Signs of Design II

Design for All: Value-Added Lifestyles

In 1999, the retail chain Target began a partnership with architect and designer Michael Graves in an attempt to mass-market “high” design to American consumers. At the time, Graves was best known for his historicist postmodern architecture (exemplified by his 1980 Portland Building in Oregon), as well as his iconic 1985 Bird Whistle Kettle for Alessi. While one path from 1980s sculptural homewares such as the Alessi Kettle was the one towards increasingly rarefied design-art objects outlined in my previous post, Graves took another path with his designs for Target. His whimsical and colorful household objects such as toasters, jugs, blenders and mixers for Target are certainly affordable and reach a mass audience. However, while Graves’ designs may be (arguably) aesthetically pleasing, they seem unlikely candidates for life in a white cube. However subtly sculpted, a plastic toaster for $24.99 is unlikely to set the contemporary art market on fire (see image below) – it is mass produced, widely available and has thus far failed to generate the avalanche of publicity or celebrity cache of a design-art object.


In 2000, Target expanded their designer range, with a line of clothing by fashion designer Issac Mizrahi, followed by products designed by Philippe Starck (since discontinued) and other less well known designers. The fully-fledged commitment to design became Target’s Design For All campaign in 2005, with a series of catchy TV advertisements aimed at heightening awareness about both design and Target’s stable of designers. Minimal biographies and images of the designers help aid a clear association between the formerly discount retailer and “high culture” – an association that even includes Target sponsoring Free Friday Nights at MoMA (although ironically, it is hard to see the Graves toaster ever making it into that hallowed white cube). What’s referred to by the retailer as the “halo effect” of Graves’ reputation as a well-known designer has improved Target’s reputation as a designer destination, or at least more designer than just your average mass market retailer. For Target, design means competitive advantage. However, it is important to note that Target designers like Graves rarely invent new products or new concepts but simply restyle old ones – in this light, Target’s Design For All can be seen as a kind of Streamline design for the 21st century, with Graves' sculpted plastic forms and colourful knobs replacing speed lines and metallic teardrop shapes of the 1930s. Indeed, this is a marketing lesson that designers such as Raymond Loewy practically invented – design, as styling, can improve the bottom line.


However, another more recent Target design example might prove more innovative and suggest an alternative definition of design in the mass marketplace – design as creative problem solving. As part of her 2002 thesis project, Deborah Adler created a new concept for a prescription medicine packaging system when she realized how easy it was for her elderly grandparents to confuse their medication bottles. Adler’s repackaging, which was developed into Target’s ClearRX system in 2005, is more than simply restyling an existing product to effect the bottom line (though it may affect the latter too). The ClearRX medicine bottle has a flat side with easily legible graphics and a simple colored ring coding system to ensure that medicine bottles and their contents are not confused (see image below). While for Target, the ClearRx design may aid in their market strategy of differentiation via design, it is also possible to see design here as a practical and innovative solution to an everyday problem. In this example, design seems to be a long way from the design-art on display in a white cube discussed below.


K-Martha and Shaping Designer Lifestyles

Target’s Design For All has been successful both as a commercial enterprise and in raising consumer awareness about design. Target’s version of design has effectively become a brand associated with an accompanied lifestyle that is distinguished, by design, from anonymous discount objects of a regular mass retailer. An even more successful example of building lifestyle branding through design is Martha Stewart. While Stewart herself may not actually design any material objects, she is a master designer of American lifestyles. And of course, attaining a contemporary lifestyle inevitably requires consuming objects – from Stewart’s books and magazines to her Everyday line of household goods from K-Mart and, most recently, Martha Stewart homes.

If Target’s Design For All suggests an accessible designer lifestyle, Martha Stewart invented the mass market designer lifestyle in the late 20th century. Using her media image as the prototype, Martha’s lifestyle is an incredibly successful design. The image of mom at home cooking, cleaning, entertaining and decorating may well be a Victorian-era image of woman as domestic servant, but it sure sells Everyday cookware at K Mart. Value-added design here means regular pots and pans are imbued, via the Martha Stewart brand, with an associated lifestyle and its inherent values.


In the Martha Stewart artifice, the values are wholesome and absolutely conventional – the celebration of traditional family values and the fantasy of a life of leisure, with ample time to complete complex craft and baking projects. From her country estate farmhouses with invented names such as Turkey Hill and Middlefield suggesting New England pedigree, to advice on polishing silver and restoring antiques, there is an aristocratic fantasy behind all of this too. In the context of her 1980s rise to fame, Stewart’s values coincide perfectly with the return to family values promoted by the Reagan administration (continued by Bush Senior). In this light, her traditional lifestyle can be seen as a reaction to the increasing divorce rate, the war on HIV/AIDS and promiscuity, and most importantly, a counter to the threat of 1970s feminism. And the artifice must be compelling – even the reality of Stewart as an ex-stock broker running a multi-million dollar lifestyle empire whose insider trading resulted in jail time has not unravelled the image world she has designed.

The suburban developments she is currently promoting are worthy of brief analysis. Coated with the veneer of convention, Stewart’s homes are Levittown-style suburban developments for the 21st century lifestyle generation. The white picket fences of the 1950s have been replaced by ranch-style fences to give the impression of a rural community, while development titles such as Hampton Oaks and Lily Pond continue the theme of country estate, despite their location in the suburbs of Atlanta or Los Angeles. Many of the homes are based on New England homes owned or formerly owned by Stewart herself – the Lily Pond series is based on Stewart's shingled Hamptons home, the Katonah series resembles her two colonial homes in Westport, Connecticut, and Katonah, New York. The bizarre sight of a whole suburb of colonial New England house styles in the suburbs of Atlanta, or in Florida or California, complete with the traditional hearth (particularly useful in Florida!) suggests that the Martha gestamkunstwerk places image above both function and context. In contrast to the badge of class distinction offered by contemporary design-art, Martha’s designer world is mass design for the American middle class in an age of insecurity – a safe, conventional artifice to consume. And consume. And consume.


IKEA: the Second Coming of Scandinavian Design

In the 1950s, the first wave of Scandinavian design invaded the United States. Though it began with organic forms and bent blonde wood chairs of Alvar Aalto and others before the war, by the 1950s, Hans Wegner and Bruno Mathesson chairs provided stylish comfort for the design-conscious while Arne Jacobsen’s minimal Ant Chairs began seeping into the mainstream. Through an economy of materials and means, as well as simple organic forms, Scandinavian design gained a reputation for being modern but not too modern, mass-produced and standardized yet maintaining a humanist resonance conveyed through its organic forms, warm wood and textiles. Initially revered by architects and designers in the United States, Scandinavian design did reach a mass market in the 1950s to some degree. But the second coming of Scandinavian design in the 1990s, the IKEA invasion, penetrated much further into mainstream American consciousness.

Scandinavian design already had a certain reputation in America, which IKEA certainly tapped, but it added a crucial ingredient: low cost. Like Target’s Design for All and Martha Stewart’s empire, IKEA came to mean affordability plus the added value of a designer lifestyle. However, while Scandinavian design has traditionally stood for durability and quality materials, IKEA have traded these for an essential ingredient of American consumerism: built-in obsolescence. IKEA’s vast range of blonde wood furniture and practical home accessories are designer yet disposable. A much larger market can now afford to value-add with Scandinavian style in their home and update their designer lifestyles with the changing seasons.



Other attributes which Scandinavian design became well known for in the 1950s – modularity, compactness and flexibility – were imported to America and mass distributed by IKEA on an increasingly larger scale. Their space saving solutions appealed to both city apartment dwellers and excessive consumers in big homes looking for practical ways to house all of their stuff. Designed in Scandinavia by a range of little-known designers, manufactured wherever the cheapest labor is, then flat packed across the globe to consumers everywhere, IKEA have built a global empire based as much on designing systems as products. While earlier Scandinavian designers are regulars in major museums – Aalto, Jacobsen and company – IKEA’s largely anonymous designers seem unlikely to make the cut. But, as with Target’s Design For All and Martha’s Everyday homeware, consumers at this end of the design market may experience a certain “trickle down effect” from the legacy of Aalto and previous generations of Scandinavian designers (now safely housed in white cubes). At Target, K-Mart and IKEA, are consumers ultimately consuming signs of design?

Signs of Design

Twenty-first century design seems impossible to define, not least because the word “design” covers such a wide variety of objects and practices. While the idea is daunting, I thought it worth attempting a preliminary mapping of twenty-first century design in an American context. What follows in an initial mapping of contemporary design via three loose categories: Design-Art, Design For All, and Undesign. For the purposes of brevity, I am focusing on product/industrial design objects – tangible, material objects that are created, consumed and understood to be design objects – although for my purposes, their image and context may be as important as their materiality. This brief survey is by no means intended to be comprehensive but is intended instead as a reconceptualization of contemporary design beyond conventional categorizations. As the entries were getting quite long, I will post this as three separate entries over the next few weeks rather than one long one. Comments are welcome.

Design-Art: Destined For A White Cube

In recent years, the term design-art (with or without the hyphen) has been used to describe limited-edition design objects which are ultimately destined for life in a museum or gallery. Recently, rarefied, limited-edition pieces of furniture have started appearing in contemporary art galleries where they are exhibited in the same neutral spaces as paintings, sculptures and installation art. In his classic essay on the white cube, Brian O’Doherty characterised the modernist art gallery as a supposedly neutral space, without impediments or distractions, a space emptied of everything but the artwork itself (see O'Doherty, Inside the White Cube: the Ideology of the Gallery Space, expanded edition by Uni of California Press, 2000; read the original 1976 essay here). Perhaps more than art, design is decontextualised by placing it in such a white space – a chair is taken from its place at the table, in the office or café, and becomes an object of reflection. In 2007, for example, Marc Newson exhibited tables, chairs and shelving cut from single marble blocks at Gagosian Gallery in New York (image below), while in the same year at the Albion Gallery in London, Fernando and Humberto Campana had two exhibitions of their limited-edition furniture, one of which featured their plush toy-upholstered Cartoon Chairs. What effect does this contemporary art context have on our understanding of 21st century design?


Newson’s association with Gagosian is worth further examination. At Gagosian, Newson’s furniture (yes, it’s design not art, we are assured in the publicity) is shown in a context with artists such as Jeff Koons, Richard Serra, Julian Schnabel and Richard Artschwager. In the same space the following year, Artschwager’s Minimalism-meets-Memphis sculptures posed as functional tables (yes, it’s art not design, we are assured in the publicity). Unfortunately, such comparisons inevitably lead to dead-end clichés such as “these objects display the blurring of boundaries between art and design”. We need to go further.

While Alessi’s sculptural household objects of the 1980s can be seen as recent forerunners of such design-art, with Newson’s furniture, the context has shifted from high-end department stores to contemporary art galleries. Within the white cube, design is understood as the creation of discrete, autonomous objects intended for contemplation, whose ultimate destination is inevitably a museum or a wealthy collector’s loft. Furthermore, the designer is characterized as a singular creative genius whose inspired and singular vision transcends everyday reality and whose creative products are worthy of prolonged contemplation. Rare objects of design-art are instantly collectable, and for this reason, there seems no difference between Marc Newson’s marble chair and a limited edition table sculpture by Richard Artschwager.

When I hear the word design, I get out my checkbook

With the rapid expansion of the market in contemporary design-art in the last decade, the prices of the Newson chair and the Artschwager sculpture may well be similar. Marc Newson’s limited edition Lockheed Lounge (or LC1 Chaise Longue, image below) is a case in point. First exhibited in Rosyln Oxley’s art gallery in Sydney in 1986, a Lockheed Lounge (one of the limited edition of 10) sold at auction in 2000 for just $105 000. It was then sold again at Sotheby’s in 2006 for $968 000, while another Lounge was sold in October 2007 at Christie’s (via London’s Frieze Art Fair) for $1.5 million. While such figures continue to grab headlines, design-art’s image certainly affects our understanding of what contemporary design is.

While the rare object of design-art remains an object of differentiation for cosmopolitan, design-saavy and market-saavy collectors, authentication by prominent museums is required to first elevate, then maintain, its value. Museums and galleries, as the other major collectors of design-art, also have a vested interest in maintaining the value of their investments, primarily through exhibitions, image reproduction and publications. As limited-editions, design-art objects increase their value through media reproduction. Indeed, if modern designers in the early 20th century were concerned with mass production, contemporary design-artists of the 21st century are concerned with mass media reproduction – the image of the design object needs to be repeated endlessly in design journals, books, websites and advertising. In this process of collection and image circulation, design-art is effectively stripped of any relationship with society, politics, or sustainability, to become overwhelmingly associated with aesthetics and/or technological experimentation.

Further connections to the mass media are established by events such as Design Miami and its attendant celebrity circus. Design-art and the cult of celebrity go hand-in-hand, as evidenced by Newson’s Lockheed Lounge rocketing to fame under Madonna in the film clip for her 1993 hit, Rain (see the film clip here). Finally, design-art operates in the same image world as recent iconic buildings by globe-trotting starchitects – in this context, 21st design-art and starchitecture function primarily as a means of distiction for a particular cosmopolitan class. By means of the sheer volume of reproductions in journals and books, its legitimation and promotion by major museums, and its celebrity magnetism, design-art has the potential to drown out all other conceptions of what contemporary design is.

The Kalita Humphreys Theater, Dallas

On a sloping site overlooking Turtle Creek, a couple of miles from downtown Dallas, stands one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s final projects, the Kalita Humphreys Theater. The Theater was completed in 1959, nine months after Wright’s death, and it represents the culmination of Wright’s thought about theater design. In an era of popular Broadway musicals and Hollywood films, Wright’s Kalita Humphreys Theater represented a commitment by both architect and client (the Dallas Theater Company) to live, local theater as a communal ritual, an almost religious experience, free from the taint of commercial entertainment. Initially supported by wealthy patrons and built in one of Dallas’ wealthier areas, the Theater may have originally reserved the communal experience for a rather exclusive audience, but with the donation of the theater to the city in 1973, the emphasis on maintaining a vital, local theater has continued to the present.


With few other buildings nearby, the Theater stands alone as a Wrightian sculpture in the landscape. The building itself comprises softened geometric forms made from Wright’s signature adobe-like concrete: its plasticity suggests both solidity as well as a mud-like connection to the earth. Jutting out of the sloping limestone site, both the materials and colors also provide visual links with the local topography, recalling the design of Wright’s earlier Fallingwater. While it is difficult today to imagine the 1950s context, the site was probably more serene and picturesque. Now, condo towers on the other side of the creek compromise the view, while low-rise housing developments are encroaching on the site from behind. The Theater’s position in a natural setting away from downtown Dallas’ commercial center coincided with Wright’s vision of an ideal decentralized city, Broadacres, where civic culture was to be placed on the peripheries rather than in the city center. While the Theater is, in a typically Wrightian manner, intimately connected with its natural surroundings, in a typically Texan manner, it is also intimately connected with the parking lot. Arrival at the Theater was to be strictly by car – while admirable in many respects, Wright’s Broadacres version of urbanism seems out of step with 21st century moves to reduce auto-dependency.


The Theater’s lobby space is horizontal and low, with a band of small, high windows that doesn’t capitalize on the view over the creek but instead directs the audience towards the theater experience within. Inside the performance space, the circular stage broke with conventional theater design of the early 20th century, dispensing with the proscenium arch or “picture frame” through which an audience views a play. By tearing down the proscenium arch, Wright and his client, the Dallas Theater Company, aimed to create a more intimate experience between audience and performers. In addition, the semi-circular seating arrangement was also intended to highlight the communal experience, as the audience have a more intimate relationship with each other (in contrast, for example, to the more individual and voyeuristic experience of the increasingly popular cinema). This intimacy is further enhanced by the low-hanging balcony and human scale of the space. Other technical innovations of the Theater included a revolving circular stage with the central drum above for lowering scenery, and sliding balconies. Wright also famously claimed that there was not a single right angle inside the theater, consciously challenging the crisp geometric forms of 1950s International Style modernism.


The young Frank Lloyd Wright worked as a draftsman for Adler and Sullivan on Chicago’s Auditorium Theater in the late 1880s, his first experience with theater design. Wright’s next theater project was a 1916 project for a theater in Olive Hill, Los Angeles, for his patron Aline Barnsdall. Several versions were proposed but none ever built. Common to all of these designs was a significant reduction in the proscenium arch, and one even had a semi-circular seating arrangement similar to the much later Dallas theater. Interestingly, Barnsdall was planning to work with Norman Bel Geddes on the Los Angeles theater, and Bel Geddes had also proposed a theater design without a proscenium arch in a 1914 exhibition. Wright’s theater plans were adapted in 1932 for a proposed theater in Woodstock, New York, which was not built, and then later adapted again for another proposed theater in Hartford, Connecticut, which was also not built. Finally, in the last years of his life, Wright had the chance to put his innovative ideas on theater design into practice with the Dallas commission.


While the rejection of the proscenium arch may have been innovative in the interwar years, by the late 1950s, the idea of breaking down the barriers between audience and actors was no longer radically new. Bertolt Brecht, whose “epic theater” theories from the 1920s called for the elimination of the “fourth wall” separating audience from actors, had been dead for four years. Interestingly, the sources of Wright’s communal theater were not completely derived from such European avant-garde theater ideals, with his interest in Japanese kabuki theater perhaps providing an alternative source for both the revolving stage and the intimate connection between audience and performers. Finally, a brief comparison with the Theater’s contemporary, the Guggenheim Museum in New York (also completed in 1959) may further illuminate Wright’s celebration of communal culture and intimacy. The Guggenheim’s famous internal spiral ramp encourages a more intimate viewing experience than conventional rows of rectangular galleries, with visitors constantly aware of others moving up and down the ramp (the Kalita Humphreys Theater also includes internal ramps) – Wright’s “space in motion” highlights not only our awareness of the architecture, the art, or the performance, but also our awareness of each other.

All images by D.J. Huppatz

Dallas, Texas: Architecture and Urbanism

It’s a good Cold War story that has taken on mythological proportions: In the 1980s, brutal Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu aired the soap opera Dallas on local television in order to illustrate the decadence of capitalism to the Romanian people. However, Romanians were so enamored of the American lifestyles they saw in Dallas that they overthrew the dictator and all lived happily after: the glossy image-world of Dallas’ excessive consumer lifestyles sparked the revolution that saved Romania from tyranny. Or so the story goes. Visiting Dallas for the first time (as I did for last month’s CAA conference), it is hard to reconcile the real Dallas with the virtual one of the soap opera.

Downtown Dallas

Encircled by a ring of freeways, downtown Dallas is a collection of bland corporate skyscrapers, alienating concrete plazas and parking garages. Even during the day, its streets are largely empty of pedestrians, while its roads are full of SUVs and large pickup trucks, heading into downtown in the morning, and out again to the suburbs in the afternoon. At night, downtown Dallas is abandoned to a nomadic homeless population, and, apart from a couple of self-contained conference hotels, is almost completely devoid of shops, restaurants, cafes or bars. Urban planning seems to be non-existent: all of the corporate skyscrapers are self-contained, and many include their own parking garages so the commuter need not interact with the greater city at all. The excesses of Reaganism and the 1980s oil bonanza saw twenty such skyscrapers grow on the Dallas skyline, transforming it from a modest city into an instant metropolis. Although heralded as a successful boomtown in the 1980s, downtown Dallas today might serve as a good case study of the problems of much late 20th century American architecture and urbanism.

I.M. Pei, Dallas City Hall, 1966-78

At the symbolic (if not quite the geographical) heart of downtown Dallas is I.M. Pei’s City Hall (1966-78). After the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, the city’s reputation plummeted, and it was popularly portrayed as a kind of new Wild West. The Town Hall was intended to be a bold public statement that might restore this tarnished image. Pei’s concept was not just another civic building, but a major urban project that would encompass a large public plaza with enough open space to offset the height of downtown’s growing commercial skyscrapers. The resulting City Hall comprises an eight storey concrete monolith whose triangular form overlooks a six acre plaza with a pool and large Henry Moore sculptures. Formally, City Hall is an exercise in geometric design; the concrete poured without joins to create an unbroken sculptural surface. But it was more than just a modernist design exercise, as Pei recalled in a later interview: "When you do a city hall, it has to convey an image of the people, and this had to represent the people of Dallas.” (Wiseman, Carter, I.M. Pei: A Profile in American Architecture, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990, p.125) Strong, unadorned and monolithic – are we to read this as a metaphor for the people of Dallas? More importantly, the City Hall is a statement about the city’s solidity and permanence, even as its neighbouring corporate towers change hands or rebrand every few years. However, the alienating, inhuman scale and bleak outlook of both the City Hall and its vast plaza may well have impressed Nicolae Ceausescu.

Dallas City Hall, plaza

The soap opera Dallas, coincidently, first aired in 1978, the year City Hall was completed, and the soap’s global rise in the 1980s coincided with the rise of postmodern Dallas. In a way, the soap created an image for the city that worked in tandem with its new wave of corporate buildings – the glamorous surfaces of both embody similar narratives of big business, patriarchal power and the materialist excess of the 1980s. One of the earliest examples of postmodern Dallas is the Hyatt Hotel (Welton Becket & Associates, 1978), whose mirrored surfaces and broken rectangular forms are best seen in the light of Fredric Jameson’s reading of the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles (John Portman, 1976). Like the Bonaventure, Dallas’ Hyatt is a self-enclosed volume, isolated from its surroundings; its mirrored skin repels our gaze, leaving us with a distorted, fragmented reflection of the surrounding city.

Pegasus Oil neon sign reflected in a skyscraper's mirrored surface

Similar to both the Hyatt and Bonaventure, downtown Dallas’ later 1980s corporate architecture contributes to this sense of a non-place without history or context. While popular stereotypes of cowboys abound in tourist stores and public sculptures, Indians are conspicuously absent in downtown Dallas. But it is not just Native American history that has been erased, Spanish and Mexican histories of the area have also been entirely erased from the postmodern city. However, not all histories have been lost, they are just hard to find. Looking carefully, a scattering of Art Deco buildings suggest a longer urban history, as well as a lone neoclassical mansion (the Belo Mansion, late 1890s) and an extravagant Romanesque Revival building (the Old Red Courthouse, 1892), both of which confirm the existence of an almost forgotten 19th century city. In the postmodern city, even these remnants of an earlier Dallas look isolated and decontextualized.

Pei, Cobb & Freed, Fountain Place, 1986

After City Hall, I.M. Pei (in the 1980s operating as Pei, Cobb and Freed) went on to design several other Dallas skyscrapers, and, along with Philip Johnson and John Burgee, reshaped much of the downtown area during the 1980s. The Texan cities of Dallas and Houston were key sites for the development of Johnson and Burgee’s version of postmodernism: historical references (though never local ones), granite facades and gables were applied to corporate headquarters, creating an effect of distinction and differentiation from the usual crowd of minimalist modern towers. Although not as self-consciously historicist or decorative as Johnson/Burgee’s projects, Pei Cobb and Freed’s corporate skyscrapers function in a similar way here in Dallas. Among their many Dallas landmarks, Pei, Cobb and Freed’s most celebrated Dallas project is Fountain Place (1986), now known as the Wells Fargo Bank (formerly Allied Bank Tower). Designed by Henry Cobb, Fountain Place is a 60 storey crystalline sculpture with a pointed top, covered entirely with reflective glass. It looks similar to Pei’s slightly later Bank of China headquarters in Hong Kong. Although Fountain Place follows the high modernist guidelines in its sense of purity, geometric form and high-tech materials, the jagged top cuts a distinctive silhouette on the city’s skyline.

Dan Kiley, landscaping, Fountain Place

The landscaping around the base of Fountain Place was designed by well-known landscape designer Dan Kiley, and comprises three acres of fountains, waterfalls and large cypress trees positioned at regular intervals in granite planters. The landscape’s center-piece is a computer-programmed fountain with over two hundred jets shooting water in geometric patterns. In a downtown devoid of genuine public spaces, such a space provides cooling water and shade from the hot Texas sun, but the security guards and cameras make it quite clear that this is not a space for lingering too long. Such landscaping is popular in Dallas: each corporate tower is surrounded by a landscaped space with scattered trees and greenery safely contained in stone planters and rectilinear grids. Here, nature has been completely conquered, and is contained within a highly controlled environment. An abundance of sculpture decorates these corporate gardens, with Rodin’s tortured bronze figures providing a bizarre juxtaposition to the blank, mirrored surface of a nearby skyscraper. The landscape designers of Chase Tower (Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, 1987) have gone even further in creating a completely controlled “total design”, with the inclusion of piped classical music emitted from loudspeakers hidden in the low foliage.

A downtown Dallas skywalk

Connecting these self-contained corporate environments is another curious Dallas phenomenon, the skywalk. The skywalk is an enclosed bridge, typically connecting two corporate skyscrapers. It seems to have at least two functions: firstly, the skywalk’s air-conditioned comfort keeps nature at bay (the Texan heat, but also rain and wind); and secondly, it functions as a means to travel between corporate buildings while avoiding the streets (thus the absence of sidewalk activities in downtown Dallas). Unlike in Hong Kong, where similar-looking skywalks function as literally a network of overhead sidewalks which connect various parts of the city (complete with buskers and pirate DVD sellers), Dallas’ skywalks are as sterile and empty as its streets.

Plaza of the Americas, atrium

In the Plaza of the Americas, an odd indoor atrium space between corporate towers (with the obligatory Texan ice skating rink at the bottom), I paused to take some photographs (see above), and before long a security guard ordered me to stop (not “asked nicely”, ordered). When I asked why, he said, “for security reasons.” In the postmodern city, secrecy and privacy are essential (hence all the mirrored surfaces). The new regime of 1980s corporate spaces watch us via a range of surveillance devices, including prominent guards and cameras, in what Mike Davis referred to as the “militarization of urban space” (see “Fortress Los Angeles: the Militarization of Urban Space” in Sorkin, Michael, ed., Variations on a Theme Park, New York: Hill and Wang). This has no doubt intensified in American cities since 2001.

Downtown Dallas parking garages

Beyond the downtown area, the clipped-lawn suburbs, shopping malls and developer’s historical fancies represent on the one hand an escape from, but on the other a mirroring of, downtown’s corporate spaces. The Texan emphasis on individual liberties seems to have morphed into paranoia, exemplified by the huge (militarized) SUVs and pickup trucks driving down the freeways from self-contained corporate environments to the suburbs. Not surprisingly, Texas is a popular state for building gated communities.

Edward Larabee Barnes, Dallas Museum of Art, 1983

While there may be a complete absence of street culture, Dallas and its neighbor, Fort Worth, have an abundance of art galleries filled with acknowledged “masterpieces”. Yet even these cultural sites seem very Texan in conception and presentation. Edward Larabee Barnes’ Dallas Museum of Modern Art (1983) is similar to its corporate neighbours: self-contained and monumental, its mute stone walls shut out the surrounding city. Within, its patrons’ desire for immortality is taken to a bizarre extreme with the recreation of the French Riviera villa of Wendy and Emery Reves (she was a Texan model in the 1940s) as a home for their collection of decorative arts and paintings. Fort Worth’s trilogy of museums, the Amon Carter, the Kimbell and the Modern, stand in a row outside the downtown area of Fort Worth, accessible only by automobile and disconnected from any other signs of life. Museums here seem to function as badges of sophistication, an acknowledgement that there is something here beyond money. However, the absence of local culture in all of these museums suggest otherwise – “culture” is something that is imported (even the curatorial frameworks have been imported, with the Kimbell functioning as a miniature Met and the Modern as a miniature MoMA. The Amon Carter, at least with its “cowboy” art theme, seems original in this context).

SOM, Chase Tower, 1987

In the postmodern city, images are all important – much of the soap opera Dallas was filmed in Hollywood and David Jacobs, who wrote the original concept, apparently knew little about the real Texas. The distinction of the Dallas skyline, meanwhile, was used prominently in the soap, creating a symbolic economy of the city based on both the soap’s image-world and downtown’s corporate architecture. Not coincidently, the finance capitalism fuelling the downtown rebuilding (and re-branding) in the 1980s was similarly built increasingly on image and intangibles (stocks, software, insurance certificates, and the like). However, the reality of the resulting physical city is significantly different from its appealing image. Controlled spaces of exclusion and paranoia, the absence of diverse public spaces, and little of the vitality usually associated with a city suggest a fundamentally flawed urban environment. Freedom means little without the ability to use it in absolute space and time: participatory democracy needs public spaces; communities need to be represented in real spaces in which they can remain vibrant. Such spaces are conspicuously absent in downtown Dallas. Thinking back to Nicolae Ceausescu and the tale of the soap opera that ended the Cold War: if only Ceausescu had shown the Romanian people the real Dallas rather than the soap opera, they may have recognised the monumental, alienating scale, and the sterile, solemn spaces of exclusion and paranoia. He might still be in power today.

Store sign, downtown Dallas, February 2008