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August 3, 2002
Susan Davis
Fat Americans
Alexander Cockburn
Can the Times' Jeff Gerth
Save Dick Cheney?
August 2, 2002
Ralph Nader
The Labor
Party
Chris Floyd
Moral Maze:
Bankruptcy Made Easy
Jeremy Scahill
Saddam,
Chemical Weapons and Donald Rumsfeld
Jeffrey St. Clair
Dark Deeds in the Black Hills:
Daschle Dooms the
Sacred Land of the Sioux
August 1, 2002
Steven Higgs
Activists
Under Siege
Anthony Gancarski
Draft
Picks:
Staffing the Latest War
Zeynep Toufe
Invisible
Children: AIDS,
Africa and Selective Vision
Alexander Cockburn
Drivel and Squawk:
Angelina Jolie, the NYT
and the Attack on McKinney
July 31, 2002
Amelia Peltz
Inside
Ramallah:
How Can the World Witness Such Suffering and Do Nothing?
M. Shahid Alam
The Academic
Boycott of Israel
Bernard Weiner
20 Things
We've Learned Since 9/11
Philip Cryan
Discourse
and War in Colombia
Neve Gordon
A Feast
of Bombs:
Sharon's Endgame for Palestine
July 30, 2002
Pierre Tristam
Branding September 11
PS Burton
Financial
Journalism:
A Very Small Cog
Tom Stephens
Hypocrites in the House:
Fast Track After Midnight
Dave Marsh
Censorship
Goes Global
July 29, 2002
Linda Belanger
Why Do They Do It?
Alfredo Castro
Colombia's
Disappeared
Anne Brodsky
Inside Pakistan and
Afghanistan with RAWA
Andrew George
The Fires
of Summer:
Don't Blame the Greens
David Vest
A Blind Mule and
a Box of Medals
July 28, 2002
Bob Geary
Our Dinner
with Fidel Castro
July 27, 2002
Ian Daoust
The New
Mahler, Seattle Style
Gavin Keeney
Zizek
and Lenin
Ralph Nader
Citigroup
Heal Thyself
M. Shahid Alam
American
Presidents (Poem)
Mokhiber / Weissman
Push Back: Women Take
on the Corporate Beasts
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
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Five
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Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
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by Cockburn
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Weekend
Edition
August 3, 2002
Vox Populi
Everyone's a Critic
by Gavin Keeney
It's possible to rule out much of the so-called
criticism of large, high-profile design proposals as "internecine"
squabbling (professional jealousy and etc), but it is not possible
to pass judgement so easily on the increasing public interest
in design -- especially urban design -- and most especially when
design includes the now-ubiquitous memorial, monument, or icon
gratuitously placed in a prominent "public" space --
the Mall in Washington, Hyde Park in London, the Potsdamer Platz
in Berlin, or the grave and historic open spaces of Florence,
Rome, or Venice.
The WW II Memorial, the proposed WTC Memorial, the Princess Diana
Memorial, the Berlin Holocaust Memorial, and a new entrance to
the Uffizi Galleries in Florence are all cases in point. What
they have in common is that everyone is now a critic,
and  this everyone transcends the usual
authorized mouthpieces of design -- architects, historians, cultural
figures, etc -- and includes "the people".
In the case of the WTC process, this has taken the form of informal
and formal "pulse-taking" -- viz., ad hoc groups supposedly
representing the "will of the people", leading to a
statistical take-down of the first six plans from Beyer Blinder
Belle and the LMDC (and Port Authority). In the sense that this
statistical "consensus" might actually represent "the
public", there is something useful to extract. In the case
of the WWII Memorial (and Senator Dole's heavy-handed role in
premiating the St. Florian proposal) one can only wonder about
representative government. With the brouhaha in Florence (lead
by Franco Zeffirelli), over the Arata Isozaki proposal for a
new loggia/entrance to the Uffizi Galleries, a different set
of problems emerge.
Isozaki's loggia is clearly a bizarre manifestation of post-modernism.
It is part neo-rational urban icon and part stage set. Perhaps
this makes Zeffirelli an appropriate critic. Isozaki's estranged
urbanism -- his hyper-conscious sensitivity to form and to the
hegemonic essence within such forms -- makes his proposal something
to look very closely into. Is it not somehow, bizarrely
"appropriate", in the sense that it appropriates a
language that aggrandizes the very thing it is critiquing?
Anyway, it is time for architects to get over the fact that the
public now cares about such things. Most of these projects either
utilize public monies or public resources (including public space)
to merely exist. They quite often are gestures of supposed magnanimity
as well. That they are thrust into the public sphere at all tells
us a great deal about how the icon or the model (or the monument)
literally rules (divides and conquers) the landscape of things
(that in most all cases is an amalgam of mostly-mute signs avant
la lettre).
RES PUBLICA It may be time to properly "socialize"
the public interest in things public versus pay that interest
lip service. Sure, let the authorities of culture continue to
premiate designs, deliberate, and act through the process of
the commission, but, at the end of this process, there may be
yet another process long overdue. This follow-on process might
be the "referendum" where the statistical pulse may
be taken without the preliminary selection of the voting members
determined by a pre-selection process or a vainglorious fiddling
with demographics in pursuit of fake heterogeneity. This referendum
might be the ultimate payback for the authoritarian mode of operation
-- either the so-called public process, or the flipside, the
cultural apparatus of the well-heeled and elite. The fake-populism
of certain critics and journalists would in this case be overridden
by the very real (and no doubt frightening) prospect that the
public might simply vote "None of the Above".
Gavin Keeney is a landscape architect in New York, New
York. and the author of On
the Nature of Things, a book documenting the travails
of contemporary American landscape architecture in the 1990s.
He can be reached at: ateliermp@netscape.net
RELATED DOCUMENTS
Winter
and Maybe Spring in Berlin
World
Trade Center Burlesque
OUTTAKES
The
WWII Memorial Fiasco - "The
National World War II Memorial will be funded almost entirely
by private contributions, as specified in Public Law 103-32.
Through the generosity of a variety of giving constituencies,
the campaign has received more than $186 million in cash and
pledges, enough to cover current estimated project costs. Support
has come from hundreds of thousands of individual Americans,
hundreds of corporations and foundations, veterans groups, dozens
of civic, fraternal and professional organizations, states and
one territory, and students in 1,200 schools across the country."
(National WWII Memorial)
National Coalition to Save Our Mall "The Fine Arts Commission; however, rejected
architect Frederich St. Florian's original design for the complex
because, the commission said, it was too large and imposing.
Critics complained that the massive ring of towering columns
proposed by St. Florian were reminiscent of the Nazi-era edifices
of Adolf Hitler's architect, Albert Speer." (The Chicago
Tribune, 07/06/00)
Monument
to Diana - "The committee had been unable to choose
between Gustafson, known for her glasshouse at the National Botanical
Gardens of Wales, and Anish Kapoor, the Turner prize winning
British sculptor, who proposed a dome of water. The committee
suggested the two designs should be exhibited for the public
to decide. That did not happen." (The Guardian Unlimited,
08/01/02)
Uffizi
Imbroglio - "Florentine film director Franco Zeffirelli,
who studied architecture in the city, has labeled the avant-garde
design, which won an international competition in 2001, a 'shameful
horror,' and has appealed to those who love the city to speak
up and defend its artistic heritage." (Wired News,
07/29/02) - Arata
Isozaki &Associates
Nuova Uscita su Piazza dei Castellani (Ministero per i Beni e le Attività
Culturali)
Today's
Features
Susan Davis
Fat Americans
Alexander Cockburn
Can the Times' Jeff Gerth
Save Dick Cheney?
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