Big Bend

Rio Grande

Originally Published February 22, 2022

Anyone who has spent time in Texas will understand its vastness, its majesty, its monotony, its mentality, its desire to secede, its petroleum culture (gas, asphalt and tires), the tar balls on the beaches, the ancient pictographs, the flash floods, the limestone escarpments, the drought (the driest since 800 AD), the wind that carves the canyon, the softness of the sunset, the crackle of gravel under your feet. 

Of all of the places in Texas, Big Bend is the most rugged, desolate and barren. Located along the Rio Grande in the southwest corner of Texas, Big Bend is a 900,000 acre national park of mountainous desert, carved out by millennia of water, sand and wind. On the other side, a set of parks and conservation areas nearly as large, is maintained by Mexico. It takes an hour and a half to reach any campsite within Big Bend. You keep a close eye on your gas gauge.

We crossed the border several times while we were here, the Rio Grande being only ankle deep in many parts.  The Border Patrol on both sides keeps watch, mostly to discourage flagrant violations, while at the same time allowing a considerable amount of traffic across the river each day.  Horses and donkeys wander across to graze and must be retrieved.  Trailside displays carry handmade trinkets for sale, with money collected from the jars at the end of the day.  It is a hundred miles to the nearest road on the Mexican side, so the coyotes do not come this way.  The ecology and wildlife have their own boundaries. The little towns have family members on both sides of the river.  

We crossed the border several times while we were here, the Rio Grande being only ankle deep in many parts.  The Border Patrol on both sides keeps watch, mostly to discourage flagrant violations, while at the same time allowing a considerable amount of traffic across the river each day.  Horses and donkeys wander across to graze and must be retrieved.  Trailside displays carry handmade trinkets for sale, with money collected from the jars at the end of the day.  It is a hundred miles to the nearest road on the Mexican side, so the coyotes do not come this way.  The ecology and wildlife have their own boundaries. The little towns have family members on both sides of the river.

The official Port of Entry at Boquillas was closed for many years after 911, and the Mexican towns suffered greatly from the loss of tourist trade.  The two restaurants in Boquillas are now full each day at noon.  At some point the National Park Service sought the help of the Mexican group, the Diablo Hot Shots, to assist in fighting forest fires, and they now regularly perform construction and conservation measures along the river for the US.  It's a fluid arrangement.

Nevertheless, appearances must be kept, and so when we crossed the river to ride to Boquillas for lunch, we skirted down the river, through the brush, and into the shadows of the desert valley, out of sight of either Border Patrol. 

Marfa

Pecos Desert

Originally Published March 9, 2022

Texas is a set of extremes and contradictions, Marfa being one of them. In the middle of nowhere, it is a thriving art community and a smug, tourist attraction. When you arrive you are given no clues. Like SoHo in the 1970's, you just have to know where to go. We stood on a corner chatting with two other lost souls, older women with Italian sunglasses, sharp lipstick and smart looking coats. "We're from New York.”

Everything worth seeing in Marfa is out of town. There are works by several important mid-century artists, as well as the work of several contemporary artists, and we had come particularly to see the works of Donald Judd. He had made Marfa a place to visit after moving here from SoHo in 1971, buying 16 decaying buildings, an entire decommissioned Army base, and three ranches spread across 40,000 acres.

There are two major "pieces" by Judd at Marfa. The first is "15 Untitled Works in Concrete," large rectangular boxes, all identical in overall dimensions, but with alternate enclosures and in various groupings. It is difficult to convey the impact of these works when seen in their desert surroundings. It's not just the size. It's that the work mediates the relationship between you, the earth and the sky, and with shifting light, darkness, gravity and weightlessness, challenges every reliable sense of consciousness.

Judd studied philosophy at Columbia University before becoming an artist, and was interested in Heidegger and Husserl, phenomenology and the study of conscious experience from the first-person point of view, and ontology and the concepts of existence, being, becoming, and reality.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the "100 Untitled Works in Milled Aluminum" residing in the two artillery buildings abandoned at Fort Russell. Judd replaced the flanking doors with full height windows so that the pieces, each exactingly fabricated, are engaged in the reflection of light from outside, from the polished concrete floor, as well as from surrounding pieces. They are ephemeral, at times reflective, at times transparent, at times devoid of all light with rectangular slots of utter nothingness. You sense you could put your hand through them, and yet there they stand, solid, silent, inert. Just as with the work of say, Mark Rothko, the elemental, experiential markers provoke an unidentifiable and deep emotional response.

We left town for the day, too exhausted to look at anything else. The following day, while travelling to our next venue, we passed the Prada store, a simulacrum in the middle of the desert, twenty-three miles outside of Marfa, just outside the town of Valentine. Everything about Marfa is elsewhere.

Louis Kahn: Building and Being

Fort Worth

Originally Published March 13, 2022

The Kimball Art Museum is one of the last few works designed by the renowned, mid-century architect, Louis Kahn.  Completed in 1972, it is now fifty years old, and looks no different than the day it was finished.  Louis Kahn spent most of his life as an academic at the University of Pennsylvania, completing his first major commission at age fifty in 1953.  His knowledge of history was vast, and he was very much influenced by the French Enlightenment architect, Étienne-Louis Boullée.  Some may be familiar with Kahn's library at Phillips Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire, which bears a strong resemblance to Boullée's metaphysical representations.

Left: Phillips Academy (Kahn)

Right: Cenotaph for Newton (Boullée)

The poetic impact of the Kimball is revealed in its details:  the arisses in the concrete formwork, the recessed control joints, the lead coins in the snap tie plugs, the reveals at the travertine, the rivulet at the portico where it meet the pool.  Each material retains its essential dignity.  Missing are the caulked expansion joints, the filler pieces, the crimpled, metal edge strips of modern construction.  Kimball is constructed of materials largely available to the Romans.

"You say to brick, 'What do you want, brick?'  Brick says to you, 'I like an arch.' You say to brick, 'I like an arch too, but arches are expensive, and I can use a concrete lintel over an opening. What do you think of that, brick?' Brick says: 'I like an arch.'" 

He is implying that materials themselves are embodied with intentionality. Discovering and respecting that intentionality is what brings a building to life.

None of this is to suggest a lack of sophistication and the vaults of the Kimball are a rather astonishing example of both a theoretical as well as empirical approach to a fundamental aspiration, that of bringing even, natural light into the galleries of the museum.  It took several iterations to arrive at a vault that would deliver uniform light to the galleries, and it was August Kommendant, Kahn's trusted structural engineer and colleague, who finally proposed a cycloid vault with a brachistochrone curve.

A cycloid is the curve traced by a point on a circle as it rolls along a straight line.  A mathematical formula attributed to the ancient Greeks, it also represents the fastest path of descent between a point A and a lower point B, where B is not directly below A, under the influence of a uniform gravitational field to a given end point in the shortest time. For a better understanding of this concept, see this demonstration.

It is useful to point out that the precedent for a top lit vault in concrete was the Pantheon in Rome, constructed in the first century A.D. which remained the longest concrete span in the world until the construction of the Palazzo Dello Sport in 1939 by the Italian engineer Pier Luigi Nervi.   In achieving a longer span Nervi used a lamella truss system based on the coffering in the Pantheon. 

Left: Pantheon (cross section)

RIght: Kimball (cross section)

The fundamental challenge of a concrete vault is to construct a system thick enough to span yet not too heavy to collapse.  By the time of the construction of Kimball, it was the development of pre-stressing and post stressing concrete with steel reinforcement cables that allowed for spans with thinner concrete.  Kommendant was a leading practitioner in this field, and for Kimball, he was proposing four inch thick concrete vaults with pre-stressed catenary cables.

The gravitational aspect of the cycloid is significant. Light seems to follow the same gravitational rules as the cycloid, resulting  a diaphanous, silver-pewter halo above the galleries, bringing out the true colors of the paintings and creating soft shadows in the works of sculpture.  During our time in the galleries we did not see a single light bulb aimed at any artwork.

Kahn was a mystic.  He operated outside the more dogmatic rules of mid-century architecture.   In suggesting what a building wanted to be, Kahn was engaging with the building as a being in an ontological way.  This idea stood in stark contrast to his contemporaries, for example le Corbusier's idea of the house as a "machine for living," or Frank Lloyd Wright's "organic," agrarian architecture, or the Bauhaus emigres, Mies van der Rohe or Walter Gropius, whose work stressed industrial production.

"When you have all the answers about a building before you start building it, your answers are not true.  The building gives you answers as it grows and becomes itself."

This post was originally published in The Tracings.

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The Good, the Bad, the Ugly...and Beautiful

The Salt River

Originally Published March 19, 2022

While many sites have warranted a full report, some have merely lingered in our mind; honky-tonk bars, small Mexican restaurants, abandoned towns. We find the Good, the Bad, the Ugly, and the Beautiful along the way, and often in the same places. To mention a few:

The Wasteland

We visited the White Sands Monument near Alamogordo, New Mexico, 275 square miles of gypsum sand desert resembling a ski resort in all but temperature.  Strangely, below the surface a layer of clay creates an oasis like condition for the cacti, yucca and grasses that survive there.  Nearby is the White Sands Missile Range and Trinity, the site of the first nuclear bomb explosion on July 16, 1945, named incomprehensively Robert Oppenheimer, who later declared that the explosion brought to mind words from the Bhagavad Gita, "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

To Infinity and Beyond

We visited Biosphere 2 in Oracle, Arizona which made no more sense today than at the time of its original venture in the early 1990's.  Rumor had it that the eight member crew became divided into two camps over the purpose of the mission, and while the cause of the dispute was never fully divulged, personal notebooks on display from the crew indicated disagreement about whether the contained environment was a "survivalist" experiment, focused on how human beings could survive with limited resources (i.e. in space) or whether it was a laboratory, controlled environment in which to study the impact of ecological change on Oxygen and CO2 levels.  Today it is the latter that has survived as the University of Arizona has taken over to study exactly such effects.  In the meantime, the considerable energy plant that was necessary to sustain the extensive mechanical systems within Biosphere 2, and which belied its sustainability premise, has been reconsidered and re-engineered to today's expectations.

The Prison Economy

We drove through Florence, AZ, home to the Central Arizona Florence Correctional Complex, a set of state, county, federal and private prisons. There is a courthouse and administrative complex in the center of town, in what could rightly be called a “vertically integrated” industry, as it constitutes the central economy of the region.  Lately, a federal order to shut down some of the original prisons and relocate the prisoners to other states has caused the town to wonder about its future.

Dirt and Destiny

We met a 78 year old woman named Tish who runs a donkey sanctuary outside of Benson, Arizona.  Toward the end of our visit with the donkeys we asked her about the beaten up racecars in the nearby barn.  "Oh, those are mine," she said.  One of the first women licensed NASCAR drivers, she grew up street racing in Texas with her favorite uncle, and continues to race on dirt tracks (the most challenging and unpredictable) in the Charger class.  Here she's posing with a recent car, Black Jack 21, named for the original donkey she adopted twenty-five years ago, and who still peruses the grounds.

The Theater of Small Towns

The small towns in the West come in an astonishing variety of forms. Some are completely abandoned, with only the shells of former buildings preserved or forgotten. Others, like Tombstone, have Hollywood set like streets preserved, authentic looking saloons, and regularly staged gunfights. Some, like Bisbee, are sophisticated retreats for a class that now works remotely, has retired, or simply decided to live at the edge of, but not off the grid. In these cases the anticipation of tourism merges with the cacophony and spectacle of the original Wild West towns.

Springtime in the Desert

Finally we were able to arrive at our first, true wild horse sanctuary at the Salt River.  On our first evening we were able to spot several herds both grazing in the nearby woods and cooling themselves in the river.  With each band the lead stallion was having his way regularly with the mares while the bachelors looked on in envy.  Fortunately, an ongoing darting effort with the fertility drug PZP has prevented the proliferation of the herd that has led to so many unfortunate consequences elsewhere.

The Magnificence of the Sunset

In the midst of this it must be said that the sunsets in the west are magnificent.  The sky is illuminated with the softest shades and the cool complements reflect around the horizon to 360 degrees.  One senses that it has always been this way, and at the same time wonders how long it will be.

Taliesen West: The Final Act

Scottsdale

Originally Published March 26, 2022

Frank Lloyd Wright, America's most well known architect, was born in 1867, two years after the end of the civil war. He had several distinct careers, beginning in the nineteenth century and ending in 1959, the year of his death at age ninety-one.  In that time he designed some 800 buildings, of which 380 were actually built. 

His personal life was equally callisthenic.  His first marriage ended after fleeing to Europe with a client's wife, Mamah Borthwick Cheney. Upon returning, and now ostracized from the Chicago community, he retreated to Spring Hill, Wisconsin where he built the first Taliesen compound.  There, on August 15, 1914, while Wright was working in Chicago, a servant set fire to the living quarters, opened the lower half of a dutch door and murdered Mamah, her two children and four others with an axe as they tried to escape the flames.

Wright's second wife, Maude "Miriam" Noel, became addicted to morphine soon after their marriage, resulting in an early separation, and shortly afterward he met Olgivanna Lazovich Hinzenburg. In 1925 he and Olgivanna moved together to Taliesen, where a fire yet again destroyed a significant portion of the compound.  Ten years later, after spurned spouses had granted divorces, Taliesen East had been rebuilt, and Wright and Olgivanna had married, they moved to Arizona to start Taliesen West.  He was seventy years old.

Wright had few resources at the time, however he had a considerable reputation. So in his final incarnation, he devised a school where apprentices would pay to come to Taliesen West, and would learn the arts of farming, building, cooking, and entertaining. They would also be expected to act as draftsmen for his remaining architectural projects. The winters were spent at Taliesen West, and the summers at Taliesen East with the apprentices handling the entire move between. It was a brilliant plan, providing Wright and Olga an extensive staff, a winter residence, and a steady income. Such an enterprise requires a certain suspension of disbelief and Taliesen West was informed by a certain theatricality in which the ritual of each of the activities was given an honorific significance. Over the years Taliesen developed a devotional following and a number of apprentices went on to brilliant, if idiosyncratic careers; Bruce Goff and John Lautner being to noteworthy.

In all of the sycophancy, it's nevertheless hard to overlook the virtuosity of the design.  Wright was a brilliant draftsman, and everywhere can be seen and felt the isometric effects of his draftsman board.  The decorative filigrees, the stained glass windows, the dentils at the soffits, the patterns in the rug all submit to the furious pace of his T Square and triangles.  The plan is set at forty-five degree angles throughout, the roofs and soffits at thirty degree angles, and where structural enclosures fail to sufficiently express the geometry, chevrons, spears, and cant strips are added.

In many ways, Taliesen West is a kind of geometric interpretation of nature, an expression of what Wright meant by an "organic” architecture.  It is a dance between Wright and the landscape that sometimes seems like symmetry, other times sometimes a submission.  It is relentless, unending, and comprehensive.  No detail is left undesigned.  No tree, rock or plant is not asked to pose for the audience.

It was the final act of the master.

This post was originally published in The Tracings.

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Arcosanti

Paradise Valley

Originally Published April 3, 2022

The Aquarian Mountains run north-south, parallel to a line connecting Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesen with Paolo Soleri's Arcosanti. Both were visionary projects, schools and utopian models for society, and in fact, Paolo Soleri spent a year and a half at Taliesen early in his career. He and his wife eventually settled in Scottsdale Arizona, founding the Cosanti Studio in 1956, and Arcosanti in 1970. *

Today, however, Arcosanti thrives as an artisanal community, largely committed to the principles upon which it was founded, centered on arcology, a structured relationship to ecology formed by minimizing the impact of urban communities. While the residents number only in the double digits, far below the 5,000 originally envisioned, the core that remain are committed to a sustainable way of living.  They grow their own food, make and sell the ceramic and bronze bells to support the school.  The day we visited we were given a tour by a young artist who after her first year of apprenticeship was now learning to cast bronze.  When someone in our tour group asked about "governance" our guide seemed perplexed, as if to say, "You're asking the wrong question."

Like so many ventures of the 1970's, Biosphere 2 for example, Arcosanti is sometimes seen as merely a commune with no scalable significance.  Yet it's hard to deny the charm of the place, and that of its inhabitants.  It is essentially an Italian hill town, and operates much in the same way, free of the automobile, of the commute, of the meaningless separation that characterizes so much of modern American civilization. Founded in 1970, the same year as Earth Day, it represents an aspiration and a path surely better than the one we are on now.

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  • Soleri's reputation has been reconsidered after revelations in 2017 by his youngest daughter regarding his sexual abuse. These revelations may not have come entirely as a surprise, as Soleri had abruptly resigned from the Cosanti Foundation in 2011.

Canyons and Rivers

Originally Published April 9, 2022

We glided through mint jelly eddies and ripples as we floated down the Colorado River.  We’d been taken upriver to just south of the Glen Canyon Dam, to travel down the river by kayak, through Horseshoe Canyon and back to Lee's Ferry.

The day before, we had taken our most daunting hike.  Cathedral Wash, reported to be an easy hike down to the river and back, instead turned out to be a schooling in rock climbing and seat of the pants descents.  At one point we encountered a group watching a mother below, stuck on an overhanging shelf. Her terrified son was screaming "we’re all gonna die!”  We sympathized. They backtracked, as we had many times, and eventually made it to safety.

The next day a Navajo guide took us through the Upper Antelope Canyon, an underground Zaha Hadid like vortex carved out of the sandstone. Thousands of years of sediment had accrued and solidified into stone, to then be sculpted by the flash floods that come down the ravines.

The Colorado River sustains much of the southwest, including Southern California.  In fact, Southern California probably wouldn’t exist without the Colorado River. The Glen Canyon and Hoover Dams manage the water for seven states in the west, and also provide hydroelectric power to these, as well as some states to the east.  At Glen Canyon, the level referred to as "dead pool" below which the dam can no longer produce electricity, is anticipated to be reached by July of this year.  Below that level the 100 year old agreements between the states sharing the water will be threatened as well.

Welcome to the movie "Chinatown."

Lazalu

Zion, UT

Originally Published April 17, 2022

We sat in silence waiting for the moon to rise over Lazalu. We had just finished a group reading, some poems, some recollections, some eulogies and songs. There were nearly thirty of us sitting in the hacienda of our host, Robert Perkins, a poet, adventurer, filmmaker and artist.. This week he was hosting a group called Kift, a gathering of techno-nomads, sharing the benefits of communal living while traveling around the country in vans, tethered through the internet to their “day jobs” in Silicon Valley.

Theirs is a community of choice, made up of a diverse group, each with their own story. Most had left a life behind, willingly or not, and it was clear, as we sat there in silence after the reading, that they seemed to find love and support in this group not found elsewhere.

We had come from Coral Pink Sands the week before, a Sahara like desert, filled with roving off-road-vehicles, many boasting the usual banners. There was the constant high pitch of engines everywhere, a thousand leaf blowers buzzing in the wind.. Lazalu was a sanctuary to calm our nerves.

Shortly after we arrived there was mention of pack mules down the road. We went with Rob to visit Paul Gooch, a local ophthalmologist whose hobby, along with some of his friends, is to take pack mules into remote parts of Zion to camp in style. His website, Longears and Sourdough is a treat, if like us, you have donks on the brain.

Rainy Day

Zion

Originally Published April 22, 2022

Today it rained for the first time in weeks, making us feel at home.  Our trip has taken us through parts of the country that have experienced over twenty years of drought. With this drought come the flash floods, created by micro bursts of rain, rushing without warning through the valleys.  The earth, like a dry sponge, cannot absorb the surge. It creates washouts in the canyons and along the roads. There are fatalities.  The signs say head for higher ground—-immediately.

We decided to drive to town, and were stopped by a herd of cows taking their time crossing the road. These are the healthiest cows we’ve ever seen. Every third one stopped for a drink of freshly delivered water on the road. They paid no attention paid to us. They have the run of the Kolob Valley, moving up and down the valley, just as they please, for the best grazing on any particular day. They belong to a ranch down the road but wander freely up into the BLM lands. Boundaries are hard to locate here.

The day before we had been to Zion to hike to the Emerald Pools. Zion is very crowded, and while the Park service does a great job of managing the crowds, there are, well, crowds. We were fortunate to find our more taciturn friends down at the paddock awaiting charges for a ride through the park. Most stood there silently saying to themselves, “please don’t pick me, please don’t pick me.” The stoic, circumspect mules knew, however, that as the most reliable mounts, they would most likely be chosen for this afternoon’s ride.

We took the shuttle to the top of the park and walked to the beginning of The Narrows. A flash flood warning had been posted earlier in the day. We watched with trepidation as a group waded up the river, some in the park issued waders, others in shorts with flip flops. It’s astonishing that so many people survive their trip to the park.

As the day closed, our wonderful hosts Rob and Diane took us to a remote promontory. We told them about our day. “Yes,” they said, “that’s why we like it over here.” We sat with our cocktails in silence as the day set in the valley below.