Journal Article Published: Spectacular Paris

Hello loyal readers (reader?)! This is becoming (so sadly), the only thing I post on this blog, but I wanted to mention that a journal article loooong in fruition* has recently seen the publication light of day.

(*Especially so, if you consider that it grew out of a paper I wrote for a graduate architecture seminar in 2003.)

The article is ponderously titled "Spectacular Paris: Representations of Nostalgia and Desire," and it appears in the journal Paroles Gelées (vol. 26 no. 1), available online here. It's kind of a favourite piece of mine: a mobilization of theories including Guy Debord's work in Society of the Spectacle to interrogate the (near)coincident opening of the Paris Las Vegas resort and casino and the release of Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge and Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Amélie, all in short succession around the turn of the millennium. Lots of meaty discussion of illusion, false vacations and, naturally, the spectacle. Both films discussed play a big role in chapter 5 of my diss, so it's nice to see some of my ongoing analysis in this vein see the light of day. Sort of a preview of things to come. Soon.

[Image from Moulin Rouge, dir Baz Luhrmann, 2001]

Easing Back In...: "cynicism in the face of mile-high towers"

Just to get a ball rolling here again, I wanted to point out some interesting questions raised over at BLDGBLOG in a post from yesterday. Author Geoff Manaugh is prepping for a panel discussion in Chicago next Saturday titled "Offshoring Audacity." The panel will be discussing the use of the developing countries and desert spaces of the East as laborities for the architectural and urban planning experiments of Western designers and builders.

As usual, the BLDGBLOG read is compelling, a quick and provocative sprint that runs from indoor ski slopes to Heidegger in a nanosecond. It sets up the questions to be consideed at the panel: Should we celebrate architectural audacity, especially as it witnesses designs crossing cultural divides and carrying American or European architects to Abu Dhabi? Or, as my borrowed title suggests, adopt a cautious cynicism, if not fear, of titanic endeavours that grow up almost over night? And, what role should regional or national identity play in all of this?

In other words, is it perhaps weird enough that Atlantis was resurrected from myth and built in the Bahamas, without it being rebuilt again pretty much the same, in Dubai?

These are all questions that make appearances in Chapter 5 of my diss, so more on this topic in coming months. For the time being, I'll just end with posting a rendering of one of the forthcoming Dubai projects that BLDGBLOG references: Park Gate, a 4.7 million square foot complex of "six mid-rise towers linked together by soaring vaulted canopies."


As World Architecture News reports, it will be part of a 12-year, $15 billion building project commissioned for Dubai from US firm Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill. Funny thing is, it's the first incredibly futuristic, aggressively audacious building project I've read of in a couple of years that hasn't left me with a queasy, paranoid feeling. It looks like an ambitious future site I would actually like to visit, when compared even with the other projects in the plan, 1 Dubai or 1 Park Avenue, both of which leave me with a (perhaps entirely irrational) feeling of dread and fatalism. There's probably some kind of easy urban-emotion version of an ink-splotch test I should take to get at the root or my architectural anxieties... I should look into that before I get back to work on Ch. 5.