Atlanta Essay

...Atlanta...Invisible...Accident...Random...Slogans...Testing Ground...Cities within Cities...Flows...Places...Quotes... Background

Quotes

These quotes are exerpts from text pertaining to Atlanta. Each one is linkled to the page with which it relates.

Invisible

Atlanta does not have the classic symptoms of a city; it is not dense; it is a sparse, thin carpet of habitation, a kind of surprematist composition of little fields. Its strongest contextual givens are vegatal and infrastructural: forest and roads. Atlanta is not a city, it is a landscape. Rem Koolhaas, Atlanta: A Reading in Jordi Bernado and Ramon Prat ATLANTA, Barcelona: ACTAR (P.75)

Accident

Inscribed with a few cryptic letters and numbers -- "W&A 00" on one side and "W&A138" on the other -- this modest granite obelisk is Atlanta's omphalos, its axis mundi, the ZERO MILE MARKER for the Western and Atlantic Railroad. Charles Rutheiser 1996. Imagineering Atlanta: The Politics of Place in the City of Dreams. New York: Verso. P.15
(ZERO MILE MARKER) Properly speaking, even the Zero Mile Marker is something less than a genuine foundation stone. Contrary to the renditions in numerous guidebooks, and even a number of scholarly accounts, the first zero mile post, or terminus, of the State chartered Western and Atlantic Railroad was located a quarter of a mile west/north west (of its present location) in 1837. Significantly, the exact location is no longer known. Charles Rutheiser 1996. Imagineering Atlanta: The Politics of Place in the City of Dreams. New York: Verso. P.16

Random

...the confusion of the downtown (Atlanta) street configuration is the result of three different land lot owners setting up their own conflicting grids which were aligned with the existing roads and railroad tracks, but which lacked transitions points where traffic could flow easily from one section to another. Timothy J. Crimmons The Atlanta Palimpsest in the Atlanta Historical Journal.
(PALIMPSEST) The visual evidence which is our concern here is the evidence that presents itself when we look at a town: the pattern of its streets and buildings, the blemishes upon the uniformity of the present that remind us of the past. If we think of what we see as a text, we recognize very soon that it is not a simple one: beneath the characters that we first trace, there are other words and phrases to be read: the town is a palimpsest. H.J. Dyos, ed. (1968) The Study of Urban History. London. P.155.

Slogans

In upstart communities the loyalties of people were in inverse ratio to the antiquity of their communities, even to the point of absurdity. Older towns could point only to the facts of limited actual accomplishment, while the uncertain future was, of course, ever more promising. Promise, not achievement, commanded loyalty and stirred the booster spirit. One was untrue to oneself and the spirit of expanding America if one remained enslaved to a vision which had lost its promise. The ghost town and the booster spirit were opposite sides of the same coin. Boorstin, Daniel (1965) The Americans: The National Experience. New York: Random House. Page 122.
(PANORAMIC CITY VIEWS)...as early as 1843, (Cesar) Daly, an architectural critic, already perceived that vistas and aerial views articulated a unity and urban order that could not be gained by a viewer traveling through the city along its rude labyrinthian streets. A bird's eye perspective offered the spectator not only an outline of the circulation scheme that ordered the city, but it also revealed the relative importance of specific buildings and gardens to the degree that each stood out from the whole. As Daly outlined, a visual and unified city could be achieved through a program of public works. In his view the plan of streets, along with canals and railroads, became the ordering structure linking together different sites, both historic and contemporary, and thus became the generating device for its civic inspiration. Christine Boyer (1994) The City of Collective Memory. Cambridge: MIT Press. P.15.

Testing Ground

All new city forms appear in their early stages to be chaotic. "There were a hundred thousand shapes and substances of incompleteness, wildly mingled out of their places, upside down, burrowing in the earth, aspiring in the earth, moldering in the water, and unintelligible as any dream." This was Charles Dickens describing London in 1848, in his novel Dombey and Son. As I have indicated, sprawl has a functional logic that may not be apparent to those accustomed to more traditional cities. If that logic is understood imaginatively, as (H.G.) Wells and especially (Frank Lloyd) Wright attempted to do, then perhaps a matching aesthetic can be devised. Robert Fishman (1987) Bourgoise Utopias New York: Basic Books. P. 204
(EDGE CITIES) Edge Cities represent the third wave of lives pushing into new frontiers this half century. First, we moved our homes out past the traditional idea of what constituted a city. This was the suburbanization of America, particularly after World War II. Then, we wearied of returning to downtown for the necessities of life, so we moved our marketplaces out to where we lived. This was the malling of America, particularly during the 1960's and 1970's. Today, we have moved our means of creating wealth, the essence of urbanism -- our jobs -- out to where most of us have lived for two generations. That has lead to the rise of EDGE CITY. Joel Garreau 1988 Edge City: Life on the New Frontier. New York: Doubleday. P.4.

Cities Within Cities

If bigness transforms architecture, its accumulation generates a new kind of city. The exterior of the city is no longer a collective theater where `it' happens; there's no collective `it' left. The street has become residue, organizational device, mere segment of the continuous metropolitan plane where the remnants of the past face the equipments of the new in an uneasy standoff. Bigness can exist anywhere on that plane. Not only is Bigness incapable of establishing relationships with the classical city -- at most, it coexists -- but the quantity and complexity of the facilities it offers, it is itself urban. Bigness no longer needs the city: it competes with the city; it represents the city; it preempts the city; or, better still, it is the city. Koolhaas, Rem (1995) "Bigness: The Problem of Large" in S,M,L,XL, Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, New York: Montecelli Press, pp. 514-515.

PORTMANS PARADOX) With atriums as their private mini-centers, buildings no longer depend on specific locations. They can be anywhere. And if they can be anywhere, why should they be downtown? At first the atrium seemed to help rehabilitate and stabilize Atlanta's downtown, but it actually accelerated its demise. That was Portman's Paradox. The rediscovery of downtown quickly degenerated into a proliferation of quasi downtowns that together destroyed the essence of center. Koolhaas, Rem (1996) "Atlanta: A Reading" in S,M,L,XL, O.M.A, Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau. New York: The Montecelli Press, p. 843.

(LENOX) Lenox is equally popular for Saturday shopping, Friday night dinner and movies, Sunday lunches and promenades, and a free weekday health spa for power walking up and down the mall. Few people can describe its exterior, but most can give detailed directions within the mall, using changing shop fronts and temporary mall displays as landmarks in its perpetually reconstructing environment. Richard Dagenhart (1994) "Visible and Invisible Cities" in Jordi Bernado and Ramon Prat ATLANTA, Barcelona: ACTAR

(MEGAMALL) The inclusion of more and more activities in the (West Edmonton) mall has extended its operating day to twenty-four hours: a chapel offers services before shops open, nightclubs draw customers after they close, and visitors spend the night at the mall hotel. The mall is also a workplace, with more than 15, 000 people employed in its shops, services, and offices, many of whom also eat and spend their free time there. Margaret Crawford (1992) "The World in a Shopping Mall " in Michael Sorkin, Ed. Variations on a Theme Park. New York: Hill and Wang. P.6

Flows

The highway is a new public space for the city. In the old city, the public park was to be the place for public interchange among social and economic classes and for freedom from the confining structure and congestion of the industrial city. Olmsted's great American public parks, reproduced across the United States, made memorable public places to promote a gregarious democracy. In the new city, highways and wide arterial roads are the locations of a new, barely understood, motorized gregariousness. The highway is a space for movements within a structure of flows. The park is for movements within in a specifically bounded place. The highway's promise of increased mobility is a promise of expanded freedom from a different, but still confining, structure of the new city. And, every hour is not rush hour. Richard Dagenhart (1994) "Visible and Invisible Cities" in Jordi Bernado and Ramon Prat ATLANTA, Barcelona: ACTAR

(FLOWS) We can see a major social trend standing out from all our observations: the historical emergence of the space of flows, superseding the meaning of the space of places.....The fundamental fact is that social meaning evaporates from places, and therefore from society, and becomes diluted and defused in the reconstructed logic of a space of flows whose profile, origin, and ultimate purpose are unknown, even for many of the entities integrated in the network of exchanges. The flows of power generate the power of flows, whose material reality imposes itself as a natural phenomenon that cannot be controlled or predicted, only accepted and managed. This is the real significance of the current (global economic) restructuring process, implemented on the basis of new information technologies, and materially expressed in the separation between functional flows and historically determined places as two disjointed spheres of the human experience. People live in places, power rules through flows. Castells, Manuel, The Informational City. London: Basil Blackwell. P.348-9.

(LAND BAY) The cellular unit of Perimeter Center is not the block but the land bay. The land bay, by contrast to the block, implies a void to be parked upon, ship-like, by a temporary tenant. Its form is the accessible garden -- not the conventional city of streets and buildings. Perimeter Center land platting is a deliberate collection of individual land bays developed as private gardens in which one works, markets, resides, and defines a collective realm. Stephan Kieran and James Timberlake (1994) "A Tale of Two Cities" in Architectural Design Profile No. 108. pp. 30-35.

Places

Today the challenge to urbanists is to develop a vocabulary that can speak to the ongoing process of development rather than its spatial contours at any moment. Similarly, we need terms that will emphasize the new patterns of social and economic interaction that our longstanding preoccupation with proximity and place has obscured. In short, as urban geographers have long maintained, we need to address the temporal as well as the spatial dimensions of the modern city. Doing so will require us to move from definition by negation (de-centered city, non-place urban realm, doughnut) to a new set of positive terms.... Whatever words we employ, field or atom or something as yet unnamed, they will help shape our city, for the kind of metaphors we choose will influence the kind of city we see. As the examples of (FRIEDREICH) ENGELS...show(s), learning how to read the city is a necessary part of learning how to change it. William Sharpe and Leonard Wallach (1987) "From the Great Town to the Non-Place Urban Realm" in Sharpe and Wallach, Eds., Visions of the Modern City. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. P.38-39.

(SENSE OF PLACE) Most of us, I suspect, without giving much thought to the matter, would say that a sense of place, a sense of being at home in a town or a city, grows as we become accostomed to it and learn to know its peculiarities. It is my own belief that a sense of place is something we create ourselves in the course of time. It it the result of habit or custom. But other disagree. They believe that a sense of place comes from a response to features which are already there -- either a beautiful natural setting or well-designed architecture. They believe that a sense of place comes from being in an unusual composition of spaces and forms -- natural or man-made....Ask the average American of the older generation what he or she most clearly remembers and charishes about the home town and its events and the answer will rarely be the public square, the monuments, the patiotic celebrations. What come to mind are such nonpolitical, nonarchitectural places and events as commencement, a revival service in a tent, a traditional football rivalry game, a country fair, and certain family celebrations..... As our cities have grown we have come closer together and acquired a more inclusive sense of community. Even so, I'm inclined to believe that the average American still associates a sense of place not so much with architecture or a monument or a designed space as with some event, some daily or weekly or seasonal occurance which we look forward to or remember and which we share with others, and as a result the event becomes more significant than the place itself. J.B. Jackson (1994) A Sense of Place, A Sense of Time. New Haven: Yale University Press. P. 159-160.

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