unstable surfaces

La Jolla, California, 2007Now, here's an example of the ground beneath one's feet being completely ambiguous, certainly mysterious: how deep is the slump beneath this sink hole?  Is it at the level of the water table, or the aquifer, or a mile deep?  This photo looks like something by Jeff Wall: a small suburban crisis.

If you click on the picture it will take you to a Guardian photo series of other, recent sink holes.

sidewalk glass blocks

Yesterday's glass block lights remind me of the heavy glass block panels let into sidewalks that provided light to cellar spaces under the pavements.  Haven't seen these for years, although they were once very common, and in looking around for pictures found lots of websites about their preservation.  The Ringuettes have a good site on the sidewalk glass prisms of Victoria BC where all the downtown sidewalks appear to have had lenses. 

Glass prisms, either square or round, are set in structural metal frames and then the whole unit spans the sidewalk over the basement level storage or working space.  They date from the early 1900s and are found extensively in old sections of cities that have either been preserved as historic districts or are so run down as to have escaped modernisation, which in sidewalk terms usually means concreting over the glass sections.

Originally clear glass, the manganese used in glass in the early 1900s  has turned these lenses a deep amethyst with exposure to sun. I remember Victoria's glass sidewalks as being quite dark glass — but I've also seen glass panels in London that are white and shine brightly at night when the cellars below the sidewalks have their lights on.  It was this that I thought of with the LED glass blocks. 

The sense that downtown sidewalks are actually roofs, that the sidewalk is not ground beneath your feet but a hollow space in which people are working, registers a lovely kind of urban knowledge.  In contrast, the total pedestrianisation of downtown streets such as 8th Avenue in Calgary, or Granville in Vancouver, where one can wander willy nilly from street wall to street wall as if the road was a creekbed at the bottom of two cliffs, where everything is up, lacks this sense that the pedestrian surface is a fragile skin between a shadowy underworld and a bright thrusting upperworld.  

It also indicates an ambiguity of ownership and property: who owns that bit under the sidewalk?  In cities obsessed with property and jurisdiction, such as Calgary, this ambiguity is not allowed.  This is a city where corporate security patrols the edges where plaza meets sidewalk, where one cannot take photographs of the public sidewalk from a private-public plaza, or photos of the private-public plaza from the public sidewalk.  The lines are hard here, the sidewalks concrete.

Norm Ringuette. Blanchard Street, Victoria, BC. 2006

cat's eyes

We don't see these cat's eyes road markings here, but they are used throughout Britain.  Two mirror-backed glass marbles reflect headlights at night and mark centre lines and road edges.  They can be white, red, yellow, green or blue indicating different road conditions.
They were invented in 1933 by Percy Shaw, who patented them and then set about manufacturing them.  The glass marbles are set in a rubber block mounted in a metal casting embedded in the road.  If a car drives over it, it is pushed into the road and the rubber decompresses after, raising it up again.  There is a small reservoir that collects rain which washes the glass marbles keeping them clean. 

In my youth I spent a summer in England with the Commonwealth Youth Movement, and we were billetted with various county families as we travelled about.  Staying somewhere in Yorkshire and driving home after some do we were at, no doubt at an army base, I noticed that my billetter turned off his headlights whenever we went through a village or small town, and then turned them on again when on the open road.  Not on full, just on dipped, which shines about 5' in front of the car.  It all seemed quite dark to me, not to say dangerous. 

However, then, you didn't put on your headlights while going through villages as they would shine into people's windows and disturb them, besides there were dim streetlights or light from other people's windows to give enough light to drive by.  On the open road, the cat's eyes caught even dipped headlights far enough ahead to be a sufficient guide.  Cars didn't go fast: small winding roads and small engines did not allow it, also the phrase 'mustn't frighten the horses' comes to mind.  Life was deferential, quiet, frugal, measured.  People invented things.  They were allowed to be eccentric, as evidently Percy Shaw became. 

I doubt that any of this exists anymore in our over-developed OECD countries, however, one could travel the world looking for quiet, frugal, measured, polite societies where life is slow rather than headlong, and I expect one would find people inventing things of great usefulness – an eccentric concept in itself.  

small urban things

Projet : Concept développé par Leblanc + Turcotte + Spooner. Crédit photo : Leblanc + Turcotte + SpoonerMontréal recently held a competition for the design of new bus shelters.  The design chosen was by Leblanc + Turcotte + Spooner.  The press release outlines a way of thinking about urban design that all cities might adopt. 

Montréal has 'made a firm commitment to making such competitions a widespread practice, promoting innovation and excellence in architecture and design, and continuing to position Montréal as a UNESCO City of Design. This project is a concrete illustration of our willingness to ensure that Montréal’s designers play a paramount role in shaping our city’s future.  This design competition is one of the five shukôs, or creative challenges, issued on September 30, 2008, by the Mayor of Montréal. Besides providing tangible impetus for creativity in design and architecture, it aims to widen access to public design commissions to greater numbers of practitioners.'

The Ville de Montréal has within it the Design Montréal office, which runs the competitions; its mission is to improve design throughout the city and to position Montréal as 'a city of design'.  This is how a city uses its designers and architects. 

The bus shelter competition was a public, not a private, initiative involving the Ville de Montréal, the Société de transport de Montréal and the Québec Department of Culture, Heritage and the Status of Women.

The shelter is good too: free standing, modular, a communications column containing digital components and back-lit ads, and an integrated solar system freeing the shelters from dependence on the grid.  The bench is interesting - more like a perch.  Calgary's latest bus shelters have seats divided by a small handrail, presumably to make it impossible to sleep on the bench – a nice little punitive touch.  In Austin, Texas, the downtown bus stops had a row of flip down seats on the side of the building lining the sidewalk. 

Bus shelters are small projects that look after the street.  They project the way a city looks after its people.


taking pictures

Norman Foster. Swiss Re Tower under construction, London. 2003

Think you can photograph Foster's Swiss Re building at 30 St Mary Axe?  Think again.  The building features prominently in Martin Vallée's 9-minute video (Comment is Free.  guardian.co.uk, 11 December 2009) where he pushes his right to wander around in public streets photographing things.  Okay, it is England, they have a Terrorism Act, however the police seem to me to be really, really polite.  Here I would be worried that they would rush up and shoot me with a taser.
 
A few years ago I was photographing the public plaza at the base of the Trans-Canada Pipeline building as part of a photomontage for Andrew King's book, building/art, showing where the plaza hit the sidewalk – not bad, cool benches, etc – a security guard hustled out and told me I couldn't photograph there.  Shocked, I said, 'but it is a public sidewalk'.  No go.  I would have to get approval in writing from the owners of the building if I wanted to photograph their plaza, and otherwise he would call the police.  This was Calgary, 2002.  Unlike Martin Vallée, I didn't push it.  It just seemed typical of the new Calgary – bullying and completely intransigent.   It's more though.  Paranoia and punitive public safety legislation have removed our right to act as artists and photographers, observers and lingerers in the public domain.

Do we still have a public domain?  Chris Roach wrote about this in On Site 19: streets. His article Urban Guerillas looks at the work of ReBar, a San Francisco group that practices a kind of urban disobedience.  Disobedience, guerilla tactics, protests -- these seem to be the only actions that point out just how many urban freedoms we have lost. 


Christina Maile

Christina Maile. Mugwort (Artemesia vulgaris) at a hydrant on Kings Plaza Station.

In 'Sewing the Landscape' (On Site 8: Sewing and Architecture), Christina Maile looked at the colonisation of hard urban surfaces by plants – resiliant, sturdy survivalists.  Since that article I have not ever passed by a stop sign, or a concrete median, or the gutter where the curb meets the pavement without looking for and finding a frilly green edge, or a sunny yellow flower, or now in November, lovely arrangements of seed heads and dried leaves.  Was there ever a text that changed my perception of the everyday city at the smallest scale so dramatically?  I don't think so.

Thinking of the city as a landscape that had been invaded by concrete is what actually happened, yet we perceive the opposite, that plants have re-occupied a landscape that never contained them.  Like the plants, we become guests in the city, rather than the city being an instrument that merely mediates the weather and facilitates travel in a much greater landscape.  If that larger landscape is under threat, as it is from enormous urban off-gassing, perhaps we need to reconceptualise our relationship to urban spaces, the landscape and to our own agency.  The mugwort, above, might be humble, but it is not self-effacing: concrete holds no terrors here. 

We have a call for articles right now for On Site 23: small things.  Looking at weeds on the sidewalk is a small thing.  Small things are seeds for larger ideas, for radical re-thinking. 

Cyclophobia

2nd Street SW. Calgary, Alberta

Tim Atherton

Prince Albert, SaskatchewanTim Atherton has contributed two photo-essays to On Site in the past: Edmonton's back lanes and fences in On Site 18: culture, and Prince Albert in On Site 19: streets.  He documents the small and insignificant which gain terrific power simply by being noticed and legitimised through collection.  The camera extricates its subject from the anonymity conferred on the ordinary.

The next issue of On Site will look at small things: micro-urbanism for example, rather than the 'master' plan, houses of less than 500 square feet. It has been a sobering year for hubris and grand designs; perhaps it is time to relearn how to cut our coat to fit the cloth.  Examples from the past abound: Prince Albert for example, overlooked because development pressure on it has been slight - new building happens on the highway leaving the downtown (above) intact.  This fine little building was, once, ordinary fabric with limited ambitions.  Did it ever need to be more? 

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Tim Atherton's blog is a lovely thing: photography and the things that influence it in the widest sense.  His entry on Sigfried Sasoon for Remembrance Day shows a fragment of Sasoon's Soldier's Declaration, his handwriting all defiant and firm.  Earlier on Atherton has a collection of photos taken at the Somme which as he points out would have been illegal if not suicidal.  A bomb explodes in front of the camera, razor wire photographed looks like some exotic cactus in sepia. 

Anyway, Tim Atherton doesn't send On Site anything anymore as his energy goes into this blog, which is actually a magazine in itself.  This raises a question: do we need magazines still?