Monthly Archive for March, 2008

I’ve been try­ing to fig­ure out some backstory.

Alma stood on the rim of the foun­tain and looked at the White Hawk. She kept her eyes still and the let the hawk’s flit in and out of con­tact. The bars of the cage were painted with a green wash, and thick like frost­ing. There were two White Hawks. They perched tail to tail, fac­ing oppo­site direc­tions, so their hunched bod­ies seemed to be the wings of a big­ger, head­less bird. In the lit­tle pond beneath them, a soft-shelled tor­toise pressed gen­tly against the tile.

Alma stood, giv­ing proper atten­tion, until the owner came back with chicken, pita, melon and lamb. He dumped half in the water, half in the cage, then held the plate out at his side. A small deer licked it clean.

“It will smell like per­fume,” he said.

She waited.

“If you kill it, its blood is like perfume.”

Plau­si­ble. The air con­di­tioned lunch, elec­tric­ity, wifi–she was drunk on lux­u­ries. That morn­ing, in his suite, she learned a few things: scale in the bath­room, Harry Pot­ter on the book shelf, empty fridge, cereal under the sink. He smiled at her and blushed pur­ple. His sweet-looking, old body made every­thing harm­less, even the white flash of his eyes. It would be so easy not to leave. There, in the open court­yard, he took her jaw in his hand and lifted her face.

Her jaw fit neatly in the v of his thumb and fore­fin­ger. She drew back. He gripped. Her body moved three steps back, but her chin stayed put. There is an ani­mal that looks like this in profile–a giraffe? Some­thing that extends its neck to eat and uses its bot­tom teeth to snap leaves from their twigs. She felt ridicu­lous and pan­icked. She laughed and he let go.

Dang. So, Thurs­day night I went to the grand reopen­ing of Santa Barbara’s Granada The­atre. I know that Santa Bar­bara reeks of wealth, but it’s the kind of wealth that likes to pre­tend its just beach-bummin’-boho-too-laid-back-to-notice. Never have I seen the dis­play of glitz and glam­our that strolled over the red car­pet and hov­ered around the cham­pagne that night. I got free tick­ets through work and later learned that peo­ple paid $1,000.00 a seat.

You know you’ve reached extrav­a­gance when all around you are furs and feath­ers, sculpted hats with lace veils, and inch-thick dia­mond bracelets. I was clearly unshow­ered and had my sweater but­toned to the throat to hide the gross yel­low stains on my t-shirt. Had I known, I would have gone all out. It was hard to take pic­tures because we were crammed in there so tight, but I really wanted to show you the old woman in the fluted red and turquoise gown, and the rows of tiny tiny cup­cakes, and the flap­per cos­tumes, and the rhine­stone cowboy.

The whole event made me reflect on what I had said ear­lier about a long­ing for an over-the-top mythol­ogy with all sub­tlety thrown to the wind. Not that I was talk­ing about some­thing that would actu­ally take place, but it did feel like I walked right into the parade I had described. It was bizarre and repul­sive and fun and ulti­mately very mov­ing. And it helped me draw a con­nec­tion between archi­tec­ture and myth, or the ways spaces give rise to meaning.

When we build, it is always with a (par­tic­u­lar) future in mind. The basis of all our designs is an ideal, and we build as though we are carv­ing around the inef­fa­ble, reveal­ing it in neg­a­tive space. At the same time, we base our ideals on the archi­tec­ture itself. Our homes, churches, schools, the­aters, etc. become stop­gaps in that we believe the imma­te­r­ial past and future can be con­tained in them. I think myth and archi­tec­ture feed each other. Yes, we bring mean­ing to struc­tures, but there’s a lot to meaning-making that we don’t con­trol and can’t pre­dict. Every time you make a shape you include and exclude. Cer­tain belief sys­tems are bet­ter suited to say, a steeple than a hogan, and vice versa. This is one way that beliefs per­pet­u­ate them­selves, find­ing res­i­dence in some­thing more last­ing than brain tissue.

This is all sound­ing more impos­si­ble the more I talk about it. But really, I would be a very dif­fer­ent per­son had I grown-up in a geo­desic dome or a cas­tle or on a farm. How was I, as a kid in church, to ‘con­sider the birds’ when I was dis­tracted by white beams and the smell of car­pet. I con­sid­ered them via another archi­tec­tural feat, imag­i­na­tion, and mean­while learned to asso­ciate moral­ity with shel­ter and a neo-Puritan aes­thetic. It is yet another tes­ta­ment to the rela­tional nature of mean­ing. Con­text is part of mean­ing, and every­thing we know depends on the way things stand in rela­tion to one another, lit­er­ally and fig­u­ra­tively. This is the human­ity of logic. Peo­ple can dream and do extrav­a­gant things in the Granada because it is an extrav­a­gant place.

So bring­ing it back to Thurs­day night: Every­one there behaved as though they believed and agreed that the the­atre held great, desir­able, intan­gi­ble things, appar­ently unavail­able else­where. Phrases like “the pin­na­cles of human achieve­ment,” “magic,” “cul­tural invest­ment,” “preser­va­tion” and “artis­tic excel­lence” thick­ened the air. Would these things really be lost or endan­gered were the Granada to fall into ruin? I’m begin­ning to think so. I mean, would we even be able to take such grandeur seri­ously (I did; there were near tears) were it not for the height of the ceil­ing, the weight of the Moroc­can chan­de­lier and the depth of the orches­tra pit? Okay, prob­a­bly, but the point is that build­ings are powerful.

True story: Charles M. Urton built the Granada using a mail-order how-to book on steel high-rise con­struc­tion. The project ran out of money, so he sold his fam­ily home in order to see it to com­ple­tion and pay-off every last worker. In 1925, a year after it opened, an earth­quake lev­eled most of Santa Bar­bara, but the Granada was undam­aged. Mr. Urton climbed the eight sto­ries and hung a home-made ban­ner that read: “Built by Charles M. Urton, Builder.” Despite the voice inside me say­ing, “Why do we treat build­ings like a legacy more per­fect than chil­dren?!”, I got chills. I want to be a builder! I want to hang my name on some­thing after I’ve bought it with my whole self. David Conant, the archi­tect over­see­ing cur­rent ren­o­va­tions, boasts of the theater’s “good bones.”

I sup­pose I am eas­ily amazed, but I reel a lit­tle bit when I think that the struc­tures I inhabit affect not just my every­day per­cep­tion of the world, but my hopes, beliefs and expec­ta­tions; that they are exten­sions of myself and points of con­tact with a col­lec­tive iden­tity. In the same way words are! Just like lan­guage! Archi­tec­ture is lit­er­ally our mode of exis­tence! I was think­ing about these things while watch­ing the Santa Bar­bara Sym­phony Orches­tra and the Santa Bar­bara Cham­ber Choir per­form the most pop­u­lar move­ment of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, O For­tuna. Seri­ously, they went all out.

BTW, I saw my very first play at the Granada when I was 6 or 7 years-old.