THESIS

ARTICLE V.1 ABSTRACT

This research focuses on the division of a community based on infrastructural goals of a city whose main economic source had become obsolete. Oakland, California was the end of the Southern Pacific railroad, and the neighborhood of West Oakland where the station was located is now a collection of smaller enclaves among a network of freeways, bordered by a light rail line and state buildings. The site of the Cypress Viaduct of the Nimitz Freeway is now a landscaped median with a pedestrian path, with a sculpture where the street crosses a major thoroughfare to downtown and the rest of the city. This sculpture, called Ladders, is a reference to the ladders used to rescue survivors of the collapse of the upper tier of that viaduct during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. After the earthquake, the rerouting of that freeway further west creates the landscape that we see today, and thousands of homes were cleared to make way for redevelopment projects such as Emerybay in Emeryville and Central Station in Oakland. The problem with the kind of redevelopment taking place, including the park where Ladders is located, is that all of the shopping malls and condominiums and public art do not communicate anything about the vibrant community that once existed there as part of the industrial culture that was destroyed. Architects and developers are working to make the financing of these projects come to fruition and are not concerned with the lessons of modernism. Highly criticized for making cities unlivable, modernist ideology called for the separation of the city according to land use. Rather than integrating the redevelopment projects along the coast of the San Francisco Bay, there is a commercial center in Emeryville and a residential center in West Oakland, with the freeway system as the main link between these places and out to the rest of the bay. One analytical lens that acutely focuses the topic of this research is the tactics of the Situationists. Through the techniques of drifting about and creating spectacles in the parts of Paris slated for redevelopment, they sought to spread public awareness of so-called blighted areas that are actually thriving and full of working class life. Situationist methods actively politicized urban conditions and, according to some authors, in such formulations, the city and its architecture become not just aesthetic objects but dynamic, practical relizations of art, unique and irreplaceable works and not reproducible productspolyrhythmic compositions of linear and cyclical times and different social spaces, born from many labors (Things, Flows, Filters, Tactics. The Unknown City. Bordan, Rendell, Kerr, and Pivaro. pp 16-17). That these many time-spaces as they exist(ed) in the city become urban art in this way may not be enough for West Oakland to recover from the economic forces as they have played out, it will be essential to create a public awareness of the racial segregation that continues through these new projects. How, then, can an architectural solution capture the essence of these time-spaces in West Oakland?

IDEOGRAM

REAL
REDEVELOPMENT DEVELOPMENT SOUTHERN PACIFIC TRAIN

MODERN TRANSIT FREEWAYS STREETS

STREETCARS

CENTRAL STATION / EMERYBAY

OAKLAND

F PATHFINDING

GROWING THE MEDIAN GROVE

DREAM

MENTAL MAP

EVENT

ROUTINE

VIRTUAL
CAPITALISM IS THE FORCE

GROWING THE MEDIAN GROVE

From my vantage point overlooking Pill Hill in Oakland, I feel a serene sense of calm. I am also overlooking the main axis from downtown Oakland off to the hills, UC Berkeley, and CCAs main campus: Broadway. In the section where I live, the street has been renamed Broadway Auto Row. The car dealerships that used to be where the Whole Foods Market is located are all here now. There are also a number of auto mechanic and auto body shops here. The close proximity of residential, commercial, and industrial uses has been a major part of Oaklands development. When it was chosen as the terminal point for the Southern Pacific, what was once the largest Oak grove in the United States began its rapid transformation. The other main axis in Oakland was Seventh Street, leading along the waterfront from downtown to the Point. The Point is now known for the underground tube of the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) light rail system that links San Francisco to the East Bay, but it was once a vast, bustling railyard. The wealthy, especially owners of downtown real estate and relocators from the 1906 earthquake, immediately settled in the hills in Piedmont and areas that were soon annexed by Oakland. They were fleeing the new industrial landscape, but also found bedrock that is more stable in an earthquake and better views. Because of this, Oaklands geological stratification is linked to its social stratification.

USGS online spatial data for Google Earth

From those redwood laden hills come three rivers that make up the watershed of Oaklands brackish Lake Merritt, once featuring an open channel to the bay when it was known as San Antonio Slough. Ships used the slough to collect redwood lumber for use in the construction of homes across the bay in San Francisco. Once so full of waterfowl and fish that it was a major Ohlone hunting ground and settlement, the channel was slowly filled in accordance with the street grid and railroad lines until 1926 when the tidal gate was installed, finalizing the transformation from San Antonio Slough to Lake Merritt. Through a combination of industrial pollution and the reduction of the channel to 4% of its original size, cutting off essential supply of oxygen levels at the lakebed, the environmental effects were felt as early as 1939 when trucks had to haul away over a ton of dead fish. Dumping restrictions in the lake remained loose until the 1962, when a severe flood prompted the installation of a new flood gate and scientists stepped in to increase tidal flow in an effort to heal the ecologically imbalanced water body. A massive restoration project, which began with aeration fountains installed in the mid-Nineties, now seeks to further improve tidal flow, build new parks, and reduce the twelve-lane road from 1949 that crosses the old channel to a six-lane road. Despite the severity of the ecological crisis in Lake Merritt, nothing is being done to alleviate the social crisis that has plagued West Oakland since around the same time as the fish died in the lake.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Architecture as a Translation of Music. Pamplet Architecture 16. Princeton: Princeton AP, 1994. Bernhardi, Robert. The Buildings of Oakland. Oakland: Forest Hill Press, 1979. Davis, Ann Leslie. Undoing the 1950s: The Death and Revival of Lake Merritt. Oakland Magazine. Sept-Oct (2011): 45-49. Gutman, Marta Ruth. On the Ground in Oakland: Women and Institution Building in an Industrial City. Dissertation, University of California, 2000. Hood, Walter J. The Next Generation of Parks. 2010 Walker Channel. Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. 2 December 2010. Lewis, Paul, Marc Tsurumaki, and David J. Lewis. Situation Normal.... Pamphlet Archietcture 21. Princeton: Princeton AP, 1998. Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory. Ed. Neil Leach. New York: Routledge, 1997. Self, Robert O. American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003. The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space. Ed. Borden, Iain, Joe Kerr, Jane Rendell, and Alicia Pivaro. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001.