Low profile cranes revisited
All of this is fine to me. Back when Councilwoman Hahn made her trip to China, returning with a model (which was on display in her office last time I was there) of a proposed low profile crane affectionately called "The Janice", I was exceptionally dismayed. We don't need to hide the cranes that make our "working harbor" such an awe insipring place to live. I'm not ashamed that we've remade the landscape in to serve our needs and desires.
I love the industrial landscape of cranes and other equipment that makes our area such an interesting place to live. I love everything from the squealing of train wheels to the yellow glow of the forest of light poles in the harbor. I love the post-apocaplyse hellfire that vents from the refinery poles, even. The only thing I don't like is the diesel exhaust, which I'd like to see get addressed in a storm of sci-fi technological fury.
The photo above is the view from my front yard. If I couldn't see the tall cranes every day, it wouldn't be Pedro.
8 Comments:
Hear! Hear!
I don't think I've ever heard anyone wax so poetic about our industrial port panorama, but I loved reading this. Cranes and cargo boxes and ships and stacks are a profound part of our visual landscape, and this is not going to change anytime soon. THIS NEEDS TO BE FACTORED INTO OUR UNIQUE URBAN DESIGN VISION, rather than ignored. Art deco might be quaint, charming an appropriate along Pacific Avenue, but a hard-edged, industrial, constructivist architecture fronting Harbor Boulevard would speak in our vernacular.
Mmm, no. It would speak in somebody's vernacular, namely that of the global shipping companies that do their hard-edged industry on that part of the waterfront devoted thereto, but not in "our" vernacular (unless "we" are shipping magnates, or architects who still worship the phony cult of Bauhaus "functionalism.")
There's no way to make a container or a stack of containers pretty; I've banged my knuckles and shins on enough of the goddamned things to know that they are inherently hard-edged. So be it. But that's no reason to bring that sort of necessary, functional ugliness to the part of the town where human beings (who are famously soft-edged) are forced to interact with them at close and intimate range. That sort of specious thinking is one of the reasons so many twentieth-century Modernist buildings look like shit once you get closer to them than a half mile.
(And when I say "specious thinking," Red, I say it with all the love. All the love.)
I don't think it's necesary to "make a container or stack of containers pretty". Who (besides you) says that something "inherently hard-edged" is bad? (For the record, I've banged a few of them myself.)
I think "a hard-edged, industrial, constructivist architecture fronting Harbor Boulevard" would speak in the vernacular of Harbor Boulevard. (See: the Harbor Dept. building.) Shipping companies couldn't give two shits about architecture. (See: former Evergreen HQ, directly behind the Harbor Dept. building.)
So anyway, who is proposing intimately interacting "functional ugliness" with "famously soft-edged" humans? (Actually, that sounds kinda hot...)
Phillip wrote:
I don't think it's necesary to "make a container or stack of containers pretty".
That makes two of us.
Who (besides you) says that something "inherently hard-edged" is bad?
Nobody, I hope. Especially nobody involved in the business of manufacturing or using objects designed to be stacked. I didn't say it either. What I said was that the Functional Ugly, acceptable in industry where function necessarily rules the day, is needlessly bleak and inhuman in a setting where people not engaged in industry (people living in a building, or out for a stroll, or on their way to get the groceries) must interact with them close up.
Indeed, people seem to understand intuitively that there's something especially obnoxious about an unprepossessing building that need not be so. Folks have been known to get downright sentimental over an old warehouse or ice factory, but few will mourn the demise of the Logicon building. And that's not even getting into the issue of deliberately ugly buildings like the Port Administration Building thing.
(Whose twee little pat-me-on-the-head-I'm-adorable idea was that, anyway? Ooh, it's all rusty on the outside just like an old ship! Isn't that precious?)
It's fine and dandy to spend your day loading hundreds of identical gray rectangular COSCO containers onto one of scores of identical gray COSCO ships. But no matter how much you may enjoy your job, when you go home at the end of the shift, you don't want to live in a neighborhood that looks like one of the decked rows at Pacific Container Terminal.
I hope that makes my point a little clearer.
(For the record, I've banged a few of them myself.)
I'm sorry, but that sort of locker room talk is unacceptable here.
So anyway, who is proposing intimately interacting "functional ugliness" with "famously soft-edged" humans?
My esteemed colleague Red spoke approvingly of "hard-edged, industrial, constructivist" architecture along Harbor Boulevard--a street which, I will point out for the record, is within rock-throwing distance of a residential neighborhood that still contains beautiful old Victorian and Craftsman houses, built back when architects still harbored the quaint notion that buildings meant to house people ought to comfortable and inviting (and kids did their homework and spoke respectfully to adults instead of listening to Norwegian black metal grindcore on their iPods and setting their pets on fire).
(Actually, that sounds kinda hot...)
The gentleman is out of order, and will take his seat.
(*takes gavel out to dinner and a movie, then bangs it*)
We'll agree to disagree (at least I will) on the subject of what is attractive, architechturewise. I've lived in Craftsman-style houses, and I think that stuff (craftsman, arts&crafts, Greene & Greene etc.) is gorgeous, but I also love the Port Administration building (the outer framework of which I believe is Corten steel. You know what they make with that stuff, don't you?).
"I've always wanted to tell people I was an architect."
I see the aesthetics of the proposed tower to be a seperate issue from the natural industrial aesthetic of the port. The era when an extremely short sighted port strove to force containers and machinery further into San Pedro has ended, but I see no reason why new buildings in San Pedro shouldn't reference the environment we live in in the Harbor area. That being said, I don't see much congruence between the aesthetic of the proposed Vue tower and the Harbor. I'd love to see the vue have an aggressively industrial vibe, I'm still a sucker for neo-brutalist sentiments.
If I had a plot of land and some dough, I'd probably build containers into my dream bunker. If I had even more dough, I'd probably love to carve loft spaces out of a car carrier or a container ship and live right on the working harbor (Why hasn't anyone proposed that yet?). The Port Administration building has always been one of my favourite buildings in Pedro, even though I never really have loved the design, I appreciate the fact that someone had the vision to actually try to design something. I just can't see the whole hard edged/soft edged thing, I guess. Any aesthetic choice is arbitrary from my perspective.
Aesthetic choice may be arbitrary when you're talking about a painting or a video installation that gallery-goers will either walk right by, walk by and pause for a minute, or stay and appreciate.
There's very little arbitrariness, though, when it comes to what people tend to want and need from buildings. The (many) mistakes of twentieth century Modernism provide excellent examples of this. Those broad plazas surrounding Modernist buildings, which doubtless looked nifty on paper, aren't just alienating and empty in a few locations; they're damned near universally devoid of people wherever in the world they are. They weren't and aren't inviting, so people didn't and don't congregate in them.
Likewise, the highrise housing blocks that characterized the "urban renewal" projects of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s didn't just make their residents isolated and angry in a few places; they did so just about everywhere they were constructed. And they were built in a depressingly great number of cities (riots in Paris, anyone?).
Bad architecture matters. Bad design matters. Bad urban planning matters. And what human beings need from buildings isn't very arbitrary at all.
"City planners believed that people's taste for green space, for ornament, for people-watching, for cozy places for intimate social gatherings, were just social constructions. They were archaic historical artifacts that were getting in the way of the orderly design of cities, and should be ignored by planners designing optimal cities according to so-called scientific principles. Le Corbusier was the clearest example. He and other planners had a minimalist conception of human nature. A human being needs so many cubic feet of air per day, a temperature within a certain range, so many gallons of water, and so many square feet in which to sleep and work. ... Ornamentation, human scale, green space, gardens, and comfortable social meeting places were written out of the cities because the planners had a theory of human nature that omitted human aesthetic and social needs."
--Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
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