GROWING THE MEDIAN GROVE

California College of the Arts Master of Architecture Thesis 2011-2012 Resistance instructor: Neal Schwartz Greg Baker

ABSTRACT One way to tackle the distance between the self and the city is to travel, setting up an analog experience as a mirror that allows a deeper understanding of self in the everyday experience, the city of residence. Sub-axial commercial corridors off of the Dotombori in Oksaka almost literally act as tributaries to the river of history. Likewise the Ramblas in Barcelona have small winding streets that feed into them where all of the commercial pedestrian traffic meets both roadway and urban plaza. It is from that deeper understanding that one realizes ways that the city of residence can be improved. For me, that city is Oakland, California, and Berkeley before that. One might notice on a drift (drive) through Oakland that abstract space, represented by the rapid appearance of condominium complexes, is in danger of erasing what was successful about the historical space, represented by the Paramount Theater, Fox Theater, and Oakland Airport. These icons of the pinnacle of Oaklands historical prominence refer to the historical narrative of cultural mixing during a short period of time, between 1860 and 1930. Both the Art Deco and stylistic eclecticism of the citys architectural heritage must factor into the redevelopment of major sites such as the Oakland army base, American Steel factory, Alameda naval base, and several small commercial sites along International Boulevard. The collision of ideas about art and technology that led to Oaklands architectural icons is impossible under the current trend. The techniques of drive and dtournement may provide a catalyst for urban transformations: In such formulations, the city and its architecture become not just aesthetic objects but dynamic, practical realizations of art, unique and irreplaceable works and not reproducible productspolyrhythmic compositions of linear and cyclical times and different social spaces, born from many labors. This is art not as the prettifying of urban spaces but as making time-spaces into works of art (Things, Flows, Filters, Tactics. The Unknown City. Bordan, Rendell, Kerr, and Pivaro. pp 17-18). An important concept borrowed from music theory, polyrhythm is what makes African drum patterns sound complex, usually superimposing different subdivisions of each measure of a song. In a city grid, polyrhythm can be found when there is one alley dividing the block into two parts on one side of a street and two alleys dividing the block into three parts on the other side. So how can polyrhythm be celebrated in urban planning? It is really nothing special when the street happens to be polyrhythmic. Instead, how can we plan for pockets of commercial activity to superimpose with residential locations at different subdivisions of larger metrics within a particular city? These larger metrics must come directly from history (and its projections of the future), including economic, ecological and geological histories. Such superimpositions allow people to wander through sections of the city that have unique character despite being planned. The goal, then, is to allow the river of history to flow in Oakland, to keep its commercial tributaries healthy that they may give rise to iconic building commissions once again.

PROPOSAL FOR METHOD OF INQUIRY The site of this project must be a city with a tenuous history and relationship with the concept of urban renewal and redevelopment. The project seeks to highlight the importance of cultural elements in the city, so the site will be a multiracial city and the methodological foundation will be ethnographic research. In an effort to understand how psychogeography can be used to imagine urban problems and their solutions, sites should be restricted to cities through which I have navigated and wandered. Sites within my own culture will be scrutinized by extensive historical research, and all places to be studied will undergo some type of environmental analysis, such as understanding geological and meteorological factors that influence urban zoning and settlement patterns. For example, geological stratification of Oakland bears a striking resemblance to the social stratification of residential zones. Studying a site within my own culture will also require consideration of critiques from other cultures. This would most likely take the form of European criticism of American society in the early twentieth century. As an extension of such critiques, I find it necessary to study urban renewal and redevelopment in the European cities as well. The Diagonal in Barcelona that cuts the rationalist street grid designed for the Extension is an important thoroughfare that displays many of the characteristics one would expect extending from the Ramblas of the old city. The modern feel of the Diagonal and its complex interwoven zoning and programming make it an ideal contrast to Oaklands freeways that cut through and soar over a city that has roots as an authentic town of the wild West. Still other models of successful urban corridors exist, such as the Dotombori, a canal that runs through the Japanese city of Osaka. Mapping the Ramblas and Diagonal, as well as old Osaka and the Dotombori, would add comparative methodology to the project. Since the site of the project is at the urban scale, there must be certain aspects of the program for all residents of that city, finding ways to span across its surface area. This engagement will likely interface with major transit corridors, which must become a central component of the project. The program inherently has this engagement as its public and infrastructural focus. How this central transit component interfaces with specific redevelopment plots will determine the degree of privacy and permanence at those nodes. Traditional programmatic distinctions such as residential, commercial, and industrial are understood as different voices in a carefully crafted polyrhythm. This project seeks to ally itself with Marcus Novaks idea, architecture and music as grounds for the present and poetic processes for the making of the future, set forth in Pamphlet Architecture 16. Certain computer processes may yield results follwing in the footsteps of Greek architect/composer Iannis Xenakis, such as those made possible by the software program Max/MSP. This software has the ability to read images to make sounds, and read sounds to make images. Cartography has the potential to yield geometry that expresses musical ideas in graphic form.

LIST OF QUESTIONS How can the history of Oakland inform a better method of redevelopment? Can a programmatic rhythm of the city contribute to generative strategies of development? How can slow change of Oaklands socio-economic stratification be set in motion?

BIBLIOGRAPHY Architecture as a Translation of Music. Pamplet Architecture 16. Princeton: Princeton AP, 1994. Bernhardi, Robert. The Buildings of Oakland. Oakland: Forest Hill Press, 1979. Gutman, Marta Ruth. On the Ground in Oakland: Women and Institution Building in an Industrial City. Dissertation, University of California, 2000. Hood, Walter J. The Next Generation of Parks. 2010 Walker Channel. Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. 2 December 2010. Lewis, Paul, Marc Tsurumaki, and David J. Lewis. Situation Normal.... Pamphlet Archietcture 21. Princeton: Princeton AP, 1998. Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory. Ed. Neil Leach. New York: Routledge, 1997. Self, Robert O. American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003. The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space. Ed. Borden, Iain, Joe Kerr, Jane Rendell, and Alicia Pivaro. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001.

ARCHITECTURAL PRECEDENT SUMMARY NARRATIVE Given the importance of racial issues in this project, an attempt is being made to identify architectural projects that overtly deal with race, particularly focusing on segregation and its effects at the urban scale. While some projects do exist, such as the apartheid museums in South Africa, almost all of the literature on the topic of race in architecture deals with the practice not the projects. In some ways, this project would actually be an inversion of the Red Location Museum in Port Elizabeth. The issue of apartheid is dealt with there by containing historical narratives, or memories, in room-like stalls with the voids between as circulation. The void space is also a space for personal reflection, and the place for seeing other museum patrons. This project seeks to tell the story of historical tension in Oakland along major transit corridors rather than contain it in a building. In some ways, however, the freeways act as a transit void space for personal reflection in between the points of departure and destination; but only in the sense that they lack historical information about a place. The freeway does not commemorate the communities it destroys. SUMMARY The architectural precedent for this project must not be a private institution such as an apartheid museum, although will draw on such projects for additional strength. In order to address racial segregation in a more public way, an urban design precedent that explores the potential of medians can be found in the Poplar Street project in Macon, Georgia. Located along a downtown street where an obelisk commemorating the United Daughters of the Confederacy stands at the main entrance to a parking area, Poplar Street has been transformed into an integrated social space. Two lanes of diagonal parking stalls are separated by a meadian that features blocky white picnic tables made to resemble cotton bales. The idea behind the Poplar Street project, also known as Macon Yards, is to create parking yards that take advantage of the car culture in the South, where meeting other people most often happens through these chance encounters. These yards may be understood in the sense that the car is mobile real estate, and that a transitional space is needed that takes form as a front yard for each piece of plug-in real estate. The Oakland-based designer of the project, Walter Hood, grew up in North Carolina, and was able to draw on his personal knowledge of the local culture in his treatment of the 180-foot wide street where, when blacks and whites come together, their history is, like, right in front of them (The Next Generation of Parks. Hood). He describes how, in the South, people drive their cars to go a single block, and so meet more people in the act of parking than walking on the sidewalk. By activating a strip of hardscape between two rows of parking, the negative aspect of Southern car culture is opportunistically mined for its positive effect on neglected urban land. The cotton bale picnic tables are accompanied by inscriptions of Confederate history, taking a background role compared to the obelisk, but nonetheless beginning to erode the traditional focus on White male history in urban commemorations.

ARCHITECTURAL PRECEDENT CRITIQUE CRITIQUE This project reimagines large scale urban planning as infrastructural transit reform. While parking yards may work in Georgia, residents of Oakland are multi-mode minded when it comes to transit options. While automobiles remain a mainstream method of transportation, it is not uncommon for Oakland residents to own any combination of a skateboard, bicycle, motorcycle, and automobile. The issue this project will confront is, first with the Cypress Freeway and now with the Grove-Shafter, the lack of physical access to West Oakland. That lack of street connectivity is what solidifies the lack of access to basic resources such as grocery stores. In the future, Oakland residents will be able to ride a bicycle from one side of the city to the other, sampling the best food from all of the top notch markets along the way. In order for that to happen, the redevelopment projects such as the Grove-Shafter Freeway and possibly even the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) lines have to be modified. In order for the motives of this project to be clear, the history of racial segregation must figure heavily in any landmark or memorable features of this modification. It must be clear that physically separating communities of color from the rest of the city using federal money is no longer acceptable. Now that Oaklands redevelopment agency is financially impotent, projects such as these must rely on the support of the community and of mindful developers who understand the potential of increased access and circulation to boost economic activity. In todays world of tax-increment financing, by which projects are funded based on projected increases in property tax revenue, one could argue that this project could demand a new method of calculating revenue based on the potential for retail and other highly taxed commercial uses to sprout up organically due to infrastructural adjustments. Creating special underpasses for bicycles will improve the quality of life, translating into higher density because it will be a more desirable place to live. Enough density to support increased revenues from property taxes could only come about by perforating the physical barriers. EXPERIMENT

HISTORICAL/THEORETICAL PRECEDENT SUMMARY NARRATIVE Oakland has the best examples of Art Deco theaters, stores and apartment houses in the country, all built in the late Twenties and early Thirties (Buildings of Oakland. Bernhardi. p ii). Following in the footseps of the colonial expressionism of its predecessor, Art Nouveau, this more manicured European style was imported at a time when the theoretical avant-garde tended toward phenomenology, or the study of sensory (ontological) potential of human experience. Martin Heideggers 1927 book Being and Time describes how interpretation and self-reflective thinking are the key to understanding existence. His later writing asserts that earth, sky, divinities and mortals a fourfold oneness that humans dwell in. The act of dwelling secures the fourfold in things, and lies somewhere in line with cultivating and constructing as a way of building (Building, Dwelling, Thinking. Rethinking Architecture. p 103). By dwelling, we measure reality against our concept of divinity, and in doing so dwelling becomes a poetic act. He claims that poetry... is the primal form of building (Poetically Man Dwells. Rethinking Architecture. p 118). SUMMARY A strong argument can be made from the history of racial segregation in the New World that cities such as New York, Chicago, and Rio de Janeiro all limit African American access to employment opportunities. Taking the extreme case of Oakland, California, many cities stand to benefit from this type research. Oaklands residential settlement pattern stratifies the city first by class and geography, with the wealthy on stable bedrock in the hills, then by race and environment, with all of the minorities living in West Oakland until after the second World War. Although West Oakland was racially mixed, the at-large electoral system meant that the city council did not have members representing specific areas of the city. Facing no political representation, African American women in West Oakland during the Thirties relied on face-to-face interaction to construct reciprocal relationships of exchange and mutual dependence that provided newly arrived families with essential goods and services (American Babylon, Self. p 56). The seed for political change was planted when the district election or ward-based system began with the municipal election of 1945. Many industries in the Forties brought jobs for African Americans in West Oakland, such as the Southern Pacific railroad yards, Oakland Army Base, and two U.S. Naval Stations. Even with the magic ingredient of proxmity to work, the job ceilings that Black workers faced, combined with redlining practices, limited African American mobility. Only professionals became homeowners, and were limited to liberal neighborhoods in Berkeley or North Oakland. The important thing to remember about the political climate in the East Bay is the way that racial segregation was built into the suburbanization process, which converted vast amounts of southern Alameda County into white homeownership. The real estate industry maintained that racially mixed communities would deplete property values, offering whites a way to hide racism in a strictly financial decision (American Babylon. Self. p 117).

HISTORICAL/THEORETICAL PRECEDENT CRITIQUE CRITIQUE Although the social networking of African American women in West Oakland during the first half of the twentieth century was born out of necessity and lack of access to public media, their approach to urban society aligns with some of the theoretical concerns of phenomenology, namely that everyday life must be created through social interaction or risk domination by mainstream propaganda. Social interaction can address what Henri Lefebvre often describes as the violence of the city by keeping eyes on the street. These interactions improve the quality of everyday life, Lefebvres critique of which led to Guy Debords concept of the Spectacle Society. It claims that the decisions in our everyday lives are not really are own, but are in fact controlled by the association of goods with media celebrities. Debord argued that face-to-face interactions could allow us to build our own lives again. This project seeks to counteract the violence of the city, which takes a very real form on the streets of Oakland, by attempting to understand the female folk traditions associated with West Oakland. The Art Deco buildings in the city center are a reminder of an architectural golden age, and yet stand in stark contrast to historical conditions that have persisted alongside them for almost a century since they were built. There must be a reconciliation of urban wisdom and the ideology behind the imported historical style. Before Heideggers treatise of that era, Gerog Simmel suggested that cities overstimulate the public, creating weak followers of the relationship betwewealthy people and their commodities. Later, Jean-Francois Lyotard wrote a critique of Heideggers notion of dwelling as a bucolic mirage in the computer controlled megacities of today, in which we dwell only in passing. The domestic rhythm of the community becomes the most important aspect of urban life, and nostalgia for the impossible dwelling awakens the domain of transit, transfer, translation and difference (Domus and the Megalopolis. Rethinking Architecture. p 275). EXPERIMENT

METHODOLOGICAL PRECEDENT SUMMARY NARRATIVE The project seeks to challenge postmodern practice by insisting that cultural symbols, ie. architectural styles, must be understood only as archaeological remains. Any new design proposal must not simply show people a faade image of the past, but must arise from comparative historical study of any precedents context to the present (virtual) reality. Oakland faces a great challenge in rehabilitating its abandoned industrial landscape, and historical narratives reveal a complex set of social relationships that are now being strangled by the new economy. The old industrial lifestyle afforded children the opportunity to be born by and learn by the hands of the daughters of wealthy company executives. This was true for the German, Irish, and later Asian immigrants as it was for the African Americans, all of whom lived in West Oakland during the citys initial development (On the Ground in Oakland. Gutman. p42). There was also a thriving Hispanic community in West Oakland, but the freeway system dislodged that community (which ended up settling in Fruitvale) and infringed upon the border of Chinatown, halting any potential for its expansion. SUMMARY The methodology for this project must somehow ensure that I obtain a particular depth of historical understanding from which to act. Ethnographic research methods will uncover the spatial memory of people who remember the changes brought about by redevelopment in the Fifties that has lasted until the present day. As the freeway system reinforced existing boundaries in Oakland, the West Oakland residents visions of what the city could become were darkened by the shadows of the overpasses. Working class people in a diverse set of West Oakland neighborhoods became dispersed so that various neighborhoods are now associated with particular ethnicities. Any new development along the waterfront and old Cypress freeway location must commemorate the diversity of West Oakland by respecting the spatial memory of its historic routes in that portion of the project. According to Dolores Hayden, care is not taken to preserve the spatial history of ordinary working people and their everyday lives due to relentless pace of urban (re)development (Claiming Womens History in the Urban Landscape. The Unknown City. p 357). Her Power of Place project in Los Angeles uses the history of Biddy Mason, a Black woman involved in the gold rush who fought to maintain her freedom and wealth, to monumentalize her success in the face of extreme socio-economic disparity. Her studies reveal that most urban landmarks commemorate the history of White male achievements. She argues that the history of minority women in American cities is a vast resource that has barely been tapped for its potential to solidify the connection between urban populations and their neighborhoods. Using the technique of ethnography in design, this project aims to infuse the history of West Oaklands African American women into the proposal for the Fourteenth Street transit corridor. This corridor will stand in contrast to the section of the Macarthur Boulevard transit corridor to the east of Market Street, which will tell Oaklands history from the point of view of the wealthy landowners of downtown commercial real estate.

METHODOLOGICAL PRECEDENT CRITIQUE CRITIQUE The Power of Place project occurred in a city with which Hayden was not familiar. When looking upon a city with fresh eyes, there are no long established assumptions about what kinds of designs are wanted. When choosing a method for this project, great care must be taken to unlearn my asssumptions about Oakland. Gaston Bachelards surrationalism pushed rational thought to the limits of rationality, demanding a tactical method of operation, a process, a way of thinking through givens (Situation Normal.... Lewis, Paul et al. p 9). The challenge is to analyze Oakland in a way that abstracts the city enough to make it a new experience for me. One way to do this is to convert spatial data into sensory data, so that one can perceive the data as an environment. Converting mappings of Oakland from visual data into sound data would be one way to link analysis to design. This sound data would then be used to arrange new rhythms of development into the city. The final design of this project should focus on perceptual innovations that deal with all the senses. EXPERIMENT