We're off to see the Wizard

Victor Fleming’s 1939 film the Wizard of Oz is a dark, disturbing and downright dystopian fantasy. The plot unfolds around the hopelessly naive daughter of a Midwestern farmer. After trudging through the first  few dreary scenes, a cataclysmic event results in the manslaughter of a citizen from a nation entirely foreign to her (for a start everything is now in colour, critically for us). She is manipulated into staging political revolution and destabilising an entire region over a pair of shoes, before being summarily dismissed back home.  Of course ultimately it could all be the ravings of a mentally ill girl in 1930s Kansas but that would make the whole thing even more horrific and in poor taste, surely no-one would ever actually suggest that... Return to Oz.

Drone Strikes are getting a little silly nowadays

As much fun as it is re-evaluating the messages of films in light of contemporary events, the ham-fisted and wholesale destruction of a standing social order before merrily absconding from any sense of responsibility, resulting in sequel even grimmer and more fucked up than before, is entirely tangential to the thrust of this post. What interests me is the possibility of alluding to a particular urban condition by using popular and evocative imagery. By developing a visual shorthand recognisable to anyone, the intention is to create polemical statements about architecture and the city that can be assessed, appropriated or rejected by near enough anyone.

I’ll explain this through an example; the Emerald City. Dorothy’s first main task is to seek out the assistance of the titular Wizard of Oz, who resides in the Emerald City. The city itself is portrayed as a glistening cluster of jagged crystals. Framed against the sky it sparkles and glimmers with promise. However things are not exactly as they seem, the city has a staged look that doesn’t derive from filmmaking’s limitations in the 1939. There is a brittleness to it all that is underlined by their visit to the Wizard. Full of bombast, pomp and self importance the Emerald City’s great man seems to have been particularly influential on a young Donald Trump. The revelation that he is a fraud is where things get pertinent for us. Throughout the film the Emerald City has evoked associations with capitalist city, especially as glass and steel construction is normative in the ‘development’ of city centres. At first it is utopian, an image of salvation after the perilous road. However the glamour and the gloss soon give way to a seriously hostile environment, ubiquitous in character and threatening in scale (complete with obnoxious security personnel). Ultimately we learn it’s all a sham, concocted by small men with a big need to impress their importance upon everyone else.

Mies van der Rohe and Robert Venturi, totally comfortable theoretical bedfellows

By riffing on Venturi’s research into signage and image (Learning from Las Vegas) and taking visual inspiration from Mies van der Rohe’s Friedrichstrasse tower proposal (made all the more pertinent because it wasn’t actually built). This series of images explores a descent into a real life ‘Emerald City’ growing up around the industrial ruins around Nine Elms in London. Whilst the photographs are site specific, these islands of corporate greed are becoming evermore ubiquitous within cities across the globe, the Emerald City is therefore a franchise. A morphology that is emerging in the city and colonising any area it can rapaciously and without any thought to quality of place. The images were initially conceived as part of a site study in the area, where I was quite taken with the stark contrast between the gritty existing fabric and the glass protuberances being constructed. Given that the prevailing buyer of these ludicrously expensive properties are non resident non domiciles, the shadowy and insidious nature hidden behind a glittering facade of glass seems especially aligned with image of the creepily perfect citadel in the Wizard of Oz and its corrupted machinations within.