I attended a panel discussion tonight at Cooper Union, produced by the New Museum and the Cooper Union School of Art that attempted to answer the question “Is provincial a bad word?”
It was billed as a “Hot Button! panel” and that to me conjured something different and exciting, but it was a standard panel and not even much a discussion. As part of their introduction, each panelist was allowed to talk about themselves then go off on their own prepared tangent about provincialism, so the introductions alone took over an hour. What that left was little time for actual debate or interaction between the panel. The moderator, who was the chief curator of the New Museum, didn’t do much moderating, although I was amused when he used the phrase “every cliché in the book,” which is a cliché itself. I will admit that I spent most of the time in the lecture hall proofreading and editing a printout of Dana’s letter of intent for grad school.
Some of the most thought-provoking points were made by Nicolai Ouroussoff, the New York Times architecture critic, who argued that the world’s capitals “have become playgrounds for the rich” and morphed into safe, sanitary and generic archetypes, where there may be little difference between Times Square and Shanghai. (His line of reasoning reminded me of William Gibson’s statements about the erosion of the “specificity of place,” which he made during an interview I attended about a year ago.) Ouroussoff directed much of his spite toward New York City, which he says has completed its architectural history and isn’t interested in adding to it, unless it’s cookie-cutter design or monuments like the Freedom Tower, the design of which reveals “more about our paranoia than our best values.” (He was a proponent of the original Freedom Tower design and has done little to mask his disgust with the concrete-buttressed stronghold currently on the drafting table.) He added that, ironically, provincialism is “never an issue in this country except in the mind of New Yorkers.”
Instead, “tertiary cities,” mostly in Europe, are the best in which to “relocate creative energy” for architecture, while some of the best work in this country is being put up in Los Angeles (although Ouroussoff suggested much of this had to do with that city’s freedom from the sort of land constraints that bedevil development in New York).
Something another panelist mentioned in passing that intrigued me (and which I hadn’t heard of despite my real estate background) was Orange County, China, a replica of American suburbs built in China for the rich. It reminded me of the philosophy behind Celebration, Florida as an improved re-creation of small-town American life that may have never existed.