no longer alien
The journey back home was long, over 24 hours door to door. But apart from the frustration of a 2½hr delay at Heathrow, there was some value in the psychological space of a time passed in the journey after a long time away from home. At SF airport I spent my last dollars on ‘Time’ and a ‘National Geographic’ to read on the flight, a last immersion into America. (As they call it, not The States).
The second to last leg of my journey was by train, through the lovely countryside around from north Manchester, Huddersfield, Dewsbury to Leeds. Mill towns, stone walls, clumps of woodlands, farms and Victorian terrace housing. We followed a canal for a good bit of the way, and I remembered a week ago trying to explain to Rachel and Emine the taken-for-granted beautiful and technical qualities of the British canal system.
The second leg of the same journey, the train from Sacramento to Richmond across the Californian Central Valley was a sharp contrast to West Yorshire. In the evening sunshine, here looked very green, very old, very irregular, a bit scruffy. Even compared to the incredible scenery of the US National Parks in my National Geographic, these are my everyday places, my cultural landscapes, and coming back is to find them freshly beautiful. I folded my magazine and mentally jumped from rafting down the Colorado river gorge to unfolding a OS map and finding my way through centuries old footpaths on a Sunday afternoon.
I got chatting to three Chinese students on their way back from shopping in Manchester Chinatown. They were eating a type of lychees that I hadn’t seen before, and they shared some with me.
backtracking a little (and seattle parks # 4)
There are a few things that I didn’t manage to write about at the time, so I’m adding them in now. Hence a temporal displacement back to Seattle, Portland and my last full day in San Francisco.
On my last day in Seattle I wandered around the Puget Sound facing seafront, from the train station north to the famous Pike Place market, further north to the Myrtle Edwards Park, slightly up and in to the new Olympic sculpture park and then onto the Seattle Center area with the space needle, international fountain and monorail. One monorail ride back into the heart of downtown and I checked out Seattle’s new city library, designed by Rem Koolhaas, before meeting Jeff Hou for a tour of Chinatown.
The Myrtle Edwards park faces onto Puget Sound, and so wandering along the meandering main path is more interesting and expansive experience than the rather mundane landscape design would otherwise suggest. I can’t remember exactly who Myrtle Edwards was, but she was some council or elected member who made important contributions to the cities development, I think in terms of wildlife corridors and nature protection. Both Seattle and Portland named public spaces after people who were key to recent visions and achievements. This seemed to reflect a genuine honouring of the importance of political boldness and thoughtfulness with regard to place. It also leads to the unusual quality of having places named after women. Refreshing! An interesting side note is that Gasworks Park was going to be named after her, but the family objected to the retention of the industrial structures. If anyone ever decides to name a park in my memory, I want the one WITH the industrial structures!
olympic sculpture park (seattle parks # 3)
The Olympic Sculpture Park (opened 2007, landscape by Weiss/Manfredi Architects) has what my dad would probably call a ‘gee wizz’ design. You’re right that this isn’t entirely a compliment. It’s a bit showy, a bit trying to do everything, more for walking through and admiring the cleverness and statement of the landscape than for staying in and relaxing. Though, to be fair, there’s an underpinning of north western landscape qualities to the design, and it tries to meet a difficult brief of leading people through a complex set of level changes and giving an appropriate setting for a wide range of modern art pieces. I don’t usually listen to music when I walk around outside, but in this case ‘Take Fountain’ (by the Wedding Present, largely written and recorded in Seattle) was a perfect aural landscape.
My highlight was a set of 5 wave structures in rusted steel by Serra (wake, 2005). The usual monumentality you would expect from Serra, but the mass and space through and around was captivating and playful. There were a number of school groups visiting when I was there and there was something about it that provoked running, leaping, chasing. Fun.
This is my attempt at uploading a sideshow… let’s see if it works! wow it does!!
Note. A paper I heard presented at the Sacramento conference on the holocaust memorial in Berlin also mention the lure of paths around large abstract sculpture as having ‘playground like qualities’; of (more controversial) running, hiding, jumping. Maybe abstract landscapes (as opposed to isolated forms) free us to respond in less inhibited ways, to allow ourselves to play.
The Seattle Center was generally a rather run-down over scaled 70s convention centre landscape, dated Dr Who-esque. The space needle was surrounded by cutsy and fading childrens’ fairground rides. But the generous, enormous, dramatic International fountain made up for it all.
I don’t consider myself a Rem Koolhaas junky, but the new central library is an amazing building: uplifting, egalitarian, and techno-funky. The library equivalent of Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory with an appropriate 21st century minimalism aesthetic). Floors that spiral round in a Dewey system ordered ramp, a bulging red floor of meeting rooms, mini conveyer belts of returned books overhead, chunky squashy seats. As my America friends would say, “What’s not to love?”
eastbank esplanade (portland parks # 2)
It’s not really a park, more like a pavement. But since 1998 the place to stretch your legs is the Eastbank Riverfront (Mayer/Reed landscape architects), 1.5 miles of walkway squeezed into almost no space between the hefty Interstate 5 and the also hefty though slightly more attractive Willamette River. Good lengths of it are floating walkways, constructed of metal flooring and pillars that sit above the water. The route links from several major bridges to the downtown area on the west side of the river, where a more traditional riverside park extends the length of the city area (much of it created in the 1970s by a visionary tearing up of a significant road to make space for the greenway).
It shouldn’t be an attractive place. The roar of the interstate is intense, with off ramps and on ramps snaking at your elbow. It would be hard to conduct a quiet conversation.
But the balance of the river, about 300m wide, and the older more attractive structures of some of the historic bridges, somehow keep your attention and orientate your interest to this side of the path.
The other significant factor in its success is the connecting loop with the west riverside. I was walking along at around midday on a hotish weekday, and was never alone. Several hundred people must have passed me or overtaken me during the hour or so walk, mostly runners and cyclists, some serious walkers. I felt like I was the only person not in lycra and missing a sports drink. This is a prime exercise lap in the city; not a place to walk to get somewhere else, not a place to go for a lazy afternoon with friends, but a place to work out. A riverside gym. And in this function, it’s really quite spectacular.
frustrated of sacramento
Most of the way through the conference now and just back from the evening banquet which was held outdoors on the steps of Arnie governer of californias Shwatzenigeer’s official residence. A few bottles of Sierra Nevada heavier so please forgive the typos!
psyching up for tomorrow:
- two sessions on ‘managing memory, managing meaning’.
- taxi ride to station
- Train to Richmond
- BART to 16th Street Mission
- taxi to rachel’s
- just over an hour at rachel’s and then a lift to 16th Street misson BART station
- BART to SF airport
- plane to London Heathrow
- plane to Manchester
- train to Leeds
- picked up by James and driven home.
So l leave midday on Sunday and get home something life 7pm on Monday. goodness!
the conference has been moderately interesting. not much in the way of thought provoking theory expanding research, but plenty of friendly interesting people and time to chat. So -ve intulectual and +ve networking compared with the AAG in SF in April. My presentation went well and I got a lot of enthusiastic feedback, which is a nice way to end my sabbatical.
I’ve been staying in the plushest and most expensive hotel so far and they don’t give you wireness network. isn’t that shocking? I’ve finally got onto the internet today on my roommate’s computer but very frustratingly sheffield uni email seems to be down so my one chance is blown.
Sacramento is a bit of a dull town… I almost resorted to going to the pre-eminent railway museum in the states! There was a heavy metal concert in a city centre park yesterday evening, but it finshed at 8 and all the rockers drove off home on their Harleys.
so here we are again
As regular listeners might have guessed by the break in blog service, James did indeed make it out and we had a fine old week catching up and exploring new parts of San Francisco and California.
I then had one day in SF to try and do all the things I meant to do before leaving (visit Chinatown, another Halprin plaza, Coit Tower, sort out fieldtrip and M.Ed stuff, buy train tickets, buy sandels, go out to Palo Alto with Rachel and visit Emine) and today I’m heading on the train out to Scaramento for the EDRA (Environmental Design and Research Association) conference.
I offer below, a few place related highlights of the last week or so (I think I’ll have to come back and put the images in later, I’m a bit tight for time at the moment).
PS. Sacramento. A bit boring compared to other places I’ve been here. And the hotel charges stupid money for internet access. boo!
living it up in Soda Springs
We were offered use of a holiday lodge by the lecturer I met in Davis so we stayed at Soda Springs in the Sierra Nevada mountains for a few days. Lovely house: Scandinavian style, woodburning stove, dead squirrel in the double garage. It’s a 1990s ‘estate’ of very upmarket holiday homes with spacious plots and curved roads in coniferous woodland.
Soda Springs is a cross-country skiing resort so it was like a ghost town midweek mid-May, and we found the whole area had shut up shop somewhat (Tess, remember Licon Ray!). Still snow on the hills (we were at about 6,000ft), but not enough to ski and too much to walk on the mountain trails.
We enjoyed some fantastic diner food (61 omelette options), tried walking in snow, watched the UEFA cup final in a bar in Truckee and stocked our woodburning stove.
arrested decline
From Lake Tahoe we headed south on amazing scenic expansive highways and turned left to the genuine ghost town of Bodie, set 8000ft high in the hills towards Nevada. Bodie was one of the capitals of the gold rush, in its heyday the second largest town in California. Changes in industry and a couple of bad fires in the first part of the twentieth century meant it was eventually deserted in the 1940s, with only about 5% of its buildings still standing.
Since then it’s been protected as a state historic park, and managed in a state of ‘arrested decline’. There’s almost no visitor facilities, no fibreglass figures, no interpretation panels, no reconstructions. Instead you make your way round the 200 or so wooden buildings, from shacks to salons, peering through dusty windows into even dustier rooms. Everything has been left ‘as left’ more than sixty years ago, sometimes relatively in order, more often chairs upturned, broken chandelier glass on the pool table, or cleared out.
The non-domestic buildings – shops, diners, the hotel – generally had more contents intact, though some parts of town had been burnt down and disappeared altogether including the Chinatown and the prostitutes’ street.
The ‘arrested decline’ policy is an interesting one, and one most historic tourist attractions are not bold enough to follow. It calls for restraint. Information is simply provided in a standard leaflet, inevitably there are questions unanswered. Some intervention must be gently, carefully carried out to keep verandas safe and buildings secure.
But it allows the place to speak for itself, and to speak differently to different visitors. While information provides a framework of understanding; watching, touching, moving and quietness gives space for the imagination. Curiosity and unanswered questions lead you round the settlement, engaging thoughts and emotions. It’s a viscal, sensory experience; made intriguing by the mystery of the left traces of human activity. And mournful. Dusty beds, empty rooms, the bleak landscape. Of course this is in part a sentimental response to loss, to evidence of loss, that places and people that are busy and full of life do change, do die, do empty. But that’s history, that’s part of why history is important. Bodie, and being in Bodie, gives space and time to engage emotionally with this change. If you are ever in this part of the world, go and visit.
it’s tufa-tastic!
Mono Lake is an environmental disaster and a spookily beautiful place. A lot has been written about the history of the lake and the devastation of water rights granted to Los Angeles, about the campaign and restoration project. It’s interesting. What’s also interesting is just how bio-diverse and important to wildlife this lake is despite being entirely toxic to fish. And if, like me, you like weird natural landscapes then the shoreline of tufa towers (calcium plus carbonate and alkali) with the sharp blue of the lake and snow capped mountains on the skyline is a good place to get your fix.
We tried to find the black fissures but they eluded us.
