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Axes of projection: poetics of urbanisation and globalisation in the Americas

2008; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 13; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13602360802453525

1466-4410

Justin Read,

Art, Politics, and Modernism

Abstract Modernist architecture in Latin America was originally intended to propel the region into the ‘developed First World’. Meanwhile, modernist architecture in Anglo-America has often served to consolidate the political-economic power of the ‘First World’, especially in the age of globalisation. This essay examines the First/Third World divide through two historical ‘moments’ of modernism, beginning in Brazil and ending in California. Brazilian modernism reached its apex with the construction of Brasília (1955–1960), designed principally by two undisputed masters of Brazilian modernism, Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer. The politico-economic ambitions of Brazil's modernist architecture, however, appear to have ended in failure. Rather than curing underdevelopment, modernism (and modernisation) may have exacerbated it. Yet for all modernism's failures, we should not assume that history has somehow left Brazil behind, as if Brazilian architecture were caught in some historical time-lag. In this essay I will test this notion by considering Richard Meier's Getty Center complex in Los Angeles. In projecting an ‘imperial’ power of globalisation onto Los Angeles, the Getty Center strives to create new meaning for its urban milieu. Yet in doing so it may be repeating problems manifest in Brasília. Notes Metonymy is a remarkably unknown and/or misunderstood figure-of-speech, even within literary/cultural studies. To clarify, metonymy is the substitution of one term (or set of terms) by another with which it is associated by extension; usually it is the use of a part to mean the whole, or vice versa. (Eg, ‘All hands on deck’ to mean ‘all sailors’; ‘Wall Street’ to mean the ‘New York Stock Exchange’; ‘White House’ to mean the US President; ‘a Picasso’ to mean a work painted by Pablo Picasso.) By contrast, metaphor is the direct association of two terms that might resemble one another but are otherwise different. (Eg, ‘rose’ for ‘love’; or ‘steel’ for ‘hard-hearted and unemotional’.) Renato Ortiz, Mundialização e cultura (São Paulo, Editora Brasiliense, 1994), p. 14. Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2001). Manuel Castells, The Informational City: Information Technology, Economic Restructuring, and the Urban-Regional Process (Oxford, B. Blackwell, 1989). Thomas L. Friedman, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (New York, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005). Thomas L. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (New York, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux,1999). Roman Jakobson, ‘Linguistics and Poetics’, in Language in Literature (Cambridge, MA, Belknap Press, 1987), p. 71. See Justin Read, ‘Alternative Functions: Oscar Niemeyer and the Poetics of Modernity’, Modernism/Modernity, Vol. 12, No. 2 (April, 2005), pp. 253–72. Thomas Deckker, ‘Brasília: City versus Landscape’, The Modern City Revisited, ed., Thomas Deckker (London, Spon Press, 2000), p. 168. Ibid., p. 168. See Néstor García Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity, trs, Christopher L. Chiappari, Silvia L. López (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1995). Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Enzo Faletto, Dependency and Development in Latin America, trs., Marjory Mattingly Urquidi (Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 1979). Quoted in T. Deckker, op. cit., p. 174. As David Underwood has commented: ‘The [Pilot Plan] — two axes intersecting to form a cross — directly and monumentally asserts a territorial acquisition that reflects the Renaissance ideals of the Iberian conquistadores. Costa described it as “a deliberate act of conquest, a gesture of pioneers acting in the spirit of their colonial traditions.” The plan conflated colonial symbolism with Catholic imagery and established a baroque hierarchy of primary and secondary axes that intersect at the modern traffic interchange of a multilane highway. Costa's plan thus recasts traditional elements in modern terms. Whether one sees a bird or an airplane, Costa's “pilot” plan conveys an unmistakable image of flight wholly appropriate to Kubitschek's emphasis on modern speed, as well as his promotion of Brazil's fledgling aviation and automotive industries.' David Underwood, Oscar Niemeyer and the Architecture of Brazil (New York, Rizzoli,1994), p. 99. James Holston, The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasília (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 199. Ibid., p. 78. To clarify, all green spaces in Brasília are designed and landscaped so as to appear more-or-less ‘natural’, including the (man-made) lakes flanking the southern tip of the Eixo Monumental. Figures obtained through the official website of the Governo do Distrito Federal, (accessed 04/11/06). As an index of this exclusion, one only need ride Brasília's metro. The system only runs between the central bus terminal (located at the intersection of axes in the middle of the Plano Piloto) and southern satellite cities, with merely one intermediary stop on the south end of the Asa Sul. Moreover, it only runs during weekdays (no Saturday/Sunday service). Obviously, the metro has been built simply for menial day labourers and domestic workers — those who work in Brasília but do not live there — under the presumption that the DF's middle- and upper-class residents all own cars. T. Deckker, op. cit., p. 188. James Holston, The Modernist City, op. cit., p. 83. In a recent study, Zilah Quezado Deckker captures this contradiction perfectly: ‘The technology already existed in Brazil, however, for the development of the new architecture: reinforced concrete frames had been used since the 1910s for large-scale constructions. The first tall buildings in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, at the turn of the century, had been built with steel frames, along with bridges and similar structures. Steel proved to be an expensive system in Brazil, however. There were no rolling facilities for structural steel members in Brazil; these, and the technical supervision of the construction, had to be imported from the United States. Although Brazil did not initially produce cement or reinforcing rods, reinforced concrete had the advantages of being prepared on site and of not requiring specialised labour, which greatly reduced cost.’ Zilah Quezado Deckker, Brazil Built: The Architecture of the Modern Movement in Brazil (London, Spon Press, 2001), p. 13. The J. Paul Getty Trust, 2004–2005 Annual Report (Los Angeles, 2006). This is a particular problem with the concrete surfaces of Brasília, which, given the humid sub-tropical climate, tend to lose their lustre without constant and costly maintenance. Meier explains: ‘Turning to Italy, where ancient and classical Rome was largely built of travertine, we worked with the family-owned Mariotti quarries in Bagni di Tivoli. Over a year we developed a technique of using a guillotine to split blocks of travertine along fault lines. After many tries, we were able to achieve the 2-foot, 6-inch squares that we needed. It was also the largest size piece that could be cut without crushing the stone with the falling blade.’ Richard Meier, ‘A Vision of Permanence’, in Making Architecture: The Getty Center, eds, Harold M. Williams, et. al. (Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Trust, 1997), p. 35. Richard Meier, ‘The Design Process’, in The Getty Center: Design Process, eds Harold M. Williams, et. al. (Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Trust, 1991), p. 35. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2000). As Murray Fraser and Joe Kerr note in their reading of the complex: ‘Part of the social pathology of Los Angeles is for the city to disguise its lack of urban coherence or connectivity by continually inventing itself as a sequence of panoramic views. True to form, Meier defends the new location for the Getty Center — visible but deliberately remote — in terms of a condition of urbanism based on spectacle.’ ‘Beyond the Empire of Signs’, in InterSections: Architectural Histories and Critical Theories, eds, Iain Borden, Jane Rendell (London, Routledge, 2000), p. 134. Fraser and Kerr astutely observe that the Getty's presentation of this allegory results from a curious (and unwitting) ‘hybrid post-colonial’ stance: the Getty masks a fear among the cultural elite that Los Angeles lacks cultural authenticity, such that city is in weak position to defend a Western Civilisation threatened by globalisation and the shift of global power from the North Atlantic to the Pacific Rim. The authors thus recognise that the Getty attempts to protect the power and authority of European culture; at the same time, it asserts Los Angeles and the United States to be the direct inheritors of that power and authority. Comparing Meier's Getty and Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim, they write: ‘With the collapse of Communism, and the attendant impact of the burgeoning economies of the Asian Pacific Rim, a profound challenge has been issued to the residual colonial mentalities that underpin European culture along with the dominant cultural producers in the USA. For those in the cultural elites of North Europe and America, the worry is that control of the visual language of Western culture might be slipping from their grasp. In fact, even the very search for new visions of the art museum suggests that control and display of cultural values has passed beyond the capacities of any one nation or continent. Thus the reinforcement of the link between European and American practices in the Getty Center and the Bilbao Guggenheim helps to shore up the image of a Western cultural hegemony that is increasingly perceived as being under threat. In this sense the designs of both Meier and Gehry are innovatory and reactionary at the same time.’ Fraser and Kerr, op. cit., p. 145. The US Department of Transportation has listed the I-10/I-405 interchange as the fifth most-heavily congested in the country. The first most-heavily congested is the I-101/I-405 interchange several miles to the north, just over the hill from the Getty Center in the San Fernando Valley. United States Department of Transportation, ‘Traffic Bottlenecks: A Primer Focus on Low-Cost Operational Improvements’, (accessed 06/08). Calculations provided by the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transit Authority, (accessed 06/08). Notably, the Wilshire corridor was initially established to link the oil fields of La Brea to the City and the Port of Los Angeles. When the oil dried up, the area was converted to high-end residential usage including the mansion of J. Paul Getty (before he re-located to Malibu). Since the early twentieth century, the Getty family has been among the largest landholders in the Wilshire corridor, and its wealth in such concerns grew exponentially when seismic height restrictions were loosened after 1960 to allow high-rise commercial property. J. Paul Getty, as head of Getty Oil and its primary subsidiaries, Tidewater Oil and Getty Realty, was directly responsible for the commercial build-up of the Wilshire corridor 1955–75, the period of its fastest growth. Coincidentally, after World War II Getty's profits from both property and oil (the two most lucrative arenas) were also invested in military aircraft production (Spartan Aviation, another subsidiary owned by Getty). And, of course, European antiquities. One may therefore draw a poetic conclusion: the forms of LA's roads have been shaped by oil production; the roads themselves are made of oil (asphalt); and one must buy and burn oil in order to use the roads. For more comprehensive accounts of these matters see: Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (New York, Simon and Schuster, 1992); and Ralph Hewins, The Richest American: J. Paul Getty (New York, E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1960). Cf. Fredric Jameson's treatment of LA's Westin Bonaventure Hotel and the concept of ‘total space’ in Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 1991).