DeLiRiouS NY......part 1

Those trucks in the street
Is it really Monday?
Time to find some trouble again
Make a bid for romance while the dollar stands a chance.
Dumb love in the city at century’s end

Those trucks in the street…

Opening lines patently familiar to a New Yorker - clarion call signalling it's time to get up and slog through yet another week.  Taken from the theme song for the movie "Bright Lights, Big City" (United Artists, 1988). The movie is based on Jay McInerney’s novel of the same name (NY:1984) about an unnamed protagonist seeking escape from his reality in mid-1980s postmodernist New York City. Not only was he living in postmodernist New York City, his story is contextualised in a timeframe in which postmodernist aesthetic and thought was coming to a festering, carbunclous head.

I found myself singing that song as my subconscious yet again registered images of pop culture peeps and storefront mannequins adorned with fluorescent costume jewellery and accessories, stud belts, leg warmers, electric blue shoes and eyeliner, skinny jeans, stiffly moussed/gelled big hair, neon clothing…and that’s just the guys.

OMG…is society now undergoing an 80s redoux?? (groan!)

Is that what’s responsible for the Footloose remake and ‘Greed is Good’ Wall Street 2? (sigh!)

Will 80s nostalgia kickstart round 2 of the Postmodernist movement? (sound of me slitting my wrists...ok not really)

Postmodernism is a portmanteau of ‘Postwar Modernism’. Postwar Modernism > Postmodernism > PoMo is a movement that began in America in the late 60’s - early 70’s. The ideologies that define the movement emerged as a reaction against the previous Modern era and its tenets, particularly those of functionalism and an adherence to tradition and clarity of function. Postmodernism rejects such rigidity and further, believes that Modernism failed to deliver on many of its promises, including that of creating utopia.

PoMo stretched across the turbulence of the 60s, the conflict and frustration of the 70s to the angst, cynicism, greed and excess of the 80s. It encompassed the visual arts (Andy Warhol’s Marilyn, Campbell’s Soup), the literary arts (McInerney’s novel, Beckett’s Waiting for Godot), architecture and music.

A snapshot of this tri-decade changing world distilled in the experiences of one man can be felt in the 4 minute run time of Steely Dan’s Kid Charlemagne which chronicles the rise and fall of uber iconic, counter-culture Bear (Owsley Stanley III): famous 60s “cook”, Grateful Dead audio engineer and unflappable LSD innovator and mass marketer:
  

        Just by chance you crossed the diamond with the pearl
        You turned it on the world
        That’s when you turned the world around…
        Did you feel like Jesus?

The post Viet Nam conflict/psychedelic freewheeling 60s era of free love and free drugs (escapism) help define the threshold between Modernism and Postmodernism. Somewhere along this time line the party was over. Society changed. Post war boom led to double-digit inflation & rising unemployment:

        All those DayGlo freaks who used to paint the face
        They’ve joined the human race
        Some things will never change.

        Son you were mistaken
        You are obsolete
        Look at all the white men on the street.

Kid Charlemagne is the flagship track from the album Royal Scam, issued in 1976.  NB the album cover: 

Man, seen from a worm’s eye view, obviously down on his luck, he grabs a nap where he once would wait to board a train (that’s a bench you find in a train terminal) to go to work in a big skyscraper not unlike one of the four fearsome looking zoomorphed skyscrapers ready to make a meal of him.  The metaphor needs no explanation.

An eerily similar image is found in Rem Koolhaas’ retroactive manifesto, Delirious New York, 1978. (Dutchman Koolhaas studied architecture at Cornell in the early 1970s.) Here we see anthropomorphed Chrysler building (William Van Alen, 1930; Art Deco) in bed with Empire State Building (Shreve, Lamb, Harmon, 1931; Art Deco).

The zoomorphisation of NY skyscrapers is a psychological projection of human fear felt in the Postmodernist era.  It represents a certain trepidation of Man being swallowed up by them and what they represent (unbridled capitalism).  A portent of things to come.  Even the buildings themselves see the sick joke.  All brace for the paradigm shift.

 
[The worm’s eye view is a common meme used in photographs of people and buildings; especially NY shots.  Those who don’t really know what they’re looking at think it’s cool.]

In the PoMo world, Capitalism is now codified as ‘The Man’ who now controls society.  We all now work for The Man. 

Capitalism and Architecture

Many PoMo buildings serve as metaphors.  Much of it reflects a disenfranchisement with (International Style) Modernism and the failure of its manifesto: ie, to create utopia in the post war (WW2) era via designing better cities and better buildings wherein people would live.  PoMo archtecture was quickly adopted by corporations to serve as symbols of wealth and power.  The late 1980s brand of capitalism focussed on product information and images rather than the thing that the image represented.  Image was reality.  Art for commerce, no longer for art’s sake (Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup series).  This fostered a climate where buildings were fighting for their own identity which fuelled a return to ornament, which came in the form of weird cross references: eclecticisms and the real being substituted by simulacra.  To what end?

Philip Johnson's AT&T Building, 1984

Cabinet by Thomas Chippendale c 18thC

Elevation. AT&T Bldg

Two iconic PoMo buildings, both located in NYC, are Philip Johnson’s AT&T Building and his Lipstick Building.  Both reference typologies not found in architecture, especially the International Style which is modernist.  The former looks like an 18 century cabinet (see Thomas Chippendale) and the latter like an elliptical tube of lipstick (see woman’s make-up bag).

'Lipstick Building', Philip Johnson, 1986

The buildings are ambiguous (a hallmark of PoMo thought and architecture) and give no indication as to what types of functions are performed in them.  Form definitely does not follow function.  (ie, the AT&T building is not furniture headquarters, and the Lipstick Building is not a cosmetics headquarters, but boy do they stand out!)  This type ambiguity is a snub at the Modernist corporate aesthetic and famous Modernism axiom attributed to Bauhaus modernist Ludwig Mies van der Rohe: "Form follows function". 

One might ask: Why design these type buildings? It’s what society wanted.  From architect Philip Johnson, self proclaimed corporate “whore”:

 

“I’m a whore.  I do what the developers pay me to do…while Mies would rather be good than interesting, I’d rather be interesting than good.”

Interesting.

What's that now, Philip??
Mies & PJ with a model of the Seagram
nb Mies 'claiming' his bldg by placing his hand on it

The Seagram Building, not two blocks up from the Lipstick building, is a classic example of the Modernist corporate aesthetic:  Rectilinear box, lack of ornamentation, self referential, use of industrial materials (the thin mullions - vertical strips that divide the windows - are in essence  I beams), economy of materials: columns, floor plates, glass curtain wall ‘skin or enclosures.  The interior of the building is travertine and even gold plate, but rendered in a non showy, non ornamental way. 

Seagram details

Seagram Building, 1958. MVDR & PJ

How many people would guess that the Seagram Building was done in 1958?  Good is timeless, Philip.

Though designed by both Philip Johnson and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the Seagram is essentially all Miesian in approach, form, look and feel (Mies was the king of the glass box). Johnson was primarily responsible for the interior architecture.  Incidentally, Mies and PJ parted ways after designing this building.  Clash of ideologies between the whore and the purist.

If one believes that the role of an architect is to articulate our environment enabling a literal comprehension  of society, then Postmodernist architecture succeeds at this.  If modernism wanted to underscore the fact that architecture must grapple with the society of its time, postmodernism highlighted that this too must include an articulation of societal flux and uncertainty.

Post war (WW2) environment led to pre war (WW3?) angst and anxiety. The political climate created a sense of unease and dread:  The Cold War was still being fought.  There was constant talk of nuclear war.  The word “superpowers” came into being.  Everywhere there seemed to be the feeling of an impending threat of total annihilation at the push of a red button, with the ‘lucky’ ones inheriting a blasted, pockmarked, toxic earth, or a cyber-punk world of degraded society littered with cool gadgets.  Common images of NYC in that era were of sidewalks thick with yuppies (a Postmodernist word), heads bobbing up and down as they marched en masse to or from work in their trench coats and sneakers & stockings (???); blank faces masking the loss of control and exuding disaffected, collective cynicism.

We cut to this blonde  

Dancing on a mirror

There’s no disbelief to suspend

It’s the dance it’s the dress

She’s a concept more or less

Dumb love in the city at century’s end

Back to our Postmodernist protagonist.  The dust cover of the novel shows the protagonist headed in the direction of the Odeon cinema.  ‘ODEON'  marquee is done in streamline moderne  – the tail end of the art deco movement (WW2…1945). This type architecture is juxtaposed on the other side with Minoru Yamasaki’s and Emery Roth & Sons’ large, looming gothic modernist World Trade Centre twin towers (completed 1970 – 1971). The skyscrapers dominate the right side of the book’s cover.  Midground we see a tiny little Beaux Arts building (representing the Classical architecture of the Greeks and Romans and its insignificance to the Postmodernist era).  Back turned to the audience, thus effaced (it’s a historical no-no to have one’s back to the audience), we get the sense of following him.  Following him in his trench coat.  Following him around in his little NYC world.  Following and watching.  As we all know, the sense of being followed or of being watched produces a fair amount of angst.  We the reader, therefore engage in producing this angst that overshadows his life.

 

Weighted down with the death of his mother, his wife leaving him, and a seemingly illogical emotive reaction to a stranger: a pregnant woman in a coma, the protagonist struggles to balance his day job at a New York lifestyle magazine as a fact checker (juxtapose this with Orwell’s protagonist in Nineteen Eighty-four who is a ‘fact eraser’ for the State newspaper) with his escapism played out on the nighttime club scene, which includes lots of girls and ‘lifestyle' or 'recreational' drug usage. 

Nobody’s holding out for heaven

It’s not for creatures here below
We just suit up for the game
The name of which we used to know
It might be careless rapture

He is centrally located between symbols of work (big corporation embodied by the Twin Towers) and play (embodied by the cinema, which is also a means of escapism).  How does one achieve Homo Ludens in a Postmodernist society? Though it may seem like it, peel back the layers and one realises that the protagonist's recreation is not fun. 

While we become acquainted with him and get a peek into his life I’m sure it escapes some readers’ attention that he has no name!  He is effaced and self-effacing, as the novel is written in second-person narrative; a Postmodernist (rehashed) literary tradition:

You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of morning.  But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy.  You are at a nightclub talking to a girl with a shaved head.  The club is either Heartbreak or The Lizard Lounge.  All might become clear if you could just slip into the bathroom and do a little more Bolivian Marching Powder.  Then again it might not.

                                       Bright Lights, Big City. NY: 1984, p 1.

He tries to look for escape from within the very environment from which he wants to escape.  As he attempts this he (we) realise that his situation isn’t singular.  It is Postmodernist zeitgeist, which in many ways could be interpreted as dystopic (yet another parallel to Orwell's novel). 

I too have felt the discomfort and sense of unease and of not belonging; a lack of a sense of identity whilst studying in NY during the tail end of the Postmodernist era.  Though primarily based outside NYC, forays into the city would sometimes produce this sensation.  Sometimes.  I always thought this was the result of being a stranger in a strange land.  Decades later I now realise that even ‘native’ New Yorkers felt this way.  Postmodernist zeitgeist.

Obsessed with the Male-female paradigms of love (of all things: LOVE?!?!): mother/wife/expectant mother, our protagonist keeps moving, travelling through this architectural landscape going through the motions of work-consumption-work-recreation-escape-work-consumption-escape-…aware of his disconnect and his inability to get it right, proceeding in an unending cycle of cynicism and resignation to his perceived lack of control over his life and its regnant ambiguities.

Scratch the cab

We can grab the local
Let’s get to the love scene my friend
Which means look, maybe touch
But beyond that not too much
Dumb love in the city at century’s end.

Dumb love in the city… .

       - Torsdag

YouTube video of Century's End.  Soundtrack to 'Bright Lights, Big City'. DonaldFagan, 1988.

More about → DeLiRiouS NY......part 1

Grand not-quite-Palladian Jamaica Resort & Spa

An article appeared in the March 25, 2011 Observer.  It read: 

SPANISH hotel chain Fiesta has announced plans to carry on with its multibillion-dollar expansion of the Grand Palladium Jamaica Resort and Spa in Point, Hanover by a further 900 rooms with an aim to add an additional 2,000 rooms in the near future.

Billed as being located in Montego Bay, Jamaica (check the travel websites), this facility is actually located in Point, Hanover, which is 60km west of Montego Bay. 

Fiesta calls it the “Grand Palladium Jamaica Resort & Spa”, but what is a “Palladium”, let alone a Grand one?  The word “Palladium” does not appear in Oxford’s Dictionary of Architecture, nor any other architecture dictionary to which I am familiar because a Palladium is not an architectural term or reference.  Per the Oxford English Dictionary:

Palladium – a statue of Pallas whose preservation was believed to ensure the safety of Troy; a safeguard.

The word derives from the Greek Goddess Pallas Athena/Athena Parthenos, whose cult statue was housed in the Parthenon: that famous 2,450 year-old Greek temple atop the Acropolis.  Those of us in the field of architecture will immediately recognise the oft used misnomer.  The word the developers meant to use was PalladiAN.  From the Oxford Dictionary of Architecture:

Palladian – of or relating to a revived classical style (circa 16 century) in architecture based on the works of that famous Renaissance architect, Andrea Palladio; the overarching theme of which is that there is a correct way to design. 

Briefly, Renaissance architecture is characterised by an emphasis on symmetry and proportion, harmony, the regularity of parts, a reference to ancient Roman architecture, an orderly arrangement of building members such as columns, lintels, pilasters, etc, and the use of semicircular arches and hemispheric domes.  Palladio’s influence on Renaissance architecture was so profound and transcendent, his I Quattro Libri dell’Architettura, The Four Books of Architecture, which contain systematic rules and plans for building, is and has been in continuous publication since 1570.

Misnomer notwithstanding, this building reflects nothing of the works of Palladio, nor of Renaissance architecture and ideals.  In fact, its departure from the formal language of Classicism and Renaissance architecture is significant.  A subversion almost.  Parodic. 

The Façade

 

There are two types of facades to the facility: the main entrance façade and the facades to the suite clusters.  I will address the latter as they are seen more often on the premise.  When approached head-on, the secondary façade gives us the sense of entering a building with corresponding mass.  The perpendicular approach, however, reveals the façade as nothing more than a prop: a tilt-up storefront akin to those seen on the set of a Hollywood Western.

Quoins

Quoins:  large, square or rectangular stones used to dress and strengthen the corners of buildings, are a typical Renaissance feature.  They strengthen corners by ‘weaving’ together in order to bind two walls, ie, two intersecting planes, together.  Quoins stacked one atop the other in the fashion indicated here do not read as structural.  In this connection, the stacking implies the corner is not supported and this  portends structural failure.  Further, as aforementioned, quoins appear at the corners of buildings; not on the face of a wall or elevation as shown on either side of the entryway (see picture below).

Portico/ Pediments/Tympanum

1.       Why were the columns in the portico: the porch area in front that supports a roof, not raised so that the 'band' below the roof, ie the entablature, would line up with the coursing that demarcates the second storey?  We’re talking a difference of about 6”.   This is just sloppy.  Analogy: how many of us have worn clothing that was cut so the pattern(s) in the cloth match and align?  The flower on a pocket that matches up perfectly with the flowers on the fabric it’s sewn to.  The 100’ angle made by matching the stripes from the lapel to the stripes on the collar as both pieces are sewn together.  This conveys the notion of continuity and makes a garment appear seamless.  This approach to transitions (of which Palladio was a master) is also done in architecture, but apparently not in this instance.  

There are no return columns or pilasters (flat, engaged columns) at the back of the portico (ie, where the roof meets the façade) looking as though the roof is only supported at the front, which means the back of the roof is about to collapse.  Yes, we know that there is a supporting I- beam in there, however, steel was not used as a supporting element in Classical architecture, hence, we shouldn’t have to cognitively rely on it to interpret a building done in the Classical typology.  Note also that the roof slams into a string of quoins on the face.  That's one crazy juncture right there.

   

2.       The pediment is any one of the triangles you see at the front (see facade picture above).  There is one at the front of the portico roof, one above it (referred to as a broken pediment, for obvious reasons) and two small ones on either side of the doorway.  Though there is precedent for the double pediment (see the Pantheon in Rome) I’m not sure what purpose the broken pediment in this case serves.   If it is decorative, then a poor job was done.  It seems more an afterthought: something made up to finish the façade.  The pitch is way too flat to be convincing and the purpose of the circular cut-out is a mystery.  I can reference no precedent for it.

3.       The tympanum (recessed centre of a pediment) is treated one of two ways in Renaissance architecture: left plain, or highly decorated with relief sculptures.  Here we get one tiny, lionhead appliqué.  Stingy.

Appliqué – a cutout decoration fastened to larger piece of material.

Doors/Windows/ Niches

Renaissance doors are typically square but set within an arch or surmounted by a pediment. Openings without doors are typically arched, with a keystone (see spa area picture below for how not to do these openings).  Additionally, door surrounds are rusticated (stone cut so that the joints are sunk, the face is roughened and projects beyond the façade).   Note the doorway in the façade.  Quoins present throughout the entirety of the two-storey archway.  Let’s give Fiesta one tick for an attempt to convey a rusticated door surround.  However, the arch itself is grossly incorrect.  There is no keystone in the centre (the crown) of this arch.  In fact, the centre of this arch is the grout line between two stones!   The keystone is called such for a reason.  Located at the centre it actually ‘locks’ an arch in place so is thereby structural.  Removal of or the absence of the keystone (cognitively, as this building is concrete and not masonry) results in the collapse of an arch. 

Made me queasy, walking under such a structure.

Similar rules apply for windows and niches, excepting the rusticated surround.   There are no windows  in this façade but we see two niches on either side of the ‘failed’ archway, which needed to be rendered more convincingly to not read as more appliqué. 

The Spa

A bit more effort was spared in executing the double columns of the pergola in the pool area by the spa by giving them capitals and somewhat of a base.  Columns are load bearing members, proportionally sized to bear a corresponding load.  These double columns are obscenely oversized to bear the load of such modest wooden beams.  Either the beams need to be larger and the columns smaller, or vice versa.   Incidentally, the beams are oriented east-west, which defeats the purpose of it being a shading device.

A frieze is the horizontal central band below the cornice and above the architrave (see picture), all three of which comprise the entablature.  In Renaissance/Palladian architecture, the frieze is treated according to the order (column type) used.  Because of the lack of ornamentation on the vast majority of this building’s columns, I generously assume the designer is using the Tuscan order.   If so, then the frieze is to be left flat and unornamented.  Other orders dictate the use of a flat frieze: the Ionic, Corinthian and Composite, but none of the columns we see here resemble such, so I’m going with the Tuscan order. 

In some instances we see no ornamented frieze and in others we get the one repeated appliqué.  Friezes, when decorated, typically tell a story in pictures.  Here we get the same image over and over and over: a reclining maiden in bas-relief.  No story here; just a one liner.  The spa building shows the appliquéd maiden alternating with some very obvious downspouts.  I trust I don’t need to say that one would never see a downspout punching through a frieze on any Classical building.  All buildings need a way to channel water away from them.  This is typically done discreetly and well incorporated in the design.  (Eg, gargoyles are actually waterspouts that channel rainwater away from their buildings.)  The repeated use of the reclining appliqué seems like an afterthought.  It is a very cheap, unattractive move and I wonder why even do it at all?

The Dome

Gleefully abandoning all Renaissance and Palladian tenets of symmetry, proportion and beauty, Fiesta's contractors set to thrice render colossal bastardisations of Brunelleschi’s beautiful, ingenious, watershed moment of a dome that crowns the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore, Italy.  The results in Point, Hanover beggar belief.  Two proudly sit on either end of the main building and one atop the spa building.  Looking as though they were moulded from hulled potatoes, there is nothing ‘domey’ about these wonky domes. There is nothing symmetrical about them and they are only loosely hemispheric: the untrained eye can clearly see that they descend beyond any hypothetical equatorial line.  They are poorly rendered, with over-subscribed ribs that indicate a clear misunderstanding of the Master’s brilliant use and invention of the originals (designed to resist lateral thrust in the absence of buttresses), and tiny, unaligned, understructured - thus unconvincing - members transition the domes’ circumferences to the square of the roofs.

Other instances continue to shock and dismay as one progresses through the property, including:  the ceilings under the outdoor walkways are mouldy, indicating improper installation of the asphalt tiles (I’m guessing that if I peeled back a tile I’d find no waterproofing membrane nor felt between tile and roof sheathing), and downspouts that empty into the colossal pool.  I wouldn’t assume that the runoff water from the roof is filtred, strained or treated in any way.

The rooms and gathering areas are executed tolerably well, which only underscores the dissonance between interior and exterior.  The former tries hard to compensate for the latter.  It succeeds as much as a double-wide mobile home with granite countertops and stainless steel appliances does.

This facility is pitiful all round and KITSCH punctuates every aspect of one’s experience of it, from its architecture to its amenities.  Kitsch: that all-encompassing German word that aptly describes a vicarious experience of faked sensations.  Guests line up at all-inclusive feeding troughs for tinned ackee (horror of horrors).  One has to search far and wide to get a cup of decent coffee AND the milk to go with it as powdered creamer is all that is in the offing in this swanky establishment.  (I resorted to getting my coffee from the gift store sample cart.  And by coffee I mean the Jablum stuff in the crocus bag; marginally palatable under normal circumstances, but a welcome reprieve in this setting.  So I had to drink four sample cups for a full serving…at least they had liquid milk.)

The landscaping comprises a few banana trees, a few Royal Palms, a couple nondescript shrubs, one variety of croton and one variety of Joseph’s Coat.  And for all the sand stealing that made international headlines and Ripley’s Believe It or Not, there is no beach to speak of here.  The beach is mucky, murky, seaweedy and gross (see aerial photo).  Hence the colossal pool.  Even the diving here is kitschy.  Forty-five minutes under water peering through muck at a denuded reef, one tired sea cucumber, a couple chromis and too many lionfish.

Per the Oxford Dictionary of Architecture:

           Kitsch - Rubbish or trash.  The term suggests works in any of the arts that is pretentious, shoddy, tawdry, inferior, and in bad taste, aping styles without understanding them, and vulgarizing them beyond redemption… the cultural revenge of the lower classes….

Ahhh.  There we have it.

Jamaica is not starved for incredible examples of fine buildings, Classical and vernacular.  Any of our parish churches (Georgian and Gothic revival styles), our courthouses (often rendered in the Neoclassical), and Greathouses (Neoclassical and vernacular, ie, Jamaican Georgian) will attest to this.  So too will many of our hotels (Half Moon – Palladian, Round Hill and Strawberry Hill – Jamaican Georgian, deMontevin Lodge – Jamaican Victorian).  Yet how often nowadays do we see the preponderance of kitschy buildings being passed off as progress?  When did this reductive way of being enter our collective psyche?  Why is kitsch becoming a dominant facet of our culture?  What does it say about us and our opinion of ourselves as an intellectual society?  What does it say of what the Spanish (Fiesta and otherwise) think of us as an intellectual society?  From the march 25 Observer article:

Yesterday, Spanish ambassador to Jamaica Celsa Nuno said the development was "an indication of very positive economic recovery and more than anything an indication of the confidence of the Spanish investors in the future of Jamaica".

Hands up those of us who believe that Fiesta could or would erect this joke of a resort in, say, Cinque Terre.  Côte d’Azur.  Heck, Varadero, even.  It would never happen.  No, non, y ¡difinitivamente no!  Yet we Jamaicans lap up this aberration for the jobs it will supposedly create (mostly menial) and the tourist dollars it will bring:

The tourism minister said this phase of the development will cost US$280 million while the next phase will include "interesting and novel attractions which will be a key part of what is going to drive the higher spend". Bartlett said more than a thousand workers will find employment in the first phase and over 3,000 ultimately.

According to Bartlett, the recent opening of the largest port in the Caribbean in Falmouth, Trelawny, which has already had its first call from the world's largest cruise ship, was indicative of the necessity for more rooms.

Can someone please tell Minister Bartlett that Point, Hanover is all of 100km away from Falmouth, Trelawny?

Kitsch is dangerous.  People pay to see the faked article.  Our smarmy leaders know this and also know they only have to pander to the lowest common denominator.  Impress this ever increasing segment of the population with whatever trinket is being offered and parliamentary votes remain secure.

Kitsch is vulgar and invasive.  Look at Sandals Whitehouse, the latest addition to the Sandals family, and compare it to its siblings.  It alarms me that even the mighty “Butch” Stewart has fallen prey.   There is much talk about the loss and degradation of Jamaican culture in the news, but the best our intelligentsia can do to address this is insist on patois being taught in schools, insist that the bible be printed in patois and defend Vybz Kartel's stint as UWI guest lecturer.  

Language is not the only embodiment of culture.  Architecture also serves a similar purpose.   Why allow such vapid eyesores to front as monumental and experiential representations of Jamaica?  For that is what these structures do and they do it to our cultural detriment.

Tourism Minister Edmund Bartlett said that the future plans for another 2,000 rooms would "make that facility the largest mega tourism entity in the Caribbean today".

He says it like it’s a good thing.

I advise those with sand to be stolen to keep watch.

- Torsdag


http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/news/Fiesta-to-go-ahead-with-Grand-Palladium-expansion_8578588

Footnote:

One thing that’s glaringly absent from Fiesta’s attempt at Palladian architecture is the ubiquitous Palladian motif:  a semicircular arched light (opening) flanked on either side by lower rectangular lights (openings).  My guess is that this was excluded only because a) it costs more (labour, materials) to do an arcuated opening, b) Fiesta’s designers probably have no idea what it is anyway, or a quite probable c) said designers assumed Jamaicans have no idea what a Palladian motif is, and can't tell the difference between it and a patty flanked by a coco bread.



Drawing by Palladio from his Four Books...



 

- Torsdag

More about → Grand not-quite-Palladian Jamaica Resort & Spa

Ineffable Place

*****I dreamt Jamie was at my house, but not my house.   I don’t know why I dreamt of her… .  She was at my house, but not my house.  A big, old, drafty clapboard house.  Painted green and cream.  There we sat with mugs of tea, talking about the incredible job of child rearing.  She telling me how she let her two (I thought she had three?) fall asleep in her bedroom in a bed jury-rigged to a ceiling track so she could easily slide them over to their bedroom when she finally went upstairs to bed.  Dreams are silly things sometimes...*****

But it was Jamie who lived in the clapboard house.  A beautiful, old, limestone and clapboard house in Maryland; the foothills of the misty, mystic Blue Mountains.   A house with a name: Lliana Lodge.  I never knew houses had names.  

Long ago…yesterday, in a grade seven summer with common entrance behind us and childhood a close second, our teachers rewarded us with two field trips: one to Castleton, the other to Jamie’s house.  I remember bringing the permission slip home to have it signed.  I remember the morning of the trip, my futiley imagining what our day was going to be like, as though going to someone’s house was an extraordinary thing. But this house had a name!  So it could not have been an ordinary thing.

The morning finally came and we were off!  Driving up familiar Hope Road, past Hope Gardens (and its intrepid maze), past the familiar zoo and its tired old lion (that recently died, poor thing), past familiar Coconut Park (now a ghost…ever notice how very creepy amusement parks are when empty?).  Past the river on the right, over the petite flat bridge, past the bougainvillea strangled walls of Blue Mountain Inn…round and round, eventually spilling out onto an unfamiliar, unassuming stretch of road.  If you could call it a road, for this ‘road’ was a green carpet.  Rolled out before us leading into the interior.

We were almost there!

Our green carpet led to a clearing.  Blue-green, with a dewy veil woven of a million tiny prisms scintillating the light of an ideal mountain sun.  A backdrop of pine trees (an unfamiliar sight) swayed welcome.  This clearing stretched out to forever, or so it seemed to me at 10; and at its vantage point sat a house.  Done in a style that I'd eventually come to know as Jamaican Georgian (a tag that 10 could care less about). Clapboard walls rose above its limestone base.  Broad, solid wood floors creaked "welcome" underfoot.  Huge, glorious iron mullioned casement windows cranked outwards.  A wide, covered verandah.   Cavernous pitched roof with exposed beams and shingles, punctuated by the ubiquitous white cap and comb (absurd name: “cap and comb”) running atop the ridge beams.  It was the most beautiful house I had ever seen; this house with a name.  

Her mother (now deceased) had the baby (now married…some years ago in Treasure Beach) in her lap, and was seated by the huge, round breakfast table in a carved oak ‘double press back’ American style chair.  There were six of these chairs around the table.  The chairs, her ‘white’ mother (from a ‘prominent’ Jamaican family) and the fact that they lived in this spectacular picture book house so unlike anything I had seen in my young life made me think, for a long time, that Jamie’s parents were American.

I remember narrow-paned French doors that opened onto two steps down, which marked the entrance to Jamie’s bedroom.  Her own room!   We stood in awe of her bed, her big-paned windows that opened outwards, seducing the morning breeze to dance with the curtains.  Her little bookcase, her toys, her vanity, which held a miniature donkey hamper with four packs of Bubble Yum…American candy…one of which went missing before the day’s end, causing a minor furore and an unjust accusation… .

I remember the pool in the back with its whitewashed sides and white painted patio surround anchored on all sides with whitewashed urns...geraniums and ferns spilling over their Greek keyed rims.   I remember a tree standing to the side of the house beside its fern-lined, half asphalt-half grass-half impatiens driveway.  It boasted a white cartwheel leaned up against it and tethered one end of a white woven hammock.  I fell in love with white cartwheels and hammocks that day.

I remember the property stretching all the way down to a river.  Tributary, actually.  We were allowed to climb under the barbed wire to swim and climb the massive boulders that were as hot as the river was cold.  Icy cold.   We ran back up to the house, shivering and dripping, after an hour or so, maybe less – time expands and contracts when you are that age.  We ran back, ecstatic yet reluctant, for it was time to go.

It was time to go…to leave this clapboard house, this old house, this named house.  House of Old Jamaica: a place of time past and present.  A cached place; a temporal place; a yesterday moving through time. 

It was time to go and we left.  I look back in space-time and see the mist from the peak descending.

- Torsdag

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