Jon Rafman: what google sees

Jon Rafman. Google Street Views, 2010

Jon Rafman. Google Street Views, 2010

I was very sloppy with this post a couple of days ago: got the dates wrong and hadn't thought too deeply about these images.  What I quite liked about them was that they themselves had no meaning: caught by a camera programmed to photograph the street in nine different directions every ten feet or whatever it is, they simply are raw information. 

Jon Rafman chose, out of billions of such raw images, a collection that he ascribed some sort of role to, simply by selecting them.  Many of the people caught in many of the images know they are on camera and act up for it, others don't notice.  There are many traffic accidents that seem to have happened just as the Google van went by.  The stone house and the roadway, above, are simply beautiful ideas, which is why I selected them out of the hundreds on Rafman's 9-eyes.com.  There are so many selection filters one could apply, it turns viewers into search engine filters themselves. Which is of course how we all negotiate our own worlds.

oxbows

John Macoun. Manitoba and the Great North-West : the Field for Investment; the Home of the Emigrant, Being a Full and Complete History of the Country. Guelph: World Publishing Company, 1882

In St Boniface, above, one can see the remains of an oxbow from the Red River. Detached from the main flow, it would have become, as indicated in this 1882 map, a slough perhaps flooding each spring.  Not to worry, the street grid has been drawn over it anyway, good flat land for development.  Just to the west (the map has west at the top) of the oxbow one can see the old seigneurial land divisions: thin narrow lots fronting on the river.
In the google satellite view, below, the edge of the oxbow is Enfield Crescent, the eccentric in the grid.  The seigneurial pattern is gone, but the road that skirted the swamp (also long gone) remains, permanently embedded in the street layout.

St. Boniface, Winnipeg: from Google Maps, rotated 90° clockwise to match the 1882 map.

Commercial Street, 1900-2005

Commercial Street, Nanaimo BC. undated postcard, ca 1910s

Commercial Street, Nanaimo BC. ca 1940Commercial Street, Nanaimo BC. 1965This all held until a few years ago when Nanaimo succumbed to the downtown revitilisation policy of knocking down the east side of lower Commercial, where Fletchers, Lindsays, the beautiful early modern Bank of Montreal and a row of small two storey buildings had been, to make way for a behemothic smoked glass convention centre, the ground floor retail bays unrented for several years, but I see a Dollar Store has moved into one of them.

High River, 1957

Main street, High River, Alberta ca. 1957-1958. Glenbow Archives PA 3520-800

A while ago I was writing something about when Starbucks started to appear in Canada in the late 1980s and how radical it was that their signs were flat to the wall.  It seemed so sophisticated and European.  We had always had projecting store signs like the signs shown in the past two days' posts, neon until the 1970s when they were gradually superseded by back-lit plastic, which I really hated, with a vengeance.  Now hardly any signs project into this public realm, unless someone is being retro.

High River was and remains a very small town; its signs and awnings are modest – less money perhaps for commercial projection out into the street.  Robson Street was and is in a city, more money, more people on the sidewalk.  Pressure to redevelop and redevelop again means that Robson Street is a glassy glamorous canyon, while High River never experienced any pressure to redevelop itself, it just went out to the inevitable 1960s highway strip, thus little has changed from the view above. 

What would that volume between building face and car grill, between cornice and pavement, be called?  without using the word 'space'.  And it divides into two parts, one the size of the building, the other the height of the ground floor.

There is a lot of clutter on these sidewalks of the 1950s; they are complex little environments.  Here is a tiny photograph by Everett Baker, the photographer who travelled Saskatchewan with the wheat pool and then the Co-op, taking thousands of kodachrome slides. This picture is unfortunately tiny (the SHFS has a clamp on images), but could be a slice of either Vancouver's Robson Street or Hastings, or Broadway of the 1950s, or Oaxaca, or Elgin, Texas. 

Saskatoon, 2nd Avenue, 1941We have a call for articles on such things here. Some articles have already been proposed.  Interestingly they are a lot about a rediscovery of small towns by urbanites leaving the metropoli with their iPads, iPhones and broadband needs.  I suppose the question will be whether the small towns with their struggling main streets will change the incomers, slowing them down, or whether the urban emigrants will change the towns. The latter I think: one can get a latte everywhere now.

Fred Herzog's Vancouver

Fred Herzog, Robson Street, 1957. Ink jet print, 51 x 34.6 cm; image: 45.9 x 29.5 cm. CMCP Collection. © Fred Herzog.

From the blurb on the Fred Herzog page at MOCCA: 'Herzog's passion for photography resulted in a large body of work depicting Vancouver during the postwar era, at a time when capitalism and consumer culture was burgeoning'.

And another:

Fred Herzog, Robson Street, 1958. Ink jet print, 51 x 34.6 cm; image: 45.9 x 29.5 cm. CMCP Collection. © Fred Herzog.This image was in the Globe & Mail book review section last week as there is a book out of Herzog's work: Grant Arnold. Fred Herzog, Vancouver Photographs.  D&M, 2011.

Herzog was German, worked as a seaman after WWII and in 1952 emigrated to Canada when he was just 22.  He became a medical photographer, and taught at UBC and Simon Fraser.  Herzog has a huge following in Vancouver as he documented a city unrecognisable now.  But I can recognise the prim little lady waiting for the bus, her hat, her gloves, her stick and sensible lace up shoes.  My childhood in Victoria was peopled with such tidy creatures who dressed to go downtown. Of course, downtown then had butchers and cake shops, lunch counters and ladies' dress shops. No malls, few cars, excellent bus service, a kind of public propriety on the sidewalk.  The fellow who has wounded his chin badly while shaving and wearing an undershirt on the street, and smoking, and having a sprained wrist: clearly a doubtful presence at the edge of our little lady's world. But at least he had shaved to go out.  Stubble was a signal that one had really given up.

graffiti

Spiller Road, Calgary. August 18 2011

Is this the new graffiti – small and repressed, taking over the huge bubble letters that are everywhere and completely unintelligible?

a handful of drives

Polly Hill. Driving map of Santa Cruz, 1912

There is a nice write up of this hand map on Strange Maps.  It reminds me that there was a time when people got into cars and drove around, looking at things, usually on Sunday afternoons.  Let's go out for a drive!  Who today in their right mind would think this was a treat?  but it used to be.

Driving has become such a chore: too fast, too much road surface, too noisy, an A to B experience, preferrably without incident.  No time to look at scenery, no stopping for gas and finding a courteous attendant, in fact little courtesy on the road itself.  It is all such a struggle. 

spies

James Hart Dyke. Contact, 2010For the centennial of the British Secret Service, James Hart Dyke was commissioned to shadow MI6 for a year, recording the sense of espionage work.  He is an architect by training, a painter in practice.  After years of watching Spooks in all its precise television definition, these works of Hart Dyke appear as mysterious renderings of banal streets, hotel rooms, landscapes.   The whole series can be seen on his website.

Who knows how many transactions happen on the streets we walk down every day, how many simultaneous lives are being conducted in the cities we take for granted just because we live there.  

Pearl Roundabout, Manãma, Bahrain

Pearl Square, or Pearl Roundabout, or Lulu Square. Manama, Bahrain. photo: google mapsBahrain, a Portuguese colony in the 16th century, then Persian, ruled by the Al-Khalifa family since 1783, independent only since 1971.  Oil is its industry, Manãma its capital with a population of 162,000 in the city, 345,000 in the greater area. 

Now from the google maps images it appears that there is a highway system running through what is a rather small city to equal Toronto's.  Again, as in Cairo, the main area for protest is a huge traffic island, which, when filled with people would halt road traffic at an important nexus. 

Traditional squares were walled by buildings of influence: the church, the state, the security services – the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, for example.  These were the sites of power and thus sites of protest.  These recent uprisings are located in a different political geography; traffic circles, in Manãma's case surrounded by haphazard development.

Manãma also appears to have one of those figurative coastlines that increase ocean frontage.  This isn't the Corniche of Cairo and neither is the violence.

Manama, Bahrain. Google maps

garbage cans

It occured to me that we needed a context for Duende's urban fire fountains.  Existing Paris garbage cans clearly discourage fires.

Matthew Blackett wrote a good piece in Spacing about the replacement of the heavy concrete and ceramic tile garbage cans in the Toronto Metro with a similar, transparent solution.  He says it is an anti-terrorism measure: one can see a bomb, whereas before they were hidden.  If they were there. 

Matthew Blackett. Spadina station, Toronto.

Then I found Artemy Lebedev's site: a two-year study of rubbish bins in the public domain, mostly in Russia and eastern Europe.  He writes with that lovely irony of someone who lives in cynical times.  'The function of a trash can is the timely collection of litter that is carelessly thrown in its direction.'

Artemy Lebedev. Movable trash can. MoscowArtemy Lebedev. A trash can that never got scrubbed, Moscow

We have just had enormous black bins with wheels delivered for our household garbage with helpful hints of what to do with our old garbage cans, such as storing sports equipment in them.  I have an aversion to throwing raw rubbish into my new, clean, very shiny garbage bin. It seems somehow slovenly not to have it tidily contained in a black plastic bag.  I would quite like to have that blue Moscow urn as my garbage can: a thing of beauty on the alley.  It just needs a lid.

winter street furniture

Duende Studio and François Bauchet. Fire Fountain, 2010

Duende, a design studio that regularly sends notices of very chic French industrial design, sent this elegant garbage can today.  Acknowledging that people on the street light fires in metal barrels, and often set themselves alight, this is a safe version.  It also aestheticises a social condition that is not always beautiful.

François Bauchet calls it a public fireplace, the winter version of Paris's fountains, an idea first floated by Yves Klein.  I doubt Klein, who died in 1962 at 34, had the homeless in mind, but he had made a conceptual shift from dancing fountains in the public domain to a winter version: both water and fire are elemental, fugitive, ephemeral.  So yes, one can see how Kleinian this lovely garbage can might be.

It is also in the tradition of the Art Nouveau Paris Metro entrances: cast iron and romantic, not a utilitarian atom in their sinuous, gratuitous decorativeness.  Well, other than holding up a sign. 
Should gratuitous beauty be put into service?  Is the issue here safety or the propriety of the street?  The poor are always with us, but at least we can make them look good?
Is it overly presbyterian Canadian of me to think that winter fire fountains casting a sweet wood-smoke pall over the city are a cosmetic device?  Yes, it is, and this is no doubt why our Canadian city streets are so bleak, so unlovely, so un-made up, so un-Parisian.

This is another example of a small thing, like the lipsticks given out during the relief of Belsen, that make a hard life bearable.  Of course we should be solving poverty at a structural level, but we don't seem to be capable of doing that.  In the meantime, might we not acknowledge that the sidewalks are our common ground where all levels of society meet the same amenities? 

Mags Harries, Asaroton (Unswept Floor), 1976

Mags Harries. Asaraton (Unswept Floor), 1976. Boston, MassachussettsAsaroton was a public art project by Mags Harries for Massachussetts' bicentennial in the Haymarket in Boston.  Market debris has been cast in bronze and embedded in a crosswalk, part of Boston's Freedom Trail.  'Asaroton' describes Roman scraps of food, long since fossilised.  And then in the title comes (Unswept Floor) with its guilty domesticity.  This piece marks the market and the detritus left on the streets and in the gutters when the market closes.  It valorises the everyday: a crushed cardboard box in bronze becomes a beautiful, abstract thing, without monumentality, something difficult to achieve at the scale of a public art project. 

We have so much monumentality, so much at the large scale, so many broad strokes in our cities.  The public realm, or the fairly meaningless descriptions 'public space' or even worse, 'green space' is not developed from the small detail, the scale of the foot or the hand, but is constructed at the scale of the crane, the flatbed truck, the swipe of brick paving texture on the plan.

One does wonder if civic public art programs which take a percentage of the cost of new developments for sculpture on the street, or on the plaza, or on the plinth are necessary compensations for the lack of the small-scale intimate detail in the modern city.  It isn't about supporting art, as is claimed, but is a deep desire to achieve beauty that in other eras was a component of ordinary civic engineering. 

Historic 18th century Boston is stuffed with beauty; perhaps this is why it understood a project that is so essentially humble and tender. 

Mags Harries. Asaraton (Unswept Floor), 1976. Boston, Massachussets

more sidewalk details

Joseph Clement. New York sidewalk details. Spacing, September 6, 2007Joseph Clement had a great piece in Spacing a couple of years ago on New York's sidewalks.  I found it when I was looking about for the glass block inserts.  He makes the point that when the sidewalk takes the place of a back alley for loading and services it makes for very wide pavements: clearly this proportional difference makes a better ground for pedestrian life.  The flâneur simply couldn't flan on niggardly strips of concrete pressed up against parked cars or downtown traffic. 

The photo above shows the care with which water is conducted away from seams between metal and paving.  Whenever the manhole cover was installed, or the glass lens panel laid, someone was thinking about longevity and the details needed to keep rain water from pooling, from splashing.  Again it is like the design of the cat's eyes where two glass marbles are set in a heavy rubber block which compresses if a car tire runs over it.  In front of the marbles is a small well to collect water, so when the rubber compresses the water rinses the front of the glass marbles keeping them clean.  There is tremendous attention to detail here that goes beyond the ease of installation and is more about imagining the post-installation working life of the product.  What a quaint idea.   

unstable surfaces

La Jolla, California, 2007Now, here's an example of the ground beneath one's feet being completely ambiguous, certainly mysterious: how deep is the slump beneath this sink hole?  Is it at the level of the water table, or the aquifer, or a mile deep?  This photo looks like something by Jeff Wall: a small suburban crisis.

If you click on the picture it will take you to a Guardian photo series of other, recent sink holes.

sidewalk glass blocks

Yesterday's glass block lights remind me of the heavy glass block panels let into sidewalks that provided light to cellar spaces under the pavements.  Haven't seen these for years, although they were once very common, and in looking around for pictures found lots of websites about their preservation.  The Ringuettes have a good site on the sidewalk glass prisms of Victoria BC where all the downtown sidewalks appear to have had lenses. 

Glass prisms, either square or round, are set in structural metal frames and then the whole unit spans the sidewalk over the basement level storage or working space.  They date from the early 1900s and are found extensively in old sections of cities that have either been preserved as historic districts or are so run down as to have escaped modernisation, which in sidewalk terms usually means concreting over the glass sections.

Originally clear glass, the manganese used in glass in the early 1900s  has turned these lenses a deep amethyst with exposure to sun. I remember Victoria's glass sidewalks as being quite dark glass — but I've also seen glass panels in London that are white and shine brightly at night when the cellars below the sidewalks have their lights on.  It was this that I thought of with the LED glass blocks. 

The sense that downtown sidewalks are actually roofs, that the sidewalk is not ground beneath your feet but a hollow space in which people are working, registers a lovely kind of urban knowledge.  In contrast, the total pedestrianisation of downtown streets such as 8th Avenue in Calgary, or Granville in Vancouver, where one can wander willy nilly from street wall to street wall as if the road was a creekbed at the bottom of two cliffs, where everything is up, lacks this sense that the pedestrian surface is a fragile skin between a shadowy underworld and a bright thrusting upperworld.  

It also indicates an ambiguity of ownership and property: who owns that bit under the sidewalk?  In cities obsessed with property and jurisdiction, such as Calgary, this ambiguity is not allowed.  This is a city where corporate security patrols the edges where plaza meets sidewalk, where one cannot take photographs of the public sidewalk from a private-public plaza, or photos of the private-public plaza from the public sidewalk.  The lines are hard here, the sidewalks concrete.

Norm Ringuette. Blanchard Street, Victoria, BC. 2006

cat's eyes

We don't see these cat's eyes road markings here, but they are used throughout Britain.  Two mirror-backed glass marbles reflect headlights at night and mark centre lines and road edges.  They can be white, red, yellow, green or blue indicating different road conditions.
They were invented in 1933 by Percy Shaw, who patented them and then set about manufacturing them.  The glass marbles are set in a rubber block mounted in a metal casting embedded in the road.  If a car drives over it, it is pushed into the road and the rubber decompresses after, raising it up again.  There is a small reservoir that collects rain which washes the glass marbles keeping them clean. 

In my youth I spent a summer in England with the Commonwealth Youth Movement, and we were billetted with various county families as we travelled about.  Staying somewhere in Yorkshire and driving home after some do we were at, no doubt at an army base, I noticed that my billetter turned off his headlights whenever we went through a village or small town, and then turned them on again when on the open road.  Not on full, just on dipped, which shines about 5' in front of the car.  It all seemed quite dark to me, not to say dangerous. 

However, then, you didn't put on your headlights while going through villages as they would shine into people's windows and disturb them, besides there were dim streetlights or light from other people's windows to give enough light to drive by.  On the open road, the cat's eyes caught even dipped headlights far enough ahead to be a sufficient guide.  Cars didn't go fast: small winding roads and small engines did not allow it, also the phrase 'mustn't frighten the horses' comes to mind.  Life was deferential, quiet, frugal, measured.  People invented things.  They were allowed to be eccentric, as evidently Percy Shaw became. 

I doubt that any of this exists anymore in our over-developed OECD countries, however, one could travel the world looking for quiet, frugal, measured, polite societies where life is slow rather than headlong, and I expect one would find people inventing things of great usefulness – an eccentric concept in itself.  

small urban things

Projet : Concept développé par Leblanc + Turcotte + Spooner. Crédit photo : Leblanc + Turcotte + SpoonerMontréal recently held a competition for the design of new bus shelters.  The design chosen was by Leblanc + Turcotte + Spooner.  The press release outlines a way of thinking about urban design that all cities might adopt. 

Montréal has 'made a firm commitment to making such competitions a widespread practice, promoting innovation and excellence in architecture and design, and continuing to position Montréal as a UNESCO City of Design. This project is a concrete illustration of our willingness to ensure that Montréal’s designers play a paramount role in shaping our city’s future.  This design competition is one of the five shukôs, or creative challenges, issued on September 30, 2008, by the Mayor of Montréal. Besides providing tangible impetus for creativity in design and architecture, it aims to widen access to public design commissions to greater numbers of practitioners.'

The Ville de Montréal has within it the Design Montréal office, which runs the competitions; its mission is to improve design throughout the city and to position Montréal as 'a city of design'.  This is how a city uses its designers and architects. 

The bus shelter competition was a public, not a private, initiative involving the Ville de Montréal, the Société de transport de Montréal and the Québec Department of Culture, Heritage and the Status of Women.

The shelter is good too: free standing, modular, a communications column containing digital components and back-lit ads, and an integrated solar system freeing the shelters from dependence on the grid.  The bench is interesting - more like a perch.  Calgary's latest bus shelters have seats divided by a small handrail, presumably to make it impossible to sleep on the bench – a nice little punitive touch.  In Austin, Texas, the downtown bus stops had a row of flip down seats on the side of the building lining the sidewalk. 

Bus shelters are small projects that look after the street.  They project the way a city looks after its people.


taking pictures

Norman Foster. Swiss Re Tower under construction, London. 2003

Think you can photograph Foster's Swiss Re building at 30 St Mary Axe?  Think again.  The building features prominently in Martin Vallée's 9-minute video (Comment is Free.  guardian.co.uk, 11 December 2009) where he pushes his right to wander around in public streets photographing things.  Okay, it is England, they have a Terrorism Act, however the police seem to me to be really, really polite.  Here I would be worried that they would rush up and shoot me with a taser.
 
A few years ago I was photographing the public plaza at the base of the Trans-Canada Pipeline building as part of a photomontage for Andrew King's book, building/art, showing where the plaza hit the sidewalk – not bad, cool benches, etc – a security guard hustled out and told me I couldn't photograph there.  Shocked, I said, 'but it is a public sidewalk'.  No go.  I would have to get approval in writing from the owners of the building if I wanted to photograph their plaza, and otherwise he would call the police.  This was Calgary, 2002.  Unlike Martin Vallée, I didn't push it.  It just seemed typical of the new Calgary – bullying and completely intransigent.   It's more though.  Paranoia and punitive public safety legislation have removed our right to act as artists and photographers, observers and lingerers in the public domain.

Do we still have a public domain?  Chris Roach wrote about this in On Site 19: streets. His article Urban Guerillas looks at the work of ReBar, a San Francisco group that practices a kind of urban disobedience.  Disobedience, guerilla tactics, protests -- these seem to be the only actions that point out just how many urban freedoms we have lost. 


the Dominion Grid

an image that everyone on the prairies has: incoming weather, driving in a straight line, fall fieldsThe Dominion Survey turned land into property in the tradition of the Enclosures Acts in Britain, where land commonly and traditionally farmed was enclosed by fences and walls by often self-appointed land-owners.  The Dominion Survey prepared the ground for the CPR and western settlement. Land held for millennia and used in accordance with constantly re-negotiated peace treaties, all of a sudden within a few years in the 1880s, was ruled off into one-mile squares, 6 mile sections, 36 square mile townships.  Road allowances were made at the edges of the sections and the first nations were bundled into reserves.

Metes and bounds, the survey system that measures land between this rock and that river, this mountain ridge and that path at least acknowledges that land has form, and in determining reserves in eastern Canada often the boundaries were negotiated according to an organic and aboriginal understanding of land use.  Not so for the Sarcee Reserve, now the Tsuu T'ina Nation, which was given three townships sitting in a row, a 36 x 6 mile rectangle running from 37th Street in south Calgary to the mountains.  Rivers and streams cut into this block and out again.  One could perhaps understand the same area being defined by the watershed of the Elbow River perhaps, but not this indifferent and random assignation of land. 

If you can measure land, you can draw it and if you can draw it, you can sell it.  Is this not at the base of survey systems?  I grew up with a western Canadian and an architect's love of the Dominion Grid, its absolute rationality that was nonetheless full of errors, correction lines that occur because of the curvature of the earth, delightful incongruities as a road slices over a hill and down a valley, standing on an escarpment and seeing the road go to the horizon twenty miles away.  Old Saskatchewan farmers could still reel off the legal description of homesteads they'd left in the 30s:  Section 22, Township 26, Range 2, West of the 4th Meridian.  I thought all this was magical, and in some sense still do.  But I also see it as a commercial project.  The CPR was given astounding bonuses for building the railway connecting BC with eastern Canada: $25 million (about $500 million today), 25 million square miles (exactly half the land) in a 50-mile zone either side of the main line and a monopoly on rail connections to the US.  Why does most of Canada live within a hundred miles of the US border?  Does the CPR have something to do with this? Are section roads straight?

CPR land was evenly dispersed, effectively limiting the size of a homestead (obtained free from the Canadian governmnent) to one section.

Christina Maile

Christina Maile. Mugwort (Artemesia vulgaris) at a hydrant on Kings Plaza Station.

In 'Sewing the Landscape' (On Site 8: Sewing and Architecture), Christina Maile looked at the colonisation of hard urban surfaces by plants – resiliant, sturdy survivalists.  Since that article I have not ever passed by a stop sign, or a concrete median, or the gutter where the curb meets the pavement without looking for and finding a frilly green edge, or a sunny yellow flower, or now in November, lovely arrangements of seed heads and dried leaves.  Was there ever a text that changed my perception of the everyday city at the smallest scale so dramatically?  I don't think so.

Thinking of the city as a landscape that had been invaded by concrete is what actually happened, yet we perceive the opposite, that plants have re-occupied a landscape that never contained them.  Like the plants, we become guests in the city, rather than the city being an instrument that merely mediates the weather and facilitates travel in a much greater landscape.  If that larger landscape is under threat, as it is from enormous urban off-gassing, perhaps we need to reconceptualise our relationship to urban spaces, the landscape and to our own agency.  The mugwort, above, might be humble, but it is not self-effacing: concrete holds no terrors here. 

We have a call for articles right now for On Site 23: small things.  Looking at weeds on the sidewalk is a small thing.  Small things are seeds for larger ideas, for radical re-thinking.