Sites of Transition: Urbanizing the Mojave
Sponsored by the Phoenix Urban Research Laboratory in partnership with
Future Arts Research @ ASU, the ASU Art Museum, and the ASU School of Art
March 17– April 5, 2008
Opening reception March 18, 5 to 7 p.m.
In spring 2008, as part of our commitment to establishing partnerships with schools of architecture in the Southwest and around the country, PURL is collaborating with the University of Nevada at Las Vegas and the University of Washington to bring to the College of Design Sites of Transition, an exhibition exploring the rapid urbanization of the Mojave Desert near Las Vegas. The exhibition, which will open at the German Architecture Center in Berlin before traveling to PURL and other U.S. venues, features sixty photographs by Ralph Stern, associate professor of architecture at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, and Nicole Huber, associate professor of architecture at the University of Washington. Part of an extensive and ongoing research project by Stern and Huber, the photographs document the effects of recent development on the outskirts of Las Vegas and in the surrounding valleys, capturing the uneasiness of social dislocation, the fragility of history, and the loss of memory.
In conjunction with this exhibit will be a one-day symposium on April 5 featuring Stern and Huber;
prominent art writer Lucy Lippard; Matthew Coolidge, the director of the Center for Land Use Interpretation in Los Angeles; and Mark Klett, photographer and professor of art at Arizona State University.
This exhibition is currently running at the Deutsches Architektur Zentrum in Berlin through February 8.
Summary by Ralph Stern + Nicole Huber
Unlike most presentations of the city, this material avoids the spectacle of the Strip. Rather, beginning with the Strip’s “backside”—the monumental parking structures and staging areas serving the spectacle—it spirals outward as it moves through various aspects of the ”everyday,” the “other” and the marginalized, through the city's inner industrial sites, trailer parks, areas slated for “urban renewal,” the cityscape of signage, and the topography of homelessness. Moving toward the city's peripheries, the images document infrastructure (vehicular, water, and waste management) before engaging the outer suburbs and fringe areas beyond. The work concludes with an exploration of the abstract geometrical forms that characterize much of the city's development and that serve to relate it, finally, to the degree of abstraction found throughout the desert in which Las Vegas is located.
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