A shout out.

Here’s a mini shout out to journalis John Lorinc, whose new book looks rather interesting, and who will be giving a talk at the UofT on Urban Poverty in Canada tomorrow.

wait – there are poor people?  oh. I thought it was performance art.

 

overdue learnin’ & loft livin’

It’s December, mid-December actually, and well above freezing. It just seems strange. The semester is over, and yet I have roughly half the work left to do I did in mid-November. A bit pathetic actually – the extent that graduate school allows one to procrastinate, self-doubt, dabble and miss. Oh, add stress in there too.

So, I am going to write the rest of an overdue paper, and explore just what Sharon Zukin and other urban scholars have to say about loft-living and add my own two cents about the potential for live-work apartments in urban areas as a housing type. An under-researched area of housing policy – some might even say not part of housing debates at all – and I decided to tackle it because it was neat.

Yeah, neat and messy and complicated and … I find myself half advocating gentrification, urban elitism, industrial displacement, adaptive re-use of buildings, Floridian creative class bullshit, and a quest for the authentic. I feel dirty.

 

City Museum

As part of an effort to explore and understand cities better, I headed to Saint Louis, Missouri. (What? Wasn’t that your first instinct?) And skipping right over one of North America’s largest urban parks, the pervasive and persistent racial divide, a non-existent economic base amidst established wealth, and a 30 year supply of urban industrial building stock ready for the post-industrial condo conversion, let us focus on one of the city’s main features: the City Museum. http://www.citymuseum.org/home.asp

For those thinking the City Museum is a dull narative of failure to adapt and falling so far, featuring lonely men standing tall amid crumbling granite infrastructure as they scramble for legacy, with cameos from redlining, the barge industry, deindustrialization, suburbanization and perverse tax subsidies… think again.

The City Museum is FUN. It is playland on drugs. It is a junkyard jungle gym that recycles materials stripped of value and showcases architectural features that once bestowed it to the (now naked and abandoned) buildings they once crowned. A wall of empty Coke bottles here, a gargoyle there, and an airplane carcass you climb through yonder combine in delight that brings out your inner nine year old. You climb on scrap metal, whizz down slides, swing on ropes, play piano, watch huge fish, have your fortune read, and pound back a couple beers before scamping off to play some more, since, heck – this monstrosity is open ’til one!

It’s as though an architect on acid took on a junkyard challenge and drew his inspiration from Charlie – but kept getting Modern Times and the Chocolate Factory confused. Superb.