ever since i found out about braddock it has seemed a place of unbelievable fiction. i've never been to the bourough in pennsylvania, but i buy into the story it tells unabashedly. who wouldn't root for a decaying ghost town with a young hip mayor that has the zip code tatooed on his forearm and a plan for revitalization centered around art? the story of braddock is unreal. when the steel industry collapsed in the 1980's, 90 percent of the population left. (right around the time of the crack cocaine epidemic.) now, one of it's greatest assets is the very fact that it has lost so much. (detroit anyone?) or, moreover, the fact that the people who have stayed are so stubburnly unwilling to write it off. the new mayor makes no guarantees that it will be easy, or a success. instead, its power is in becoming a "laboratory for solutions to all these maladies starting to knowck on the door of every community." any city has something to learn from the braddock case study.
today braddock became a little more real. one of the artists it boasts of attracting with its abundance of cheap space visited mica, josh tonies. according to the lecture description, "his current work explores transient structures ...the non space, a theoretical space that is not connected to history or identity. his landscapes are reflexive to patterns found in the systems of our mental environment. his work responds to excessive information and excessive space." artist statement ambiguity aside, i was intregued. josh showed us one video in paticular that i thought totally rocked, and talked about things happening in braddock like transformazium and the matchwood festival (aka matt wellin's undercover summer life).
anthropogenic prospects from Joshua Tonies on Vimeo.
i don't know. it was nice to see something different.
1 comment:
yeah braddock is awesome. it's such a weird area to visit though, and it really still doesn't know what it wants to be. I mean, the mayor is really boasting the whole artist thing, but it hasn't fully moved in that direction yet.
I'm sad I missed that talk, i was en-route from pgh to here though. glad to hear it was good.
braddock was actually the focus of my paper last semester in urbanism, and im still debating it for my senior thesis (other than historic preservation obv.)
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