Verde Smoke

[10/20/07] This week’s ruminations extend the discussion of significant detail from vocabulary to the grammar of the language of landscape in Lawrence (and Austin actually). Basically, grammar refers here to the rules or formulas employed to communicate meaning using land vocabulary elements such as materials, forms, paths, and processes. And like any good sentence, the meaning is all in how you construct it – its order, its relations, its context in time and space. I see multiple grammars at play in Lawrence: creation, immigration, exodus and reluctant residence.

So, because I like to map things out and take them literally, here’s a breakdown of what I see as the grammar of one of the photos I took last week for the last assignment:

[adjectives] [noun] [adj][noun] [verb] [adverb]
The ruby, aged brick and iron lines of mills and canal watch silently,
[materials] [shapes] [process]

[adjective][noun]
as the chaotic verve of people, handmade paper lanterns, and turning trees
[materials] [form]

[verb] [adverb] [adj] [noun] [verb]
bustle spontaneously where only rigid industry once was dominated.
[process]

I’m attracted to using this type of formula to analyze the Lawrence landscapes is because it is a city with such a clear narration of order and production. The historical plan of the layout of Lawrence’s main streets and dominant buildings certainly created strict grammar rules to govern the conversations around business and social life.

But I wonder how much that grammar holds true now in 2007? Last week when Holly Jo, a fellow MIT DUSP student, were walking around waiting for the Canal Illuminations event to begin at dusk, she kept saying “I know that the main center of life in this city is north of the river and canals, but I keep looking toward the south and feeling like it should really be down there.”

The old grammar of Lawrence is embedded in the main street grid, with lines parallel to the water, intersected by bigger veins going north and south. I tried to do some searching online for the history of the use of the land in Lawrence before the city was set up by Abbot Lawrence, but there was little to be found. It seems as if all the histories of the land of Lawrence start when the dam was built and the city streets lined up. And on the first day, Abbot built the great dam, bringing the power to fuel the first migrations to the center of his new city. The river itself must have had its own grammar before the industrialists harnessed it to power their machines…I wonder how if Lawrence’s new plan for canals and streets agreed in composition with the older natural forces in the region.

Many huge mill buildings stare at you from the southern bank if you walk around the main streets of Lawrence’s business center, complete with a large, well-lit clocks. In fact, Holly Jo also pointed out that there are clocks everywhere Lawrence, on buildings and standing alone. I thought it might be a not so subtle way for the management (here as the storyteller using the grammar) to remind employees and residents (the readers) to be on time to their mill shifts, like the chimes of the church bell remind people to pray and worship. I also wonder how much the six and seven story looming buildings were built to subordinate the common worker by their scale, to physically induce the feeling of powerlessness of being an individual in the face of such huge authority.

And now I wonder how these landscapes speak to the residents now in Lawrence. Without the industry thriving behind the walls of these buildings, does life like community gatherings, restaurants, art studios and condominiums feel like foreign, parallel processes? Do the new immigrants to this city feel any ownership to the conversation told through this space, or do they feel like squatters, saving their money to send home to family and get back to them someday?

And although Lawrence is known as the Immigrant City, a “multi-ethnic and multicultural gateway city,” I’m at a loss to find this grammar in the landscape of Lawrence. There are many paths for movement, and performances spaces for gathering for creation, commerce and gathering, but no physical gateways for welcome from the outside. Almost making me feel like “if I lived here I’d be home right now” – you’re either in or you’re out. The absence of this grammar is rather interesting to me, as I think about how to use the collective perceptions and formed identities of the residents as a tool for them to envision the city’s future.

For some perspective, I’ve also been thinking about landscape language during my trip this week to Austin, Texas for the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture conference. I’ve been mostly holed up in the hotel, alternating presenting, listening, and networking with doing schoolwork. We only emerge at night, combing the blocks around the hotel for Austin life and local brews.

At the current moment, I’m sitting in a Starbucks beside Austin’s capital building and watching the bright calliope of a walk for heart disease research go by the window. It’s extremely ironic to me because I’ve been saying for days that Austin almost doesn’t feel like a city with any life, because when I walk around during the day, I don’t see anyone walking on the sidewalks or riding a bike – just truck after mammoth truck driving by on extremely wide roads and highways and by empty restaurants and clubs. And here they all are, even as the last trickles of the youngest girls and seniors in wheelchairs pass by; they’re walking and moving on the streets of Austin I kept observing as empty and desolate.

The main context I need to consider about the landscape of Austin is the weather – the intense heat of 90 degrees on a “chilly” day that drives people into air conditioned vehicles or inside frigidly cooled concrete buildings. Plus, I think they love oil here more than they love barbeque – so the expansive frontier that is Texas can hold the wide streets and fuel the big cars. This landscape uses a grammar of considerable scale and maybe I’m feeling threatened by my vantage point as a short stranger.

This gathering of support for those suffering from heart disease is embodied in an act of walking, that fights the disease through exercise and awareness. This interruption of the landscape I’ve been scowling at all week by lines of colored t-shirts and decorated dogs on leases is welcome and enlightening – it brings the patterns of Austin LIFE down to my human range of vision and emotion.

I’m thinking about how my collective identity project can be both a conversation that uses the grammar of Lawrence but also acts like a welcome interruption into the dialogue as well. Yesterday, I heard Courtney Fink from Southern Exposure (San Francisco, CA) talk of the work her organization sponsored by Ledia Carroll. who marked all over their city a continuous blue chalk line where a lake used to be. Then they held a gathering is the center of the old lake to educate people about the history of the landscape of their neighborhood and the current health of its ecosystem.

Description from Southern Exposure’s website:

Ledia Carroll uses a field line chalker to draw the perimeter of Lago Dolores, a former freshwater lake, in her Mission Lake Project. The full perimeter outlined with a blue chalk line will mark the shoreline of a now vanished lake in the Mission District that stretched roughly over a five-block diameter from (what is now) Van Ness to Guerrero and 15th to 20th Streets. Following the still visible ancient depression of the lake, Carroll’s graffiti chalk line will make the boundary of Lago Dolores apparent to the public. Mission Lake Project is a social project encouraging Mission District residents, gallery visitors, and tourists to take a walk in a place you may already know to see something not seen before but is true. A lakeside barbeque, perimeter bike race, and guided tours of the underground waterways round out the project.

This type of project is an artist’s intervention into the landscape of history and temporal standing of the current living patterns. SO, I’m now not only debating how I’m going to gather the narratives of the Lawrence, but also how I’m going to project and share them in the physical space, perhaps with some sort of installation in public spaces, and preferably with a way to record their reactions and feedback.