Anyone Home? Los Angeles architect Fritz Haeg’s ‘Salons’ create a sense of community for people from various disciplines who might otherwise never meet by James Trainor
One summer night in 1947 the science fiction writer Ray Bradbury and a friend decided to take an after-dinner walk down Wilshire Boulevard. Even then, just two years after the end of World War II, Los Angeles was in the expansionist thrall of the automobile. The idea of two men strolling, not driving, down the Miracle Mile was already seen as somehow deviant, anti-social, potentially criminal. Within minutes a police patrol car came up alongside the two suspects, who were questioned at length just for attempting the Old World social activity of flâneurie. In LA, a place that thinks itself a city but is just a centreless agglomeration of low-density hubs that could not communicate were it not for the freeways and boulevards that link them, it has become a cliché that no one walks, that people are separated by distance, by the cocoons of their cars, by their insular lifestyle. It has become the guiding myth of its own self-image of modern alienation. It creeps into films such as Robert Altman’s Short Cuts (1993) or Crash (2004), whose opening voice-over monologue confides that ‘In LA, nobody touches you. We’re always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much, that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something’. cont'd.... http://www.frieze.com/column_single.asp?c=318 _______________________________________________ in-enaction mailing list http://mail.architexturez.net/mailman/listinfo/in-enaction + Architexturez collaborative at http://portal.architexturez.org/
