3 weeks Ago
Press Herald art critic Jon Calame sits with statues of Bulgarian authors Petko and Pencho Slaveykov in Sofia, Bulgaria. Photo courtesy of Jesse Calame Can the weather change human behavior? Does a person say or think, feel or believe, different things when it is — for example — raining? This April in Portland has certainly made an affirmative reply seem likely. Likewise, it seems quite possible that the built environment can color and alter our experiences in large ways and small.
The spaces and materials we encounter are a lot like shifting weather patterns: They can be cold or hot, calm or jarring, comforting or upsetting, invigorating or discouraging, familiar or strange. Sometimes we wrestle against a street, sidewalk or building, not unlike a gust of wind or driving rain. In more desirable circumstances, we are wrapped by our surroundings like a warm breeze.
Our thoughts and feelings are shaped by the process. It can be a subtle thing. Year after year, passing by a broken or depressing bus stop on the way to work; week after week buying groceries in a cavern lacking even a single window; morning after morning watching ourselves brush teeth by the light of a glaring, ghoulish light bulb.
It’s not offensive enough to impose upon conscious thought, and in this way can be all the worse: We suffer these small indignities unawares, fraying some unnamed part of ourselves like a flag left flapping in the wind. We may sense its absence once it is gone, but we won’t know when or how we lost it. On the other hand, sitting on the wide marble steps of a dignified public building can be satisfying.
Hearing the dull thud of a library book returned to the drop box on the way home, a comfort. Encountering a weathered seaside fortification makes the needs and aspirations of other generations seem clear, recognizable and worthy of consideration. When forms and spaces in the public domain compete with and contradict one another, it is a reminder that there can be little consensus — ever — about what any particular place might mean.
This human landscape seems to say: It is complicated, I contain secrets, I am many things simultaneously! These secrets make a careful investigation of public spaces, public art and public architecture frequently rewarding. Every other week it will be my good fortune to use this space to examine some structures and installations accessible to all of us, coaxing them to divulge a few of their secrets. Some of these may be dark or depressing or unflattering and some will be just the opposite.
Either way, the looking tends to be instructive. My training is with architectural history and historic preservation of architecture, so my inclination is toward constellations and patterns more than isolated overachievers. I teach contemporary art history at the Maine College of Art and Design and at the University of Southern Maine, so I am keen to hear what the bleeding edge of artists working in the public sphere have to say for themselves.
What do they care a lot about? What images or issues are worth the enormous expense and trouble and energy required to produce a new piece of public art? Does the treatment of these images and issues seem compelling and worthwhile, or confusing and disenchanting? It seems reasonable to demand a lot from the public domain. After all, Maine taxpayers contribute much to its evolution, appearance and upkeep. It should be, at its best, convivial, solid, edifying, inclusive and affordable.
It should often be pleasurable, and should encourage informal social interactions. It should be much more than a space for commerce, recreation and transit, it should suggest something greater than the sum of its parks. It should constantly be getting better.
I can say that with confidence because of a simple, obvious principle that arrived with the industrial era (in relation to which we seem to be fast approaching the decadent, dangerous end game) and remains with us whether we like it or not: A good design may be transferred and translated into countless, equally good specimens wherever the needs and constraints are similar. There can be no good excuse for sustained ignorance of a successful solution to a common problem. Take, for example, a versatile and convenient reading lamp (It could be almost anything a lot of people routinely need and use, like a water pitcher, hospital, toothpick or house).
We can imagine a lamp made of durable and attractive materials that is so versatile, so adjustable, so well balanced on a table, so consistently useful in its simple capacity to throw the right amount of light where it’s needed, that it constitutes a nearly perfect lamp. Proper lighting is a deeply personal matter, but for myself I imagine a metal and Bakelite lamp with two ball-and-socket joints (one near the base, and one close to the bulb) that allow me to point the beam wherever I wish. Perhaps yours is a lava lamp or disco ball.
Now let us take this perfect instrument and mass produce it, driving its cost down and ensuring, one hopes, it could become affordable to most. Open source blueprints would encourage manufacturers to make ongoing improvements and efficiencies to its design without subtracting anything from its excellent function. In this way, every enthusiastic reader would have easy access to a nearly ideal reading lamp, every dancer a nearly ideal disco ball, and so forth.
Going forward, every new lamp design would be naturally expected to be as good as these models, if not, in the undying march of human ingenuity, just a little bit better. Never worse. How could it be worse? We already have the almost-perfect lamp sitting on our living room table.
If we substitute a house for the lamp, we encounter stubborn difficulties. Should it not be the case that each new house, or hotel, or gas station, or office building, or school, is as good, if not just a little bit better, than the best example yet known? Is it not possible to identify these near-perfect templates, wherever they are found in the world, and email their blueprints to a willing contractor? How can the progress of design not inevitably ratchet itself forward, only forward, with the teeth of the ratchet “catching” at the last and highest point of accomplishment, refusing backward movement or the repetition of feeble, partial or discredited solutions? Yet it must be admitted that few of us live in, or went to school in, or work in, spaces and buildings that can be called optimal. Desirable.
Nearly perfect. Rather, many can be called names too rude to appear in a respectable newspaper. Discussion of design, especially design in the public domain, can diverge quickly into discrete camps.
One camp looks at effective, thoughtful design as a reward for the wealthy, an upgrade to business class, a kind of dessert brought to the table of those who have finished their dinner and who wish to indulge a little. A luxury — and rare. This is the conventional, and undeniably elitist, approach favored by capitalism in which everything lovely and beautiful is granted to those who can pay for it.
The other camp looks at good solutions as foundational, essential, primary and potentially universal. I prefer to dwell in the second camp. I look forward to lamp-hunting with you, through fair weather or foul.
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