Culture and Coexistence into the Great Unknown
An expanse of earth, adorned, improved, contoured, designed, and experienced. Architecture, travel, design, culture.
From a failed attempt to peddle influence to save an upside-down real estate venture, to a spectacularly autocratic design, Zaha Hadid’s 666 Fifth Avenue captures the Trumpian moment, in all it’s bejeweled phallic grandeur that the Bible’s Revelations warned us about.
Surrounded by volcanoes, coffee plantations, and picturesque villages, the once-ruined former colonial capital, Antigua Guatemala, remains the most charming city in the Republic, a vibrant and somewhat overly commodified mix of Ladino-Spanish, Kaqchikel-Maya, and multinational Gringo cultures coming together.
At one time billed as the Moon Goddess and Andy Warhol It-Girl, singer Nico’s dark, avant-garde music and deep, hypnotic voice were first heard in the Velvet Underground. She continued to work sporadically as a solo artist after leaving the Velvets, though a longtime heroin addiction and methadone dependency sidetracked her career. Check out the documentary on her life, Nico:Icon.
Morro Bay, the bounty of sea, dune, bay, and estuary ebb and flow against the sacred Nine Volcanic Sisters, the rocky Morros. Small town charm coexists with protected parkland and one of the few remaining functioning wetland estuaries in overpopulated California, a direct counterpoint to its channelized and endlessly pumped and polluted waterways. The landscape invites migrating birds and tourists, fosters endangered plants and animals, and allows fish populations to thrive.
In San Francisco, the Mission District has celebrated Day of the Dead every year in since the early 70’s with altars in Garfield Park, serving as a community graveyard for the night and through art, music, other live performances and a walking procession. With the neighborhood in transition from rapid gentrification, will this vibrant culture rite continue? Yes, for now… Photos by Jack Eidt from 2015.
Can re-purposed shipping containers become the next inexpensive, quick to construct, green building solution for affordable housing? Danish “starchitect” Bjarke Ingels, as well as a recent Orange County, California, project, assert yes to all of the above, but there are limitations.
Salvador Dalí and filmmaker José Montes-Baquer, in honor of underappreciated Surrealist Poet Raymond Roussel, shot a fake documentary of an non-expedition to Mongolia in search of gigantic mythic hallucinogenic mushrooms.