The Critics
Tis week
A new book tackles both Las Vegas and Venice in one go, writes James Pallister
CCTV tower and a flock of geese are all treated in the same deadpan way. An electro-buzz of music pulses
over the film, blocking out any sound from the city itself. It is an act of control that shows Morris’ studied obliviousness to the people and places she films. By stripping every scene of its ambient sound, Morris presents the Bird’s Nest stadium and the goose farm as equally significant parts of the Olympics. Her paintings treat cities in the same way, with repetition and converging images key to her grid-like inspection of skyscraper windows. Morris captures the smallnesses
of a huge event in a huge urban environment through brief snapshots. CCTV-tower architect Ole Scheeren is filmed at work in his office. Workers are shown scrubbing one square of a vast marble floor. Shops swarm with customers. Te CCTV tower is glimpsed out of a car window. Buildings are not shown as monuments, but living things that are built, used, cleaned and changed. As Morris herself put it,
‘obsolescence is built into something’ in her film. Te Olympics lasted two weeks, but the buildings are supposed to last for much longer. In fact, architecture increasingly must adapt to circumstances around it. Te building
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that housed the swimming pool that Morris showed in her turquoise- saturated presentation of the diving competitions is now a shopping mall. In films such as Midtown (1998),
Morris shows an interest in planned distractions, allowing for no heroes and no single subject. Beijing is no different. Tis film also rejects obvious narrative. Morris weaves her own kind of story out of moments of convergence. Te currents of Morris’s micro-narratives, whether of architecture, money or food, are not obvious, but are beautifully and indelibly there. A man shovelling meat into his mouth recalls, gruesomely, the geese at the beginning. Te city is part of a massive interaction, out of which stories emerge. As for the lack of ego in the film, famous people and the buildings of Beijing are treated with composure, but that moment of delight when you recognise a person or thing in the middle of strangers is still there. Morris may mistrust the construct of fame, but she still works with it: hence Jackie Chan, Henry Kissinger et al occasionally popping into the frame. Perhaps, rather than being hypocritical, these unexpected appearances are just yet another of what she calls ‘planned distractions’. ■
At this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale I shared a vaporetto with an elderly American couple. How, I asked, did they like Venice? It was ‘okay’ but ‘We much prefer the version back home.’ They were talking about Las Vegas’ Venetian resort. As well as its own Great Sphinx of Giza, Las Vegas has canals, a Rialto Bridge and a campanile. Clark County’s version is cleaner, more compact and well – more friendly. For decades, Las Vegas and Venice have drawn architects to them as objects of study, critique and inspiration, almost to the point of tedium. They’re both deeply weird, fascinating cities, tied by the problem of water – too much and too little. Alex MacLean’s new book, Las Vegas/Venedig, Fragile
Mythen brings the two cities together. Architect-trained MacLean is a photographer equipped, handily, with a pilot’s licence. His range is wide: pictures of neat suburban developments carved out of the desert nod to Andreas Gursky; others focus on details, like land defences to the south of the Venice lido, which recall Richard Long’s land sculptures. In one picture, lines of virgin building plots surround a real estate visitor centre and (unfilled) swimming pool – a strange and unwelcome new typology born from the US subprime mortgage crisis. Elsewhere an estate backs onto the slipway of an empty reservoir, capturing the spectre of water (or lack of it) that haunts both cities.
It’s an interesting time to put Vegas alongside Venice. Last year the USA’s National Register of Historic Places added its famous ‘Welcome to Las Vegas’ sign to its list: Sin City has entered a phase of having to engage with conservation and, for the first time in a century, is shedding jobs and its population is dropping. Venice’s has halved since 1966. A study in scale, vulnerability and threat, MacLean’s book is worth adding to the Christmas list – whichever Venice you prefer.
■ Las Vegas/Venedig, Fragile Mythen, by Alex MacLean, Schirmer/Mosel, €49.80,
www.shirmer-mosel.com
aj 02.12.10
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