The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part IV: Tactical Filters
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Iain Chambers
24.2 | Desert, California, 1991.
optical fiber, cement, tarmac, neon. In this pragmatica desertica critics sourly
inform us that memory—too wasteful to inscribe, too time-consuming to
acknowledge—is bleached out, purged. Only the bronze statue of John
Wayne (from Jean-Luc Godard’s favorite Ford western, The Searchers) in the
Orange County airport foyer remains as a trace. But perhaps the apparent
starkness of oblivion invites us to think again. Perhaps here memory is spatialized
rather than sedimented in vertical strata. So, the seemingly memoryless
city of Irvine is both doubled and shadowed by the older, largely
Spanish-speaking, settlement of Santa Ana. The rational light of the former’s
planning and management depends on the shadows that accommodate
those who service and sustain it from afar. To consider memory in
spatial terms—as different, even separate, sites—is inevitably to contrast
experience of the vertical city (Naples) with the horizontal one (Irvine). The
former is in debt to, sometimes overwhelmed by, historicity: in Naples time
is an avatar that not only reminds us of our bodies, our mortality, but devours
every explanation, reason, and judgment. Irvine meanwhile is a city
that apparently exists at the end of time; here explanations are not introspective
(memory, narcissism) but projective (fantasy, desire). The sedimented,
vertical city is governed by its foundations (mythic, historical,
cultural), the other by its horizon (desert, sea, sky). One might be tempted
to suggest that while one is a city the other is a settlement, hence provisional:
only the freeways have a certain air of permanency. One represents
time, the other represses it.