Grim

I wonder what architects and designers are thinking about this
country's largest - and growing - civic architectural project,
the grim national prison program, an expensive residential plan
for upwards of 1 in 260 of our ignoble citizens, and related
justice and enforcement facilities: courts, detention centers,
criminal lawyers' offices, jails.

Massive budgets, materiel, professional fees, construction jobs
-- regional, local, landscape and site planning are involved.
And how does all this relate to recent discussions about urban
villages, unresponsive lurkers, venn diagrams, and sacred
geometry?

The lachrymose cultural and aesthetic industry (architecture
included) devoted to mourning Ur-apocalyptic historical moments
--  War,  Human Tragedy, etc. -- is surely well intentioned if
retroactive, but seems too frequently to suffer from a
suspicious preoccupation with heroic motifs, monumentalisms,
rhetorical excesses, bombastic homilizing.

Does this not thrive on the remote epic horror it exoticizes --
distracting its shocked audience from the smaller scale,
simple, ambiguous even petty local tragedies unfolding around
them in which they participate, or in which they could
conceivably intervene in humane, if un-heroic, ways?

As there is banality in evil, there is also an evil in
insidiously unremarkable events, so ordinary that their
accumulating cruelty is not iconographically alluring to the
monumentalist artistic imagination, or to audiences trained in
a particular dramatic genre of epic evil until ... well, until
it's just too late to do something other than bemoan a new
cycle of tragedy and grieving.

Mea culpa.

Deborah



Responding to msg by MKAPLAN@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Michael
Kaplan) on

>"It is good to remember the pain and suffering of the
>holocaust  victims, but will somebody out there please
>say  a prayer for the native american tribes that
>actually were victims of mass  genocide."
>
>I didn't want to respond to Lebbeus Woods with the
>obvious, but Dave Cooper  has said it, and he is right.
>Claude Lanzmann poignantly talks about the  Holocaust
>in his nine-hour film "Shoah" without showing an inch
>of  historical footage. Rather, he visits contemporary
>Poland, interviews  witnesses and shows the sites of
>the camps as ruins. We should each revisit  these
>"sites" in our own way.