In
New York there is this double miracle: each of the great buildings and each of
the ethnic groups dominates or has dominated the city - after its own fashion.
Here crowdedness lends sparkle to each of the ingredients in the mix whereas
elsewhere it tends to cancel out differences. In Montreal, all the same
elements are present - ethnic groups, buildings, and space on the grand American
scale - but the sparkle and violence
of American cities are missing.
Clouds spoil our European skies.
Compared with the immense skies
of America and their thick
clouds, our little fleecy skies and little fleecy clouds resemble our fleecy thoughts, which are never thoughts
of wide open spaces. . . In Paris, the sky never takes off. It doesn't soar
above us. It remains caught up in the backdrop of sickly buildings, all living
in each other's shade, as though it were a little piece of private property. It is not, as here in the great capital New York, the vertiginous glass facade
reflecting each building to the others. Europe has never been a continent. You
can see that by its skies. As soon as you set foot in America, you feel the presence
of an entire continent - space there is the very form of thought.
By contrast with the American 'downtown areas' and their
blocks of skyscrapers, la Défense has forfeited the architectural benefits of
verticality and excess by squeezing its high-rise blocks into an Italian-style
setting, into a closed theatre bounded by a ring-road. It is very much a garden
à la française: a bunch of buildings with a ribbon around it. All this has closed
off the possibility that these monsters might engender others to infinity, that
they might battle it out within a space rendered dramatic by their very
competition (New York, Chicago, Houston, Seattle, Toronto). It is in such a
space that the pure architectural object is born, an object beyond the control of architects,
which roundly repudiates the city and its uses,
repudiates the interests of the collectivity and individuals and persists in its own madness. That object
has no equivalent, except perhaps the arrogance of the cities of the
Renaissance.
No, architecture should not be humanized. Anti-architecture, the
true sort (not the kind you find in
Arcosanti, Arizona, which gathers together all the 'soft' technologies in the
heart of the desert), the wild, inhuman type that is beyond the measure of man
was made here - made itself here - in New York, without considerations of
setting, well-being, or ideal ecology. It opted for hard technologies,
exaggerated
all dimensions, gambled on heaven and hell. . . Eco-architecture, eco- society
. . . this is the gentle hell of the Roman Empire in its decline.
Modern demolition is truly wonderful. As a spectacle it
is the opposite of a rocket launch. The twenty-storey block remains perfectly
vertical as it slides towards the centre of the earth. It falls straight, with
no loss of its upright bearing, like a tailor's dummy falling through a
trap-door, and its own surface area absorbs the rubble. What a marvellous
modern art form this is, a match for the firework displays of our childhood.
They say the streets are alive in Europe, but dead in
America. They are wrong. Nothing
could be more intense, electrifying, turbulent, and vital than the streets of
New York. They are filled with crowds, bustle, and advertisements, each by
turns aggressive or casual. There are millions of people in the streets,
wandering, carefree, violent, as if they had nothing better to do - and
doubtless they have nothing else to do - than produce the permanent scenario of
the city. There is music everywhere; the activity is intense, relatively violent, and silent (it is not the agitated, theatrical activity you find in
Italy). The streets and avenues never empty, but the neat, spacious geometry of
the city is far removed from the thronging intimacy of the narrow streets of
Europe.
In Europe, the street only lives in sudden surges, in
historic moments of revolution and barricades. At other times people move along
briskly, no one really hangs around (no one wanders any more). It is the same with European cars. No one actually lives
in them; there isn't enough space. The cities, too, do not have enough space,
or rather that space is deemed public and bears all the marks of the public
arena, which forbids you to cross it or wander around it as though it were a
desert or some indifferent area.
The American street has not, perhaps, known these historic moments, but it is always turbulent, lively, kinetic, and
cinematic, like the country itself, where the specifically historical and
political stage counts for little, but where change, whether spurred by
technology, racial differences, or the media, assumes virulent forms: its
violence is the very violence of the way of lif
(SOURCE: America. by Jean Baudrillard)
1 comment:
Great insight by Baudrillard. New York described in a best way!
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