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News, Satire

Disturbing Photo from 1972 APA Future Leaders Conference

We came across this disturbing photograph taken at the 1972 American Planning Association Future Leaders Conference:

From left to right (standing):

John de Lancie gave up planning and became an actor, getting his start playing several roles on The Six Million Dollar Man before most famously playing “Q”, a being with God-like powers, in Star Trek: The Next Generation. When asked how he approached playing an omnipotent being, he replied, “I based Q’s pretentiousness on one of my planning professors at Kent State University.”

Steven Littleton, PA became a real estate attorney and broker as well as part-time magician in Las Vegas, Nevada. He still performs weekly at the Leopard Lounge and Style Revue in North Las Vegas under the pseudonym “The Magnificent Steven.”

William Bonin was convicted and executed in 1996 as the “Freeway Killer” in Los Angeles, California.

Gregory Marmalard, FAICP became the Special Assistant for Community & Development to Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco of Louisiana. He advised Governor Blanco that Lousiana did not need Federal assistance in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. He is currently serving as a Assistant Deputy Secretary for the Department of Transportation in Washington, D.C.

Douglas C. Neidermeyer, AICP was killed by his own planning staff in Little Vietnam in the Uptown area of the City of Chicago. The planning staff was acquitted of the murder on the grounds of “temporary sanity.” It is still the only case in history of the United States judiciary that was ever decided on these grounds.

Dr. Ronnie F. Farley, FAICP received his PhD from the University of Santa Barbara, Remote Learning Campus and became APA President in the late 1980s. He was convicted of money laundering for misuse of Federal housing funds in the mid-1990s and sentenced to 20 years in prison. He was released for good behavior in 2002 from the Federal Prison Camp, Alderson in West Virginia. He became a best-selling author, publishing under the pseudonym “Stephanie Meyer.”

Seventh person standing to the far left remains unidentified though several eye witnesses have sworn his name is Abad’on Beel z’bub, an exchange student from Hierapolis in southwest Turkey.

Center, being spanked:

Chip Diller, AICP has been the serving Planner II of Bacon County, Georgia since 1982 where he won 10 awards for meritorious long service before the County Commissioners discontinued the award. He is a avid fan of the 1980s game, Dungeon and Dragons, and a three-time winner of the P&D Championship Series.

Kneeling, left to right:

W.F. Scott never finished planning school at the University of Minnesota. He became a factory worker and the father of Seann William Scott, who co-starred in several American Pie films and The Dukes of Hazard remake in 2005.

William Patrick went missing in 1978. He was officially declared dead by his family in 1985.

Thurston Howell V served as the National Director of the Sierra Club from 1985-1992. Officially, he is “retired” though, according to anonymous sources, this really means he was committed to the Elizabeth Arkham Asylum in 2002 and screams “rising ocean levels” every hour on the hour, night or day.

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Urban Patterns

Urban Patterns | Ragusa, Sicily in Italy

“Can we move to Italy?
Meet me by the church up high on the hill.”
— Italy, Julia Fordham

Urban Patterns | Ragusa, Sicily, Italy
by Dr. Mark David Major, AICP, CNU-A

To many people, Ragusa, Sicily in Italy represents the prototypical Italian hilltop village lying below the Hyblaean Mountains. It is listed on the UNESCO World Heritage Sites. The origins of the oldest part of the town on a 300-meter (980 feet) high hilltop (upper town to the right, below) lying between two valleys can be traced to the 2nd Millennium BC, i.e. more than 3,000 years ago. The ancient city came into contact with nearby Greek colonies and grew due to the nearby port of Camerina. Following a short period of Carthaginian rule, it fell into the hands of the ancient Romans and the Byzantines, who fortified the city and built a large castle. Ragusa was occupied by the Arabs in 848 AD, remaining under their rule until the 11th century, when the Normans conquered it. Thereafter Ragusa’s history followed the events of the Kingdom of Sicily, created in the first half of the twelfth century (Source: Wikipedia).

Satellite view from 2 km of Ragusa, Sicily in Italy (Source: Google Earth).

Upper town has a deformed grid layout where the street pattern conforms to the topography of the hill. This tends to make movement longer in terms of time and distance through upper town but changes in elevation are more gradual. This offers an excellent contrast to an urban pattern such as that found in San Francisco, where the regular grid layout enables movement through the layout to be shorter in terms of time and distance but changes in elevation tend to be much steeper. Together, Ragusa and San Francisco provide two models of how to incorporate acute topographical conditions within a settlement. The vertical construction of dwellings adapts to the topographical conditions of a local site in particular ways. In the case of San Francisco, this occurs by steeply adapting finished floors so they step up or down in section with the topography, which serves to maintain the conceptual logic of the regular grid imposed on the land. In Ragusa, the logic of the deformed grid in the town emerges from an apparently local process of aggregating dwelling units. During this aggregation process, finished floors are adapted to the contours of the topography so changes in finished floor elevation tend to be gradual instead of steep. In this way, the layout literally incorporates the acute topographical conditions into its functional pattern. This is why Moholy-Nagy (1968) describes such layouts as geomorphic. The street pattern of the newer areas adjacent to lower town (to the left, above) at the foot of the hill in the valley is a regular grid since the topography is less acute (e.g. more flat) at this location. The lower town also utilizes larger block sizes in its regular grid layout.

(Updated: April 11, 2017)

Urban Patterns is a series of posts from The Outlaw Urbanist presenting interesting examples of terrestrial patterns shaped by human intervention in the urban landscape over time.

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FUBAR Absurdities, Mark David Major, Satire

The Insidious Landscaping-Agricultural Complex

The Insidious Landscaping-Agricultural Complex
by Dr. Mark David Major, AICP, CNU-A, The Outlaw Urbanist contributor

President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s warning “against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex” in his farewell address of January 17, 1961 is well-known. What is less well-known is this echoed a similar warning President Eisenhower gave in a speech to the Akron Woman’s City Club in Ohio one year earlier, in which he railed against “the undue influence of the emerging landscaping-agricultural complex in American suburbia.” Many have discounted this lesser-known warning due to suspicions that President Eisenhower might have been suffering from an acute case of panophobia (fear of everything) in the last year of his presidency.

However, as we gaze across Suburbia today, we have reason to believe that President Eisenhower’s warning about the emerging Landscaping-Agricultural Complex was not without merit. In suburban sprawl hell, somewhere in Northeast Florida, mindless minions in service to the orthodoxy of the Landscaping-Agricultural Complex are mulching street signs, fire hydrants, overflow pipes, and electrical transformers. Why? NOTE: These photographs were lost during The Outlaw Urbanist website migration in 2017 but, rest assured, what the article describes about excessive mulching was very real.

Is there value in moisture retention for a road sign? Are the landscapers nurturing the ‘growth’ of this sign to a more adult height? Or perhaps additional moisture will enable the speed limit to grow above its current 15 MPH level? Is this what occurred with the overflow pipe? Was it originally only six inches in height and, over time, the additional moisture retention of mulching around the pipe enabled its growth an imposing height of two feet? Fire hydrants certainly require water in order to operate (upper right) but I’m pretty sure mulching has nothing to do with how they get water. Finally, why mulch around an electrical transformer (lower right)? It sits on a concrete pad, which is already well-hidden by the grass. Surely this was the point of painting them green in the first place, so they would be less noticeable. Personally, I didn’t even know they existed until they mulched around the base (read: sarcasm).

The only way I can rationalize this attribute of ‘mulching everything’ is the Landscaping-Agricultural Complex is artificially inflating the per square footage or volumetric costs of the amount of mulch used in this suburban community. Either that, or I am just not smart enough to understand the functional benefits of moisture retention in mulching inanimate objects.

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Art, Essay, The City in Art

Floating Towards Jerusalem | The City in Art

Lajos Vajda’s Floating Houses, 1937, 46 x 32 cm, tempera on paper (Private Collection).

Floating Towards Jerusalem | The City in Art
by Dr. Mark David Major, AICP, CNU-A

Lajos Vajda’s Floating Houses (1937) is a personal favorite. Some sources describe Floating Houses as a surrealist work, which actually seems a better description about Vajda’s artistic circle (see below) than the composition itself. Instead, Floating Houses is better characterized as an avant-garde abstract composition that represents its subject (a townscape) liberated of gravity and dimensionally.

The only concession to gravity lies at the edge of the composition (i.e. canvas). This can be seen in the overlapping houses at the bottom and the inverted house form depicted along the right edge. This ‘gravity of the edge’ abstracts an invariant characteristic of urban form. There is a type of gravity associated with settlement edges, which is both economic and resource-based in nature due to the availability of (cheap) land. By definition, settlements grow at their edges. Floating Houses represents this invariant in a wonderfully inventive and whimsical manner. The only concession to dimensionally emerges from the two-dimensional plane of the canvas itself, most evident in the overlapping house forms at the bottom right. Many artists have played with the two-dimensional plane of the canvas in this manner for depicting an urbanscape. We will see some additional examples in subsequent articles during this series.

Vajda’s use of color for this composition also represents something rich about human settlements. Though the houses have been liberated from gravity and dimensionally in a free-floating environment, the predominant use of earth tones reiterates the unbreakable relationship of the settlement to the land, or man-to-nature. The intermittent use of white, providing a beautiful contrast to the predominant earth tones, appears principally reserved for representing man-made structural elements (window frames, a roof peak, and foundations). This embeds Floating Houses with a dialogue about the man-nature didactic. Interesting, the use of white (a symbol of purity) for representing these man-man structural components may suggest a positivist perspective on this subject within the composition.

For an artist noted for his use of religious symbolism, this might appear to be lacking in Floating Houses…. at first glance. Vajda’s use of four-pane windows and the resulting depiction of a cross might be incidental. However, since these cross forms tend to be framed by the white man-made structural elements, it is rather a subtle comment about religion being primarily a product of man than nature. If we accept this interpretation, then the artist also appears to concede a component of religion to the natural by using the darker browns (of wood, or nature) for the three crosses. In this context, the symbolism of the three crosses becomes significant, i.e. the Holy Trinity, Christ was crucified with two others (criminals) at Golgotha, and he rose on the third day. This introduces a dark undercurrent in terms of purity (Christ) and criminality (those crucified with him) for this representation of a townscape. Vajda then reinforces the message with the depiction of three paneless framed windows in white (good) and three voids represented in black (evil) at the center bottom. Finally, the most central part of the composition (white roof peak with two round voids) takes on an anthropomorphic quality that watches over the town (perhaps God or some other force). Taken together, this embeds Lajos Vajda’s Floating Houses with multiple layers of meaning and symbolism about Man, nature, and religion, good and evil, and town and country.

About Lajos Vajda
Lajos Vajda (1908-1941) was a Hungarian avant-garde painter and a student at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts in 1927-30. He studied with Fernand Léger at Paris in 1930-34, where he was introduced to cubism and surrealism. Vajda collected folk art motifs for his artworks. He combined religious (Orthodox Christian, Roman Catholic, and Jewish) symbols, architectural and folk art motifs, abstract, figurative, and surrealistic elements on his art to create complex visionary images. He is considered the most distinctive artist of the Hungarian avant-garde movement. His art influenced generations of Hungarian artists including the members of the European School Art Group (1945-1948) and the Vajda Lajos Studio (est. 1972). Vajda died in a Jewish forced labor camp in the fall of 1941 at the age of 33 (Source: Wikipedia and American University).

The City in Art is a series by The Outlaw Urbanist. The purpose is to present and discuss artistic depictions of the city that can help us, as professionals, learn to better see the city in ways that are invisible to others. Before the 20th century, most artistic representations of the city broadly fell into, more or less, three categories: literalism, pastoral romanticism, and impressionism, or some variation thereof. Generally, these artistic representations of the city lack a certain amount of substantive interest for the modern world. The City in Art series places particular emphasis on art and photography from the dawn of the 20th century to the present day.

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News, Satire

What do the ‘wet dreams’ of engineers and concrete-mixers look like?

The Outlaw Urbanist was able to gain access to this exclusive image, which accurately represents the dreaming state of members in the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) and the American Concrete Institute (ACI). The image was compiled using the latest double-secret beta version of new Dreamscape Image Capture Technology (DIC-TEC 1.2) (you may assume from Apple). The subject matter of the dreamscape is fascinating. However, even more so was the remarkable degree of consistency found during the dreaming state for more than four dozen engineers and concrete-mixers, from which this composite image was created. Of course, being engineers and concrete-mixers they universally dream in black and white. Because of this, certain aspects of the composite image have been colorized using the ‘vibrancy’ function available in the DIC-TEC software.

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