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#YOU WOULD THINK ID FIGURE IT OUT BUT IF I HAVE FRAGMENTS OR ALTERS THEY SURE ARE SOME DODGY MFS
burialrite · 3 years
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for the millionth time in my life i am questioning if i have osdd
#YOU WOULD THINK ID FIGURE IT OUT BUT IF I HAVE FRAGMENTS OR ALTERS THEY SURE ARE SOME DODGY MFS#like. I've been struggling with this since at least my sophomore year of high school#and the intense dissociative issues have come and gone but there's always been a baseline for it#i experience periods of distinct dissociation and depersonalization in patterns that can sometimes be recognized as an alter#i am so terrified of encroaching on this community space bc i am terrified im faking this but i havent. told anyone.#this is basically me telling everyone but it's not bc im a coward about it#i just wish i had a name for what happens when i go nonverbal and feel dave hovering at the back or hear jake talking to me its overwhelmin#i feel names and memories pop into my head that arent recognizable to me#and i dream increasingly about the same world and the same people and see friends ive never met there but i know and love them#i worry that its nothing. i worry that this is just me seeking attention and that im just wrong about it and dont know myself or my feeling#maybe thats true but i so strongly want to understand what may be happening its worth it to ask i guess#btw disclaimer this is just a vent the emotions/sentiments i express here are only directed toward myself#i would be so much more certain about this if the events were closer together#but i think i spend so much time masking that it's ingrained into my outward persona now and i couldnt relax if i wanted to#which makes it a lot harder to relax enough to think about it and feel out the dissociation instead of shutting myself down#anyway dave has been around for a long time along with marie#i started hearing marty's name repeated in my head maybe 4 months ago? it took me til last week to hear it correctly tho#jake said hi a few nights ago#again this is so candid i am probably going to delete this#i just wanted to get it off my chest#mumblings#another small note i only experience mild dissociative amnesia which leads me to believe it's not full DID#especially bc i didnt experience repeated consistent trauma until around 8-10 yrs old which makes it much less likely#ok bye for real
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ilsansbest · 6 years
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two weeks
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pairing: jungkook x reader genre: m, slight angst warnings: no warnings apply word count: 4.9k 
inspired by this song
For the nth time in the span of ten months, you had once found yourself sitting on your couch comforting a heartbroken Jungkook. He was a rather sensitive guy, albeit rarely showcasing it. Amongst the things you had learned about him well, that you knew best. So, it came as no surprise when he stood in front of your door, face puffy.
See, a few months back, Jungkook met a girl whom he sworn he was head over heels for. The first couple of months rolled quite smoothly as they were in their ‘honeymoon’ phase of their relationship, practically joined to the hip, exploring and making new memories of each other. Ten months later, almost a year into the relationship, things appeared to become rather bleak.
The amount of times he’d announced to you that he’d break things off yet end up running back to her were countless. Despite you warning him about her toxic behavior, he never seemed to listen as he always went crawling back, like a lost sailor lured in by the bewitching Siren. Maybe Jungkook failed to see her true self through his rose tinted glasses or maybe it was your own jealousy that altered her image to you, or maybe both.
It truly pained you to see her toying with Jungkook’s emotions like that, finding ways to manipulate everything to his disadvantage. However, all times you tried to help him it backfired and turned into full fledged fights, which only tainted your friendship.
You ran a soothing hand up and down his back while he cried softly with his head buried into his palms. The sight of him like this only fueled the anger inside you and you were this close to driving over to her place and teach her a lesson, but you had dignity and foremost you didn’t want to hurt Jungkook more by doing such a reckless thing.
“She said she wanted a break,” Jungkook finally looked up at you with tear stained cheeks. “That means she’s breaking up with me in girl vocabulary, right?” His voice strained.
“Jungkook...” you trailed off, unsure of what to say since it most likely meant that. “It’s not always like that...” Came your words of reassurance.
“It is!” Jungkook cried and flung himself back on the cushions on your couch, blankly staring at the big round light fixture that dangled from the ceiling of your small living room.
Your palms grew sweaty, chest heavy at what you prepared yourself to tell him. “You know,” you paused to lick your lips, the corners of your mouth growing dry. “Maybe it’s for the best, Jungkook.” You raised your eyebrows and gave his knee a light squeeze.
“No, you know how much I love her.” Jungkook shot you an incredulous look.
He loved her and that hurt.
It hurt because that would never be you, he could never look at you like you were the center of his world or better yet, his entire world. Although you hated the way his eyes lit up whenever he spoke to you about her, you hated yourself more for feeling bitter over his happiness. But he could never know, by any means.
“Maybe she’ll come back around.” You said through bitterly through gritted teeth, you yourself knowing it was a big fat lie. Even if she did, it wouldn’t last long anyway.
“She will. She always does.” Jungkook smiled sadly, the words feeling bittersweet even on his mouth.
Thick silence fell upon you. You hugged one leg closer to you bringing it up and resting your chin on your knee, eyes trained on Jungkook’s form.
“Do you want hot wings?” Your query broke the prolonged silence that was slowly making you uncomfortable.
Upon hearing your question, Jungkook’s head turned towards you and the ghost of a smile made its way on his lips at the mention of his favorite choice of takeout. “Only if there’s ice cream for dessert.” He said.
You smiled at how easy the boy was to please. “A whole tube of it.”
Two weeks later, Jungkook had received a phone call from her. He, of course, found his way back to her without any second thoughts, only for him to break things off two weeks later.
It was him who decided they needed a break this time, her presence being too overbearing and suffocating for him to handle any longer. Although it was his decision it didn’t mean that he didn’t long for her or check his phone every second in case she called. She never did though, and you were the one trying to help Jungkook mend his broken heart. It just seemed that on his part, he wasn’t as willing to move on. That was evident because whenever she decided to call he would go running back even if in most cases it was just for a quick fuck.
Now, it had been almost another two weeks since they’ve been apart. You didn’t know how you’d ended up there but you found yourself laying on his couch, his body pressed against yours. Normally, you wouldn’t have thought much of the situation, it being a normal occurrence in your friendship, since there were no feelings in between. At least on Junkook’s part.
Jungkook hugged you closer against his front and your cold sweat broke over you. His chest vibrated softly against your back when he hummed, his face buried deep in your hair.
“You smell nice.” He mumbled as he inhaled deeply, taking in the sweet fragrance of your strawberry shampoo.
You bit your lip when you felt the tip of his nose and lips grazing the nape of your neck, an array of goosebumps forming at the mere touch. “I always smell like that, what do you mean?” You let out a nervous chuckle.
“I know you do, and I like it.” He hummed and pressed a chaste kiss against your neck.
“Jungkook, what are you doing?” Your voice came out light and breathy, his soft lips adding fuel to the fire building up inside of you.
He slid from behind you to hover above you instead, his hair falling in front of his big doe eyes peering down on you.
“Heck, even I don’t know.” He shook his head exasperated. It was obvious that a lot was going on in his head that moment, judging by the way his jaw tightened.
“I want to kiss you.” Jungkook spoke.
“What?” You blurted our awestruck by his statement.
He didn’t answer though and dipped his head down in lieu, meeting your lips in a shy and hesitant kiss.
In the fragment of a second yours reacted immediately against his and reciprocated his kiss more urgently. It all felt so surreal, Jungkook kissing you out of the blue, it had your mind all hazy.
He couldn’t contain the sigh that slipped his throat as he continued to kiss you with the same ardor you were. The moment his tongue found its way into your mouth, moans slipped out both of your lips. The kiss grew more urgent and fervent, teeth carelessly clashing as you practically devoured each other.
Jungkook hissed when he felt your pelvis brush against crotch and bit your bottom lip, tugging it lightly. Enjoying the little sounds you elicited from him you repeated your action, lifting your hips upwards to meet his, to which Jungkook let out a light curse.
You felt your chest tightening feeling the air within your lungs diminish as seconds passed by and your lips still remained sealed in a kiss. Pushing your head to the side, you broke off the kiss but Jungkook remained unbothered and let his lips trail towards the skin of your sensitive neck. Your fingertips dug into the taut muscles of his upper back as his teeth grazed the side of your neck.
A minute passed like this, hot kisses exchanged amidst heavy breathing and the muffled background noise of an indie cult movie you had playing on the tv. Much you your dismay, you were forced to pull away by the persistent ringing of his phone.
Jungkook muttered an apology against your lips, pulling away and reaching out for his phone. Upon checking the caller’s ID his eyes widened and he quickly fumbled with the device on his phone before sliding a shaky finger across the screen and accepting the call.
“Baby, hey.” He greeted breathlessly and your heart dropped to your stomach in an instant at the word of endearment. It was her.
Your eyes followed his figure as he paced around, a huge grin on his face while he conversed. Tears welled up in your eyes and you gnawed on your lower lip, your throat beginning to throb as you strained to hold back the tears that threatened to spill. You had never felt more stupid and naïve before, reprimanding yourself at how easily you let your guard down.
Jungkook came back minutes later, a troubled frown etched on his face.
“Did you guys make up?”
“I don’t know just yet, I’m confused. But we’re going out tomorrow.” He replied, the corners of his mouth tugging upwards a little at the thought of spending time with her.
“I thought you guys were over for good...” you couldn’t help but comment, feeling the jealousy bubbling in the pit of your stomach.
“It’s not that easy, you know that.” Jungkook said, to which you scoffed as a response.
“This has been going on for months, she treats you like pure shit, Jungkook!” You snapped, the tone of your voice shocking the both of you. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to come off like this,” came your quick apology. “I just hate seeing you like this, I know you’re not fully happy.”
“But I’m not happy when I’m not with her.”
“You are, when you’re with me.” You retorted quietly and you felt so small and vulnerable then, curled up in the corner of his couch.
“I’m going home.” You announced, dashing out of the living room towards his room to get your backpack.
Jungkook yelled at you from the same spot on his couch. “But I thought you were staying over!”
“I was,” you came out of the room, zipping your puffer jacket. “But I think I’m coming down with something so I’m not feeling well.”
“I can make you some chicken soup.” Jungkook looked at you with pained eyes.
“No, it’s okay. I don’t want you to catch something. Goodnight, Guk.” You waved at him before you exited his apartment hurriedly.
If there ever was one thing that could sum you up perfectly was, making bad choices.
So here you were, making the worst one of them all. However, every bit of rational thought evaded your mind near Jungkook’s presence, yet alone straddling his thighs as you kissed.
“Fuck, I want you so bad. So, so fucking bad.” Jungkook groaned in your mouth as he pushed your hips down and pressed your clothed core against him.
Disappointed in the way your body reacted, you cursed internally at the butterflies that frolicked in your stomach. It wasn’t the first time you had found yourself on him and it wasn’t the first time you’d heard this words slip from his mouth. However, in the end you always felt like a fool when he left you each time she tried to lure him in.
“Do you, really?” You doubted the sincerity of his words.
Jungkook casted a confused look your way. “Yeah.”
“Then, this,” you motioned between the two of you. “When will this stop?”
“What do you mean? I thought you liked me too?”
You gave him an incredulous look. “Too?!” You scoffed. “How can I believe that when you want me only when she’s done toying with you. Are you, perhaps, using me to get over her?”
“No, no.” He shook his head fervently and his hands cupped the sides of your face, his thumbs softly caressing the apples of your cheeks. “I’ve liked you for a long time, it’s just-“ Jungkook paused to weave his fingers through his hair, clearly torn and distraught over his confused emotions.
“I don’t know what to do.”
With an angry huff, you climbed off of him and grabbed your back from the nearby armchair.
“Y/N, where are you going?”
“Home, where else.” You replied, avoiding his gaze. You were at the door know, hastily tying your shoelaces, dying to get out of his apartment.
“Please stay with me.” His plea came out strained and needy.
“Not until you figure out your emotions. Until then, I’m sparing myself the unnecessary pain.” You said but only you knew well enough that was a lie. Being away from Jungkook only hurt more, the thoughts and evil voice in your head eating away at you, draining you.
Two weeks had passed when Jungkook found himself banging on your door late at night. He felt ashamed of going back and forth between her and you, not being able to fully cut himself off of her. Despite you constantly being on his mind, part of him still dreamt and thought of her.
“Jungkook, what are you doing here it’s like 11:30.” You said, instead of greeting him properly. You were clad in your pajamas and you were getting ready to call it a day, having to wake up early for an 8am class the following day.
“I just missed you.” He said to which you only sighed as a response. “Are you going to let me in?” He shuffled on the threshold.
“Come in.” You stepped aside and closed the door behind him, completely ignoring his comment and how it almost made you fling yourself at him.
“So, wh-“ Your question was cut off midway by his lips pressed on yours.
“Fuck, I missed this.” Jungkook mumbled and cupped your cheeks in a sweet manner that had your knees bucking. You gripped at his toned chest for support and felt the rapid beating of his heart against your fist.
“Jungkook,” you managed to say in between kisses, although it came out as more of a moan. “Why are you suddenly being like this?” You questioned.
Jungkook stopped to look at you, breathing heavily. “I told you I missed you.”
“Have you talked to her?” You dodged his comment and he did the same to the question pointed at him.
You couldn’t help but scoff. “I’m not surprised.”
“Y/N...”
“Do you know how much it hurts me? When will you realize that she’s no good for you? I can’t go on like this knowing that you’re still not over her.”
“Y/N...” He called your name again.
“Will you let me show you just how much I want you?”
“Yes, please.” Jungkook pleaded with his forehead against yours, his eyes trained on your lips.
“Only if you truly want this Jungkook.” You whispered, your breath fanning over his lips.
“Kiss me. Just, fucking kiss me.” He demanded softly and he needn’t repeat himself twice, your lips having already found their way on his.
“God,” he moaned into your mouth. “You don’t know just how much I’ve missed this,” he trailed off as he cupped your cheeks. “Just how much I’ve missed you.” He mumbled against your lips.
Out of habit, you blindly led him to your bedroom while still preoccupied in the heated exchange of your kiss. His wet tongue lapped against yours in a sloppy and hungry manner and you kissed back with fervor, tugging on his white t-shirt in an attempt to bring his body closer to yours. The warmth radiating off his body combined with the muskiness of his cologne was enough to drive you insane.
Before you realized, the back of your knees buckled the moment they hit the edge of your bed, toppling over on the mattress with Jungkook’s weight on top of you.
He hovered above you hoisting himself up on his elbows and stared deeply into your eyes, his own dark and lust filled, pupils dilated. Both of you had stopped doing anything, yet neither of you moved to connect your lips again, too engrossed in your impromptu staring contest.
“Why’d you stop?” Your query came out in a soft mumble.
“I just want to savor this moment.” He mumbled back, breaking eye contact to look away in embarrassment at how disgustingly cheesy he was being all of a sudden.
“Huh, what’s this?” You questioned, not expecting his reply. “What, is this our last time meeting?” You hesitantly asked and your stomach churned at the possibility of having to break this off after that, after a night of shared intimacy and passion.
“No,” He shook his head, his already big eyes widening even more probably thinking how incredulous you sounded that moment. “At least I hope not.”
“Just,” You paused, biting your lower lip. “Let’s not talk about this now.” You pleaded. As much as you wanted a definite answer on where you stood the heat of the moment burned got like a scorching bush fire and only Jungkook could put it out.
And that he proceeded to do, although to you it only felt as if he made matters worse leaving scorching kisses on the expanse of and littering your neck with lovebites. Breathless whimpers that slipped from your mouth sounded more alike to a soft melody to Jungkook’s ears and that reeled him on the even more.
His strong hands found your hips and brought them against his, the hard of his erection rubbing against your clothed core. Simultaneous moans were exhaled into each other’s mouths in between hungry kisses and you felt your juices seep through your underwear, due to the pent up sexual tension, almost soaking your sweatpants.
You let out a desperate whine the moment his hand found its way on your center and began to palm you through your layers of clothes. “God, I want you to take me now, so bad.”
“Patience is a virtue, baby, you should know that.” Jungkook chastised your eagerness and kept on teasing you with his palm pressed firmly against your pussy but not really moving to cause the friction you craved.
“Fuck, I hate you.” You grumbled rather out of breath, to which he only chuckled and thought he should spare you by slightly rubbing his palm against your throbbing core.
“What about now?” He whispered in your ear and slipped his hand inside your pants, nimble fingers immediately working on your aching nub through the soaked cotton fabric of your underwear. “Ah, fuck,” Jungkook cursed in surprise at just how wet you had become already, the fact only making his cock strain against his skin tight jeans. “You’re completely soaked.” He muttered.
“That’s why you should hurry up because I think I’m gonna cum in any second.” You huffed, eyes rolling back as the pads of his forefinger and middle finger pressed steady circles against your clit, sending shocking waves in the pit of your stomach, pulling at the coil in your abdomen that was about to snap any second.
“I haven’t even properly had my way with you yet.” Jungkook tutted at you. Here you were, laying on the mattress of your bed, a writhing mess beneath him, entirely at his mercy.
Meanwhile, his fingers seemed to be unfazed by your urgent pleas as they picked up their pace and intensity ever so slightly against you, eliciting broken moans from you. His fingers neglected your nub only to latch around the waistband of your underwear and push them down your hips and thighs, finally exposing you fully to him.
A string of curses left Jungkook’s lips at the sight of your glistening pussy in full display in front of him. He almost let out animalistic growl, only thinking of practically devouring your pussy and have you quaking uncontrollably. So that he did.
He lowered his head on you, his fringe tickling your sensitive skin, and burrowed his face into your slick folds. The round tip of his nose brushed against your clit and sent weak waves of pleasure coursing through your whole body while his mouth and tongue were occupied with your fold and your entrance. Jungkook would suck each fold, never once breaking eye contact as he did so and then proceed to dip the tip of his tongue in your entrance, collecting the bit of your essence dripping out of you.
The sounds he made were lewd, lascivious but that moment it was like music to your ears. A slight whimper left your lips as you couldn’t hide your disappointed at the loss of contact when he removed his head. He looked up at you and gave you a toothy grin that under any other circumstances would’ve granted him a sweet kiss and maybe a squish of the cheeks but now, your mind was clouded; mainly focusing on his glistening lips and chin laced with your juices.
“You taste so fucking good.” The simple praise making you feel as if on cloud nine. He didn’t wait for any response, knowing that he would most likely only get out an incoherent mess of a sentence out of you so he focused on the task at hand, literally. His hand ghosted ever so closely on your pussy, the pads of his fingers brushing against your folds before dipping slightly inside your entrance.
The minuscule touch sent your mind into overdrive and it was way too much when Jungkook slid two fingers in. Both of you cursed at the same time, each for their own reasons. You because of how good it felt and him because of how wet yet how tight your pussy was, it was unfathomable.
“Can’t wait to be inside of you.” He croaked out, pumping in and out in a steady pace and occasionally curling the tips of his fingers to meet your spot that felt as if a string was pulled each time he pressed against it.
“Ju- ah fuck, just do it alread-“ You let out a moan as your spot was met, eyes screwing shut and fingernails raking down his muscled back.
Normally, Jungkook would’ve continued his own work without paying any heed to any requests, he loved his foreplay a little too much. But seeing you such a needy mess beneath him, he could only but succumb to your desires and please you how you wanted and when you wanted.
“If you insist.” At that, Jungkook hastily wriggled out of his jeans and cursed at himself for not choosing something more loose fitted; it was a hassle. However, soon enough he succeeded and his black boxers followed suit, leaving him stark naked from his waist down. Feeling weirdly uncomfortable only wearing his hoodie, he removed that too and you took every little detail of him in. From the way his hair was slightly messy as a result of you repeatedly combing through it, to the mole dotting his neck, to his toned abdomen and even to the little happy trail, leading to his erect member.
He noticed your eyes trained on his cock and moved his hand down to give himself a few good pumps, smirking at the way your thighs clenched at the sight of him getting off in front of you. Approaching the bed, he kneeled and moved up to straddle each side of your thighs.
You bit your lip as you felt his tip on your entrance, slowly easing in. Sighs left both of your lips the moment he was fully buried to the hilt inside of you. You felt so full, your walls desperately clenching around his length.
“Fuck, baby,” Jungkook moaned once he began gyrating his hips. “You’re so fucking tight. So, so fucking tight.” He kicked his head back and another moan ripped through his throat.
Unlike his, your moans came out more of as high pitched whimpers, feeling overwhelmed by it all. Your eyes rolled back in pleasure and you desperately tried to keep them trained on him, wanting to look at him as he fucked you into oblivion, his hips having picked up a quicker pace.
The almost pornographic sounds of skin on skin, moans and deep breathing permeated the small bedroom. One of Jungkook’s hands gripped tightly on your hip, keeping you still as he rutted his his against you, while the other one moved beneath your shirt and lifting it up to reveal your breasts, hardened nipples in their full glory.
Wasting no time, he ducked and latched his lips around the nub, a moan ebbing out of your parted lips while his tongue worked wonders on your nipple. He alternated from licking, biting, sucking and pinching with his fingers and that was enough to have you chanting out his name like a mantra.
“Fuck! Jungkook-“ You screamed and bit into his shoulder when his hips picked up a relentless pace against yours. “Keep fucking me like this, please!” You cried out and latched onto his shoulders. Your fingers dug deep into his golden skin, engraving tiny crescents on it above a thin layer of sweat that had formed.
“Fuck, I’m gonna cum if you keep going like this.” You groaned and moved your hand down to your clit, to chase out your release. Jungkook felt your hand between your bodies and removed it with his thumb, that moved rapid circles on your clit, pink and throbbing with arousal.
A string of curses followed by his name left your lips and Jungkook felt his dick twitch at the sound of it. Never had his name sounded so sweet and filthy at the same time coming from someone’s lips.
“I want you to scream my name for me, baby.” Jungkook instructed softly, nibbling on your earlobe. “Can you do that for me, princess?” He asked in a sweet tone and you swore that for a moment you came right then upon hearing the word of endearment.
“Yes, Jungkook! You fuck me so good!” You screamed with all the strength you could muster and you weren’t surprised your neighbor didn’t bang on your door to keep it down, not that you would listen anyway.
That little praise was enough to boost Jungkook’s ego. He shuffled and hooked both of your legs over his shoulders, the new angle hitting a deeper spot that with just a few more rough thrusts was enough to topple you over the edge. There was no built up, it was rather a sudden tidal wave washing over you, complete euphoria taking over you whole. Jungkook slowed down the moment your high came, riding out your climax.
Once you stopped shaking beneath him, he thought of it as an opportunity to regain his fast pace, not caring about how overstimulated you were and the fact that you could come again in any second.
“Fuck, I’m so close, baby.” Jungkook growled, the sound almost animalistic.
“Come for me, please.” You begged, holding onto the nape of his neck.
Jungkook gave about another good few thrusts before you felt his hips getting sloppy against yours which only signaled he was about to climax; his steady pace was long gone.
“I-I’m com-“ Jungkook stuttered, feeling as if he was about to to spill inside of you any moment and pulled out.
Your legs were now loosely wrapped around his slim waist and watched him carefully as he gave himself a few good pumps before stilling in his hand, his load shooting out thick and all over your exposed chest and stomach.
Jungkook came in quiet whimpers, hand pumping himself even after he had come and had become growing soft.
The room fell silent again, the only sound was heavy panting that soon was dying down.
“Why don’t we get you cleaned up?” He asked and made his way into your bathroom, retrieving some wet wipes to wipe you clean.
“Jungkook?”
“Yes, baby?” He responded and even though it felt like the nth time him calling you that, you couldn’t help but feel your heart swell at how beautiful and just how right it sounded coming from him.
“What are we?” You asked in a small voice that even you yourself were surprised he heard.
“Whatever you want us to be. What to do you want us to be?”
“If only there wasn’t someone in the middle, things would’ve been way easier.” You mumbled, clearly avoiding his question.
“Baby, consider it over. I’m with you now and I don’t want anyone else but you. Trust me.” A reassuring hand stroked your hair softly, slowly lulling you to sleep.
“But, for now, rest.” He instructed softly and laid down beside you, hugging you close, so afraid you’d regret everything and end it all. But for that moment he just decided to savor the moment.
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real-did · 7 years
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theres not quite enough space in an ask to fit what i want to write can you please read it here?? (freetexthost(.)com(/)noukpbd1a1) its okay if youre uncomfy with opening the link. theres nothing particularly upsetting but theres about 3 asks worth of text. i just want to know if what im experiencing in anything similar to an actual separate personality, because imvery bad at understanding other peoples definitions of things. thank you if you have any advice at all!
Throwing this under a cut for length!
can you tell me if this is a seperate personailty? a series of intrusive thoughts? an entirely different person? an imaginary enemy? whatever it is, it has interpretable feelings, it comes and goes, and it has a terrible sense of humor. it might be gone now. its definitely not doing anything. i cant feel it. i know what it looks like, what its name is, how to make it come out, how it feels to be it. all it has the ability to do is make me feel like it, and to tell me how it feels about something without words. it cant control me, or its never tried. i know its egotistical, narcissistic, and it wants to intimidate me into accepting it. i used to think it was an ID, something like that. i had no idea what an ID was at the time. i would type and say what it made me feel, and i felt like her when i did but she wasnt in control. every time i considered getting rid of it, it got so angry and felt so strong. eventually i spent ten minutes, or a whole day, (it felt quicker when it was over) completely ignoring it while it screamed inaudible feelings at me. and it seemed to go away. but i know its not gone because whenever i see a picture of it i still get those feelings(its like i can /feel/ it smiling), and i still get angry at people insulting it and it still feel encouraged to let it back into my life.should i let it come back? all it did was make me feel happy, but i dont know if its healthy. i dont think its a thing people will like, its a character thats outside of my experiance, and it obviously isnt a very nice thing, since it indirectly threatened me on multiple occasions. and i still dont know what it is? if its a person or if i gave a set of intrusive thoughts a personality and let it run wild? it seems to be latched onto a particular identity.do you know what this is? your community is the only one i know of with any similar experience. attempts of talking about it to therapists came back with confusion because i couldnt explain. they said it was intrusive thoughts? but it doesnt feel like that. do you have any idea?
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Hey, thank you for trusting me enough to send this. What you’re describing sounds more developed than intrusive thoughts. I can shoot out some ideas but the best thing to do is spend time writing about this and figure out the best way to describe it to a professional. I’m going off a limited amount of information here and can just suggest some ideas. 
My first thought is that you might have projected parts of your personality onto this this character and are using it as a coping method to keep these personality parts separate from you. I’ve noticed quite a few people with BPD/other cluster B personality disorders doing this, and that might not be the case with you, but it’s an idea. I’ve heard experiences like this being described as like a “dark side,” and this coping method can be unconscious or conscious. If this is the case, then you’ve unconsciously developed a fragment, and I believe the best course of action would be to work with a therapist to treat and kind of re-absorb this fragment. 
It could be an alter. From what you’ve described, this doesn’t meet the criteria for DID/OSDD yet, but a lot of people don’t know they have DID until later in life. Quite a few people who later go on to have DID/OSDD and weren’t aware of it earlier in life have odd experiences like yours. 
There’s a chance it’s more of a spiritual thing, rather than a psychiatric thing, but that’s not my area of expertise. You could do research into tulpas and that sort of thing if you’d like. 
The decision on whether or not to let it back into your life is yours to make, I can’t really advise you either way, but I want you to be safe and happy. Whatever makes you safe and happy is a good choice. What I recommend doing is writing about these experiences and reading them/showing them to a therapist. Look into BPD if you can, look into dissociative disorders, and if you feel as though your experiences aren’t disordered (it sounds as though they are, but these are just ideas), look into alternative explanations. 
I’m here for you if you have questions. 
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apsbicepstraining · 6 years
Text
A ‘radical alternative’: how one being changed the insight of Los Angeles
In the 1960 s, British architectural pundit Reyner Banham swore his love for the city that his fellow intellectuals hated. What Banham wrote about Los Angeles redefined how “the worlds” perceived it but what would he think of LA today?
Now I know subjective rulings can vary, the correspondent Adam Raphael wrote in the Guardian in 1968, but personally I reckon LA as the noisiest, the smelliest, “the worlds largest” awkward and most uncivilised major metropolitan in the United States. In short, a smelling sewer …
Three years later, Raphaels texts appeared in reproduce again as an epigraph of Reyner Banhams Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies “the worlds largest” exuberantly pro-Los Angeles book further written. Ever since booklet, it has shown up on directories of great volumes about modern metropolis even those is drawing up by people who believe Los Angeles anything but a great American city.
Somehow, this volume that drew so much of its initial publicity with offend appreciate( In Praise (!) of Los Angeles, sneered the New York Times reviews headline) has kept its relevant through the activities of the decade, such that newly arrived Angelenos still read it to familiarize themselves. But what can it educate us about the Los Angeles of today?
An architectural historian a decade into his busines where reference is firstly saw, Banham knew full-well that his fellow academics detested Los Angeles. How and why he himself came so avidly to appreciate it constitutes the core question of his work on the city, which culminated in this slim volume.
The many who were ready to cast doubt on the value of business enterprises, he reflected in its final chapter, included a discriminated Italian architect and his wife who, on was found that I was writing this notebook, disbelieved that anyone who cared for architecture could lower himself to such research projects and walked away without a word further.
The project began when Banham drew his shaggy beard and wonky teeth to Los Angeles and declared that he enjoyed the city with a rage, in the words of novelist and Bradford-born Los Angeles expat Richard Rayner. Learning at the University of Southern California, who introduced him up in the Greene friends architecturally venerated Gamble House in Pasadena, Banham had a privileged base from which to investigate. But what “hes been gone” looking for, and the mode he wrote about what “hes seen” and felt, redefined the method the academic nature and then the wider world perceived the city.
Reyner Banham with his shaggy beard and wonky teeth in 1968. Photograph: Peter Johns for the Guardian
Not that he proclaimed his love right there on the tarmac at LAX. Banham initially determined the city incomprehensible a reply said that he shared many critics, wrote Nigel Whiteley in the study Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future.
Banham first attempted to publicly explain this cutting-edge metropolis, saturated across its tremendous cavity with electronic devices, synthetic chemicals and televisions, in four 1968 BBC radio talks. He told of how he came to tractions with LAs embodiment of the experimental: its experimental figure and infrastructure, the combinations of cultures it altered, and the experimental lifestyles to which it gave rise.
But even an appreciator like Banham had his qualms with research results. In Los Angeles you tend to go to a particular region to do a particular act, to another to do another thing, and finally a long way back to your home, and youve done 100 miles in the working day, he grumbled in the third largest talk. The distances and the trust on mechanical transportation leave no room for accident even for happy accidents. You schedule the day in advance, program your activities, and forgo those random meetings with acquaintances and strangers that are traditionally one of the reinforces of city life.
Nevertheless, to Banham this un-city-like municipality contained out a predict: The unique ethic of Los Angeles what stimulates, intrigues and sometimes repels me is the fact that it gives radical alternatives to almost every urban abstraction in unquestioned currency.
In his subsequent landmark book, Banham listed Los Angeles deviations from conventional urbanism, as well as from all the rules for civilised living as they have been understood by the pundits of modernity, with obvious gratify. It seemed to legitimise a representation “youve already”, in a 1959 essay, recommends to oust the old-fashioned perception of a single dense core surrounded by a wall.
Civilised living in suburban LA. Image: University of Southern California/ Corbis via Getty Images
Banham foresaw the city as scrambled egg, its eggshell break-dance open, its business yolk mixed with its domestic lily-white, and everything spread across the landscape, its evenness agitated only by occasional specialised sub-centres. A tourist to Los Angeles today might hear the city explained in just the same room: as a system of nodes, a constellation of metropolitan villages, training exercises in postmodern polycentrism.
Banham placed another digit in the eye of diehards who insisted that a city should have just one strong centre with his short section A Note on Downtown, which opens with the words, … because that is all downtown Los Angeles deserves.
From its fetishised designs such as the Bradbury Building and Cathedral of Saint Vibiana to its brand new place towers in their standard livery of dark glass and sword, Banham wrote that everything accepts as an unintegrated fragment in a downtown background that began to disintegrate long ago out of sheer irrelevance, as far as one can see.
The notebooks contrarianism reflects the contrarianism of Los Angeles itself, which, insofar as it performs the functions of a great city, to its implementation of length, cosmopolitan form, inventive vigour, international influence, distinctive way of life, and corporate temperament[ demonstrates that] all the most admired theoreticians of the current century, from the Futurists and Le Corbusier to Jane Jacobs and Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ought to have wrong.
Filled with photographs and sketches, Banhams book on Los Angeles segments its subject up into the four ecologies of its subtitle: the beaches and beach townships of Surfurbia; the Foothills with their ever more elaborated and costly residences; the utilitarian Plains of Id( the only parts of Los Angeles flat enough and boring sufficient to compare with the cities of the Middle West) and the famed, then infamous, freeway system he dubbed Autopia: a single comprehensible place, a coherent cognitive state in which Angelenos waste the two calmest and most worthwhile hours of their daily lives.
The 1893 Bradbury Building in downtown LA was an unintegrated fragment in Banhams eyes. Image: Michele and Tom Grimm/ Alamy
Between assemblies on the citys ecologies, Banham examined the buildings found in them. Populist, stylistically promiscuous, tradition-agnostic and often deliberately impermanent, Los Angeles architecture has, of all the citys parts, drawn distain the longest. There is no reward for aesthetic excellence here , no beating for aesthetic misdemeanour; nothing but a vast planetary detachment, wrote the novelist James M. Cain in 1933.
More than 40 years later, Banham received a stylistic reward of Tacoburger Aztec to Wavy-line Moderne, from Cape Cod to unsupported Jaoul roofs, from Gourmet Mansardic to Polynesian Gabled and even in boundary Modern Architecture.
He discussed at length the LA building known as the dingbat a two-storey walk-up apartment-block … built of wood and stuccoed over, all indistinguishable at the back but inexpensively, elaborately, decorated up-front, decorated with an aspirational reputation such as the Capri or the Starlet.
In defining dingbats as the true symptom of Los Angeles metropolitan id, trying to cope with the unprecedented appearance of residential concentrations too high to be subsumed within the misconceptions of homestead living, Banham diagnosed the center and lingering strain, then as now, between wanting to grow outward and needing to grow upward.
Banham gleaned out the implications of Los Angeles ostensibly disposable builds not by venerating them , nor defaming them, but simply by considering them because they are. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour would propose the same approaching in their own city classic, Memorizing from Las Vegas, publicized the following year: Withholding decision may be used as a tool to obligate later sentence most sensitive. This is a way of draw lessons from everything.
Still, even appreciators of Los Angeles might take issue with this method when Banhams non-judgmental attitude at least toward the esthetics of American commercial culture starts to look like advocacy for bad taste.
The self-absorbed and perfected Watts Towers. Image: Hulton Archive/ Getty Images
Non-appreciators of Los Angeles certainly did. The painter and critic Peter Plagens, columnist of an 11,000 -word excoriation in Artforum magazine entitled The Ecology of Evil, disappeared thus far as to description Banhams book hazardous: The hackers who do shopping mall, Hawaiian restaurants and savings-and-loans, the dried-up civil servant in the discord of roadways, and the legions of showbiz fringies will sleep a little easier and piece a lot harder now that their enterprises have been authenticated. In a more human society where Banhams doctrines would be measured against the subdividers crime of the territory and the cause specks in kids of my own lungs, the author are likely to be held up against a wall and shot.
Uncowed, Banham followed the book by starring in Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles, a 1972 video documentary that followed him through one day in the town that induces rigmarole of history and interrupt all the rules, and stimulated within him a passion that goes beyond gumption or intellect. Stops on the tour included Simon Rodias handmade Watts Towers( a absolutely self-absorbed and perfected shrine) to Los Angeles characteristic fantasy of innocence( prominently celebrated on all the delineates in his volume ); the overgrown divisions of the old-fashioned Pacific Electric Railways rusting runways that once tied the whole immense city together; the decrepit canals and beachside bodybuilding facilities of Venice; and a Sunset Boulevard drive-in burger joint.
There, Banham asked the painter Ed Ruscha, plainspoken and painstaking commentator of American city banality, what public buildings a visitor should appreciate. Ruscha recommended gas stations.
Banham pre-empted objections to Los Angeles metropolitan model by claiming the organize materials very little, having already written that Los Angeles has no urban figure at all in the commonly accepted gumption. Yet whatever it does have, he debated, has caused a fascinating, and sometimes even efficient, prepared of emergent metropolitan phenomena.
Come the day when the smog doom lastly descends, he chronicled over aerial hits of Wilshire Boulevards double sequence of towers and frame-filling communities of separated houses, … when trafficking in human beings grinds to a halting and the private auto is prohibited from the street, quite a lot of craftily situated citizens will be able to switch over to being pedestrians and feel no pain.
Cyclists on Venice Beach … though often of LA is not bike-friendly. Image: Alamy
The end of the car in Los Angeles? Bold paroles for the person who is called Wilshire Boulevard one of the few enormous streets in the world where driving are particularly pleased when you have, like earlier generations of English academics who school themselves Italian in order to read Dante in the original, learned to drive in order to read Los Angeles in the original.
But just as the languages heard on wall street of Los Angeles have proliferated, the language of mobility has changed there, as has much else besides. How legible would Banham, who died in 1988 , now find it?
The smog that theorized bane of the citys postwar decades which he ever downplayed has all but faded. The era of apparently inexhaustible room to pander an preoccupation with single-family residences has given way to one of construction cranes germinating to satisfy the brand-new is asking for high-density horizontal living. They accept not only over a downtown lift miraculously from the dead, but the specialised sub-centres scattered all over greater Los Angeles.
Though the ban on private cars hasnt come yet , no recent development astonishes any Angeleno who was there in the 1970 s more than the citys brand-new rail transportation network, which started to develop virtually 30 times after the end of the Pacific Electric. It grades as such as a success for financing, planning and implementation( at the least by the globally unimpressive American standard) that the rest of the country now ogles to Los Angeles as an example of how to build public transportation and, increasingly, public seat in general.
Readers might scoff at Banham calling the Los Angeles freeway network one of the greater drives of follower but he has demonstrated more of an ability to see beyond it than numerous current spectators of Los Angeles. Even though it is vastly better than any other motorway structure of my acquaintance, he wrote, it is inconceivable to Angelenos that it should not be replaced by an even better plan nearer to the perfection they are always seeking.
Banham felt downtown Los Angeles only deserved a short chapter devote to it. Photo: Alamy
Banham also foresaw the rise of the self-driving vehicle, so often mooted these days as an alternative solution to Los Angeles traffic woes. But cars that drive themselves( as distinct from Baede-kar a then-fantastical expres piloting system dreamed up for Banhams TV doc, that brings an uncanny resemblance to those every American driver uses today) “re coming with” difficulties that Banham also prophesied all those years ago. The marginal gains in economy through automation, he wrote, might be offset by the psychological destitutions caused by destroying the residual illusions of free decision and driving skill.
Under each outwardly celebratory sheet of Banhams book lies the notion of change as Los Angeles merely constant: no matter how excitingly modern the car and the road, their day will come to an end; no matter how comfortably idyllic the detached mansion, it very must fall out of preference, or into impracticality, sooner or later.
Some of these components that reaped Banhams attention have, after their own periods of dishonour, changed fashionable again. Even the humble dingbat has received a lieu in the future of the city, becoming the object of critical analyze and architectural rival.
Banham also accompanied the future of Los Angeles in other unprepossessing builds, especially one striking and elegantly simple-minded stucco casket on La Cienega Boulevard. Its inventor? A particular Frank Gehry, then virtually unknown but now one of the stronger influencers of the constructed surrounding in not only Los Angeles( his current high-profile campaign commits re-making the citys famously dry, concrete-encased river ), but other metropolitans as well. The Toronto-born starchitect became his adopted hometowns architectural emissary only one of the myriad channels in which Los Angeles has influenced the rest of the metropolitan macrocosm.
These eras, the rest of the urban nature also influences Los Angeles. No longer striving for the purposes of the delusions of total exceptionalism that prevailed in Banhams day, it has, with its towers, sets, commons and even bike-share plans, saw steps towards the liveability so is necessary in 21 st-century urbanists. It now even resembles( if faintly) New York, Boston, London, and Paris those exhaustively scheduled , non-experimental municipalities where, Banham lamented, warring pressure group cannot get out of one anothers hair because they are pressed together in a sacred labyrinth of cultural tombstones and real estate values.
In its impressive offer to incorporate older metropolitan excellences and play by the rules of good urban issues, modern Los Angeles neglects the possibility of becoming a similarly sacred labyrinth at its jeopardy. Continuing Banhams Los Angeles: the Architecture of Four Ecologies on its syllabus will hopefully protect against the dreadful fate of losing its rule-breaking experimental urban spirit.
The engineering-trained generator involved Los Angeles as a kind of machine. Though it has come in for a seriously requirement overhaul of its interface in recent years , nobody has already been written a customers manual more engaged in the city on its own terms as Banham did 45 years ago.
Follow Guardian Cities on Twitter and Facebook to join the discussion
The post A ‘radical alternative’: how one being changed the insight of Los Angeles appeared first on apsbicepstraining.com.
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apsbicepstraining · 6 years
Text
A ‘radical alternative’: how one being changed the insight of Los Angeles
In the 1960 s, British architectural pundit Reyner Banham swore his love for the city that his fellow intellectuals hated. What Banham wrote about Los Angeles redefined how “the worlds” perceived it but what would he think of LA today?
Now I know subjective rulings can vary, the correspondent Adam Raphael wrote in the Guardian in 1968, but personally I reckon LA as the noisiest, the smelliest, “the worlds largest” awkward and most uncivilised major metropolitan in the United States. In short, a smelling sewer …
Three years later, Raphaels texts appeared in reproduce again as an epigraph of Reyner Banhams Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies “the worlds largest” exuberantly pro-Los Angeles book further written. Ever since booklet, it has shown up on directories of great volumes about modern metropolis even those is drawing up by people who believe Los Angeles anything but a great American city.
Somehow, this volume that drew so much of its initial publicity with offend appreciate( In Praise (!) of Los Angeles, sneered the New York Times reviews headline) has kept its relevant through the activities of the decade, such that newly arrived Angelenos still read it to familiarize themselves. But what can it educate us about the Los Angeles of today?
An architectural historian a decade into his busines where reference is firstly saw, Banham knew full-well that his fellow academics detested Los Angeles. How and why he himself came so avidly to appreciate it constitutes the core question of his work on the city, which culminated in this slim volume.
The many who were ready to cast doubt on the value of business enterprises, he reflected in its final chapter, included a discriminated Italian architect and his wife who, on was found that I was writing this notebook, disbelieved that anyone who cared for architecture could lower himself to such research projects and walked away without a word further.
The project began when Banham drew his shaggy beard and wonky teeth to Los Angeles and declared that he enjoyed the city with a rage, in the words of novelist and Bradford-born Los Angeles expat Richard Rayner. Learning at the University of Southern California, who introduced him up in the Greene friends architecturally venerated Gamble House in Pasadena, Banham had a privileged base from which to investigate. But what “hes been gone” looking for, and the mode he wrote about what “hes seen” and felt, redefined the method the academic nature and then the wider world perceived the city.
Reyner Banham with his shaggy beard and wonky teeth in 1968. Photograph: Peter Johns for the Guardian
Not that he proclaimed his love right there on the tarmac at LAX. Banham initially determined the city incomprehensible a reply said that he shared many critics, wrote Nigel Whiteley in the study Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future.
Banham first attempted to publicly explain this cutting-edge metropolis, saturated across its tremendous cavity with electronic devices, synthetic chemicals and televisions, in four 1968 BBC radio talks. He told of how he came to tractions with LAs embodiment of the experimental: its experimental figure and infrastructure, the combinations of cultures it altered, and the experimental lifestyles to which it gave rise.
But even an appreciator like Banham had his qualms with research results. In Los Angeles you tend to go to a particular region to do a particular act, to another to do another thing, and finally a long way back to your home, and youve done 100 miles in the working day, he grumbled in the third largest talk. The distances and the trust on mechanical transportation leave no room for accident even for happy accidents. You schedule the day in advance, program your activities, and forgo those random meetings with acquaintances and strangers that are traditionally one of the reinforces of city life.
Nevertheless, to Banham this un-city-like municipality contained out a predict: The unique ethic of Los Angeles what stimulates, intrigues and sometimes repels me is the fact that it gives radical alternatives to almost every urban abstraction in unquestioned currency.
In his subsequent landmark book, Banham listed Los Angeles deviations from conventional urbanism, as well as from all the rules for civilised living as they have been understood by the pundits of modernity, with obvious gratify. It seemed to legitimise a representation “youve already”, in a 1959 essay, recommends to oust the old-fashioned perception of a single dense core surrounded by a wall.
Civilised living in suburban LA. Image: University of Southern California/ Corbis via Getty Images
Banham foresaw the city as scrambled egg, its eggshell break-dance open, its business yolk mixed with its domestic lily-white, and everything spread across the landscape, its evenness agitated only by occasional specialised sub-centres. A tourist to Los Angeles today might hear the city explained in just the same room: as a system of nodes, a constellation of metropolitan villages, training exercises in postmodern polycentrism.
Banham placed another digit in the eye of diehards who insisted that a city should have just one strong centre with his short section A Note on Downtown, which opens with the words, … because that is all downtown Los Angeles deserves.
From its fetishised designs such as the Bradbury Building and Cathedral of Saint Vibiana to its brand new place towers in their standard livery of dark glass and sword, Banham wrote that everything accepts as an unintegrated fragment in a downtown background that began to disintegrate long ago out of sheer irrelevance, as far as one can see.
The notebooks contrarianism reflects the contrarianism of Los Angeles itself, which, insofar as it performs the functions of a great city, to its implementation of length, cosmopolitan form, inventive vigour, international influence, distinctive way of life, and corporate temperament[ demonstrates that] all the most admired theoreticians of the current century, from the Futurists and Le Corbusier to Jane Jacobs and Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ought to have wrong.
Filled with photographs and sketches, Banhams book on Los Angeles segments its subject up into the four ecologies of its subtitle: the beaches and beach townships of Surfurbia; the Foothills with their ever more elaborated and costly residences; the utilitarian Plains of Id( the only parts of Los Angeles flat enough and boring sufficient to compare with the cities of the Middle West) and the famed, then infamous, freeway system he dubbed Autopia: a single comprehensible place, a coherent cognitive state in which Angelenos waste the two calmest and most worthwhile hours of their daily lives.
The 1893 Bradbury Building in downtown LA was an unintegrated fragment in Banhams eyes. Image: Michele and Tom Grimm/ Alamy
Between assemblies on the citys ecologies, Banham examined the buildings found in them. Populist, stylistically promiscuous, tradition-agnostic and often deliberately impermanent, Los Angeles architecture has, of all the citys parts, drawn distain the longest. There is no reward for aesthetic excellence here , no beating for aesthetic misdemeanour; nothing but a vast planetary detachment, wrote the novelist James M. Cain in 1933.
More than 40 years later, Banham received a stylistic reward of Tacoburger Aztec to Wavy-line Moderne, from Cape Cod to unsupported Jaoul roofs, from Gourmet Mansardic to Polynesian Gabled and even in boundary Modern Architecture.
He discussed at length the LA building known as the dingbat a two-storey walk-up apartment-block … built of wood and stuccoed over, all indistinguishable at the back but inexpensively, elaborately, decorated up-front, decorated with an aspirational reputation such as the Capri or the Starlet.
In defining dingbats as the true symptom of Los Angeles metropolitan id, trying to cope with the unprecedented appearance of residential concentrations too high to be subsumed within the misconceptions of homestead living, Banham diagnosed the center and lingering strain, then as now, between wanting to grow outward and needing to grow upward.
Banham gleaned out the implications of Los Angeles ostensibly disposable builds not by venerating them , nor defaming them, but simply by considering them because they are. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour would propose the same approaching in their own city classic, Memorizing from Las Vegas, publicized the following year: Withholding decision may be used as a tool to obligate later sentence most sensitive. This is a way of draw lessons from everything.
Still, even appreciators of Los Angeles might take issue with this method when Banhams non-judgmental attitude at least toward the esthetics of American commercial culture starts to look like advocacy for bad taste.
The self-absorbed and perfected Watts Towers. Image: Hulton Archive/ Getty Images
Non-appreciators of Los Angeles certainly did. The painter and critic Peter Plagens, columnist of an 11,000 -word excoriation in Artforum magazine entitled The Ecology of Evil, disappeared thus far as to description Banhams book hazardous: The hackers who do shopping mall, Hawaiian restaurants and savings-and-loans, the dried-up civil servant in the discord of roadways, and the legions of showbiz fringies will sleep a little easier and piece a lot harder now that their enterprises have been authenticated. In a more human society where Banhams doctrines would be measured against the subdividers crime of the territory and the cause specks in kids of my own lungs, the author are likely to be held up against a wall and shot.
Uncowed, Banham followed the book by starring in Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles, a 1972 video documentary that followed him through one day in the town that induces rigmarole of history and interrupt all the rules, and stimulated within him a passion that goes beyond gumption or intellect. Stops on the tour included Simon Rodias handmade Watts Towers( a absolutely self-absorbed and perfected shrine) to Los Angeles characteristic fantasy of innocence( prominently celebrated on all the delineates in his volume ); the overgrown divisions of the old-fashioned Pacific Electric Railways rusting runways that once tied the whole immense city together; the decrepit canals and beachside bodybuilding facilities of Venice; and a Sunset Boulevard drive-in burger joint.
There, Banham asked the painter Ed Ruscha, plainspoken and painstaking commentator of American city banality, what public buildings a visitor should appreciate. Ruscha recommended gas stations.
Banham pre-empted objections to Los Angeles metropolitan model by claiming the organize materials very little, having already written that Los Angeles has no urban figure at all in the commonly accepted gumption. Yet whatever it does have, he debated, has caused a fascinating, and sometimes even efficient, prepared of emergent metropolitan phenomena.
Come the day when the smog doom lastly descends, he chronicled over aerial hits of Wilshire Boulevards double sequence of towers and frame-filling communities of separated houses, … when trafficking in human beings grinds to a halting and the private auto is prohibited from the street, quite a lot of craftily situated citizens will be able to switch over to being pedestrians and feel no pain.
Cyclists on Venice Beach … though often of LA is not bike-friendly. Image: Alamy
The end of the car in Los Angeles? Bold paroles for the person who is called Wilshire Boulevard one of the few enormous streets in the world where driving are particularly pleased when you have, like earlier generations of English academics who school themselves Italian in order to read Dante in the original, learned to drive in order to read Los Angeles in the original.
But just as the languages heard on wall street of Los Angeles have proliferated, the language of mobility has changed there, as has much else besides. How legible would Banham, who died in 1988 , now find it?
The smog that theorized bane of the citys postwar decades which he ever downplayed has all but faded. The era of apparently inexhaustible room to pander an preoccupation with single-family residences has given way to one of construction cranes germinating to satisfy the brand-new is asking for high-density horizontal living. They accept not only over a downtown lift miraculously from the dead, but the specialised sub-centres scattered all over greater Los Angeles.
Though the ban on private cars hasnt come yet , no recent development astonishes any Angeleno who was there in the 1970 s more than the citys brand-new rail transportation network, which started to develop virtually 30 times after the end of the Pacific Electric. It grades as such as a success for financing, planning and implementation( at the least by the globally unimpressive American standard) that the rest of the country now ogles to Los Angeles as an example of how to build public transportation and, increasingly, public seat in general.
Readers might scoff at Banham calling the Los Angeles freeway network one of the greater drives of follower but he has demonstrated more of an ability to see beyond it than numerous current spectators of Los Angeles. Even though it is vastly better than any other motorway structure of my acquaintance, he wrote, it is inconceivable to Angelenos that it should not be replaced by an even better plan nearer to the perfection they are always seeking.
Banham felt downtown Los Angeles only deserved a short chapter devote to it. Photo: Alamy
Banham also foresaw the rise of the self-driving vehicle, so often mooted these days as an alternative solution to Los Angeles traffic woes. But cars that drive themselves( as distinct from Baede-kar a then-fantastical expres piloting system dreamed up for Banhams TV doc, that brings an uncanny resemblance to those every American driver uses today) “re coming with” difficulties that Banham also prophesied all those years ago. The marginal gains in economy through automation, he wrote, might be offset by the psychological destitutions caused by destroying the residual illusions of free decision and driving skill.
Under each outwardly celebratory sheet of Banhams book lies the notion of change as Los Angeles merely constant: no matter how excitingly modern the car and the road, their day will come to an end; no matter how comfortably idyllic the detached mansion, it very must fall out of preference, or into impracticality, sooner or later.
Some of these components that reaped Banhams attention have, after their own periods of dishonour, changed fashionable again. Even the humble dingbat has received a lieu in the future of the city, becoming the object of critical analyze and architectural rival.
Banham also accompanied the future of Los Angeles in other unprepossessing builds, especially one striking and elegantly simple-minded stucco casket on La Cienega Boulevard. Its inventor? A particular Frank Gehry, then virtually unknown but now one of the stronger influencers of the constructed surrounding in not only Los Angeles( his current high-profile campaign commits re-making the citys famously dry, concrete-encased river ), but other metropolitans as well. The Toronto-born starchitect became his adopted hometowns architectural emissary only one of the myriad channels in which Los Angeles has influenced the rest of the metropolitan macrocosm.
These eras, the rest of the urban nature also influences Los Angeles. No longer striving for the purposes of the delusions of total exceptionalism that prevailed in Banhams day, it has, with its towers, sets, commons and even bike-share plans, saw steps towards the liveability so is necessary in 21 st-century urbanists. It now even resembles( if faintly) New York, Boston, London, and Paris those exhaustively scheduled , non-experimental municipalities where, Banham lamented, warring pressure group cannot get out of one anothers hair because they are pressed together in a sacred labyrinth of cultural tombstones and real estate values.
In its impressive offer to incorporate older metropolitan excellences and play by the rules of good urban issues, modern Los Angeles neglects the possibility of becoming a similarly sacred labyrinth at its jeopardy. Continuing Banhams Los Angeles: the Architecture of Four Ecologies on its syllabus will hopefully protect against the dreadful fate of losing its rule-breaking experimental urban spirit.
The engineering-trained generator involved Los Angeles as a kind of machine. Though it has come in for a seriously requirement overhaul of its interface in recent years , nobody has already been written a customers manual more engaged in the city on its own terms as Banham did 45 years ago.
Follow Guardian Cities on Twitter and Facebook to join the discussion
The post A ‘radical alternative’: how one being changed the insight of Los Angeles appeared first on apsbicepstraining.com.
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0 notes
apsbicepstraining · 6 years
Text
A ‘radical alternative’: how one mortal changed the impression of Los Angeles
In the 1960 s, British architectural pundit Reyner Banham said his love for the city that his fellow academics disliked. What Banham wrote about Los Angeles redefined how the world recognized it but what would he think of LA today?
Now I know subjective beliefs can differ, the writer Adam Raphael wrote in the Guardian in 1968, but personally I calculate LA as the noisiest, the smelliest, the most unpleasant and most uncivilised major metropolitan in the United States. In short, a smelling sewer …
Three years later, Raphaels messages appeared in publication again as an epigraph of Reyner Banhams Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies the most exuberantly pro-Los Angeles journal further written. Ever since pamphlet, it has shown up on schedules of enormous books about modern municipalities even those is drawing up by people who ponder Los Angeles anything but a great American city.
Somehow, this notebook that attracted so much of its initial advertisement with offend importance( In Praise (!) of Los Angeles, sneered the New York Times examines headline) has kept its relevance through the activities of the decade, such that newly arrived Angelenos still read it to familiarize themselves. But what can it teach us about the Los Angeles of today?
An architectural historian a decade into his busines where reference is firstly visited, Banham knew full-well that his fellow eggheads detested Los Angeles. How and why he himself came so avidly to appreciate it constitutes the core question of his is currently working on the city, which culminated in this slim volume.
The many who were ready to cast doubt on the merit of business enterprises, he reflected in its final chapter, included a distinguished Italian designer and his wife who, on discovering that I was writing this volume, doubted that anyone who cared for architecture could lower himself to such research projects and keep walking without a word further.
The project began when Banham drew his shaggy whisker and wonky teeth to Los Angeles and declared that he adoration the city with a heat, in the words of novelist and Bradford-born Los Angeles expat Richard Rayner. Teaching at the University of Southern California, who introduced him up in the Greene friends architecturally venerated Gamble House in Pasadena, Banham had a privileged base from which to examine. But what he went go looking for, and the space he wrote about what he saw and felt, redefined the course the academic world-wide and then the rest of the world saw the city.
Reyner Banham with his shaggy beard and wonky teeth in 1968. Photo: Peter Johns for the Guardian
Not that he affirmed his love right there on the tarmac at LAX. Banham initially met the city incomprehensible a answer said that he shared numerous reviewers, wrote Nigel Whiteley in such studies Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future.
Banham first attempted to publicly explain this cutting-edge metropolis, saturated across its tremendous cavity with electronic devices, synthetic chemicals and televisions, in four 1968 BBC radio talks. He told of how he came to grips with LAs embodiment of the experimental: its experimental chassis and infrastructure, the combinations of cultures it altered, and the experimental life-styles to which it gave rise.
But even an appreciator like Banham had his qualms with the result. In Los Angeles you tend to go to a specific place to do a specific event, to another to do another thing, and finally a long way back to your residence, and youve done 100 miles in the working day, he grumbled in the third talk. The intervals and the reliance on mechanical transportation leave no chamber for collision even for glad accidents. You project the working day in advance, curriculum your activities, and forgo those random meetings with pals and strangers that are traditionally one of the rewards of municipality life.
Nevertheless, to Banham this un-city-like city propped out a predict: The unique cost of Los Angeles what excites, intrigues and sometimes repels me is the fact that it offerings radical alternatives to almost every urban hypothesi in unquestioned currency.
In his subsequent landmark book, Banham listed Los Angeles departures from conventional urbanism, as well as from all the rules for civilised living as they have been understood by the scholars of modernity, with evident enthrall. It seemed to legitimise a framework he had already, in a 1959 section, proposed to supersede the old-fashioned conception of a single dense core surrounded by a wall.
Civilised living in suburban LA. Image: University of Southern California/ Corbis via Getty Images
Banham foresaw the city as scrambled egg, its shell burst open, its business yolk mixed with its domestic lily-white, and everything spread across the landscape, its evenness vexed only by occasional specialised sub-centres. A visitor to Los Angeles today might listen the city was reported in merely the same lane: as a network of nodes, a constellation of city villages, an exercise in postmodern polycentrism.
Banham placed another paw in the eye of diehards who insisted that a town should have just one strong centre with his short chapter A Note on Downtown, which opens with the words, … because that is all downtown Los Angeles deserves.
From its fetishised formations such as the Bradbury Building and Cathedral of Saint Vibiana to its brand new place towers in their standard livery of dark glass and steel, Banham wrote that everything sits as an unintegrated fragment in a downtown scene that began to disintegrate long ago out of sheer irrelevance, as far as one can see.
The books contrarianism manifests the contrarianism of Los Angeles itself, which, insofar as it play-acts the functions of a great city, in terms of length, cosmopolitan mode, inventive energy, international influence, unique way of life, and corporate personality[ testifies that] all the most admired theorists of the current century, from the Futurists and Le Corbusier to Jane Jacobs and Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ought to have wrong.
Filled with photographs and charts, Banhams book on Los Angeles divides its subject up into the four ecologies of its subtitle: the beaches and beach townships of Surfurbia; the Foothills with their ever more elaborated and expensive residencies; the utilitarian Plains of Id( the only parts of Los Angeles flat enough and carrying enough to compare with the cities of the Middle West) and the famous, then notorious, freeway organization he dubbed Autopia: a single comprehensible home, a coherent cognitive state in which Angelenos waste the two calmest and most fruitful hours of their daily lives.
The 1893 Bradbury Building in downtown LA was an unintegrated fragment in Banhams attentions. Picture: Michele and Tom Grimm/ Alamy
Between chapters on the citys ecologies, Banham examined the buildings found in them. Populist, stylistically promiscuous, tradition-agnostic and often purposely impermanent, Los Angeles architecture has, of all the citys constituents, sucked distain the longest. There is no reward for aesthetic morality here , no beating for aesthetic misdemeanour; nothing but a vast planetary callousnes, wrote the novelist James M. Cain in 1933.
More than 40 years later, Banham ascertained a stylistic reward of Tacoburger Aztec to Wavy-line Moderne, from Cape Cod to unsupported Jaoul tombs, from Gourmet Mansardic to Polynesian Gabled and even in member Modern Architecture.
He discussed at length the LA building known as the dingbat a two-storey walk-up apartment-block … built of timber and stuccoed over, all same at the back but inexpensively, elaborately, decorated up-front, decorated with an aspirational figure such as the Capri or the Starlet.
In defining dingbats as the real evidence of Los Angeles urban id, trying to cope with the unprecedented form of residential concentrations too high to be subsumed within the misconceptions of homestead living, Banham diagnosed the center and long-lasting friction, then as now, between wanting to grow outward and needing to grow upward.
Banham drew out the implications of Los Angeles ostensibly disposable constructs not by adoring them , nor belittling them, but plainly by envisioning them as they were. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour would propose the same approaching in their own metropolitan classic, Discovering from Las Vegas, published the subsequent year: Withholding ruling may be used as a tool to shape later finding more sensitive. This is a way of draw lessons from everything.
Still, even appreciators of Los Angeles might take issue with this method when Banhams non-judgmental attitude at the least toward the aesthetics of American commercial culture starts to look like advocacy for bad taste.
The self-absorbed and perfected Watts Towers. Photograph: Hulton Archive/ Getty Images
Non-appreciators of Los Angeles certainly did. The painter and critic Peter Plagens, generator of an 11,000 -word excoriation in Artforum magazine entitled The Ecology of Evil, extended thus far as to name Banhams book hazardous: The hackers who do shopping centre, Hawaiian eateries and savings-and-loans, the dried-up civil servant in the schism of superhighways, and the forces of showbiz fringies will sleep a little easier and labor a lot harder now that their enterprises have been authenticated. In a more human civilization where Banhams doctrines would be measured against the subdividers abuse of the ground and the conduct molecules in little kids lungs, the author are likely to be put up against a wall and shot.
Uncowed, Banham followed the book by starring in Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles, a 1972 television documentary that followed him through one day in the town that manufactures rigmarole of record and end all the rules, and induced within him a passion that goes beyond appreciation or intellect. Stops on the tour included Simon Rodias handmade Watts Towers( a entirely self-absorbed and perfected gravestone) to Los Angeles characteristic fantasize of innocence( prominently differentiated on all the delineates in his book ); the overgrown segments of the age-old Pacific Electric Railways rusting runways that once tied the whole big metropoli together; the decrepit canals and beachside bodybuilding facilities of Venice; and a Sunset Boulevard drive-in burger joint.
There, Banham asked the painter Ed Ruscha, plainspoken and painstaking see of American urban banality, what public buildings a tourist should ensure. Ruscha recommended gas stations.
Banham pre-empted objections to Los Angeles city anatomy by claiming the figure stuffs very little, had now been written that Los Angeles has no metropolitan organize at all in the commonly accepted feel. Yet whatever it does have, he quarrelled, has rendered a fascinating, and sometimes even efficient, specified of emergent city phenomena.
Come the day when the pollution doom finally tumbles, he narrated over aerial shots of Wilshire Boulevards double row of towers and frame-filling communities of disconnected houses, … when trafficking in human beings grinds to a halting and the private vehicle is banned from the street, quite a lot of craftily residence citizens will be able to switch over to being pedestrians and detect no pain.
Cyclists on Venice Beach … though often of LA is not bike-friendly. Image: Alamy
The end of the car in Los Angeles? Bold terms for the man who announced Wilshire Boulevard one of the few enormous streets in the world where driving is a pleasure when you have, like earlier generations of English academics who taught themselves Italian in order to read Dante in the original, “ve learned to” drive in order to speak Los Angeles in the original.
But just as its own language hear on wall street of Los Angeles have proliferated, its own language of mobility has changed there, as has much else besides. How readable would Banham, who perished in 1988 , now find it?
The smog that guessed bane of the citys postwar decades which he ever minimise has all but vanished. The experience of apparently unlimited infinite to gratify an infatuation with single-family lives has given behavior to one of building cranes budding to satisfy the new demand for high-density horizontal living. They put not just over a downtown grow miraculously from the dead, but the specialised sub-centres sown all over greater Los Angeles.
Though the ban on private cars hasnt come yet , no recent development stupefies any Angeleno who was there in the 1970 s more than the citys new runway transit system, which started to develop virtually 30 times after the end of the Pacific Electric. It grades as such as a success for financing, the planning and execution( at the least by the globally unimpressive American standard) that the rest of the two countries now looks to Los Angeles as an example of how to build public transportation and, increasingly, public seat in general.
Readers might scoff at Banham calling the Los Angeles freeway network one of the greater toils of guy but he has demonstrated more of an ability to see beyond it than many current commentators of Los Angeles. Even though it is vastly better than any other motorway arrangement of my acquaintance, he wrote, it is inconceivable to Angelenos that it should not be replaced by an even better system nearer to the perfection they are always seeking.
Banham find downtown Los Angeles merely deserved a short section devote to it. Photo: Alamy
Banham also foretold the rise of the self-driving gondola, so often mooted these days as an alternative solution to Los Angeles traffic woes. But cars that drive themselves( as distinct from Baede-kar a then-fantastical expression sailing organisation dreamed up for Banhams TV doc, that countenances an uncanny similarity to those every American driver uses today) come with difficulties that Banham also predicted all those years ago. The marginal gains in economy through automation, he wrote, might be offset by the mental deprivations caused by destroying the residual misconceptions of free decision and driving skill.
Under each outwardly celebratory page of Banhams book lies the notion of change as Los Angeles exclusively constant: no matter how excitingly modern the car and the route, their day will come to an end; no matter how comfortably idyllic the separated mansion, it extremely must fall out of preference, or into impracticality, sooner or later.
Some of these components that attracted Banhams attention have, after their own the times of disrepute, made fashionable again. Even the humble dingbat has experienced a place in the future of the city, becoming the object of critical analyse and architectural challenger.
Banham also verified the future of Los Angeles in other unprepossessing constructs, especially one astonishing and elegantly simple stucco casket on La Cienega Boulevard. Its designer? A particular Frank Gehry, then virtually unknown but now one of the stronger influencers of the built context in not only Los Angeles( his current high-profile project concerns re-making the citys famously dry, concrete-encased flow ), but other metropolitans as well. The Toronto-born starchitect became his adopted hometowns architectural emissary only one of the myriad modes in which Los Angeles has influenced the rest of the urban nature.
These epoches, the rest of the metropolitan world-wide also influences Los Angeles. No longer struggling for the purposes of the illusions of total exceptionalism that prevailed in Banhams day, it has, with its towers, improves, commons and even bike-share structures, constructed paces toward the liveability so is necessary in 21 st-century urbanists. It now even resembles( if faintly) New York, Boston, London, and Paris those exhaustively contrived , non-experimental metropolitans where, Banham lamented, warring pressure group cannot get out of each other hair why i am pressed together in a hallowed labyrinth of culture gravestones and real estate values.
In its impressive proposal to incorporate older metropolitan honours and play by the rules of good urban design, modern Los Angeles ignores the possibility of setting up becoming a similarly sacred labyrinth at its peril. Deterring Banhams Los Angeles: the Architecture of Four Ecologies on its syllabus will hopefully protect against the grim fate of losing its rule-breaking experimental city spirit.
The engineering-trained scribe saw Los Angeles as a kind of machine. Though it has come in for a naughtily involved modernize of its interface in recent years , none has already been written a useds manual more engaged in the city on its own terms as Banham did 45 years ago.
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A ‘radical alternative’: how one mortal changed the impression of Los Angeles
In the 1960 s, British architectural pundit Reyner Banham said his love for the city that his fellow academics disliked. What Banham wrote about Los Angeles redefined how the world recognized it but what would he think of LA today?
Now I know subjective beliefs can differ, the writer Adam Raphael wrote in the Guardian in 1968, but personally I calculate LA as the noisiest, the smelliest, the most unpleasant and most uncivilised major metropolitan in the United States. In short, a smelling sewer …
Three years later, Raphaels messages appeared in publication again as an epigraph of Reyner Banhams Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies the most exuberantly pro-Los Angeles journal further written. Ever since pamphlet, it has shown up on schedules of enormous books about modern municipalities even those is drawing up by people who ponder Los Angeles anything but a great American city.
Somehow, this notebook that attracted so much of its initial advertisement with offend importance( In Praise (!) of Los Angeles, sneered the New York Times examines headline) has kept its relevance through the activities of the decade, such that newly arrived Angelenos still read it to familiarize themselves. But what can it teach us about the Los Angeles of today?
An architectural historian a decade into his busines where reference is firstly visited, Banham knew full-well that his fellow eggheads detested Los Angeles. How and why he himself came so avidly to appreciate it constitutes the core question of his is currently working on the city, which culminated in this slim volume.
The many who were ready to cast doubt on the merit of business enterprises, he reflected in its final chapter, included a distinguished Italian designer and his wife who, on discovering that I was writing this volume, doubted that anyone who cared for architecture could lower himself to such research projects and keep walking without a word further.
The project began when Banham drew his shaggy whisker and wonky teeth to Los Angeles and declared that he adoration the city with a heat, in the words of novelist and Bradford-born Los Angeles expat Richard Rayner. Teaching at the University of Southern California, who introduced him up in the Greene friends architecturally venerated Gamble House in Pasadena, Banham had a privileged base from which to examine. But what he went go looking for, and the space he wrote about what he saw and felt, redefined the course the academic world-wide and then the rest of the world saw the city.
Reyner Banham with his shaggy beard and wonky teeth in 1968. Photo: Peter Johns for the Guardian
Not that he affirmed his love right there on the tarmac at LAX. Banham initially met the city incomprehensible a answer said that he shared numerous reviewers, wrote Nigel Whiteley in such studies Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future.
Banham first attempted to publicly explain this cutting-edge metropolis, saturated across its tremendous cavity with electronic devices, synthetic chemicals and televisions, in four 1968 BBC radio talks. He told of how he came to grips with LAs embodiment of the experimental: its experimental chassis and infrastructure, the combinations of cultures it altered, and the experimental life-styles to which it gave rise.
But even an appreciator like Banham had his qualms with the result. In Los Angeles you tend to go to a specific place to do a specific event, to another to do another thing, and finally a long way back to your residence, and youve done 100 miles in the working day, he grumbled in the third talk. The intervals and the reliance on mechanical transportation leave no chamber for collision even for glad accidents. You project the working day in advance, curriculum your activities, and forgo those random meetings with pals and strangers that are traditionally one of the rewards of municipality life.
Nevertheless, to Banham this un-city-like city propped out a predict: The unique cost of Los Angeles what excites, intrigues and sometimes repels me is the fact that it offerings radical alternatives to almost every urban hypothesi in unquestioned currency.
In his subsequent landmark book, Banham listed Los Angeles departures from conventional urbanism, as well as from all the rules for civilised living as they have been understood by the scholars of modernity, with evident enthrall. It seemed to legitimise a framework he had already, in a 1959 section, proposed to supersede the old-fashioned conception of a single dense core surrounded by a wall.
Civilised living in suburban LA. Image: University of Southern California/ Corbis via Getty Images
Banham foresaw the city as scrambled egg, its shell burst open, its business yolk mixed with its domestic lily-white, and everything spread across the landscape, its evenness vexed only by occasional specialised sub-centres. A visitor to Los Angeles today might listen the city was reported in merely the same lane: as a network of nodes, a constellation of city villages, an exercise in postmodern polycentrism.
Banham placed another paw in the eye of diehards who insisted that a town should have just one strong centre with his short chapter A Note on Downtown, which opens with the words, … because that is all downtown Los Angeles deserves.
From its fetishised formations such as the Bradbury Building and Cathedral of Saint Vibiana to its brand new place towers in their standard livery of dark glass and steel, Banham wrote that everything sits as an unintegrated fragment in a downtown scene that began to disintegrate long ago out of sheer irrelevance, as far as one can see.
The books contrarianism manifests the contrarianism of Los Angeles itself, which, insofar as it play-acts the functions of a great city, in terms of length, cosmopolitan mode, inventive energy, international influence, unique way of life, and corporate personality[ testifies that] all the most admired theorists of the current century, from the Futurists and Le Corbusier to Jane Jacobs and Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ought to have wrong.
Filled with photographs and charts, Banhams book on Los Angeles divides its subject up into the four ecologies of its subtitle: the beaches and beach townships of Surfurbia; the Foothills with their ever more elaborated and expensive residencies; the utilitarian Plains of Id( the only parts of Los Angeles flat enough and carrying enough to compare with the cities of the Middle West) and the famous, then notorious, freeway organization he dubbed Autopia: a single comprehensible home, a coherent cognitive state in which Angelenos waste the two calmest and most fruitful hours of their daily lives.
The 1893 Bradbury Building in downtown LA was an unintegrated fragment in Banhams attentions. Picture: Michele and Tom Grimm/ Alamy
Between chapters on the citys ecologies, Banham examined the buildings found in them. Populist, stylistically promiscuous, tradition-agnostic and often purposely impermanent, Los Angeles architecture has, of all the citys constituents, sucked distain the longest. There is no reward for aesthetic morality here , no beating for aesthetic misdemeanour; nothing but a vast planetary callousnes, wrote the novelist James M. Cain in 1933.
More than 40 years later, Banham ascertained a stylistic reward of Tacoburger Aztec to Wavy-line Moderne, from Cape Cod to unsupported Jaoul tombs, from Gourmet Mansardic to Polynesian Gabled and even in member Modern Architecture.
He discussed at length the LA building known as the dingbat a two-storey walk-up apartment-block … built of timber and stuccoed over, all same at the back but inexpensively, elaborately, decorated up-front, decorated with an aspirational figure such as the Capri or the Starlet.
In defining dingbats as the real evidence of Los Angeles urban id, trying to cope with the unprecedented form of residential concentrations too high to be subsumed within the misconceptions of homestead living, Banham diagnosed the center and long-lasting friction, then as now, between wanting to grow outward and needing to grow upward.
Banham drew out the implications of Los Angeles ostensibly disposable constructs not by adoring them , nor belittling them, but plainly by envisioning them as they were. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour would propose the same approaching in their own metropolitan classic, Discovering from Las Vegas, published the subsequent year: Withholding ruling may be used as a tool to shape later finding more sensitive. This is a way of draw lessons from everything.
Still, even appreciators of Los Angeles might take issue with this method when Banhams non-judgmental attitude at the least toward the aesthetics of American commercial culture starts to look like advocacy for bad taste.
The self-absorbed and perfected Watts Towers. Photograph: Hulton Archive/ Getty Images
Non-appreciators of Los Angeles certainly did. The painter and critic Peter Plagens, generator of an 11,000 -word excoriation in Artforum magazine entitled The Ecology of Evil, extended thus far as to name Banhams book hazardous: The hackers who do shopping centre, Hawaiian eateries and savings-and-loans, the dried-up civil servant in the schism of superhighways, and the forces of showbiz fringies will sleep a little easier and labor a lot harder now that their enterprises have been authenticated. In a more human civilization where Banhams doctrines would be measured against the subdividers abuse of the ground and the conduct molecules in little kids lungs, the author are likely to be put up against a wall and shot.
Uncowed, Banham followed the book by starring in Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles, a 1972 television documentary that followed him through one day in the town that manufactures rigmarole of record and end all the rules, and induced within him a passion that goes beyond appreciation or intellect. Stops on the tour included Simon Rodias handmade Watts Towers( a entirely self-absorbed and perfected gravestone) to Los Angeles characteristic fantasize of innocence( prominently differentiated on all the delineates in his book ); the overgrown segments of the age-old Pacific Electric Railways rusting runways that once tied the whole big metropoli together; the decrepit canals and beachside bodybuilding facilities of Venice; and a Sunset Boulevard drive-in burger joint.
There, Banham asked the painter Ed Ruscha, plainspoken and painstaking see of American urban banality, what public buildings a tourist should ensure. Ruscha recommended gas stations.
Banham pre-empted objections to Los Angeles city anatomy by claiming the figure stuffs very little, had now been written that Los Angeles has no metropolitan organize at all in the commonly accepted feel. Yet whatever it does have, he quarrelled, has rendered a fascinating, and sometimes even efficient, specified of emergent city phenomena.
Come the day when the pollution doom finally tumbles, he narrated over aerial shots of Wilshire Boulevards double row of towers and frame-filling communities of disconnected houses, … when trafficking in human beings grinds to a halting and the private vehicle is banned from the street, quite a lot of craftily residence citizens will be able to switch over to being pedestrians and detect no pain.
Cyclists on Venice Beach … though often of LA is not bike-friendly. Image: Alamy
The end of the car in Los Angeles? Bold terms for the man who announced Wilshire Boulevard one of the few enormous streets in the world where driving is a pleasure when you have, like earlier generations of English academics who taught themselves Italian in order to read Dante in the original, “ve learned to” drive in order to speak Los Angeles in the original.
But just as its own language hear on wall street of Los Angeles have proliferated, its own language of mobility has changed there, as has much else besides. How readable would Banham, who perished in 1988 , now find it?
The smog that guessed bane of the citys postwar decades which he ever minimise has all but vanished. The experience of apparently unlimited infinite to gratify an infatuation with single-family lives has given behavior to one of building cranes budding to satisfy the new demand for high-density horizontal living. They put not just over a downtown grow miraculously from the dead, but the specialised sub-centres sown all over greater Los Angeles.
Though the ban on private cars hasnt come yet , no recent development stupefies any Angeleno who was there in the 1970 s more than the citys new runway transit system, which started to develop virtually 30 times after the end of the Pacific Electric. It grades as such as a success for financing, the planning and execution( at the least by the globally unimpressive American standard) that the rest of the two countries now looks to Los Angeles as an example of how to build public transportation and, increasingly, public seat in general.
Readers might scoff at Banham calling the Los Angeles freeway network one of the greater toils of guy but he has demonstrated more of an ability to see beyond it than many current commentators of Los Angeles. Even though it is vastly better than any other motorway arrangement of my acquaintance, he wrote, it is inconceivable to Angelenos that it should not be replaced by an even better system nearer to the perfection they are always seeking.
Banham find downtown Los Angeles merely deserved a short section devote to it. Photo: Alamy
Banham also foretold the rise of the self-driving gondola, so often mooted these days as an alternative solution to Los Angeles traffic woes. But cars that drive themselves( as distinct from Baede-kar a then-fantastical expression sailing organisation dreamed up for Banhams TV doc, that countenances an uncanny similarity to those every American driver uses today) come with difficulties that Banham also predicted all those years ago. The marginal gains in economy through automation, he wrote, might be offset by the mental deprivations caused by destroying the residual misconceptions of free decision and driving skill.
Under each outwardly celebratory page of Banhams book lies the notion of change as Los Angeles exclusively constant: no matter how excitingly modern the car and the route, their day will come to an end; no matter how comfortably idyllic the separated mansion, it extremely must fall out of preference, or into impracticality, sooner or later.
Some of these components that attracted Banhams attention have, after their own the times of disrepute, made fashionable again. Even the humble dingbat has experienced a place in the future of the city, becoming the object of critical analyse and architectural challenger.
Banham also verified the future of Los Angeles in other unprepossessing constructs, especially one astonishing and elegantly simple stucco casket on La Cienega Boulevard. Its designer? A particular Frank Gehry, then virtually unknown but now one of the stronger influencers of the built context in not only Los Angeles( his current high-profile project concerns re-making the citys famously dry, concrete-encased flow ), but other metropolitans as well. The Toronto-born starchitect became his adopted hometowns architectural emissary only one of the myriad modes in which Los Angeles has influenced the rest of the urban nature.
These epoches, the rest of the metropolitan world-wide also influences Los Angeles. No longer struggling for the purposes of the illusions of total exceptionalism that prevailed in Banhams day, it has, with its towers, improves, commons and even bike-share structures, constructed paces toward the liveability so is necessary in 21 st-century urbanists. It now even resembles( if faintly) New York, Boston, London, and Paris those exhaustively contrived , non-experimental metropolitans where, Banham lamented, warring pressure group cannot get out of each other hair why i am pressed together in a hallowed labyrinth of culture gravestones and real estate values.
In its impressive proposal to incorporate older metropolitan honours and play by the rules of good urban design, modern Los Angeles ignores the possibility of setting up becoming a similarly sacred labyrinth at its peril. Deterring Banhams Los Angeles: the Architecture of Four Ecologies on its syllabus will hopefully protect against the grim fate of losing its rule-breaking experimental city spirit.
The engineering-trained scribe saw Los Angeles as a kind of machine. Though it has come in for a naughtily involved modernize of its interface in recent years , none has already been written a useds manual more engaged in the city on its own terms as Banham did 45 years ago.
Follow Guardian Cities on Twitter and Facebook to join the discussion
The post A ‘radical alternative’: how one mortal changed the impression of Los Angeles appeared first on apsbicepstraining.com.
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apsbicepstraining · 6 years
Text
A ‘radical alternative’: how one mortal changed the impression of Los Angeles
In the 1960 s, British architectural pundit Reyner Banham said his love for the city that his fellow academics disliked. What Banham wrote about Los Angeles redefined how the world recognized it but what would he think of LA today?
Now I know subjective beliefs can differ, the writer Adam Raphael wrote in the Guardian in 1968, but personally I calculate LA as the noisiest, the smelliest, the most unpleasant and most uncivilised major metropolitan in the United States. In short, a smelling sewer …
Three years later, Raphaels messages appeared in publication again as an epigraph of Reyner Banhams Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies the most exuberantly pro-Los Angeles journal further written. Ever since pamphlet, it has shown up on schedules of enormous books about modern municipalities even those is drawing up by people who ponder Los Angeles anything but a great American city.
Somehow, this notebook that attracted so much of its initial advertisement with offend importance( In Praise (!) of Los Angeles, sneered the New York Times examines headline) has kept its relevance through the activities of the decade, such that newly arrived Angelenos still read it to familiarize themselves. But what can it teach us about the Los Angeles of today?
An architectural historian a decade into his busines where reference is firstly visited, Banham knew full-well that his fellow eggheads detested Los Angeles. How and why he himself came so avidly to appreciate it constitutes the core question of his is currently working on the city, which culminated in this slim volume.
The many who were ready to cast doubt on the merit of business enterprises, he reflected in its final chapter, included a distinguished Italian designer and his wife who, on discovering that I was writing this volume, doubted that anyone who cared for architecture could lower himself to such research projects and keep walking without a word further.
The project began when Banham drew his shaggy whisker and wonky teeth to Los Angeles and declared that he adoration the city with a heat, in the words of novelist and Bradford-born Los Angeles expat Richard Rayner. Teaching at the University of Southern California, who introduced him up in the Greene friends architecturally venerated Gamble House in Pasadena, Banham had a privileged base from which to examine. But what he went go looking for, and the space he wrote about what he saw and felt, redefined the course the academic world-wide and then the rest of the world saw the city.
Reyner Banham with his shaggy beard and wonky teeth in 1968. Photo: Peter Johns for the Guardian
Not that he affirmed his love right there on the tarmac at LAX. Banham initially met the city incomprehensible a answer said that he shared numerous reviewers, wrote Nigel Whiteley in such studies Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future.
Banham first attempted to publicly explain this cutting-edge metropolis, saturated across its tremendous cavity with electronic devices, synthetic chemicals and televisions, in four 1968 BBC radio talks. He told of how he came to grips with LAs embodiment of the experimental: its experimental chassis and infrastructure, the combinations of cultures it altered, and the experimental life-styles to which it gave rise.
But even an appreciator like Banham had his qualms with the result. In Los Angeles you tend to go to a specific place to do a specific event, to another to do another thing, and finally a long way back to your residence, and youve done 100 miles in the working day, he grumbled in the third talk. The intervals and the reliance on mechanical transportation leave no chamber for collision even for glad accidents. You project the working day in advance, curriculum your activities, and forgo those random meetings with pals and strangers that are traditionally one of the rewards of municipality life.
Nevertheless, to Banham this un-city-like city propped out a predict: The unique cost of Los Angeles what excites, intrigues and sometimes repels me is the fact that it offerings radical alternatives to almost every urban hypothesi in unquestioned currency.
In his subsequent landmark book, Banham listed Los Angeles departures from conventional urbanism, as well as from all the rules for civilised living as they have been understood by the scholars of modernity, with evident enthrall. It seemed to legitimise a framework he had already, in a 1959 section, proposed to supersede the old-fashioned conception of a single dense core surrounded by a wall.
Civilised living in suburban LA. Image: University of Southern California/ Corbis via Getty Images
Banham foresaw the city as scrambled egg, its shell burst open, its business yolk mixed with its domestic lily-white, and everything spread across the landscape, its evenness vexed only by occasional specialised sub-centres. A visitor to Los Angeles today might listen the city was reported in merely the same lane: as a network of nodes, a constellation of city villages, an exercise in postmodern polycentrism.
Banham placed another paw in the eye of diehards who insisted that a town should have just one strong centre with his short chapter A Note on Downtown, which opens with the words, … because that is all downtown Los Angeles deserves.
From its fetishised formations such as the Bradbury Building and Cathedral of Saint Vibiana to its brand new place towers in their standard livery of dark glass and steel, Banham wrote that everything sits as an unintegrated fragment in a downtown scene that began to disintegrate long ago out of sheer irrelevance, as far as one can see.
The books contrarianism manifests the contrarianism of Los Angeles itself, which, insofar as it play-acts the functions of a great city, in terms of length, cosmopolitan mode, inventive energy, international influence, unique way of life, and corporate personality[ testifies that] all the most admired theorists of the current century, from the Futurists and Le Corbusier to Jane Jacobs and Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ought to have wrong.
Filled with photographs and charts, Banhams book on Los Angeles divides its subject up into the four ecologies of its subtitle: the beaches and beach townships of Surfurbia; the Foothills with their ever more elaborated and expensive residencies; the utilitarian Plains of Id( the only parts of Los Angeles flat enough and carrying enough to compare with the cities of the Middle West) and the famous, then notorious, freeway organization he dubbed Autopia: a single comprehensible home, a coherent cognitive state in which Angelenos waste the two calmest and most fruitful hours of their daily lives.
The 1893 Bradbury Building in downtown LA was an unintegrated fragment in Banhams attentions. Picture: Michele and Tom Grimm/ Alamy
Between chapters on the citys ecologies, Banham examined the buildings found in them. Populist, stylistically promiscuous, tradition-agnostic and often purposely impermanent, Los Angeles architecture has, of all the citys constituents, sucked distain the longest. There is no reward for aesthetic morality here , no beating for aesthetic misdemeanour; nothing but a vast planetary callousnes, wrote the novelist James M. Cain in 1933.
More than 40 years later, Banham ascertained a stylistic reward of Tacoburger Aztec to Wavy-line Moderne, from Cape Cod to unsupported Jaoul tombs, from Gourmet Mansardic to Polynesian Gabled and even in member Modern Architecture.
He discussed at length the LA building known as the dingbat a two-storey walk-up apartment-block … built of timber and stuccoed over, all same at the back but inexpensively, elaborately, decorated up-front, decorated with an aspirational figure such as the Capri or the Starlet.
In defining dingbats as the real evidence of Los Angeles urban id, trying to cope with the unprecedented form of residential concentrations too high to be subsumed within the misconceptions of homestead living, Banham diagnosed the center and long-lasting friction, then as now, between wanting to grow outward and needing to grow upward.
Banham drew out the implications of Los Angeles ostensibly disposable constructs not by adoring them , nor belittling them, but plainly by envisioning them as they were. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour would propose the same approaching in their own metropolitan classic, Discovering from Las Vegas, published the subsequent year: Withholding ruling may be used as a tool to shape later finding more sensitive. This is a way of draw lessons from everything.
Still, even appreciators of Los Angeles might take issue with this method when Banhams non-judgmental attitude at the least toward the aesthetics of American commercial culture starts to look like advocacy for bad taste.
The self-absorbed and perfected Watts Towers. Photograph: Hulton Archive/ Getty Images
Non-appreciators of Los Angeles certainly did. The painter and critic Peter Plagens, generator of an 11,000 -word excoriation in Artforum magazine entitled The Ecology of Evil, extended thus far as to name Banhams book hazardous: The hackers who do shopping centre, Hawaiian eateries and savings-and-loans, the dried-up civil servant in the schism of superhighways, and the forces of showbiz fringies will sleep a little easier and labor a lot harder now that their enterprises have been authenticated. In a more human civilization where Banhams doctrines would be measured against the subdividers abuse of the ground and the conduct molecules in little kids lungs, the author are likely to be put up against a wall and shot.
Uncowed, Banham followed the book by starring in Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles, a 1972 television documentary that followed him through one day in the town that manufactures rigmarole of record and end all the rules, and induced within him a passion that goes beyond appreciation or intellect. Stops on the tour included Simon Rodias handmade Watts Towers( a entirely self-absorbed and perfected gravestone) to Los Angeles characteristic fantasize of innocence( prominently differentiated on all the delineates in his book ); the overgrown segments of the age-old Pacific Electric Railways rusting runways that once tied the whole big metropoli together; the decrepit canals and beachside bodybuilding facilities of Venice; and a Sunset Boulevard drive-in burger joint.
There, Banham asked the painter Ed Ruscha, plainspoken and painstaking see of American urban banality, what public buildings a tourist should ensure. Ruscha recommended gas stations.
Banham pre-empted objections to Los Angeles city anatomy by claiming the figure stuffs very little, had now been written that Los Angeles has no metropolitan organize at all in the commonly accepted feel. Yet whatever it does have, he quarrelled, has rendered a fascinating, and sometimes even efficient, specified of emergent city phenomena.
Come the day when the pollution doom finally tumbles, he narrated over aerial shots of Wilshire Boulevards double row of towers and frame-filling communities of disconnected houses, … when trafficking in human beings grinds to a halting and the private vehicle is banned from the street, quite a lot of craftily residence citizens will be able to switch over to being pedestrians and detect no pain.
Cyclists on Venice Beach … though often of LA is not bike-friendly. Image: Alamy
The end of the car in Los Angeles? Bold terms for the man who announced Wilshire Boulevard one of the few enormous streets in the world where driving is a pleasure when you have, like earlier generations of English academics who taught themselves Italian in order to read Dante in the original, “ve learned to” drive in order to speak Los Angeles in the original.
But just as its own language hear on wall street of Los Angeles have proliferated, its own language of mobility has changed there, as has much else besides. How readable would Banham, who perished in 1988 , now find it?
The smog that guessed bane of the citys postwar decades which he ever minimise has all but vanished. The experience of apparently unlimited infinite to gratify an infatuation with single-family lives has given behavior to one of building cranes budding to satisfy the new demand for high-density horizontal living. They put not just over a downtown grow miraculously from the dead, but the specialised sub-centres sown all over greater Los Angeles.
Though the ban on private cars hasnt come yet , no recent development stupefies any Angeleno who was there in the 1970 s more than the citys new runway transit system, which started to develop virtually 30 times after the end of the Pacific Electric. It grades as such as a success for financing, the planning and execution( at the least by the globally unimpressive American standard) that the rest of the two countries now looks to Los Angeles as an example of how to build public transportation and, increasingly, public seat in general.
Readers might scoff at Banham calling the Los Angeles freeway network one of the greater toils of guy but he has demonstrated more of an ability to see beyond it than many current commentators of Los Angeles. Even though it is vastly better than any other motorway arrangement of my acquaintance, he wrote, it is inconceivable to Angelenos that it should not be replaced by an even better system nearer to the perfection they are always seeking.
Banham find downtown Los Angeles merely deserved a short section devote to it. Photo: Alamy
Banham also foretold the rise of the self-driving gondola, so often mooted these days as an alternative solution to Los Angeles traffic woes. But cars that drive themselves( as distinct from Baede-kar a then-fantastical expression sailing organisation dreamed up for Banhams TV doc, that countenances an uncanny similarity to those every American driver uses today) come with difficulties that Banham also predicted all those years ago. The marginal gains in economy through automation, he wrote, might be offset by the mental deprivations caused by destroying the residual misconceptions of free decision and driving skill.
Under each outwardly celebratory page of Banhams book lies the notion of change as Los Angeles exclusively constant: no matter how excitingly modern the car and the route, their day will come to an end; no matter how comfortably idyllic the separated mansion, it extremely must fall out of preference, or into impracticality, sooner or later.
Some of these components that attracted Banhams attention have, after their own the times of disrepute, made fashionable again. Even the humble dingbat has experienced a place in the future of the city, becoming the object of critical analyse and architectural challenger.
Banham also verified the future of Los Angeles in other unprepossessing constructs, especially one astonishing and elegantly simple stucco casket on La Cienega Boulevard. Its designer? A particular Frank Gehry, then virtually unknown but now one of the stronger influencers of the built context in not only Los Angeles( his current high-profile project concerns re-making the citys famously dry, concrete-encased flow ), but other metropolitans as well. The Toronto-born starchitect became his adopted hometowns architectural emissary only one of the myriad modes in which Los Angeles has influenced the rest of the urban nature.
These epoches, the rest of the metropolitan world-wide also influences Los Angeles. No longer struggling for the purposes of the illusions of total exceptionalism that prevailed in Banhams day, it has, with its towers, improves, commons and even bike-share structures, constructed paces toward the liveability so is necessary in 21 st-century urbanists. It now even resembles( if faintly) New York, Boston, London, and Paris those exhaustively contrived , non-experimental metropolitans where, Banham lamented, warring pressure group cannot get out of each other hair why i am pressed together in a hallowed labyrinth of culture gravestones and real estate values.
In its impressive proposal to incorporate older metropolitan honours and play by the rules of good urban design, modern Los Angeles ignores the possibility of setting up becoming a similarly sacred labyrinth at its peril. Deterring Banhams Los Angeles: the Architecture of Four Ecologies on its syllabus will hopefully protect against the grim fate of losing its rule-breaking experimental city spirit.
The engineering-trained scribe saw Los Angeles as a kind of machine. Though it has come in for a naughtily involved modernize of its interface in recent years , none has already been written a useds manual more engaged in the city on its own terms as Banham did 45 years ago.
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