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Edward Booth-Clibborn, the editor of a new and lovely
volume on the city of Phoenix, is not a Phoenician—and
neither am I. (In fact, I was delighted and a little shocked
at the term "Phoenician" used to mean "native of Phoenix"
and have been thinking about its implications ever since—see
the footnote.) This means that we both have the privilege
of seeing Phoenix from a distance, maybe the only time when
this vast and diverse collective strewn over the desert coalesces
into a single unified entity. When Booth-Clibborn chose PHX—the
airport code—as the title for his book, and then reinforced
it with the cover image of a jet descending into the city,
perhaps this recognition was at the back of his mind.
The book doesn't strike one as particularly
"looking like Phoenix," but that's maybe because I don't truly
know what Phoenix looks like. Booth-Clibborn's point seems
to be that Phoenix bears out few of the assumptions that the
world makes about Western American cities; that Phoenix is
indeed a new kind of city, one that takes its own urban circumstances
as it finds them and then goes out and makes a city out of
what it's stumbled over, ended up with, been stuck with, as
well as what it's received as gift from the natural world—the
sun, the desert, the open and dry construction-inviting plain.
Who knows what this kind of city should
look like? PHX tries to short-circuit assumptions with strong
infusions of international-style graphics and big chunks of
first-person reportage from the artists and architects who
are creating a new kind of culture in a built environment
that is as reliant for its survival on technological means
as a city on another planet.
The book is constructed in several layers
that are shuffled together like a baccarat deck, but that
remain distinct. First, there are essays. Booth-Clibborn opens
the book with a brief preface detailing his surprising experience
of the city as a visitor, and expressing gratitude to the
Maricopa Partnership for Arts and Culture for providing the
means to produce the book as a way of showcasing the arts
and culture of the city as one of its selling points.
Next, Nan Ellin, one of the moving forces
behind the book's inception, writes a clear and affectionate
piece on her personal relationship with Phoenix and her perception
of her chosen city as a paradigm of the postmodern urban concretion.
Her position as Director of the Urban and Metropolitan Studies
Program at ASU gives her a thorough grasp of the nature of
cities, and without bludgeoning us with her learning she does
convey a number of clear ideas about the nature of cities
in this new millennium.
The next layer, dispersed to good effect
throughout the volume, is the photoessay on the landforms
and built environment of Maricopa County by Tomoko Yoneda.
These vistas of desert and hive are sometimes lovely and sometimes
viscerally shocking to a denizen of more conventional cities.
The vast subdivisions, the weird intersection of machined
uniformity and wild land, the oddly colored water that is
drawn from under the earth and stained with minerals—all
this does a great job of informing the non-Phoenician reader
that this is indeed a different kind of place, a place where
the usual assumptions no longer apply. This collection of
images is excellent context for the main body of the book,
which is its presentation, in their own words and images,
of some of the architects, designers, and artists who make
Phoenix their home.
Most striking in this collection are the
architects. From all evidence, it seems clear that a number
of factors have created a truly new and distinctive architecture
in Phoenix: the plethora of building that's occurred during
the last decade, the comparatively low price of land (think
Manhattan, Chicago, or LA for contrast), and the youthfulness
of the city, coupled with the incubator of ASU and its architecture
and urban studies programs. The buildings presented in the
book are almost uniformly impressive: the architecture here
is the only really decisively place-specific work in the book—but
the work has little to do with what we outlanders think of
as "Southwest." It does have to do with Taliesin West, though
Phoenician architects' uses of materials and temperature management
seems light-years beyond that good beginning.
Vernon Swaback's Scottsdale Hangar One makes
brilliant use of unusual materials to merely sketch in walls,
creating a partially shaded enclosure that positively boasts
of its difference from buildings in soggier climes. Victor
Sidy's Desert Shelter evokes the sunscorched detritus of human
failure that one encounters in the deep desert and makes a
resourceful shelter out of it, like any skink or fox. Marwan
El-Sayed's House of Earth and Light is a surpassingly lovely
place to live, bringing together less "Southwestern"
forms than desert-adapted forms. Tentlike awnings, gridded
shade roofs, concrete reminiscent of rammed earth, and glass
that evokes the water of Al-Andalus, captive and treasured,
remind us that good architecture does grow out of the ground
into the mind, and that perceptions of conditions can unite
places far dispersed.
After this, the designers are best represented.
As a sample, look at Angela Johnson's T-shirt ballgowns. Her
explanation—that she could easily find discarded T-shirts
in Phoenix, but that fabric stores were scarce—is charmingly
direct. Her resourcefulness, taking the city as she found
it and going from there, strikes one with the force of real
creativity punching it out with praxis. This seems to be a
virtue of the Phoenician mediated world, a world where "raw"
doesn't exist in usable form.
The artists' work is often interesting;
it's rich and diverse. It doesn't seem, though, to be particularly
specific to any place. A few people (the sculptor Tom Eckert,
a native; Matthew Jason Moore, a site-specific farmer) seem
utterly bound to the qualities of place, but most are not:
they're improvisers, magpies, creators of resonant collections
(Sue Chenoweth, Steven Yazzie) . . . but maybe that is Phoenix.
Contingency and improvisation. A perpetual override of what
came before. Of course "before" insists, in the form of open
spaces and 115-degree days, but culture here is clever enough,
rich enough, inventive enough, to establish a hundred sensually
inviting microcosms, escapes from the sun's hammer. And these
are what is desirable everywhere in the world now. In a mediated
world, real life is lived indoors, in a big well-lit room,
wired for everything. Maybe that's the condition of the whole
world eventually, and it arrived in Phoenix ahead of time,
because there was little to get in the way.
FOOTNOTE: "Phoenician,"
for me and maybe for most people, means the people who came
up with the alphabet, the ones who took secret voyages to
places no one else knew about, nomads, placeless people. They
were traders—big-time capitalists who knew about money
and commerce. And they were Semitic—cousins to Arabs
and Jews. Have they finally found their homeland, these notorious
seafarers, in a place most people come to through the air?
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