I Am Phoenix And You Can Too!

I've been on a few kicks lately regarding architecture, urbanism, and ebay.

Mom was selling some of her tea and coffee sets, and so I threw them up on Craigslist for what I thought was a really good deal. Not an ounce of interest. I am usually a big fan of Craigslist- it's kind of the libertarian's ebay- no registrations, no profiles, no fees. It's easy, clean, and you decide who you want to sell to and how to work out the details of payment (cash, check, trades, etc.) But the tea and coffee sets weren't moving and I begen to think that for their value, I needed to up the game.

I think the last time I listed something on ebay, I sold dad's expensive mountain bike and that was years ago, so I set up a new account, went through all the hoops with PayPal etc. Re-discovering ebay was kind of a time suck- people are selling all kinds of stuff on there. Once I'd listed a few items for sale, I was checking ebay compulsively like Facebook to see how many watchers, views, and bidders I had on each item.

Right now, I've got two bids out on a pair of nice headphones and a pair of Ralph Lauren winter boot. Both are lightly used and my bids are pretty low. Actually, I expect to be outbid on both of them. I also have eight items listed on ebay for sale, and of those, five have active bids. It's kind of exciting.

I met with Tempest last Sunday afternoon to go over the Adams st project. I've decided to jump in feet first to this thing and see what I can learn and where this thing goes. This project is a proposed restaurant-bar-coffee-retail in an old restaurant space on Adams street. However, this is only the ground floor. Above that is a five or six floor parking garage, and,  oddly, a tennis club on the roof with a half dozen courts.

The woman behind the project wants us to feature a strong native American and Latino component. I'm still trying to understand the impulse behind it. I'm guessing that since she's envisioning some kind of relationship with the convention center, that this space would be a strong destination for convention-goers, who would get a kick from a bit of Old Town Scottsdale, the West's Most Western City (TM) kind of stuff. Tempest mentioned "talking stick" quite a few times.

Sometimes you have to bite the bullet and embrace kitsch if that's what the client wants, I guess. There are probably tasteful ways to make modern architecture with a southwestern and Native American nod, but it's hard to not make that nod dismissive, derivative, or simply bad taste.

There was a certain hill in Australia that developers wanted to level and turn into a shopping mall. That particular hill was sacred to the native aborigines since they believed that the hill was the sleeping spot of a giant snake god, and so they campaigned their concerns. The developers and architects came up with what they thought was a sensitive and appropriate compromise of making the ramp to the parking garage look like a snake. There was a lawsuit and the judge ruled in favor of the aborigines, probably an unusual outcome.

I can accept that to a certain extent we live in a fantasy and that architecture in the current economic model has to facilitate that fantasy. But really, haven't we done enough to stomp on the native Americans and Latinos? After the Mexican American wars, the structured racism, broken treaties, and the Trail of Tears, do we really need to co-opt some tribal blanket patterns for the facade treatment? It's bad enough we stole their future, do we need to belittle the tattered remains of their cultures as well?

Anyway, these are petty concerns. The main thing is that I'm now involved in this project, which is an interesting experience in how these kind of projects get going, get funded, get put together, all that. Why do I care? I remember sometime before I graduated from ASU, listening to NPR and there was a guy talking about projects and funding. I was shocked to find out that most lenders have only five standard project types for which they will lend money on reasonable terms. Five. A shopping mall is one of those five. So is a detached house. It blew my mind because 1) it explained why our cities are so fucking boring- the same five types of projects repeated ad nauseum 2) architects don't design buildings- lenders design buildings. I can accept, grudgingly, that architects ultimately provide a service to a client, and that the architecture which is produced is the vision of the client, the fundamental what of the project. However, this itself is an illusion- if your owner can't get funding from lenders, there's no project.

Who shapes the build environment the most? It's definitely not the architects, it's not the developer, it's not even the legislator or the zoning official: it's the lenders, who are driven by underwriters with a pathological and instinctive fear of anything that has not been proven wildly economically profitable for a hundred years. It's an entirely capitalist process and outcome:  bland, boring, repetitive, strip-mall filled suburban sprawling cities are predictable and they make money. So that's what get's built. Awful to live in. Awful to visit. Good for the anonymous underwriters. At least until the skilled labor and creative class leaves because it's too boring and soul-sucking to bear.

The biggest problem I have with the capitalist model is that it leaves too much out of the financial model. Glaring omissions. Obscene shortsightedness. Reckless disregard for human life, both in quality, duration, and even continuation of the species. If you design a product that encourages and hastens ecological disaster which will kill millions upon millions of people, you are in fact, facing an irreparable loss of your customer base. If the net result of your business model is the collapse of civilization, you will face very unfavorable exchange rates in the dollar to stale Twinkies market.

I am sure that most of you think I am being over dramatic. Starbucks opening 1,000 more stores next year is not the first horseman of the apocalypse. However, everything in the world is connected. If you accept that two hundred years of industrialization