Ferguson And Beyond

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-hawthorne...

Protestors in Ferguson, Missouri holding hands
twanasparks.org

Hello Everyone:

Ferguson is a suburb on the eastern edge of St. Louis, Missouri.  Its Main Street, Florissant Avenue, looks like any other commercial strip around the United States with fast-food franchises, banks, pawnshops, and storage facilities.  In short, pretty non-descript.  Yet, on August 9, 2014 Florissant Avenue became a flashpoint for long simmering racial tensions.  On that fateful day eighteen year old Michael Brown was shot to death by a police officer, touching waves of, sometimes, violent protests. Now that the dust seems to be settling, it is a good time to look at how this played out on Main Street.  Recently, Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorn published an article, "Race, violence in Ferguson, Mo., cop killing play out on Main Street," in which he discusses how this seemingly non-descript commercial strip became center stage for scenes of rage directed at the police and civic officials and its implications for other American cities.

Robert Venturi
archdaily.com

Main Street was the subject of architect Robert Venturi's defense in 1966 of his book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture.  Toward the end of the book, he posed the question "Is not Main Street almost all right?  Indeed, is not the commercial strip of a Route 66 almost all right?"  Judging from the media reports and urgent tweets from nearby Canfield Drive, where the unarmed Mr Brown was shot while walking to his grandmother's apartment, the answer to Mr. Venturi's questions is not exactly.

Rather, it was the images of the local police, responding to the Saturday (August 9) night looting that gained traction in the media and social media sites.  It was pictures and videos of the police presenting a massive show of force, driving tanks and armored vehicles motoring past the McDonald's and check cashing stores, pointing automatic weapons at protesters, and eventually hurling tear-gas canisters not only into the crowd but also into neighboring front yards.  By the middle of the following week, there was no escaping the sites and sounds of a city aflame as those photographs made the rounds across the digital universe making it look as if the viewer was witnessing something happening in Iraq rather than small town America.  An assault on American suburbia.

Mourners at a Michael Brown memorial
billboard.com

Despite the fact that race is the driving issue of the story-the population is 70% African American, protect by a police department that is 94% white-it was not race, per se, that made the country sit up and take notice.  Rather, it was photographs and videos of a militarized police force moving across the suburban landscape that shocked everyone into thinking no, Main Street is anything but all right.  Let me add my own thoughts on this subject.  I, too, was quite stunned to see police kitted out in gear more appropriate for military operations, randomly pointing their weapons at passersby, riding around in military vehicles.  These sights seem better suited for military operation in the Middle East than Midwestern America.

Protestors demanding justice for Mike Brown
myfoxatlanta.com

Race, of course, is part of that story as well.  In the last ten years, the suburbs around northwest St. Louis have seen a significant growth in their African American populations.  Unfortunately, the composition of the county police has been slow to reflect the changes in the demographics, or at the very least, reflected these changes far more slowly.  In the macro-sense, economic and demographic shifts continue to disintegrate the lines between city and suburb, threatening to make this distinction as useless as it has been in Los Angeles for decades.  As of writing this post, much of what actually happened in Ferguson is still unknown or disputed, including the issue of when and how exactly the confrontation turned violent.  The officer who shot Mr. Brown has yet to make his statement.

I ♥ Ferguson
poynter.org

 
Returning to Robert Venturi's book Complexity and Contradiction in Architect, Mr. Venturi was anxious to tackle a particularly rigid brand of American good taste while dealing with inter-professional challenges.  His questions regarding Main Street and the commercial strips were mostly guided by architect and critic Peter Blake who also wrote about this part of the American landscape two years before Mr. Venturi.  In God's Own Junkyard, Mr. Blake complained, "...the aesthetic order and calm central to, say, Thomas Jefferson's design for the University of Virginia were almost impossible to find in postwar American architecture, especially its commercial variety."  Mr. Venturi found this assessment to be amusing, ironic, and revealing all at the same time.  Mr. Venturi wrote, "The pictures in [his] book that are supposed to be bad are often good...The seemingly chaotic juxtapositions of honky-tonk elements express an intriguing king of vitality and validity."  With the passage of time, the "seemingly chaotic" elements of the commercial strip have morphed into a unending homogenous blur of chain restaurants and Starbucks.

Cleaning up after the riots
bizjournals.com

The contemporary view of Florissant Avenue is filled with scenes of riot police and tear gas, not the image that Messrs. Venturi and Blake had in mind.  Thus, Christopher Hawthorn suggests that might be time to modify Mr. Venturi's questions, while understanding that the implications are much different and the stakes higher, at least in the political context.  Mr. Hawthorn asks,
If the protests and the police overreaction had happened only on Canfield Drive, away from the recognizable corporate signage on Florissant, would we still be talking about this story?  And what about the the police response? 

 Was there something about the architectural character of Florissant that led officers to defend it with such a dramatic and ultimately absurd show of force?

Does a largely white police force see protestors in the middle of a strip like that, only recently abandoned by white residents, and feel as though its turf-or its own culture-is threatened?

Does America?

Florissant Avenue McDonald's
poynter.org

Robert Venturi heralded "the commercial strip of a Route 66" as way of letting his readers know that there was architectural and cultural, and progress in the postwar built environment where others, such as Mr. Blake saw aesthetic and moral decline.  Mr. Venturi viewed roadside architecture a essentially a democratic type of energy.  Embedded within the American character is a strong urge to turn chaos into order, smooth out the wrinkles, stamp out moments of cultural, visual, or political unpredictability.  One example is the effort to cast Frank Gehry's proposed Eisenhower Memorial as disrespectful, or somehow un-American.  There law-and-order faction also reside within architecture.

By Thursday August 14, Ferguson saw a refreshingly different police presence, when the Missouri Highway Patrol came in and allowed the protestors plenty of room to operate.  The decidedly more humane approach to law enforcement echoes the arguments put forth by August Heckscher, writer and cultural advisor in the Kennedy White House, whom Mr. Venturi quotes liberally in his book.  In his 1962 book The Public Happiness, Mr. Heckscher wrote about the dangers of imposing civic order solely through force as in Ferguson.  As a sort of prescient view, Mr. Heckscher wrote, "Equilibrium must be created out of opposites.  Such inner peace as men gain"-regarding cities, he might have written-"must represent a tension among contradictions and uncertainties.  This statement was written in 1962, in a few short years, cities such as Los Angeles and Detroit exploded with riots and anti-Viet Nam War demonstrators would take to the streets prompting mayors and police commissioners to greet them with an irrational level of force.

March down West Florissant
stltoday.com

 Christopher Hawthorn concludes that it is a surprisingly  shorter and straighter path from Robert Venturi to the St.  Louis suburbs and the connection between them involves more than imagery of the commercial strip.  It involves our constantly changing tolerance levels for dissent in the urban, suburban, privately owned spaces.  It encompasses Occupy Wall Street and the Florida subdivision where George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin.  In a post on Ferguson on August 14, 2014 titled "A Brief History of Black Folks and Sidewalks," writer Stacia L. Brown (http://www.stacialbrown.com/2014/08/14/a-brief-history-of-black-folks-and-sidewalks/) looks at the historical tensions between police and African Americans and how they have played out in the public realm.  Returning to the questions posed in his book, Complexity and Contradictions in Architecture, they were hopeful and purposefully naive, keeping with the intended "gentle manifesto" tone of the book.

What should we ask about Ferguson in the days and weeks ahead?  The questions we pose should be more forthright, after all were prompted by the police who defended the commercial strip, nobly defended by Robert Venturi, as if the very soul of American culture had to be wrested back into their control.  If that a commercial strip full of fast food chains and check-cashing stores is icon of American culture, what does that say about America itself?