Christina's Campus

Boy! What a surprise! Who'd have thunk that so ultra-contempo a bunch of prison-designing architects as Agence Sauer Kraut would reference a piece of middle-brow Americana kitsch in one of their publicity pieces?

This is, of course, their prize-winning (they got Miss Congeniality, and an honorable mention for their effort in the talent portion of the contest, when they tap-danced while playing the glockenspiel simultaneously) attempt at student-warehousing. And how intriguing that they would insert the pathos-inspiring crippled chick from Andrew Wyeth's widely-reproduced, widely-despised "Christina's World." Were they suggesting an arched-eyebrow irony by juxtaposing the American maiden crawling through the corn? And that French girl gazing blithely on? What does she signify? Is she about to finish her sandwich, get up and finish Christina off, so that she can have their miserly-sized dorm-cell all to herself? What could these sadomasochistic architecturally-astute jail-wardens be hinting at? What kinky fantasies lurk behind those double-glazed windows, inside a structure that was clearly intended to be every bit as sexually-inspiring as the campus at UC-Irvine? It's all a bit Hitchcock, isn't it?

Good News For Post-Modern Man

Such good news!

They're tearing the building down and starting over!  Yes!

Ok, so it's not good news like that . . . but its good news just the same.

I've got the architect's name!  

It's Sauerkraut! (en Francais: Choucroute).

Ok, so it's not actually Sauerkraut, not Choucroute, but it's damn close. Given that today is, after all, Monday, when nobody in France goes to work much anyway — and it's  Easter Monday at that — the tastefully bustling offices of Agence d'Architecture Choucroute are closed anyway, so it wouldn't make sense to call 'em. Other than to leave a voice mail, of course. But, hey, be my guest! It's a free-ish country.

But really. Really! It's such really good news! You should see the proud papa achitect photoshopped-photos!   They just couldn't be more pleased with how their creation looks in photoshop, with all the wee li'l authentique pedestrian-esque folk nearby, and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon artfully  arrayed as a backdrop (there being nothing — NOTHING! — that an architect loves so much as using a prior generation's avant-ultra style, now in terrible ultra-disrepute, of course, as a backdrop to this new masterstroke of super-stylin' ass-whippin' genius-osity.  It's kind of like some medieval morally-instructive vision of Heaven (my latest design) and (yours, avec amber-tinted salad-bar sneeze-guard plexi-glas balcony-blocking poodle-catching patio panels, which might as well be in avocado green and harvest gold, you gauche retrograded gulag-decorating bastard) Hell.

More to be revealed, of course. But I couldn't help but share this good news for (post) modern man.

The Solution

THE FUNKY WESTERN CIVILIZATION
(Tonio K.)

come on everybody
get on your feet
get with the beat
there's a brand new dance craze
sweeping the nation
and it's called the funky western civilization

well there's a riot in the courthouse, there's a fire in the street
there's a sinner bein' trampled by a thousand pious feet
there's a baby every minute bein' born without a chance
now don't that make you want to jump right up and start to dance?

My Struggle As An Architect

Okay, so once again you're thinking, "Man, what kind of crime did those poor bastards behind bars DO that they've gotta keep them so securely away from us decent folk?"  Probably you're hiding the valuables under the mattress at this very moment, right?

But no!  It's not merely to keep them locked up like a whole bunch of Counts of Monte Cristo (plural), like Colonel Dreyfuss, the traitor (oops!  sorry!  our bad!  never mind! deso-fuckin'-lee!), it's also about keeping the riff-raff out!  But surely you knew that?  Surely you already knew that Architects are mainly visionaries, to the wee tiny degree that they're visionaries at all, of social control.

Because this charming new prison site is set sternly at the very gateway of Chateau Rouge, and as any Parisian (most of whom would never go anywhere near there) could tell you, that basically means "Little Africa."  It's the greatest ethnic concentration in all of France.  It's the first step, fresh off the boat, into Paris, the city where most of the African music in the world gets recorded, and where African hair gets plaited, and where Best Africa sells absurdly large plates of absurdly fragant and absurdly tasty food for five euros and where everybody meets up at L'Omadis, and where there are waxcloth tailoring joints and African bookstores and herbshops and couscous et tangine restaurants where the Senegalese neighbors simply step behind the bar and pour themselves a glass of water and . . . well, here, 

http://vibesdafrique.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=4&action=display&thread=1315

here's a little list of African record stores in Paris, and after halfway down, it's all within a rock-throw of this particular brand new architectural wonder penal institution.

But see, that's the other reason for the bars.  What do we learn about our pal, The Architect?  

Gee, let's get his name, and his phone number, and we'll call him up and let him represent himself.  We'll let him explain those prison bars, and the Correctional Institution Aesthetic.  We'll let him discuss what he's learned from his struggle — "Mein Kampf" is how that translates into German — at The Drancy School of Architecture.

The Design School of Drancy

Nice, huh?

Reminds me of that rough stretch I did in the Maximum Security Penitentiary in San Quentin.  Oh, they tried their best to break me, but I just zipped my lip — I'd never rat anyone out!  And then, once I finally got out of solitary confinement, I paid six packs of cigarettes to get a new tattoo on my chest, done with a rusty needle and lampblack ink:  Less Is More!   With topless Chicana lasses wearing sombreros and wings and garter-belts framing it.  

I'm tempted, of course, to declare this architectural style The Stalag 13 School, but it is, after all, France, and there's a certain resistance (not much of a Resistance, really, unless you call ordering another bottle of Vichy water a resistance) to les Allegmagne.  But really, it's probably much more appropriate to title this type of architectural endeavor as adhering to The School of Drancy.

(Drancy, just south of Paris, was an internment camp — easily and conveniently converted from public housing — where Vichy officials, French government functionaries, gathered undesirables so they could hand them over to the Gestapo and then see them swept off to Auschwitz and elsewhere.  Designed for 700, it held as many as 7,000; once again proving the incredible efficiency of modern architectural design.)

Brutality Is In The Details

Okay, it's kind of ugly.

Okay, so it's really ugly.  Really ugly and brutal.  Really, really U & B.

But it's only when you get up close (and it sort of militates against getting up close) that you learn how extra-ugly it really is.

Apparently, it's not just God that's in the details.  Ugliness is in the details, too.

(And then, next, we get to talk about the neighborhood this Cellblock Number Nine just landed right on top of . . . although using Architect-O-Talk, we probably shouldn't call it a neighborhood,  but instead simply pile up a few juice-free jargon-morsels, like Common Built Environment Contextuality (you can pretty much just load up on that type of language, you know, because it all makes as much or as little sense as the next four-car-pileup.)

Do the Crime, Do the Time! Or, Escape From Devil's Island

No, I don't know what crime you have to commit to get incarcerated here.  I'd imagine it would have to be pretty darn serious, like a whole series of bank-robbery-rape-murder-massacres, because clearly The Architect intended that no one would ever manage to escape from his own personal Alcatraz.

In France, as it happens, you get to wear your own clothes in prison. That stripe-y jail pajama stuff undoubtedly got declared cruel and unusual punishment.  They haven't actually opened (or closed, I guess) this prison, so it's hard to tell what the inmates will be like, but I'm guessing they're likely to be a pretty rough bunch, a set of hard cases, the kind of tough customers who will be staring with flinty-eyes through the little slits of windows they've been provided, carving fake guns out of soap, and planning their big breakout.  

Boy, I wouldn't want to be The Architect — what was his name again? — when they get their hands around his neck.   I can just hear 'em now, growling "Assymetrical random pattern windows that don't open properly?  Why, you rotten bastard!  Here's an random assymetrical boot up your ass!"

Isn't Irony Just The Greatest?

See that upper part, the flap? The folded-back flap part?

If you weren't such a philistine, such a aesthetic nincompoop, you'd understand that the flap-part, was intended to be ironic. Duh!   It wasn't a fuck-up whatsoever!  He meant to do that!  It was in the plans and everything!

Gosh, when I live in a building, when I look for what makes a building really liveable and lovable, and how it helps the neighborhood it lives in, the first thing I always consider is irony. 

It's just like with friends — you know that guy who used to be your friend back in your first year of college?  And how he never said anything, nothing whatsoever, that wasn't drenched in irony? And remember how you kind of got sick of him after a while, after about a month or so, and realized how incredibly shallow and lame he was, and how he was afraid to have any soul, or any real guts of his own?  

Ok, well imagine if he'd been planted, permanently, in a really prominent spot in your neighborhood, right up against the sidewalk,  where you had to walk by him and see him and listen to him be a irony-spewing wiseass every day.  Forever.

Gosh, I wonder what this architect sounds like when you talk to him...?

How to Impose Your Genius Sense of Style on EVERYONE! Even If It Ruins EVERYTHING!

Wouldn't you love to see the lovely rendering on the cover of the blueprints?  With probably one or two architectonic stick-figures walking their architectonic stick-dog on a leash?   All of them as flat and feature-free as this building itself, so as to properly coordinate with The Architect's grand vision?  In which messy three-dimensional humans wouldn't clutter His Building's environment?

Sadly, this strident monstrosity has been hurled into a really vibrant spot.  That's a local branch of the Sorbonne right next to it, with a great library, so loads of people move through it.  And across the street is le Renaissance, a perfectly preserved example of what an elegant bistro on the backside of Montmartre looked like at the turn of the century — the previous turn of the century.

And it buzzes with people, three-dimensional people, and now, as spring arrives and everyone sits outside, they get to look right straight across as this guy's own personal horror-story art statement, this uninhabitable shoebox, this prison-windowed incarceration center.  Hey, thanks, fella!  What was your name again?  Mind if we get your phone number?  

Which Knucklehead Designed This One? And Where Does He Live?

As a near-perfect example of Post-Modern fashion-victim architecture, out of style decades before it was even built, it ought to be hard to top this one.  Ought to be, but it won't be, unfortunately.  Squished imperiously into a really lively part of Paris' 18th Arrondissement, it looks like a parody of a building — and that's before the prisoners who get sentenced to live there even show up —  but plainly that's what _____________, the arrogant ass who "designed" it intended all along.  After all, he doesn't have to live in it, and then watch it stain the neighborhood.

But hey!   Enough of the typical ineffectual carping, of the usual ex post facto frustration.  Let's play that exciting new real-life game: Blame The Architect!  

All you have to do to play is: First, let's find out the name of the architect.  Name the over-bearing, over-educated asshole who very likely never even visited this neighborhood until his soul-destroying ego-trip shoved its way in, spreading and spilling "architect blight" all around  like rat poison in a shiny new box.

Then, once we learn the name of the architect, let's get his phone number, and we can call him up and ask him all kinds of fun questions.  Like, "What the hell did you think you were doing?"

And "How come your building seems so damn determined to damage a really vibrant place?" "Do you really hate other people that much?"   "How do you sleep at night?"   Questions like that.

Of course, he may not be inclined to answer, mainly because you're asking him reasonable questions in sensible language rather than Architect Cant or Auto-Aestheti-Speak.  Thus, you're a phillistine.  With no right to ask questions, or even question his taste's extraordinary superiority.   So sit down, shut up, and get steam-rollered.  That's the way this dance is  meant to be done.  At least that's what the architects think.