thanks for asking Selma! I never would've sought out that excellent essay by Alex. You DMTree-ers are such a bunch of brainiacs!
"Throughout its history there has been a dialectic between an “elitist” and a “populist” concept of the Park." ...I live near a park (very small one) with similar tension. I think it's a normal urban park problem. My sympathies tend towards the populist (at my park its a battle between Portuguese soccer teams, and nice white urban ecologists who want to make architectural reference to pre-existing waterways in the form of brass maps and embedded fish shapes ...erg) but I object to the Christo on these grounds as well. Having spent an hour on a park bench in Central Park on Good Friday, watching a kid learn to ride her bike and eavesdropping on softball players ("I was dating this older woman, she's like 40, but I just got a motorcycle and we broke up") it seems to me that people are finding their way to enjoyment of the space quite well without big orange banners hanging over their heads. The idea seems like a sort of hypothesis about abstraction (like when people undertake urban planning based on designs that will look nice later on a map) that is frankly insulting on the ground.
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"Throughout its history there has been a dialectic between an “elitist” and a “populist” concept of the Park." ...I live near a park (very small one) with similar tension. I think it's a normal urban park problem. My sympathies tend towards the populist (at my park its a battle between Portuguese soccer teams, and nice white urban ecologists who want to make architectural reference to pre-existing waterways in the form of brass maps and embedded fish shapes ...erg) but I object to the Christo on these grounds as well. Having spent an hour on a park bench in Central Park on Good Friday, watching a kid learn to ride her bike and eavesdropping on softball players ("I was dating this older woman, she's like 40, but I just got a motorcycle and we broke up") it seems to me that people are finding their way to enjoyment of the space quite well without big orange banners hanging over their heads. The idea seems like a sort of hypothesis about abstraction (like when people undertake urban planning based on designs that will look nice later on a map) that is frankly insulting on the ground.
- sally mckay 4-13-2004 6:17 am