Urban Displacement: a radical response to
urban sprawl
(The possibility of a park in midtown Anchorage)
Background
It
is not the beautiful vista or the harmonious public space which requires
our attention. Whatever we would do there would
be unnecessary embellishment. It is the desolate areas that we should
attend to.
And what could be more desolate than a vacant lot in midtown Anchorage?
Except, perhaps, the shopping mall it will inevitably become.
Suppose that something interrupted the progress of modern development.
Suppose that something disrupted a parking lot with its asphalt pavement
and orderly grid. Suppose that one day the earth ruptured.
Gradually, a mound appeared, and outcroppings—fragments of stone—began
to re-form into a figure. Grass and shrubs now grow over
the rupture in the earth, and the vegetation is advancing
further
into the
parking lot.
Project description
The site is a large undeveloped lot in the part of Anchorage
known as “midtown”.
The site is typical of Anchorage, which is a morass of urban sprawl surrounded
by the distant beauty of Cook Inlet and the Chugach Mountains. The site
is bounded by Benson Boulevard on the north and Thirty-Sixth Avenue on
the south and lies between Denali and “A” Street.
If left to the pressures of commercial development, the site
will be a monument to consumption. This “improbable
monument” imagines
that other forces intervene, so that the site becomes a memorial
to the possibility of radical resistance to the expected
order of things.
A portion of the site is shown in the model (at 1/8” = 1’ scale).
The figure is approximately 240 feet long and 32 feet high.
The materials are asphalt, dirt, indigenous rock, sand,
gravel and
vegetation.
Further developments
Public response to the site has been overwhelmingly positive,
as the area provides a respite from the dust and monotony
of midtown.
In spite of the
city’s barricades the public frequents the site to
picnic and to contemplate the stones.
Planning and Zoning, the Department of Public Works, the Anchorage
Assembly and the Anchorage Council on the Arts have met to determine
the appropriate
reaction to these phenomena. The Municipality has now decided
to dedicate the area as a public part.
Permanent landscaping
and pedestrian “amenities,” such
as walkways and benches, will be provided as part of the city’s “One
Percent for Art” program. (There was considerable
debate in the Assembly over whether public funds could
be appropriated
where
a park
appeared as
an act of nature and not as a capital construction project,
until the proponents pointed out the tremendous cost savings
to the
city of this
process.)
Municipal botanists report that vegetation found nowhere else in Alaska
has appeared at the site. Groups of people have recently been observed
gathering at the site at various times apparently engaged in some ritual
or celebration. Health and Social Services is studying their movements
to discern if they have a purpose, pattern or effect, and the city
has hired an astronomer.
City engineers and soils experts are investigating reports, as yet
unconfirmed, that the fissure continues to advance and may threaten
buildings in its
path.
Biographical information
Elizabeth Ingraham was born in Kentucky and spent her formative years
in Colorado. She now resides by necessity but with vigilance
in the 21st century.
She has
a BA degree in art history from the University of Colorado and a law
degree from the University of Denver, and she practiced
law for fifteen
years, most of that time in Alaska, where she worked
for Native groups to implement the federal settlement of their aboriginal
land
claims and
participated in radical social change on an unimaginable scale.
She received
an MFA in sculpture from the University of California
Santa Barbara, where she was the first visual artist to
be awarded an Interdisciplinary
Humanities
Fellowship, and she now teaches Visual Literacy, a foundation
design program for all art, architecture and textiles students
at the University of Nebraska
Lincoln.
In 2003,
she was the first recipient of the Thatcher
Hoffman Smith Award, a
biennial prize which open to all fields of creative activity, including
the arts, cultural affairs, education and science. The Thatcher Hoffman
Smith award recognizes a visionary creative work in progress which
demonstrates the power of original thought and expression to enrich
the world. She received this award for her skins series of sculptures.
Her work is widely exhibited and also appears from time
to time in unsanctioned locations. |