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Thought these two reviews from H-Urban offer some food for thought regarding landscapes--
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Ellen
Date: Thu, 2 Nov 2006 06:07:54 -0000
Subject: REVIEW: Gruen on Ockman and Frausto, eds, _Architourism_
Joan Ockman and Salomon Frausto, eds. _Architourism: Authentic, Escapist,
Exotic, Spectacular_. Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2005. 191 pp. Illustrations,
notes. $39.95 (paper), ISBN 3-7913-3279-X.
Reviewed for H-Urban by J. Philip Gruen, School of Architecture and
Construction Management, Washington State University
Architectural Tourism: More Complexity Than Meets the Gaze
Depending upon one's perspective, architectural tourism is as old as
architecture itself. Some of the earliest sites known to humankind may
have had ritual or pilgrimage functions, and people traveled vast
distances to encounter them. For example, the oracle at Delphi attracted
pilgrims, or tourists, and the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
European Grand Tour focused upon the visitation of monuments to western
civilization in antiquity and the Renaissance. But that was an earlier,
arguably different, time. Back then, touring the built environment was a
means to an end, whether that end was salvation, knowledge, or refinement.
If the splashy production and title of Joan Ockman and Salomon Frausto's
edited collection of essays, exhibits, and projects, _Architourism_, is
any indication, architectural tourism is now an end in itself.
A quick glance at the book reinforces this idea. Browsers cannot but help
to be arrested by the book's numerous high-quality, predominantly
full-color images, featuring buildings and spaces as diverse as Santiago
Calatrava's Milwaukee Art Museum and a crocodile-shaped hotel in Kakadu
National Park in the Northern Territory of Australia. Even older
buildings, such as the Pyramids of Giza in Egypt or the Pyramid of the Sun
in Teotihuacán, Mexico, are depicted not as we might expect from the
textbook view (as isolated monuments set in vast, arid landscapes), but
closer to how they are encountered by tourists: that is, surrounded by
hawkers, guides, and other tourists, who may have paid for the very same
package tour that they did. From the appearance of the book alone, one
might assume that the tourist industry is now--and suddenly--cashing in on
the new-found global appeal of the built environment.
That images are a major feature of the book should come as little
surprise. Architecture is a visual art, and tourism is often equated with
site-seeing, if not also with "sight"-seeing. The so-called tourist gaze
(a term coined by John Urry in his eponymous book of 1990, where tourists,
through vision, objectify everything out of the ordinary from their
privileged positions of power), continues to cast an influential shadow
over scholarly approaches to tourism today. This remains the case whether
or not the built environment is inserted into the discourse.[1]
But browsers beware: a careful reading of the bulk of the essays reveals
no overwhelming preference for the role of sight. Most essays cast a
wider net: one where sight is one of many faculties driving the tourist
encounter; where memory, physical proximity to the built environment, and
other senses can be understood as equally important. Furthermore, there
are only snippets of the elitism that colored the early years of tourist
studies, when tourists were typically depicted as non-thinking tools of
capitalism, who experienced precisely what the travel agencies,
guidebooks, or tour guides instructed them to experience.[2]
In _Architourism_, tourism itself is not universally regarded as a
denigrating and shallow practice, and tourists are given far more agency
than they are conventionally afforded. Many of the essays critically
probe the complexity of the tourist encounter, as authors seem unwilling
to assume that tourists are unaware of their status or the ways that the
tourist industry attempts to shape their experiences. Karal Ann Marling's
article, for one, notes the pleasure that tourists seem to take in the
architectural simulacra that can be found in places such as Country Club
Plaza in Kansas City, Walt Disney World in Orlando, and the Mall of
America near Minneapolis. If we neglect the positive transformative
powers such sites can have on people, she cautions, we miss the point (p.
125). A few of the essays, such as those by Yi-Fu Tuan and Tim Edensor,
even suggest that touring the built environment--whether a grand monument
such as the Taj Mahal or a decaying industrial ruin in E ngland -- can
potentially provide a kind of transcendence from the everyday. And, for
the most part, the articles do not re-hash the tired discussion of the
alleged distinctions between traveler and tourist, which inevitably end
with far more exceptions to any rule. Even if the book's visually oriented
graphic design does not always reflect its written content, it remains a
refreshing effort overall.
Nonetheless, there does not appear to be any widespread agreement as to
what _architectural_ tourism is, and whether it is, in fact, new.
Mitchell Schwarzer's lively, personal, and provocative opening essay on
architecture and mass tourism comes closest to defining architourism as it
is popularly imagined: a worldwide, frequently urban, phenomenon where
internationally renowned architects are lured to design buildings intended
to attract tourists as much as, if not more than, locals. Schwarzer
concedes that the desire to create an iconic structure is not new, but
that the difference today "lies in the number of tourist-magnet buildings
underway, as well as the global marketing considerations that go into all
aspects of project planning, including design" (p. 25). Frank Gehry's
Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain (1997), is considered a catalyst for
this phenomenon--so much so that the term "Bilbao effect" might, in
certain respects, be interchangeable with "architourism."
In their introductory remarks, Ockman and Frausto acknowledge that
Gehry's Guggenheim and its ability to capture the public imagination while
regenerating an entire city also generated their book, in addition to the
conference and exhibition that preceded it (p. 8). Yet only Schwarzer's
essay that follows delves into a discussion of the latest iconic buildings
in any great detail, and the book's content as a whole suggests that
architourism might be considered more broadly. A special image-based
section does feature a few recently completed or proposed projects by
well-known architects, but the mostly short articles, written by scholars
in a variety of fields, discuss everything from politics to power,
gentrification to nationalism, preservation to postcolonialism, and,
nearly always, consumption. The notable figures of _Architourism_ are as
often theorists or social scientists like Theodor Adorno, Georg Simmel,
and Guy Debord as they are architects such as Zaha Hadid, I. M. Pei, or
the firm of Herzog and de Meuron. A few of the articles, exhibits, and
photo essays are only peripherally about architecture (Keller Easterling's
article about the special tourist zone in North Korea that marks an
attempt to heal political differences between North and South Korea is one
example), and others seem only partly related to tourism (Martha Rosler's
photographs of travelers passing through airport security checkpoints, for
instance). Some of the book's featured sites and buildings might be on
some tourist itineraries today (the World Trade Center site, Dresden's
Frauenkirche, and Auschwitz, for example) but likely draw visitors perhaps
less for their physical presence than for the memory of the tragic events
with which they are commonly associated.
By no means is this intended as a criticism, however. The book's
interdisciplinary scope and multiple perspectives helps demonstrate that
architectural tourism cannot be separated from economic, political, and
social issues that penetrate any other sort of tourism and, in fact, is
bound to them. If a variety of critical views make the definition of
architourism less explicit, then so be it. What Ockman and Frausto have
effectively done is opened up the discourse on the connections between
architecture and tourism, and for that alone, this book is valuable.
But it is more than that. _Architourism_ is very readable, and the
articles hold together remarkably well for an edited
collection--particularly one put together following a conference and
exhibition. With respect to the variety of perspectives offered in the
completed publication, it is telling that the original name for the
conference and exhibition, _Architourism: Architecture as a Destination
for Tourism_ (organized in 2002 by the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the
Study of American Architecture at Columbia University), was not retained
for the present volume. Indeed, architecture is not always presented in
the book as a destination for tourism, but often appears to be incidental
to a process that finds tourists searching for the ever-elusive authentic
experience, seeking the exotic, attempting to escape, or relishing the
spectacular -- themes which form the basic organizational structure for
the book, and themes around which the conference was also organized.
Following the editors' introduction and Schwarzer's piece, the book is
then organized into the four principal sections of "authentic," "exotic,"
"escapist," and "spectacular," each of which features an introductory
discussion of the respective term and an essay or essays addressing the
term with respect to particular case studies in the built (or designed)
environment, each by a different author. Although, at times, a discussion
of the term in question seems tacked on to the various essays rather than
driving their content, it is to both the authors' and editors' credit that
there is an attempt to address the term and maintain the publication's
consistency. The article by D. Medina Lasansky, which exposes the
Mussolini-led efforts that shaped Tuscany as a collection of medieval and
Renaissance scenes now embedded into our contemporary consciousness, is a
case in point in that it queries what constitutes authenticity,
architecture, and architectural tourism. But Lasansky' s evaluation of
the authentic, with respect to the built environment, does not necessarily
cohere with that of Christiane Hertel, Anette Baldauf, or James E. Young,
who also contribute essays to the "authentic" section. Similarly,
McKenzie Wark's essay in the "exotic" section argues that the exotic
itself no longer exists (every inch of the globe has long been mapped and
its potential for tourism explored), while Tim Edensor's analysis of a
resort in Mauritius demonstrates that the staging of the exotic is very
much alive. Ackbar Abbas is perhaps most accurate when he writes that his
"ruminations on the exotic and its ambivalences have a certain bearing on
the concept of architourism, an idea that is also not without its
ambivalences" (p. 106). With different interpretations of the authentic
and exotic (as well as that of escape and spectacle), it is unsurprising
that architourism itself remains elusive, at least in this book.
_Architourism_ has other aspects that differentiate it from a more
traditional edited collection, where the graphic design of the publication
is considerably less important than the writing. Here, the two are
elevated to equal importance, but the graphics are more distracting than
provocative. Indeed, one is frequently jolted by varying page colors,
different font sizes, and images that do not always relate directly to the
topics and themes discussed in the essays. Also interspersed throughout
are reproductions of work from the exhibition, featured on yellow pages
called "site-seers." These site-seer pages include a card stock insert of
Hans Haacke's untitled World Trade Center project, which depicts the
silhouette of the buildings but, away from the urban context in which his
poster-sized cut-outs originally appeared, has the unfortunate (and
probably unintended) effect of lending the book a "pop-up" feel. A few
projects, including a new luxury resort in Obersalzberg, Germany (on the
site of Hitler's Bavarian mountain retreat), Norman Foster's proposed
cultural district on the West Kowloon waterfront in Hong Kong, and two
additional Guggenheim museums proposed for Rio de Janeiro and Taichung,
Taiwan are featured as "detours" on pink pages and analyzed, presumably by
the editors, in white text. The "spectacular" section also hones in on
three recent projects by Diller and Scofidio, Ten Arquitectos, and Bernard
Tschumi, with images and brief descriptions--here on black pages--only
hinting at the range of meanings and functions that an "architourist"
building or complex might contain. Save for Ockman's introductory
analysis of the site-seer pages early in the book, readers are left to
ponder the relationship of the featured projects to the themes or to
"architourism" more generally--with questionable success.
If one is to understand the alleged phenomenon of "architourism" as pure
visual dazzle--what Pellegrino D'Acierno calls "ecstatic, excessive,
exorbitant, aestheticized, imagistic, seductive" in his probing and
excellent introduction to the section on spectacle (p. 137), then the
book's design is aiding and abetting this process. (In the book's preface
or "point of departure," the editors find themselves "deeply indebted" to
Brett Snyder for a "truly dazzling book design" [p.11].) It is perhaps
unconventional to harp on the graphic appearance of a book in a review.
Yet that appearance, while making the book far sexier than the
conventional academic tome, belies the variety of critical approaches in
the essays, many of which divert from visual spectacle.
Perhaps the article that questions the tyranny of visuality to the
touristic process most directly is the final essay by Ockman herself,
where she tracks the travels of a select handful of influential
twentieth-century architects. Here, we read about the significance of
sketching, taking photographs, writing, and physical interaction with
locals to the touristic process--experiences which, Ockman argues, not
only shaped these architects' own work, but is "bound up with the
evolution of the twentieth-century architectural imagination" (p. 162).
Easily one of the more thorough and innovative essays in the book, Ockma's
lens is nonetheless focused exclusively on architect-tourists (who, for
perhaps obvious reasons, tend to pay closer attention to the built
environment than others). Given Ockman's subjects, her essay shifts from
the idea of architecture as a mass-audience attraction, which further
complicates the notion of "architourism."
Is this problematic? Only if one approaches the book hoping to nail down
a single definition for "architourism," a term which Ockman and Frausto
readily admit to creating themselves (p. 9). Insofar as they chose an
array of articles that approaches architecture and tourism from numerous
perspectives, one must assume that the editors were less interested in
defining the term than raising its possibilities and asking contributors
to address it. It is too early to speculate about whether the term
sticks, but at the very least, architecture should now be considered a
legitimate topic of scholarly inquiry into tourism.
Notes
[1]. John Urry, _The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary
Societies_ (Newbury Park: Sage Publications, 1990).
[2]. See, for example, Daniel J. Boorstin, _The Image: A Guide to
Pseudo-Events in America_ (New York: Vintage Books, [1962] 1992),
77-117.
Copyright (c) 2006 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the
redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational
purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location,
date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social
Sciences Online. For other uses contact the Reviews editorial staff:
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 2 Nov 2006 06:14:20 -0000
Subject: REVIEW: Tallack, _New York Sights_
Douglas Tallack. _New York Sights: Visualizing Old and New New York_.
Oxford and New York: Berg, 2005. xii + 212 pp. Illustrations, color
plates, bibliography, index. $89.95 (cloth), ISBN 1-8452-0169-8; $26.95
(paper) ISBN 1-8452-0170-1.
Reviewed for H-Urban by Angela Blake, Centre for Urban and Community
Studies, University of Toronto
Seeing New York
One of the greatest challenges faced by a newcomer to New York City,
certainly since the closing decades of the nineteenth century, is how to
see the city. Should one see it from atop a tall building for an overall
but perhaps abstract view? Or focus on the city from street level,
appreciating the variations among neighborhoods but struggling to
understand them as comprising a coherent whole? From the 1890s onward, as
New York expanded in population as a result of mass immigration, and
became both more extensive and more dense as a result of its physical
growth, newspaper and periodical articles, as well as tourist ephemera,
all struggled with the connections between seeing, knowing, and
interpreting the city. Theorists of urban culture and of modernity--art
historians as well as cultural historians of New York--have taken on these
questions throughout the last century.[1] Douglas Tallack's contribution
finds a niche in this crowded arena by combining the questions of the ur
ban historian with the visual reading of the art historian, producing an
analysis of the visual culture of New York City from the close of the
nineteenth century to the period immediately before World War I. Like many
scholars of "New York," what Tallack really focuses his attention on, he
freely admits, is the borough of Manhattan. The outer boroughs will have
to wait for their own visual culture suitor to pay them their due. But
given that Manhattan has so often been the actual object of the New
York-oriented writer, painter or photographer's gaze, Tallack's focus is
appropriate. Tallack aims to bring together canonical and non-canonical
representations of New York with the socio-cultural context of their
production. _New York Sights_ covers familiar historical ground in a
manner that, given the author's focus on visuality and his theoretical
acuity, may be unfamiliar to some historians. However, for scholars
interested in early twentieth-century urban culture, or in the v isual
culture of cities, this book represents a vital contribution.
Tallack's goal is broad: to discuss the visual representation of Manhattan
as the city's identity shifted from what he (and contemporary observers)
termed the "old" to the "new New York." Within that frame, Tallack
analyzes particular images and particular ways of seeing in relation to
the cultural, economic, and infrastructural changes that combined to
produce New York as the capital of modernity. Tallack's periodization of
this shift, from the 1880s to the 1910s, follows that of contemporary
writers such as Sadakichi Hartmann, Marianna Griswold Van Rensselaer, and
John C. Van Dyke, whose 1909 book _The New New York_ provided the
strongest contemporary description for the shift and its meanings.[2] But
Tallack also at times extends his discussion to include later
photographic, cinematic, and painted images of the city that continue a
representational thread he wishes to pursue. While this may muddy the
historical periodization, it allows Tallack to give greater weight to hi s
comments. The chapters are organized around different perspectives on the
city which, Tallack argues, produce specific types of views and thus
meanings--the view from street level, from and of mass transit, views from
a distance, and a final chapter on "visual excess" (perhaps the book's
strongest) which considers the "extraordinary, iconic nature of New York,
a city that cannot easily be separated from its visual representations"
(p.166), examining the period from mid-century to September 11, 2001.
The great strength of Tallack's book lies in his sophisticated
interpretations of individual images. Tallack is well versed in the
language of art history but deploys such language tempered by a
wide-ranging theoretical and historical knowledge, rendering his analysis
more accessible to an American Studies and urban history readership. The
resulting discussions of visual texts--as varied as bird's-eye views in
Moses King's turn-of-the-century tourist guides to photographs by Alfred
Stieglitz, and paintings by artists such as John Sloan, Charles Sheeler,
John Marin, and Piet Mondrian--provides the reader with a strong sense of
how the representation of New York worked in dialogue with larger
contemporary tensions over the meaning for Americans of their nation's
burgeoning consumer capitalism, its divisions of class and power, and the
struggle to maintain notions of American republican exceptionalism in the
face of an emerging American empire and the apparent reproduction of t he
social divisions from the "old world" of Europe.
In its interdisciplinarity and its analysis of visual texts in historical
context, Tallack's work stands as an example of scholarship in the
American Studies tradition of Alan Trachtenberg and scholarship in art
history by scholars such as T.J. Clark.[3] Tallack's references are mostly
to the secondary literatures of art history and visual culture studies, so
some urban historians may at first glance assume the work would not fit
well into their teaching or their own scholarship. Although a familiarity
with the theoretical discussions of vision and visuality by art historians
such as Martin Jay and Jonathan Crary, and with the work of
twentieth-century European theories of modernity by Walter Benjamin, Georg
Simmel, and the Frankfurt School will stand the reader in good stead, a
deep background knowledge of those literatures is not necessary to
evaluate Tallack's analysis. For example, if one takes chapter sections
that focus on an image subject--such as Stieglitz's and othe rs'
photographs of the Flatiron Building--and reads through Tallack's analysis
of the images and his contextualization of them, even the theory-shy
historian or the beginner in visual culture studies can appreciate
Tallack's reading.
One minor challenge Tallack's book poses is of a more structural nature.
The author's overall thesis and the arguments of the different chapters
are not easy to find. Perhaps the problem extends from an academic writing
style different from that predominating in the American humanities
academy; Tallack was educated at Sussex and is now at the University of
Nottingham. Urban historians eager to engage with Tallack's analysis of
New York may find themselves searching back and forth in Tallack's
introductory chapter for the classic thesis statement U.S.- educated
scholars are trained to write. That quibble aside, I would highly
recommend this book to urban historians wishing to update their thinking
and teaching about American cities to include an analysis of urban visual
culture. Chapters of the book could certainly be assigned to undergraduate
urban history and American Studies classes. _New York Sights_ may be
especially useful to graduate students pursuing urban topics in h istory,
American Studies, or literature departments. Tallack's book models the
type of close analysis necessary for the evaluation of visual documents as
primary sources and for work in material culture studies. His references
to both European and North American secondary literatures, theoretical and
historical, represent the breadth of reading and depth of critical
thinking vital to the development of a strong research topic at any stage
one's academic career.
Notes
[1]. Walter Benjamin, _Illuminations_, ed. H. Arendt, trans. H. Zohn
(London: Collins, 1973); John Berger, _Ways of Seeing_ (London: Penguin,
1972); Norman Bryson, _Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze_
(London: Macmillan, 1983); Jonathan Crary, _Techniques of the Observer: On
Vision and Modernity_ (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1992); Michel de
Certeau, _The Practice of Everyday Life_, trans. S. Rendall (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1984); David Frisby, _Fragments of
Modernity: Theories of Modernity in the Work of Simmel, Kracauer and
Benjamin_ (Cambridge: Polity, 1985); Martin Jay, _Downcast Eyes: The
Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought_ (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1993).
[2]. John C. Van Dyke, _The New New York: A Commentary on the Place and
the People_ (New York: Macmillan, 1909).
[3]. T.J. Clark, _The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet
and His Followers_ (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985); Alan Trachtenberg,
_The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age _
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), and _Reading American Photographs: Images
As History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans_ (New York: Hill and Wang,
reprint 1990);
Copyright (c) 2006 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the
redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational
purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location,
date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social
Sciences Online. For other uses contact the Reviews editorial staff:
------------------------------
--
Dr. Ellen Fernandez-Sacco
Research Fellow
Office for History of Science & Technology
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