As an architect, I’ve long been fascinated by urban street artists, who ignore ownership and assume they have a right, indeed a duty, to splash ugly, blank walls with beauty, wit, scorn, questions. Street art mocks rules and dictums to rattle our sense of order and control, even as it amuses and delights.
As the court jesters of modernity, street artists work at night, sometimes literally leaping from walls to roofs and between buildings to escape apprehension. In Banksy’s film, “Exit Through the Gift Shop,” a tagger paints sidewalks with the shadows cast by benches under streetlights. I thought of going to West Baltimore, a concrete desert of sidewalks and rowhouses, to paint the shadows of absent trees. Would it be better to raise awareness or just plant some actual trees? As one of my mentors would say to a forced binary: yes.
Some art intentionally strikes a balance between disrupting complacency and suggesting a way forward. Lucy Neal’s book, “Playing for Time: Making Art as if the World Mattered,” is stuffed with collaborative arts projects to affirm artists as truth tellers and activists. Bringing people together to reimagine the future is the foundation of change.
Artists make space for paradox—beauty and ugliness, joy and despair, action and passivity, building and wrecking. As the denizens of the in-between, they are provocateurs of liminal spaces, practitioners of both-and. They serve a vital cultural value in asking questions without providing answers.
My affinity for architecture stems in part from my penchant for solving problems and giving answers. Though it’s freeing to ask questions for their own sake, I’ve always resisted calling myself an artist. And yet I love to be in the flow, tuned in to the vital currents of imagination, delighted by surprises that arise. I feel happier and more alive after a session at the writing desk, more worthy of being here.
I go to the forest for the same kind of connection, to be reminded of my belonging, to encounter non-human Others. It is a sublime paradox to discover that we all belong to this earth, even in our ignorance and wasteful destructiveness. Even after believing our culture’s stories of human exceptionalism, of separation, of rights to resources, of control and domination. Even when we worry that there may not be a home to return to if we keep going the way we are. In the forest, all of that falls away. Unexpected things happen.
It is strange to encounter these Others. Strange and humbling. It asks a lot of me, to suspend my culturally conditioned skepticism, to convince my overly active rational mind to rest a while. To allow myself to be open and vulnerable, to feel awkward, maybe embarrassed. It’s a dangerous, delightful business to court the Other. The poet Adrienne Rich says it well:
“there is always the risk / of remembering your name.”
I am part of the 55% of the world population living in urban areas. Love or hate them, cities are part of our environment, and they will be part of our future. I’m pleased to see movements to green cities, to transition to low-energy, high resource-efficiency living. Young people are moving into rustbelt cities full of enthusiasm and appreciation for their creative energy and stimulation. People are starting urban farms and rethinking personal transportation.
One of the unexamined stories we live with is the false dichotomy between the city and wild nature. Expulsion from paradise is older than Adam and Eve being booted from the Garden of Eden. The ancient story casts humans out of our belonging, forces us to build cities for shelter and protection from predators, and leaves us feeling unworthy and unredeemable.
In our time, the city is depicted as the place of reason, of science and technology, of knowledge, human will and intellect, invention and problem-solving. The forest pulses with mysterious life, cyclical, wild, unpredictable and uncontrollable. Maybe instead of trying to control and predict everything, we can welcome and embody all of these energies in our lives.
I’m with the street artists who say we are animals living in a wild world, even in the city.
What I’m reading
Camille Dungy’s voice in Soil is grounded and engaging. As a poet, her prose is deft, unshowy, layered and honest. I love her “real talk” about the solo-hero-in-the-wilderness trope of much environmental writing. Her stories about her house and garden are like a conversation with a dear friend.
Grant by Ron Chernow is a page-turner, no lie. A fascinating deep dive into a critical time in our history. Chernow captures all the characters’ personalities and it’s amazing to realize how small the country was back then. Everybody knew everybody, either from West Point or the Mexican war or their hometown. I mean, the Mississippi was considered the western frontier! Given what I learned from Wendell Berry’s The Need to Be Whole about Grant’s compassion for Lee and his men at Appomattox, I can’t wait to see how Chernow handles it.
A poem to inspire your wanderings
Lost Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here, And you must treat it as a powerful stranger, Must ask permission to know it and be known. The forest breathes. Listen. It answers, I have made this place around you, If you leave it you may come back again, saying Here. No two trees are the same to Raven. No two branches are the same to Wren. If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you, You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows Where you are. You must let it find you. ~ David Wagoner
Thank you for explaining your affinity to architecture. I have always loved optimising indoor spaces. I love multifunctional furniture. I think optimising our spaces is especially important in cities, where space is limited.
The art is to make the space functional, aesthetically pleasing and practical. We had to remodel when my husband ended up in a wheelchair. The builder and I had many ‘discussions’ and he thought I was mad at times, but we made it work. Putting wheels on the kitchen table and chairs was a game changer.
I found very few architects were thinking of the needs of the elderly or disabled. Or if they did, they built new buildings with huge disabled friendly bathrooms. The reality is that most people have to adapt their much smaller homes, and there is little information and resources out there.
Beautiful post. Your passion for urbanism and architecture really comes through in this post. I love the diverse art you picked. More please.