Pittsburgh Alpha to Omega

A crane fell here in Manhattan today as I type this.  It killed four by last count and smashed a neighboring building.  Another building went down two weeks ago, and the week before that part of a Trump building collapsed and a man was beheaded.

In the guise of uplift and progress, these buildings actually dehumanize people when they don’t kill them outright.  Although they are all made of identical materials – reinforced concrete, glass, and steel – they don’t soar and swoop like the interstate highways, dams, and bridges made of the same materials.  The graceful arcs of interchanges on the expressways and autobahns are not mirrored in these condo blocks.  Neither are they meant to last like those structures.  The future is here, in spirit, for an instant – but it will disappear, it will crumble, before our very eyes.

So instead of a small number of really impressive “monuments” such as those that survive from the disdained historical past, our century will leave, across the planet, a sprinkling of almost identical structures.  It is, in a way, one vast global conceptual monument, whose parts and pieces are spread across the world’s cities and suburbs.  One city, in many locations.

They’re doing it in New York right now.  All over town almost identical concrete and glass buildings are rising.  Many are going up so quickly that one wonders if the speed of construction isn’t just a way to get them up before anyone can object.  Now, with the credit/economic disaster in progress, the heat is truly on to spend any previously allocated money.  Some towers have the names of famous architects attached, others do not.  Visually it’s often hard to tell them apart – they are all, ultimately, designed by the developers, while the starchitect is simply another kind of logo that can be applied in an attempt to distinguish one building from the other.

I met David Byrne once in 2001, when he came through town to play a show and to promote The New Sins; and I recall my surprise when he rode up to the line snaking outside Jay’s Book Stall in Oakland on, of all the crazy things, a bicycle.  In his new book, anecdotes about biking in different places around the world (including Pittsburgh) are linked by musings on various topics and photos taken by Byrne and others (including Rudy Rucker, whose novel Hylozoic I reviewed recently).  It’s a fun read, particularly if you’re into Byrne or biking, music or design.  Thanks to Matt Bennett for the recommendation.

4/5 stars

Byrne begins the first chapter, on American cities, by summarizing the history of the modern city and pinning the blame for said abominations on Le Corbusier, Charlie Wilson, Robert Moses, and Hitler – or on misguided futurism, the military-industrial complex and the automobile – and compares the “built” landscape of Valencia, California to a film set, remarking that, “The mental dislocation is a wonderful feeling.”  This chapter also covers “The Return of Pittsburgh”, and Byrne writes of the Maxo Vanka murals at St. Nicholas church in Millvale, and of his most recent visit last year,

“It seems that Pittsburgh is more than just standing – the cultural district downtown is jumping on the weekend, the little neighborhoods are thriving with their corner bars and grocery stores, the strip district still has its booming markets and, I am told, folks are moving back into the city.”

Besides giving a tad too much credit to the Heinzes for the degree to which Pittsburgh is “thriving” (he acknowledges that the city is bankrupt, the idiocy of the stadiums, etc.) he seems to grok what’s cool about it.  Not much on cycling here, other than to note it’s “a challenge” due to “the hills that are everywhere”.  True ‘nuff, but I’d still rather bike around here than Manhattan (where Byrne lives), which cycling scene he goes on about at length in the final chapter.

Bicycle Diaries really is all over the place.  The Istanbul chapter, for instance, contains the above-quoted bit about the crane and dehumanizing buildings.  In the Argentina chapter (mostly concerned with regional musical styles/audiences vs. global ones), he writes of a dog park, the design of which he admires, in Manhattan “at Twenty-third Street and Eleventh Avenue”, and in the Manila chapter, rather critically, of written language (seems Byrne’s been reading Burroughs, whose “policeman inside” he also riffs on in the London chapter).  In the San Francisco chapter, he discusses Bohemian Grove, the Beats, the links between the psychedelic and infotech movements, and his first time there,

“in the early ‘70s, lured by the hippie eco techno worldview embodied by the Whole Earth Catalog. I joined a friend in an attempt to build a dome in a field up in Napa County.  I eventually lost focus on the dome project and ended up busking with another friend on the streets of Berkeley – he played accordion, I played violin and ukulele and struck ironic poses.  It was successful.  I realized that at that time I was more interested in irony than utopia.”

A visit to Oakland’s Creative Growth, “a visual arts center for people who are mentally and/or psychologically challenged” fuels a rant on outsider art (“Social functionality, to me, is the key word in the inside/outside dichotomy, not sanity.”) and the problem of evaluating creations independently from their creators (“If we opt to denigrate Speer’s monumental architecture then there are a whole lot of other architects who, judging by the way their work looks, are equally ‘Fascist,’ and many of them are working today.”).  In the New York chapter, he describes a power outage and weighs in on 9-11 echoes in E.B. White’s 1949 essay “Here Is New York”. The semi-hyperstitional passage he cites is,

“A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal passages, cremate the millions.”

Byrne goes on to say,

Now, with the atomic bomb especially, as White points out, that protective aspect of what a city is has been turned upside down.

But, he notes, just as this shadow begins to loom over great mixtures of humanity like New York, an institution, the UN, is rising to attempt to put an end to this threat.  Death and hope simultaneously, as always.

While I can’t join Byrne or White in investing any hope in the UN, I can totally get behind what the former says in the next paragraph regarding the Freedom Tower One World Trade Center,

The new World Trade Center is being built atop a thirty-story concrete windowless bunker.  A monument to fear – a symbolic return to a medieval mind-set and walled cities.  Even though we are united and connected in so many new ways, some are still building massive walls and fortifications that won’t really protect us from anyone determined and clever enough.  Walls and concrete barricades aren’t really an effective means of protection these days – nothing is, really.  All that interconnectedness that facilitated much of the explosion of megawealth over the last decade also facilitated the interpenetration of everything, so that no one or no building is truly isolated and “safe” anymore.  Safety is in getting along.

as well as his take on the “Rules of the Road” (in short, “Follow ‘em!”).  Byrne closes with an interview with Janette Sadik-Khan, New York’s transportation commissioner, on getting around the city a century from now, a quotation from Enrique Peñalosa’s “The Politics of Happiness”, and some sketches of his bike rack designs which have been implemented around NYC.

Bonus points for turning me on to Peñalosa, The Life of Birds and Juana Molina.

Find yourself a city to bike in, happy reading and cuídate.