Building or Dying

a reality written on the landscape

This is important, and at some point you should slow down for fifteen minutes to watch it carefully:

Just give him the first 1:30, and you’ll begin to see where he’s headed. But then keep going, because he expands on the point. We tell a story about ourselves with the things we choose to build, and the built environment we choose to inhabit. We communicate our respect for ourselves, and for others, by the reality of our stuff. Who are we? What’s the significance of our lives? What do we deserve? Screenshot:

So:

How interesting that societies full of ugliness are experiencing demographic decline. How interesting that the most wonderfully progressive places are full of trash and decay.

At the risk of sounding like a lunatic, every few months I drive a couple hundred miles to stand on the steps of this building:

The Inyo County courthouse is Eastern California’s “only example of monumental Neoclassical Revival public architecture,” built in 1921 by an agricultural county of a few thousand people. Inyo now has a population of a little under 19,000 people, in a county that’s bigger than Vermont, and a just a bit smaller than Massachusetts. The place lacks resources. I was across the street from this courthouse last year just after a serious traffic accident, talking to a business owner about how hard it had been to pull together some volunteer firefighters to respond to the crash; eventually, the VFD down the highway in Lone Pine sent an engine. Lightly populated, lacking in wealth, full of thoughtful beauty and dignity.

The hallways of the courthouse are lined with the pictures of the people who have occupied positions of responsibility in the county:

The interiors are layered with OSHA-compliant modern features and cheap office furniture, but you can see the history in the features:

And so of course the State of California, which centralized authority over courthouses in 2002, is working to replace the Inyo County courthouse. This building will eventually be “vacated” in favor of a “new modular courthouse.”

History is cyclical, and it’s not that hard to figure out where we are in the cycle. Here’s the place in Los Angeles that would later be renamed MacArthur Park:

Same neighborhood, currently:

How wonderfully progressive. It’s a huge relief that we’ve defeated the darkness of what America used to be.