon: "Private accounts and locked spaces and phantom movement and communication via the Republic of Newsletters and RSS signals across the Isles of Blogging. We are as ghosts and might as well get good at it." Bit by bit, our collective narrative about the world as an open matrix of free information flow becomes harder to believe.
If Twitter is to digital communication as Italian piazzas are to urban design, both represent myths of public space that were never quite as true as we wanted them to be. Matt Levine makes a similar point discussing the efficient-market hypothesis: "The conventional form of the efficient markets hypothesis says, roughly, that nobody can reliably beat the market. But the much more straightforward and intuitive form of the efficient markets hypothesis says that you can’t beat the market. And if somebody else can beat the market, why would they do it for you? Either they’ll charge you their entire outperformance (and then some) in fees, or they’ll just turn you down flat." In other words, so much of the world's important information has always been locked up in private, inaccessible places. Meanwhile, our societal narratives about our openness shift between acknowledging and denying that inaccessiblity and fragmentation. Twitter has served as a sort of efficient-market hypothesis for culture, supporting a notion that a comprehensive, accurate view of what matters in the world is even possible. What Robert Venturi noticed about space, and what the modernists missed, is that no such bird's eye view is available, just a series of private enclaves that simulate the feeling of having it.
Reads:
1950s-style "memory towns" are being built in suburban California to provide reminiscence therapy for elderly individuals with cognitive impairments.
How Will Police Solve Murders on Mars? by Geoff Manaugh.
RIP Paul Virilio, too. "A city is already a mesh of slow and fast times, but perhaps sometimes a new pocket of stillness can be created."