Category Archives: Environment

Barry Johnson, Environment

Paul Goldberger, please save me from the Towers of Dubai

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OK, the experiment in blending semi-officially begins. Last night, I went to hear Paul Goldberger talk about the challenges facing cities in the 21st century. I blogged about the lecture at length today on OregonLive. If you’re looking for a fairly close account of what Goldberger said, that’s the place to go.

Here’s a paragraph from that post:

To my mind, the most important idea in Goldberger’s lecture is his description of the public realm It’s a squishy idea, maybe, comprising the things we as citizens of a specific city, Portland, have in common and the common ground on which we meet, the sense of community and the place of community, the generation of specific culture and its transmission through the city. The sprawling, atomized, privatized, cities that Goldberger is arguing against can’t be as vital, as integrated, as creative as the traditional city that Portland has tried to preserve, aggressively since the defeat of the Mt. Hood Freeway proposal in the 1970s and its replacement with light rail. Or at least that’s what his argument for the public realm suggests.

Goldberger isn’t the first to worry about the public realm, the erosion of our common ground, the withdrawal from the drama and information and diversity of the street. We even worry about it here on Art Scatter, if only because we worry about it in our own selves! It’s related to our concern about democracy — which can only be successful if the public realm is open and active and fluid. The promise of democracy is that it will produce BOTH better decisions AND decisions that people will support. Better decisions depend on the diversity of opinion and creativity of mind that the public realm encourages. And wide support depends on the trust and breadth of discussion that the public realm creates.

Although Goldberger couldn’t have been more complimentary about “Portland” as an attempt to produce and preserve a vigorous public realm, I think his instincts as a journalist, meaning I suppose his professional skepticism, might have made him wonder just how far-reaching and solid our achievements really are. If I could, I would have asked him about that. The popular impression, he said, is that Portland is the “anti-Houston”; but I doubt that he traveled far outside the central core of the city to areas that are as placeless as any nowhere corner at the intersection of major arterials in the Houston mega-plex. Our experiment in the “public realm” is incomplete, we’d all agree.

Ultimately, did Goldberger make me feel “better” about the future of cities? Not really, but that wasn’t his goal. He simply located some areas we should be vigilant about. But there are other more vicious threats out there. Goldberger didn’t mention climate change, for example, or even more lethal applications of technology than atomization and its resulting anomie or my own favorite — something plague-like that does an end run around our compromised worldwide centers for disease control. Or, for that matter, the social turmoil that comes from the unequal distribution of resources in a world of resource scarcity. I still see the towers of Dubai in my head…

Bob Hicks, Environment, Food, General

Farewell to Papa Pinot: An Oregon legend dies

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I remember David Lett a lot of ways, and not nearly as many as I wish I did: Here was a man, I always felt, I’d really like to know well. I didn’t. Although I’ve drunk a fair amount of his wine (again, not nearly as much as I’d like to have) we didn’t move in the same circles. Our paths crossed infrequently, and mostly anonymously — that is, I knew who he was, but he didn’t know who I was.

This morning’s Oregonian arrives with the news that Lett, founder of the pioneering Eyrie Vineyards, died late Thursday at his Dundee home. He was 69. The Associated Press filed this report, and gave the cause of death as heart failure.

Lett had passed the winemaking duties at Eyrie Vineyards to his son Jason three years ago, but it’s always been David’s spirit that’s defined the place. And what a place: a true slice of Oregon grit, a pioneering venture with a global impact, a place that knew what it wanted to do and stuck to its guns. Lett and Eyrie produced Oregon’s first commercial pinot noir in 1970, and to this day, despite the winery’s international acclaim, it’s still a little, musky-smelling, no-nonsense small-manufacturing joint in an old turkey-slaughtering plant across the railroad tracks in the McMinnville flats — in short, a glorious place to visit. No shimmering hillside chateau for David Lett: For him, it was all about the wine.

Lett had at least a couple of public images, and I suspect both had their measure of the truth. One was Papa Pinot, the genial elder statesman of the Oregon wine industry, a twinkling, silver-streaked Santa Claus of a man. The other was David Lett the irascible iconoclast, the fierce defender of making wines his way, which was, he believed, in the true traditional French manner. This David Lett believed in subtle, elegant, understated, long-lived wines that revealed their secrets in a whisper and were meant to blossom in companionship with food, not to stand out in a long line of gut-busters in a marathon tasting. He had little patience for younger winemakers who built high-alcohol fruit bombs and priced them through the roof, and he was outspoken about it, which didn’t endear him in some circles. I suspect he was proud of that. At heart he was a farmer and a chemist and a small manufacturer and an artist, and although he could be smooth, these are also identities that encourage a certain bluntness.

Continue reading Farewell to Papa Pinot: An Oregon legend dies →

Environment, General, Visual Art

Turning up the “Volume” on planning in Portland

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Art Scatter regular Tim DuRoche, a man of wide-ranging interests, has allowed us to post this account of Portland’s “Summer of Planning”, which is rapidly becoming a “Fall of Planning”. We’re especially happy to have his report of Portland planning chief Arun Jain’s talk on the last day of the “Volume” art exhibition, organized by Portlandart proprietor Jeff Jahn, in some ways the clearest expression of the uneasy relationship between art and urban planning. Tim writes about planning, urban design topics for Portland Spaces’ Burnside Blog.

By Tim DuRoche

With all the hubbub about cities and planning in arts circles—Sojourn Theatre’s Built, the Lawrence Halprin Fountain-centric City Dance, visual arts group shows Volume and the Thomas Sieverts-inspired Suddenly for starters, you kind of have to wonder—is urban planning the new black?

Or in the context of the lo-fi, local artscape, is an embrace of placemaking and the language of planning yet another double-coded, wink-wink social-practice gambit from the legions of folks making art that’s rife with sewing circle/swap meet simplicity?

The marquee-prominence of planning in cocktail-conversation Portland thrives because of civic engagement, while on the viz art end, Portland’s social-practice artists bank on a street-level participation that’s one part community charrette, part tea party, part cracker-barrel confession, and many parts Tom Sawyer whitewashing.

So what happens when an architect-planner meets a young-and-restless art posse head on?
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Barry Johnson, Environment

More thoughts on the edge (with a little gloom attached)

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The comment thread on the On the edge (of cities) post right below shows there is a lot of passionate interest in the topic — Thomas Sieverts’ idea that architects need to lift their eyes from the city core and regard the outer limits of the city with the same intensity and, well, we’ll say it, love that they have for the traditional European city center. Whether that interest is also broad we’ll test with another post on the matter, this one arising from two Monday night events: Metro president David Bragdon speaking with Portland Spaces editor Randy Gragg at Jimmy Mak’s; and a big-name concluding panel at PNCA that featured Sieverts, architect Brad Cloepfil, Reed Kroloff (who runs Cranbrook Academy, supervised our tram design competition and who was dean of architecture at Tulane when Katrina hit), and Matthew Stadler as moderator.

The topic of both the panel and the Bragdon-Gragg exchange went something like this: What can governments do to encourage good design? And it frequently kept to the question, though this “healthy” topic also generated a number of tasty digressions and frankly was never as dry as the question seemed to promise. And thanks to Stadler, the Sieverts analysis/prescription was always lurking in the background.

I know from the clock on the wall that I won’t be able to give a full account of what happened in this post (I know what you’re thinking: O sweet mother of the Titans, don’t tell me there’s a third post brewing; what is this, the Halprin fountains?), but I will get a few thoughts out there, and perhaps the Scatter regulars at the event can fill in some details.

Continue reading More thoughts on the edge (with a little gloom attached) →

Barry Johnson, Books, Environment, General

On the edge (of cities): past and present

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We’ve been MIA on Suddenly the set of exhibitions, lectures and events exploring the shape of our cities through the lens, primarily, of German urban designer/theorist/architect Thomas Sieverts. But we did make it to Sieverts’ lecture and a panel discussion Friday afternoon at the UO’s new architecture school branch in the White Stag building in Portland’s Old Town, a suitably central (or maybe, paradoxically central) spot to consider the remaking of suburbs, I suppose.

Matthew Stadler (a Scatter friend) did the introductions and moderated the panel, which was appropriate, because it was his reading of Sieverts’ book Cities Without Cities that suddenly changed his thinking about where the energy in cities really is these days and started this “movement” going. I think I’m getting ready to argue that Matthew’s was a creative misreading of Sieverts, though I’m waiting for one more event, another panel on Monday night, to confirm my first impressions, especially since I haven’t read the book(!).

Fairly early on in Sieverts’ lecture another friend of Scatter wondered about the intelligibility of his argument. But I think I understood the gist. The thought line he presented went something like this. 1) European cities are “splash” cities, meaning they no longer have compressed central cores. Instead, they sprawl a lot like American cities. In Sieverts’ powerpoint, charts and graphs showed just how “splashy” specific German cities had become. 2) The edges of this sprawl are chaotic and featureless. 3) German cities are shrinking in population, which makes it hard to change the edges through growth: It takes transformation. 4) Architects should address the problems of the edge, supplying aesthetic “meaning” and cultural coherence to them, even though planners tend to ignore them because they are so nondescript. 5) If these “edge cities” are going to compete in the global economy, they are going to have to attract “creatives” (Richard Florida’s young creatives, though Florida wasn’t mentioned), and that makes the transformation of these featureless suburbs, between spaces, crucial.
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Barry Johnson, Environment, General, Visual Art

Monday scattered like the New Carissa

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With the late September sun blazing and the pinot noir grapes sweetening by the minute, Scatter attempts to move its attention from dreams of wine-y complexity to almost anything else.

1. The New Carissa. We met the news that the salvage of the stern of the New Carissa on the coast near Coos Bay was nearly complete with some unexpected sadness. Remove it as though it never happened? The derelict New Carissa was a formidable adversary, defying our best efforts to… well, do anything with her that we wanted. Just the saga of the bow section — towed (with great difficulty) out to sea for burial, it breaks free in a storm and re-grounds near Waldport, gets a tow back out to deep water where it is blasted by a destroyer and sunk by a torpedo into 10,000 feet of water — is incredible. It would have all been completely comic if oil from the ship hadn’t leaked and destroyed marine wildlife nearby. Put us in the camp with those who would have left a hunk of stern on the beach, not as a tourist attraction, mind you, which would have been silly, but as a monument to our folly, a permanent metaphor. (That’s Henk Pander’s Wreck of the New Carissa, above.)

2. WaMu, Seattle misses you. We linked you to Regina Hackett’s story in the Seattle P-I that detailed some worry about the fate of Washington Mutual and the building-sharing agreement it has with the Seattle Art Museum. Now, of course, WaMu has turned into a subsidiary of JP Morgan Chase & Co. and her new story with John Marshall talks about the worry at many other Seattle arts organizations that WaMu’s extensive arts funding will diminish or disappear. This is just the direct fallout from the sub-prime loan mess; we have yet to see how much deeper this blade will cut.

3. Mark Rothko at the Tate. Scatter follows Rothko pretty closely — he went to Lincoln High School, after all, and was a friend of Portland painters Carl and Hilda Morris — even though we sometimes don’t know what to make of him. Or maybe it’s that we think different things about him at different times. In any case, the show of his late work (1958 when he famously withdrew from his Four Seasons restaurant commission in the Seagram buildling until his suicide in 1970) at the Tate Modern in London is drawing similarly mixed responses. We recommend a reading of Laura Cumming’s review in the Observer, which describes an exhausted Rothko and locates the figurative elements threatening to bust loose in all the abstraction. Rachel Campbell-Johnston in the London Times, however, finds something altogether different — a lighter, brighter, soaring Rothko. Let’s see: exhausted or soaring? Maybe a trip to London to sort all of this out would be in order if only the Scatter piggy bank didn’t rattle so forlornly.

Bob Hicks, Environment, Film, General, Visual Art

Thursday scatter: of foxes and hen houses, etc.

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An egg crisis is ravaging the hen house.

They’re disappearing.

And the foxes are shocked, shocked.

While the hens bemoan the loss of their little ones — several survivors have been running around crying that the sky is falling — the foxes have gathered the whole barnyard to declare that Something Must Be Done. Trust them: We Must Act Now.

The head fox has declared that the true victims are the foxes themselves, who have been cruelly deprived of their stockpile of eggs. To avert catastrophe, the foxes’ hoards must be replenished: The hens must lay 700 billion new eggs, right now. The farmer, blinking owlishly, agrees. One wise old fox, who yearns to live in the farm house, has declared that he will Suspend All Other Activities while he Helps Find a Solution. That solution will be found by foxes, and foxes alone. And the solution is that the Hens Will Provide.

Meanwhile, no omelettes this morning. And for music lovers, the rooster doesn’t much feel like crowing, either. Where’s Aesop when we need him? Where’s George Orwell?

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NEW GUY AT THE GUGGENHEIM: Those who can curate, curate. Those who can curate well, lead museums. At least, that’s the mini-trend among major museums in New York.

Following the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s appointment earlier this month of European tapestry curator Thomas P. Campbell to replace the venerated Philippe de Montebello as director, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation has named Richard Armstrong, director of the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, as the Guggenheim‘s next director.

Like Campbell, Armstrong rose in the ranks on the strength of his curatorial qualities, not his showmanship: His specialty is contemporary art, a good fit for the Goog. And the ever-busy Carol Vogel, in her report for the New York Times, suggests that after years of expansion in Bilbao, Venice, Berlin and (coming in 2013) Abu Dhabi, Armstrong and the Guggenheim are ready to shift their focus back to New York. Another good report comes from The Art Newspaper.

Is it possible that sober financial times are bringing more prudential museum leaders? De Montebello, of course, has combined prudence, measured daring and a brilliant commitment to the art for more than 30 years at the Met, following the mercurial reign of supershowman Thomas Hoving. At the Guggenheim, Armstrong will follow high-rolling Thomas Krens. And when the Portland Art Museum‘s Hoving-like director John Buchanan headed south to take over the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the museum board replaced him with Brian Ferriso and charged Ferriso to quiet the waters and keep things on an even keel.

The question is, will an even keel fill the cruise ship with customers? Is generating excitement gauche, or is it part of what a museum is about? To what extent does a museum exist for insiders, and to what extent does it have a duty to appeal to the general public?

These are uneasy times, and leading a major — or modest — museum is no easy task. To Armstrong, Campbell, Ferriso and their compatriots, then: Good luck, be wise, balance well, take risks, and don’t forget the public.

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HAPPY BIRTHDAY, SOMEDAY: Someday Lounge, that is. The Old Town Portland night spot and hub for interesting alternative arts has turned two and is celebrating with a bunch of events this weekend. The one that catches our eye is the premiere of Pig Roast and Tank of Fish, a documentary about Portland’s Chinatown (which is more or less where the Someday coexists) to be shown at 7 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 28. Here’s what the Lounge has to say:

Portlander Ivy Lin directed and produced Pig Roast & Tank of Fish. “I’ve always wondered why our Chinatown went from being the second largest in the U.S. to almost like a ghost town. It’s in the heart of downtown, with that beautiful gate and garden and nothing much else,” says Lin. “Earlier this year, 70 Asians showed up at a city council meeting to testify against the the siting of another homeless shelter on Block 25 in Chinatown. I was not even involved with the Chinese community then, but I was very moved and this event became the inspiration for this project.”

This documentary is the first-ever motion picture to acknowledge the history/legacy of Chinatown, Portland’s oldest neighborhood where the pioneers of many ethnic communities once called “home.” It includes some rarely seen footage of ongoing cultural/social activities behind closed doors…Chinatown is not dead!

See you there, Friends of Art Scatter.

Barry Johnson, Dance, Environment, General

The Halprin fountain dance, one week later

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I thought I was done with the Halprin fountain “event” or “happening” or “dance” — I still can’t quite name it — that ended the Time-Based Art Festival in Portland last Sunday (that would be Sept. 14). But I keep getting flashbacks of the performance, replaying little bits in my mind, thinking about some of the music I heard. You know what that’s like: Something more than random neurons firing.

I’ve had a couple of aids in this. The first is visual. Art Scatter received a very nice email from writer Brett Campbell, who was also very taken with the Halprin happening and said he was working on an essay of his own. When he completes it, we will link to it. This is right down his alley: He’s working on Lou Harrison book and Harrison was in the middle of the San Francisco milieu of Lawrence and Ana Halprin. But as a memory igniter, Brett’s wife, photographer CaroleZoom, was actually more important, because she sent us some images of the event. Quite beautiful ones, which explain the adulatory comments I heard about the first piece of the performance choreographed by Tere Mathern — which I was unable to see (I was late, it was too crowded). So, I’ve posted those here.

And there was the thread to the original post… Randy Gragg, one of the key organizers, responded a couple of times. Carolyn Altman, who was a Portland dancer/choreographer/writer, wrote in from Georgia, where she now lives, with memories of the fountains. Dance writer Martha Ullman West got things going and left us wanting more of her eye on the dances themselves.

And realizing that I missed Martha’s eye made me understand how inadequate the description of things in the original post was/is. If I could do it over, I would try to tell you how the dancers moved, more than simply saying it was “old-style” modern dance, carving space, attending to changes in topography and water flow, operating at scales tiny and grand, how they rolled and buckled and ran, the qualities in the momentary tableaux, the muscle groups engaged and relaxed, the dancers and the way their dance personalities emerged. The music would be harder for me — help us, Brett! — fleeting, sporadic, in search of original impulses to propel it, guide it, original impulses to communicate to us.
Continue reading The Halprin fountain dance, one week later →

Barry Johnson, Dance, Environment, General

Sunday in the park with the Halprins (while Rome burned)

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So, while Wall Street Giants shuddered, pivoted and crashed to the ground, Art Scatter was amusing itself at “City Dance,” the celebration of Lawrence and Anna Halprin, specifically Lawrence’s Portland plazas and fountains, Anna’s dances and early ’60s San Francisco art music, which somehow affected both. I will type (or is it keyboard, technically?) as long as I can, until the shock wave takes us off line… oddly it seems appropriate to muse on subjects such as these during times of economic crisis.

We’ve already set up the fountains, and to a lesser extent the dances, in a post below. To summarize, L. Halprin was hired by Ira Keller and the PDC to provide some public spaces for Portland’s first major Urban Renewal project, the demolition of the South Auditorium district and its replacement by a Skidmore, Owings, Merrill office/residential park. Keller was so happy with these, that he later asked L. Halprin to finish off the set with a plaza/fountain in front of what was then Civic Auditorium. It’s now the Keller Auditorium and the fountain is now Keller Fountain, though old-timers will be excused for calling it the Forecourt Fountain.

Fast forward 40 years or so. The fountains and plazas, important icons in the history of urban landscape design, could use a little conservation work, and so architecture writer/magazine editor Randy Gragg, the Halprin Conservancy, Third Angle New Music Ensemble and four Portland choreographers (Tere Mathern, Cydney Wilks, Linda Austin and Linda K. Johnson) banded together to help raise our collective consciousness about the Halprins’ work by staging a moving concert through all four sites (Keller Fountain, Pettygrove Park, Lovejoy Fountain, Source Fountain).

So on Sunday afternoon, sunny and warm, several hundred Portlanders, unaware perhaps that financial Redwoods were crashing, assembled to watch the show on the last day of the Time-Based Art Festival. Maybe there were more than that, adding the two concerts together. The second concert was so packed that when I arrived right before it began, I couldn’t get close enough to see anything much at the first site, the Keller Fountain, but that’s not going to deter me from my posting. Because there were three more sites to visit.
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Barry Johnson, Dance, Environment, General

Deep Portland history: Lawrence Halprin and Ira Keller

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Monday night, Randy Gragg and Portland Spaces magazine staged another of its Bright Light City Discussions; this one featured historian Carl Abbott and was part of the Time-Based Art Festival. We took notes! More importantly we learned a lot about Lawrence Halprin and a provocative piece of Portland history. There was lots of information, some of which we may have gotten wrong. Don’t hesitate to correct our record!

Before the start of the Randy Gragg and Carl Abbott presentation on the history of the old South Auditorium district and the Lawrence Halprin fountains and plazas that replaced it, I happened to sit across from Robert Perron. This was lucky. Perron taught landscape design at UC Berkeley in the early ’60s when Halprin was there and knows a lot about him and his aesthetic impulses. And his knowledge of Portland is deep, possibly because he’s worked on so much of it, including the Salmon Street Fountain, Terry Schrunk Park and the First Presbyterian Church garden park. Because of that he understands the accidents, unintended consequences and budget shortfalls that affect the design of our cities and therefore our lives.

Shrunk was the mayor and Ira Keller was the chairman of the newly formed Portland Development Commission (PDC) when the decision was made in the late ’50s to bulldoze the aging neighborhood south of downtown and replace it with a utopian Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM) residential and commercial district with impressive towers surrounded by green space. And in the green space, Keller decided, there should be a series of plazas and fountains designed by Halprin.
Continue reading Deep Portland history: Lawrence Halprin and Ira Keller →