The Case for Experience

The trouble with disaster scenarios is that they are evocative. Geoff Manaugh's BLDG BLOG discusses the disaster photography of Armestre and Gomez for Greenpeace. Their images envision coastlines across the world under meters of water, the effect of global warming. The problem is, "do i care about a coastline in spain?" It feels like a photographic work of fiction, a fiction that on some levels might be cool to see someday. As long as i'm not affected where I'm at, its pretty damn interesting, right? The pictures don't describe any tangible evidence of human suffering. All Gore's imagery in An Inconvenient Truth showing Florida and Manhattan being submerged are equally scary and evocative, but have less impact than they deserve. Perhaps detractors of America would rejoice at seeing Manhattan submerged. He also describes differing opinions on New Orleans. The images of the submerged city, depending on which side of the fence you're on, show either a tragic amount of lives lost due to nature and political apathy, or a tragic amount of lives lost when they made themselves so poor that they couldn't escape and our government had to bail them out.

Manaugh also talks about "liberation hydrology" in Miami:

"The implicit, if inadvertant, message here seems to be: hey, south Floridians, and all you who are bored of the world today, sick of all the parking lots and the 7-11s, tired of watching Cops, tired of applying to colleges you don't really want to go to, tired of credit card debt and bad marriages, don't worry. This will all be underwater soon. "

A flooded Miami (ficitonal) and flooded New Orleans (actual) are a lot less exciting knee deep than from a birds eye view.

Imagery and experience in this case are wholly different things.

The point is:

My monument must be evocative through experience. The most successful monuments are experiencial, even if on different levels. I will continue to point to Eisenman's and Foster's monumental buildings in Berlin. Users define their meaning through experience. My project will be successful if I can convey the weight of our actions to the users through experiencing what, where, how, and why i build my monument.