Arthur Erickson Travel Fellowship, June 2016
Los Angeles, Salton Sea, Yuma, Picacho, Bisbee, Douglas, Aguas Pietras, Colombus, Palomas, El Paso, Juarez, Roswell, Alburquerque, Hualapai, Las Vegas.
This travel proposal explores notions of symbolism and meaning through the architectural iconography of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas – the four American States that share the border with Mexico. A catalogue of existing and contemporary physiognomies (built sheds and signs, ornamental traditions, heterogeneous billboards, public typologies) of edge cities emerge as desirable trace of learning. The ornamental structures and the decorated sheds, the signs – painted and posted – the billboards and other structures that line the roadways of edge cities provide an irresistible laboratory for this search for meaning. As a concentration of cultural artifacts, they change our ideas of ornament and will be documented and cataloged as one of the principal outcomes of this study.
Ornament has become the outcast figure of twentieth century architecture, barely tolerated as an early form of Pop, useful when we want to make surfaces “communicate” a “language” of desire or value. We played with the humor in Pop, and the irony of Postmodernism, but in the end we were just dancing on the fuming ruins of modernism. What now? Can we use the semiotics of architecture to re-insert political momentum in the design of our cities? How do we read cultural encounters in space and form? The proximity with the Mexico border provides the frame of reference for the critical analysis of representational objects found in the Southern USA urban landscape. This proximity suggests a subject – receiver of signs – of multiple or mixed identities.