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thehauntologicalsociety · 7 years ago

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The body is under threat in the city—The cinema is under threat in the city—The digital city is antipathetic to both ...

In early 2016 I was standing in the ballroom of the Duke of Cornwall Hotel in Plymouth (UK), chatting with a kilted Dee Heddon, co-founder with Misha Myers of The Walking Library (see Heddon & Myers 2014), and waiting for a performance of a scabrous Pearl Williams routine by Roberta Mock, author of a key account of walking arts (2009, 7-23). Conversation drifted to films and Dee wondered what kind of resource for wandering a passion for movies might offer.

It was an appropriate space for Dee’s question. The ballroom is on the ground floor of the hotel, which rises to an impressive tower topped by a single room. It was to this room that Roberta’s partner, Paul, and I had gained access on a ‘vertigo walk’ some years previously. We had walked from Paul’s childhood home town of Saltash on the other side of the Hamoaze, a stretch of the River Tamar, into Plymouth. This involved us crossing high above the river gorge on the 1961 road bridge. Although he had crossed this bridge many hundreds of times by car and bus, Paul, susceptible to vertigo like myself, had never walked it before.

Having successfully negotiated the bridge, we sought out all the highest points in the city that we could access. The manager of the Duke of Cornwall led us up winding stairs and opened the room in the tower for us. A telescope stood at a window; above the bed (and this was after 9/11) hung a framed photograph of the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in New York. I might have thought of ‘Wolfen’ (1981), or the anachronistic underwater shot of the twin towers in Tim Burton’s 2001 ‘Planet of the Apes’, or ‘Man on Wire’ (2008) even, but the opening scene of Fulci’s ‘Zombi 2’/Zombie Flesh Eaters’ (1979) was how I immediately cross-referenced through film what I was feeling on coming into the room; to be precise, the moment when the music reaches its climax not for the monster, but for the Manhattan skyline. Flying in the face of Ivan Chtcheglov’s assertion that “[W]e are bored in the city, there is no longer any Temple of the Sun”, in Fulci’s movie solar rays spill from behind the twin towers, just as they have from behind the zombie cadaver. The two monoliths cancel each other out and the movie almost stalls before it can begin; landscape and body equally ruinous.

I want to propose that by systematically drawing on such associations – of the ambience, shape or narrative of particular places with memories of movies – the effectiveness of a certain kind of political and critical walking can be enhanced. Ironically, this walking springs from the dérive of the Lettrists/situationists who, subsequent to their exploratory walking, developed a theory of the ‘Society of the Spectacle’, a deeply negative attitude to the predominance of the visual, and produced anti-art and anti-cinema works like ‘Hurlements En Favour De Sade’ (1952) in which the screen throughout is blank, either dazzling white or dark. While what follows skirts a narrow adherence to the asceticism of later situationist theory, drawing upon the Lettrist/situationist experimentation with art processes recovered in more recent publications such as McKenzie Wark’s trilogy (2008, 2011, 2103), it also implements the orthodox situationist technique of détournement, hacking up and depredating the movies drawn upon and redeploying their images, themes and narratives in ways that are often aggressively at odds with their makers’ intentions.

The body is under threat in the city. The cinema is under threat in the city. The digital city is antipathetic to both. The cinema offers the urban walker a chance to return as an immanent and imaginative body to the city.

Stephen Barber, in considering the turbulent confluence of body, performance, film and digital screens, makes this damning assessment of the contemporary city: “[T]he city’s surface, as a scoured and excoriated environment.... precludes and voids the eruption of performance acts.... forming an exposed medium that is already maximally occupied with such visual Spectacles as digital image-screens transmitting corporate animations, along with saturated icons, insignia and hoardings.... surface has no space for the corporeal infiltration of performance, unless that performance is commissioned.... to fully serve corporate agendas” (2104, 89). Barber’s portrait of urban surface is extreme, but it explains the absurd policing of image-making and the suppression of the most innocuous of non-retail behaviours by mall security guards, the tendency, akin to conspiracy, among consumers to mistake advertising logos for ornament and the strange brutalist sculptural contraptions placed to inconvenience rough sleepers.

When the screen was digitised, the Society of the Spectacle became architectural. A new intensity to the integration of the Spectacle (Debord 1998, 8), beyond and subsuming free market and authoritarian manipulation, now commits it to an invasive, algorithmic pursuit of the preferences of the online majority. An authoritarian redesign of the city, complementing the ‘nudge units’ of its happiness industry, is under way; engineered to encourage the preferences that the Spectacle prefers. This new city space wraps free market around free interiority; then, by scandal-dramaturgy and pseudo-spirituality, it demands a confessional revealing of all things to the Spectacle’s algorithms.

Against such tides, I want to propose a means of ambulant, contemplative and corporeal resistance, drawing upon the anachronisms of the cinema screen, on an unsentimental deployment of our memories of movies, and on our walking bodies. I want to propose that we, walking artists, pedestrians, anyone who will listen, should perform our walking; as a matter not of life and death, but as part of the struggle between vivacity and morbidity; in resistance to a society that seeks to exploit not just our labour, but our entire lives. We should “perform” our walking because in this mode it is “integrally concerned with survival.... not necessarily its [performance’s] own survival as a medium.... but always of the body, and of the inhabitable spaces of corporeality in the digital world” (Barber, 2014, 211). Such talk of survival signals just how antagonist circumstances are for the immersive walker, repeatedly prodded for digital access or visual seduction. The luxury, once, of distinguishing between the heightened and super-sensitised walk of the derive or flânerie or whatever we want to call it and the humdrum everyday shopping trip or walk to the call centre has increasingly withered; the new city centre surface is an intense, demanding and closely woven battleground. Where, before, an exulting in finding the accidental poetry of damaged signs, long-abandoned esoteric communications or dust from Mars all constituted a little taking back of the surplus joy and ecstasy extracted from their production on the part of the sensitised walker, the digital city changes that relation. Now we are not only consumers, but the unpaid producers of what we pay to consume – our reflections on or images of the pleasures of our latest ‘drift’ are turned through the alchemy of social media into instantly scalable and exploitable product – and the deficit is already so wide that being able to perform a heightened journey through the city is no longer about bonus additions to the pleasures of everyday life, but about the survival of our subjectivities and of the meaningfulness of our agency.

I am not suggesting that cinema is a unique resource; nor that the films cited below could not be replaced by better ones, nor that a subjective choice of films by any walker is not more important than an argument over the objective worth of any one film over another. There may be similar resources to be found in obscure branches of religious iconography, in literature or philosophy, in gaming or in folk traditions. What makes film such a valuable resource is its availability in multiple forms, its formal self-entanglements, its susceptibility to a spectatorial-edit and the historical architecture of its projection: that large, off-white and flawed screen. Carrying a memory of that fragile means of crude reflection, mediating the plethora of images in your hoard of movie memories, constitutes a ‘screenplay’ by which to act the streets and perform your own trajectory through them; preserving by enacting your memories and subjectivity, without revealing anything to either security guard or digital algorithm; walking discreetly with morphing hallucinations, learning to look through multiple eyes and settling, eventually, on long shots and gentle pans.

To make my argument for a cine-dérive, I will reference a number of movies and a few key concepts: unitary urbanism, actuality, ‘anywhere’, doubleness, the released or floating eye, separation, landscapity, effacement and totality.

In 2008 at the Vue in Exeter I attended a midnight showing of ‘The Mist’, directed by Frank Darabont and based upon a Stephen King story. Those of us present were considered questionable enough to be repeatedly monitored by an anxious cinema manager; standing to the side of the screen. The movie’s paranoid narrative was thus enhanced. Halfway through the screening, the imagery of the genre movie was loosened; at a moment when the screen itself suddenly re-appeared from behind the movie as a blank.

The eponymous miasma of ‘The Mist’ makes its appearance early on in the movie and hangs around until just before the final credits. It seems to watch the movie’s characters; just as, that night, the manager was watching us. At one point the camera drifts, as if it is the viewpoint of the mist itself, across a glass storefront behind which fugitives from the mist’s deadly inhabitants are sheltering. A miasma looking through transparency! When a handful of the survivors briefly leave the store, the moment occurs: the characters (in search of medicine in a neighbouring building) disappear into the mist. For a few seconds there is only whiteness on the screen; indeed, there is nothing on the screen! The screen itself emerges from behind the colour reflections of the projection, reaching through the image directly to the cinema-goer. Of course, this effect does not occur for anyone watching a streamed or dvd version, but in the cinema, at the moment of stripping away, the film enters itself, becomes its own subject, the confined melodrama of the besieged store falls away: cars, road signs and even a freeway appear like sketched line drawings, almost not there at all. A beast of extraordinary scale appears and looms, indifferent, a mass of extraneous claws; a gigantic Spectacle just passing through.

There is something Deleuzian about this screen landscape, a kind of ‘anywhere, anytime’ where “a collection of locations and positions which coexist independently of the temporal…. moves from one part to the other, independently of the connections and orientations which the vanished characters and situations gave to them” (Deleuze, 2005: 123). This space – or rather the making of this space from representations of place (the cinema’s counter-digital alchemy) – subverts, within an un-subversive film, cinema’s privileging of “the human face, the human body, the relationship between the human form and its surroundings, the visible presence of the person in the world” (Mulvey, 1993: 114-115), effacing what Delueze calls “landscapity”, the characterisation of the landscape as face-like, replacing it with a barely tangible, elusive, ideal and unscalable space that resists reproduction. From this negation emerges a screen that is more like a translucent membrane or a cloud of dust than a reflecting and re-presenting mirror.

Landscape is rarely filmed without the representation of human form, character or mind. This is partly a residue of the romanticist practice of ‘pathetic fallacy’ and of the correlationist tendency in phenomenology; the idea that objects have influence, not as a result of the properties inherent in them, but as a result of those imagined for them. In an ‘experimental’ film like Nina Danino’s ‘Temenos’ (1998), consisting almost exclusively of long shots of sites associated with apparitions of the Virgin Mary, or critical films like Patrick Keiller’s ‘Robinson’ trilogy (1994, 1997, 2010), of which Iain Sinclair writes “(M)ovement becomes a function of voice” (25), or a mainstream mystery-movie like M. Night Shyamalan’s ‘The Happening’ (2008) in which landscape and climate are granted autonomous agency, it is still the human discourses about these landscapes – through consecration, narration or fear – that predominate. The vibrancy of objects, as vividly expressed by neo-vitalists or Object-Oriented Ontologists, only very occasionally permeates cinema.

A rare exception is the brief fūkeiron (landscape theory) movement in Japan. Its seminal movie, ‘AKA Serial Killer’ (Ryakushô renzoku shasatsuma, 1969), the work of a number of filmmakers including Adachi and Matsuda Masao, consists entirely of a series of fixed shots, with (mostly lateral) pans, of locations in Japanese cities: pedestrians come and go, trains arrive and leave, alleyways and jazz clubs are deserted. An intermittent voiceover describes the rationale for these shots: they follow the life trajectory of teenager Nagayama Norio who in 1968 murdered four people in a chaotic crime spree. The sequence of shots tracks Nagayama’s rootless wandering across Japan after leaving his rural home.

The movie rejects not only the sensationalism of the Japanese media coverage of Nagayama’s case, but also the ‘rapid fire’ editing and frantic scenes characteristic of contemporary militant Japanese counter-cultural documentaries. ‘AKA Serial Killer’ was filmed at a time of violent student uprisings, with which the film makers were in general sympathy, and it is against images of the violent clashes between thousands of riot police and armed and helmeted students that the film was expected to be ‘read’. By adopting a method similar to the ‘actuality’ films of the very early pre-dramatic cinema, Adachi and Matsuda seek to shift an attention already attuned to violence to find it within the repetitions, circulations and orderings of un-dramatic urban goings-on; in the “mechanisms of control and governance built into the everyday environment.... which operates through subtle, noncoercive, and economic forms of policing and managing the urban population”. What the movie shows is “[W]hat remains in place after the departure of the student protestors and riot police.... the ubiquitous presence of the state” (Furuhata, 118, 138).

The calm, but critical viewing that ‘AKA Serial Killer’ solicits, by playing a simple, sparse and spectral documentary narrative across the relentless flows of homogenous, economic cities, encourages the viewer (and dériviste) to learn to be static in the city, to be in a state of ‘static drift’, to allow the streets to pan slowly by, to ignore the blurs of what passes close up and focus on what is ‘background’ and that is, for once, the main performer. This calm and stable viewpoint pre-empts the cool and indifferent gaze of the fixed video surveillance cameras that makes geographical and dreadful the blighted town of Santa Mira in ‘Halloween III’ (1982), and haunts the characters of Michael Haneke’s ‘Hidden’/’Caché’ (2005) with a shared memory of violence.

Matsuda Masao remarks that when the film makers were considering Nagayama’s story “we became conscious of the landscape as the antagonistic ‘power’ itself”. Inverting Walter Benjamin’s description of an early Parisian photographer representing landscapes as if they were the deserted scenes of crimes, they “filmed crime scenes just like landscape [photographs]” (Furuhata, 135, 134); thus making viewers detectives in the city, but turning around (détourning) the usual function of a detective and redeploying their forensic skills to examining a suspect state’s undemonstrative coercion. By shifting focus from the state’s human agents (riot police, etc.) the portrayal of the state is rendered hyper-materialist; not a human ordering of neutral and inert materials but the order of certain materials imposed (or adopted) on the humans – “to grasp oil as a lube is to grasp earth as a body of different narrations being moved forward by oil” (Negarestani, 19) – by which the state becomes landscape.

By drawing on a memory of such restrained filming of ‘backgrounds’ as agents, a critical walking becomes more possible. The walker becomes the camera, not simply walking in response to the terrain, but with a particular, cinematic discipline of looking; in this case, one that detaches itself from the narrative-of-the-walk that is often generated by exploratory and hyper-sensitised walking. For radical walkers, this means that rather than seeking out spaces and relations where social violence becomes explicit, spectacular and reproductive, they can watch for the behaviours of materials that organise violence in an undemonstrative way, where relations can be disrupted or diverted by the gentler means of installation, sabotage, détournement and re-telling.

In Nagisa Ôshima’s ‘The Man Who Left His Will On Film’ (1970), fūkeiron filmmaking is criticised by student radicals as “morally and politically bankrupt.... wast[ing] film by shooting mundane settings that could be filmed ‘anywhere, anytime’” (Furuhata, 131). It is exactly that ‘anywhere, anytime’ (Wrights & Sites, 110) that is the radical contradiction of the urban landscape portrayed in ‘AKA Serial Killer’; the violence of homogenisation and the circulation of goods creates a slipperiness and connectedness that can be turned to particularities that resist the flow of the state’s ordering and distribute different contagions, constructing situations at odds with the violence of the mundane.

Landscapes in movies very different to ‘AKA Serial Killer’ achieve a similar naive ‘actuality’, a non-dramatic coolness, that makes them susceptible to, even welcoming of, their appropriation as part of a walker’s memory hoard: the deserts of Werner Herzog’s ‘Fata Morgana’ (1971), the eventless landscapes of Chantal Akerman’s ‘News From Home’ (1976), ‘the Zone’ in Tarkovsky’s ‘Stalker’ (1979), the fragments of a ruined English park in ‘The Pleasure Garden’ (1952), the swimming pools of the Connecticut suburban rich in ‘The Swimmer’ (1968) or the route in ‘Yellowbrickroad’ (2010): “you think that the trail will understand you, and that’s the worst part, it does”.

By assembling a memory-library of movie sequences or images, the walker can slip between different modes of looking in the same walk, spontaneously and in response to a changing terrain (triggering a different movie memory) or in a planned way that attempts to triangulate a terrain through a range of different lookings and the (potentially) different kinds of information that they detect. ‘Useful’ sequences, suitable for retaining in such a memory-library, are not necessarily restricted to serious, political or art movies. In the past I have drawn on, even at times favoured, fantasy and genre movies, enjoying how work derided as ‘hack’, ‘commercial’, ‘too violent’ or ‘artless’ sometimes peels, embroiders and embrocates the spaces I walk. The point of the memory’s leverage on the real landscape may be some visual similarity, or an association of ambiences, or even where the terrain or events in it have been shaped in response to movies.

I have often drawn on movies that divulge certain patterns at odds with their movie’s intentions, which then fold back on their image systems in accidental critiques; for example, the psychopath test in ‘The Parallax View’ (1974) which implicates both conspiracy and whistleblower, or the discovery/destruction of the underground murals in ‘Roma’ (1972) that throws in doubt the efficacy of Fellini’s luxuriating imagery. As means to the magical-in-the-ordinary, such excerpts can be reliable allies for a radical walker, standing in for utopias in the face of “our incapacity to imagine the future” (Jameson, 1984, 247). They are useful kit for filling newly found holey space; for making interventions against inbuilt systems of dismantlement.

All this could have been applied at any time since moving pictures became one of the forms of mass media; however, what I am proposing here is that, for the first time since then, the ‘grounds’ have changed, the same for psychogeographers and radical walkers as for everyone else. What is newly at stake in the digital city is our subjectivity; not in the sense of our individuality, but of our interiority out of public view. It will be harder to be playful; from now on the cine-dériviste may find her archive is bombarded with uninvited totalities along with the brief sequences she has personally snatched from the genre pool which, if she discloses them, will form the basis for the algorithms’ future bombardments.

With that proviso in mind, I turn to Joe Chappelle’s monster-horror ‘Phantoms’ (1998). In its opening sequence two sisters are negotiating space in a car-bound dialogue; by talking out one family melodrama they make room for another, metaphysical, one. The camera, also released, moves outside the car to establish the limits of a Colorado town and when it returns to the car it now looks out, lingering on the frontages of suburban houses in a pre-digital town as if they were the faces of human characters; the ghosts of the soap-opera narrative we never get to see.

Distinct from the movie male who constitutes “a figure in a landscape” (Mulvey, 1981, 210), in ‘Phantoms’ the doubleness of the central female characters is a quality both of and dividing the two women. This provokes a negation-reflection within the material of the landscape; the houses assume the iconic face in close-up, an oppressive ‘landscapity’, face-like features of the landscape that exist in a perpetual moment (mediatised, stale, self-reflecting and immaterial), less and less able to “adroitly negotiate[s] and enforce[s] its own mass within the image” (Barber, 2002, 20). This becomes more explicit, through another doubleness, in Tom Holland’s Stephen King TV movie adaptation ‘The Langoliers’ (1995), where a young girl intuits and a male ‘mystery writer’ explains their fellow characters’ predicament, awaking on an airborne plane to find that all the crew and most of the passengers have disappeared and that they are travelling in a space stuck a few moments before the present in an inert past: “what is happening to [us] is happening to no one else”. Such radical separateness is characteristic of dramatic film in general; but this is a very average movie which, by making the structural conditions of its own discourse the subject of itself, becomes collectable in parts, particularly its geography of the very recent past. This includes a deserted and echo-less airport, the untimely fading of daylight, and the wholly unpopulated world below their flight. This is a terrain that aches with loss, like the landscape of a Makoto Shinkai animation; it effaces “landscapity” and generates objects and ‘grounds’ that are blank, screen-like, collapsible and radically isolated. Despite its clumsiness, ‘The Langoliers’ makes explicit the feint of many movies: revealing that its action has been happening, in a real illusion, just a few moments back in its own past, but now, in its final reel, is returning to where it always was and will always be. It reproduces Marc Augé’s non-places – airport terminals, institutional boardrooms, airliner interiors – as spaces of political repetition, of a perpetual present and the eradication of the deep, historical past, for the reproduction of present relations; a double effacing in a “contemporary social system… (which has) begun to.... live in a perpetual present and in a perpetual change that obliterates traditions’ (Jameson, 1997, 205).

‘The Langoliers’ evokes a society that has begun to cohabit with the images and representations of itself, recycling the present as a repeatable moment, already just a short while in its past, represented as soon as lived. Its tendency to auto-destruction ushers in a “sheer description” (Jameson, 1988: 95) without visage; and, for a while at least, all that remains in ‘The Langoliers’ is an airborne dérive without a destination, a plane in flight above a world without airports whose surface is being visibly eaten up by its own past.

To plunder such images and such a precarious trajectory, often from “the proliferating corporate zones of Europe’s multiplex complexes, [where] the would-be spectator finds everything except the traces of film” (Barber, 2002, 158) – from the groundless flights of fantasies and super heroes – and from tinier and tinier often handheld screens, is to sometimes float precariously in search of any central urban surface onto which to cling. However, by walking with a memory of ‘The Langoliers’, or of similar landscape-effacing movies, from ‘The Truman Show’ (1998) to ‘The Final Girls’ (2015), it becomes possible to map contradictions within the economy of the Spectacle: specifically, the small folds and hiatuses that are opened up by its relentless pursuit of our subjectivities, within which we can hide our subjective life from that pursuit. Similarly, at a bigger scale, the combination of the fragmentation and appropriation of appearance and the gentrification of Spectacle-resistant areas is now pushing psychogeographers, and all those in search of an ambient city, to the margins, in the literal sense of suburbia and the edgelands. From the inner city of ‘Lights Out For The Territory’ [1997] the trajectories shift to the outer limits of ‘London Orbital’ [2003]), or in the case of Fife Geography Collective’s superb collection of dérive accounts ‘From Hill to Sea’ (2016) the journey is even further afield. This suggests that radical walkers now require a kind of binocular vision (one familiar from these movies which reveal that theirs is a doubled world) in order to simultaneously navigate across to physical margins while seeking havens for interiority within the detail and texture of their immediate terrain.

In 1938, H. G. Wells proposed a ‘World Brain’, a library with branches in every community across the globe, stocked with a core canon of books chosen by international committees, “knitting all the intellectual workers of the world through a common interest and a common medium of expression into a more and more conscious co-operating unity” (23). Some have claimed that this was the ‘first Internet’. However, the ‘web’ has been far more of a diversifying and fragmenting force than intended by Wells. Cinema, limited by costs, its collaborative technology, the experiential primacy of projection and a monopolised industrial structure, can still offer a ‘World Terrain’ of sorts; an accessible and exchangeable (look at the explosion of fan and lay critical writing!) canon of landscape images that is striated by exclusions, translations and the wounding centralisations of focus and rapid-fire puncta.

The constitution of such a canon of landscapes is always far from purely aesthetic. To pluck one counter-example, arbitrarily: in 1950s England, local authorities lobbied to be placed “on a waiting list for the honour of having their buildings and monuments modelled for film destruction” in a wave of sci-fi and horror movies that re-enacted, fantastically, the precarity of the Blitz for an audience barely old enough to remember it (Conrich, 88). Nor are these landscapes in any way neutral or universal; the integrity of the body of the viewer is as much in play in them as the fabric of their fictions. These are mostly male and often violent landscapes. Innumerable movies propose ways for how the viewer/walker might take themselves apart in order to take the movies apart; from the use of double exposures in early cinema, influenced by ‘spirit photography’, through the surgery of ‘Les Yeux Sans Visage’ (1960), the eruptive and steely objectification of the ‘Tetsuo’ movies (1989, 1992, 2009) and the jouissant mutilations of ‘Hellraiser’ (1987), the bodies of those keen, or forced, to experience materiality are regularly dispersed to the landscape, their corporeal materials escaping from their container, to combine trangressively and ‘miscegenously’ with inorganic vibrancies. All these are fictions that the walker can archive and re-deploy in order that their own gaps entangle with the ‘voids’ – “empty corridors that penetrate the consolidated city, appearing with the extraneous character of a nomadic city living inside the sedentary city” (Careri, 188) – of the material landscapes.

In Higuchinsky’s ‘Uzumaki’ (2000) the nomadic eye is released; previously opened with a razor in ‘Un Chien Andalou’ (1929), with scissors in ‘Spellbound’ (1945), and dilated by hypnotism in ‘Herz Aus Glas’/’Heart of Glass’ (1976). In ‘Uzumaki’, it peers vividly through a broken windscreen, popped from its socket, until, by a sudden, stuttering, stabbing zoom, as if the camera is exaggeratedly reaching out for information like the sensory organs in James J. Gibson’s theory of perceptual systems (1983), it dominates the screen.

Metaphorically released from its organism in this way, the eye is free to roam, moving between a satellite-seeing, where space, viewed from above, is defined by trajectories, and a zooming descent into super-detail through “layered surfaces that successively cover over one another” including an “outer wrapping (that) is none other than the human mind and its products” (Ingold, 1993: 37). The model for the dériviste’s hybridisation of these lookings (“to see the world from multiple viewpoints at any one time” [Smith, 113]) is right there in the modern movie camera’s capacities to pan and zoom – sometimes simultaneously, as famously in ‘Vertigo’ (1958) and ‘Jaws’ (1975) – and then by cranes and drones to fly out of situations or plunge down into them; so nurse Ana Clark’s accelerating trajectory through the rabid Milwaukee suburbs in Zack Snyder’s remake of ‘Dawn of the Dead’ (2004), with concentrated domestic melodramas flooding onto gardens and roadsides, is abruptly released and flung upwards on the bloom of an explosion to a malevolent bird’s eye view reminiscent of the gulls’ in ‘The Birds (1963), or of the scene in David Lynch’s ‘Inland Empire’ (2006) when the camera moves out from the socially abject and emotionally intense death of Sue Blue to reveal a sound stage and its fabricated scenery.

When ‘Uzumaki’ (like ‘The Langoliers’) introduces a force from the past – a mirror found under the water of a nearby lake – corporeal fragmentation increases, eyes swivel in their sockets, mutilations (as in ‘Dark City’ [1998]) and hairstyles become subject to the vortex of the eye; “wanting to be seen” contorts a girl gang, a father obsessively videos snails, and corpses twist like corkscrews, until finally the eye is ejected from its body, wounding the movie through its shattered screen. ‘Uzumaki’ is infused with these exploratory spirals of seeing; it constitutes a kind of ‘unitary cinema’ (counterpart to the situationists’ ‘unitary urbanism’) – subjecting each and every part (snails, washing driers, hairstyles, streets, clouds, bodies) to the sensory pattern of the whole – doing for the movies what the situationists longed to do, reparatively, for the city: overcome separation. This is the contradiction – the emergence of a stilled, synchronic pattern from a forward-lurching linearity – by which the violence of the dramatic cinema, editing bodies when not diegetically dismembering them, can be cooled, returned to the calmer ‘actuality’ of pre-dramatic cinema, restoring a slow and meandering flow to life; for example, in the painfully and beautifully extended shots of a Béla Tarr movie, or in the intense weavings of bodies and cameras in Miklos Janscó’s. First by separation, the floating free or deregulation of the senses through cinema’s technology, and then seeking to restore itself to a transformative connectivity by an anachronistic pedestrian pace and a historic cinematic reserve. The cinematic memory archive here serves as a parallel to what the radical walker seeks to achieve by placing a pedestrian and anachronistic torque upon a hyper-accelerated society, while deploying her senses, enhanced (in the sense of imitating techniques like zoom and pan) by an equally anachronistic, estranging and disruptive analogue cinema technology.

The need for radical walkers and walking artists to navigate certain contradictions in the streets – between the hyper-acceleration of information and architecture’s solid frame, between the overwhelming of the sensorium by the onrushing data of the ‘drift’ and a cool organisation of it for future use – partly explains the continuing influence of situationist theory and practice among ambulatory activists. The vitality of the dérive in experimentally and experientially joining ambience to ambience, resistant space to resistant space, is still resonant.

Situationist critique identified separation as the means by which the Spectacle subordinates social activity to itself; “a social relationship between people that is mediated by images” (Debord, 1995, 12), a relationship of separation by representation and reflection. This separateness is both the ends (patriarchal, statist and bourgeois dominance over everything else) and the justification (the heroic individual male figure in the landscape) of the totality of social relations, the ruling and ruled ‘grounds’ for being/becoming. However, there is no restitution in a simple re-unification. The “unitary urbanism” counterposed by the situationists to the totalised separateness of the Spectacle is not a restoration to just any available connection of things, but an interrogation of those connections, a feint that allows separateness to be re-separated, individualised, to be further floated free, to be made an outcast from outcasts before it can return, unrecognisable and hungry to connect in novel ways. The origins of “unitary urbanism” lie in ‘hypergraphics’, a ‘Lettrist’ post-writing method for communicating in multiple vocabularies; not so much a unification as an assemblage of multiplicities, creating (as yet meaningless) gaps and voids, new levels of a-communication and materiality, unhuman and unthinkable, to which the terrain can return as an agent, and the pedestrian as a poet/sculptor/paramedic/dramaturg, collapsing functions. Just as in ‘Uzumaki’, the world of the urban locale is dismantled in order to make explicit, and relatable to, its subjection to unhuman patterns.

The Spectacle, however, also has a similar predilection for such dismantling ‘leaps to faith’; reproducing itself as both the logic and product of its separateness, repeatedly escaping its subordination to any totality other than its own. This, though, comes at a cost, for it too is “developing for itself” (Debord, 1995: 16) and is endangered by its self-referential ends and means, always having to start from scratch and wipe the slate clean, increasingly reliant on natural disasters, wars and economic crises; and vulnerable to a future totality – democratic or fascistic or unimaginable – that can ‘get in’, after a future disaster, before it does.

None of this can be successfully opposed by confronting the Spectacle with what is ‘real’ or by a simple stripping away to what is ‘true’ (something powerfully demonstrated by the Trump and Brexit campaigns in 2016); this is what John Carpenter’s ‘They Live’ (1988) shows, but does not know. The film exposes its city as a blanket illusion, revealing (through the eyes of its proletarian hero, John Nada, equipped with special sunglasses) the ‘real’ city of 1980s America, a landscape of monochrome, geometrical buildings, and homogenous main drags lined with hoardings transmitting subliminal slogans: SLEEP, CONSUME, OBEY. There is, however, a debilitating contradiction in Carpenter’s conceit. If the monochrome revelation effected by John Nada’s dark glasses is the true city (controlled by Reaganite, free-marketeer aliens), disguised electronically as what we take for real, colourful life, then why, when Nada has destroyed the masking system does the monochrome city not appear to everyone? Why, instead, are the aliens exposed in our colourful world of illusion, rather than us discovering ourselves in their real world of subjection?

‘They Live’, like other ‘trash’ 1980s movies – such as ‘CHUD’ (1984) and ‘The Stuff’ (1985) – that indicted corruption, profit and property, and celebrated acts of resistance (a kind of movie revived by the recent ‘The Purge: Anarchy’ [2014]), addresses the Spectacle as a pattern of corporate and entrepreneurial misrepresentation. It fails to grasp (it shows, but does not explain) that in the Society of the Spectacle appearances are all you get; “reality erupts with the Spectacle, and the Spectacle is real” (Debord, 1995, 14) and the promise of a truth ‘behind it all’ (the ‘grail’ of conspiracy theory) is the greatest deception, and that we, like so much else in the Spectacle, produce that deception ourselves. The crime of the Spectacle is not that it erects a screen between us and the truth, but that it distributes everything, including us, to screens.

Like much occult psychogeography and radical binary narratives of illusion/truth, the problem of ‘They Live’ is not its escapism, but its failure to take its fantasy seriously enough. For the hoard of a cine-dériviste, a totalised whimsy is of little help, but a rigorous realist fantasy (as Carpenter’s movie at first promises to be) can be; yet there are few examples. Where, we might ask, is the situationist ‘Turner Diaries’? Perhaps ‘V For Vendetta’ (2005) is the closest, generating the most popular image of contemporary resistance. But without rigour and realism in fantasy, far better, then, to chisel off something like the pre-credits sequence from ‘Predator 2’ (1990), where the camera races over tree tops, monkeys screech, setting up for a return to the jungle setting of the original ‘Predator’ (1987), only for the camera to rise up and reveal a Los Angeles skyline beyond its fringe of palm trees. Such transitions in the archive are reminders not only of just how quickly the landscape can shift, but that we are always in more than one place at any one time.

The dériviste effaces the Spectacle by reading the codes of the Spectacle and then re-encoding its surfaces with subjective codes of her own; not according to a repetition of survival behaviours or a quest for revelation, but by what she can encode, with pleasure and the coolness that ‘actuality’ brings to looking. When subjected to a separated, calmed and cooled eye, the abject canon of movies fragments, its particles serving not as keys to solving the codes in urban space, but as miasmic screens for dissolving and traducing their meanings and ‘realism’ in the letters and sounds of a new language: “external action and character interaction are suspended.... almost to zero…we peer into an opaque landscape via a slowly tracking survey without clues to help us decipher it… We share effectively in the intensive movements onscreen as we input speculative mental activity in place of dramatic action” (Powell, 2007, 138).

When I look at almost any hilly rural scene, or see a cliff or gorge, I pleasurably fear that the slow, unfeasible, whirring Kenwood Chef-like dalek spaceship from ‘Daleks – Invasion Earth 2050’ (1966) will emerge, in all its kinkiness, from behind the green landscape. I grasp the fabricated nature of the English rural scene; its grasses, hedges, cattle and copses as artificial as Linoleum, the fruit of generations of genetic and environmental manipulation, England’s ‘green and pleasant land’ turned paper-thin. Even my sardonic Nan could not mediate the sheer horror of life (at least to my 11 year old self) conjured by the creak of metal and the Bernard Herrman soundtrack for a bronze mega-soldier, ‘Talos’, astride the beach in ‘Jason and the Argonauts’ (1963). It is not any fear of death I feel, on my beach, but a fear of the life in inert, inorganic and constructed things; hard and statuesque one moment, hot and streaming the next: the “anorganic metal-body trauma-howl of the earth” (Land, 498).

I am still in mental dialogue with these image-trajectories on my walks, as I find sand blowing against a thousand pink ink cartridge cases on the beach or skirt the floods encircling electricity pylons; I have not found the ends of their trails yet: “you think that the trail will understand you, and that’s the worst part, it does”.

10.

The films, above, beginning with those chosen for their exemplary qualities, are shifting more firmly towards my personal preoccupations; inevitably, but necessarily. For the hoard of sequences, camera positions and soundtracks, to have any resonance with the dérive, must spring from strong personal memories of screening and spectatorship, in tune with a key principle of mythogeography: that the walker is as much the mutable site of the walk as their route (Smith, 115).

In brief, my personal hoard might contain some of the following:

The anachronistic ‘actuality’ of suburbia – “[T]he city’s peripheral terrains remain under the visual sway of cinema rather than that of the digital image” (Barber, 2002, 182) – crossing class divides in ‘One Hour Photo’ (2002).

The potency of the landscape to produce a sur-reality, an over-reality, like the Kenwood Chef ufo hovering into view across the hills or the swooping and levitating shots in Gaspar Noé’s ‘Enter The Void’ (2009).

A city-totality or a transport network defined by the absence of a single person (and how that reverses the prioritisation of commodities over people): ‘Spooloos’/’The Vanishing’ (1988), ‘Ne le dis à personne’/’Tell No One’ (2006), ‘En la Cuidad de Sylvia’/‘In the City of Sylvia’ (2007).

Fabulous bodies capable of exceeding corporate agendas within a skin’s soggy container: the shadow folk in Dreyer’s ‘Vampyr’ (1932), the supine rather than upright, slithering rather than walking, beings of Żulawksi’s ‘Possession’ (1981) and Benson and Moorhead’s ‘Spring’ (2014); and bodies subjected to those corporate agendas, like the mother and daughter’s walking a hillside road and gazed upon in Cattet and Forzani’s détournement of a giallo, ‘Amer’ (2009).

Monuments and monolithic buildings, seen as if through the eyes of Larry Cohen’s ‘Q The Winged Serpent’ (1982), such as the warehouse in ‘Nosfertu’ (1922), the Seattle Space Needle in ‘The Parallax View’ (1974) or the Transamerica Pyramid in the 1978 remake of ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’, are monstrous and not “iconic”.

A Fortean historicist-uncanny, like that of the village in Ilya Khrzhanovskiy ‘4’ (2004), anywhere that strangeness is historic rather than supernatural.

‘Tenten’/’Adrift in Tokyo’ (2007): a healing reminder that even the permanent dérive must, and should, end sometime.

11.

When Jean-Michel Mension called, unannounced, on Guy Debord at his room in Rue Racine he was surprised to find him “in the role of a gent in a dressing gown” (47) For Debord, and many of the other situationists, to ‘drift’ the city was a disruption of their everyday lives. For Mension, and the other youthful ‘delinquents’ in the situationists’ circle, it was simply one part of a life of rebellion: “[T]he first true dérives were in no way distinct from what we did in the ordinary way” (101). Mension’s “milieu of destruction” (Debord, 2004, 15) was idealised by Ivan Chtcheglov in the idea of permanent dérives, a subjection in the form psychological distress to what Constant built into his situationist models of a new city: permanent rush and transformation, more accelerationist than ‘unified’.

Under the conditions of the nascent digital city – even in these very earliest days of the ‘internet of things’ (which by its title alone expresses something of the Spectacle’s overwhelming ambitions, comparable to Google’s plans for immortality, to digitize matter) – a future ambulation will need to walk both sides of a binary of permanence and disruption. Disruption of the everyday, as a portal to the ambient, occulted imaginary or taking back surplus pleasure, as a means to edit and reassemble the codes of the city, will continue to serve walkers as a tactic, but not as a strategy. Fighting separation with further separations may work up to a point, but beyond that lies all kinds of New Babylons additional to those visualized by Constant, all of them fulfilling what “dérive experiences lead to proposing… the constant diminution of these border regions, up to the point of their complete suppression” (Debord, 2006, 62). Caught between Stalinism and Nazism, twentieth century critical modernism backed rapidly away from “an embrace of totality in aesthetics.... [as] it led to an embrace of totality in political communities” (Levine, 5); but we live now under different conditions, in the peculiar circumstances of a global totality rested on the anti-totality principles of neo-liberalism and prosecuted by a plethora of invasive, algorithmic ‘Skynets’. In the situation of our subjectivity in peril, jump cuts between atmospheres, ‘catapults’ and cutting a ‘V’ through the city are challenged to disrupt their own disruptions, to ‘leap’ the borders of their own separations; the epic walks, sensitized and often social, of Monique Besten, Anthony Schrag, Thomas Bram Arnold, Elspeth Owen, Esther Pilkington, Mads Floor Andersen and others seem to point to a permanent drift, and to a daily serious adventure through variegated zones of ambience as predicted by Ivan Chtcheglov (6). To that flow I am adding the suggestion of a cinematically-bathed daily practice as a provisional-totalising of ambulatory tactics on the way towards a strategy for more than surviving the apocalypse, based upon the revival of the subjective: an intense hyper-sensitization in the streets once “lived and suffered through the eye” but now for the whole body of senses.

What the static camera and gentle pans of ‘AKA Serial Killer’ and the landscape-privileged sequences from movies as different as ‘Stalker’ and ‘The Langoliers’ offers such a whole-body dériviste is an ‘actuality cinema’ default consciousness, a pre-dramatic sensitivity and a pre-romantic realism; a shift away from occult adventures and romanticism (by passing through them and beyond them) to a cooler re-exploring of landscape and a return of the primacy of terrain to psychogeography.

This bathing of the terrain with cinema images, and letting the terrain bathe back “imbu[ing] the film image with an imposed dimension.... negotiat[ing] and enforc[ing] its own mass within the image (Barber, 2002, 20), will enwrap the walker in a controlled intensity, within which they can order and direct their suffering and separated mind/body/eye: a discreet and subjective psycho-cinematography for an invasive digital city where, “alongside its powerful web of media screens, [it] is assembled from the delicate visual and emotional projections of its inhabitants” (Barber, 2002, 156).

Phil Smith is a performance-maker, writer and ambulatory researcher, specialising in performances related to walking, site-specificity, mythogeographies and counter-tourism. A core member of site-based arts collective Wrights & Sites; and a co-author of the company’s various ‘mis-guides’. He writes and performs ‘mis-guided tours’, and creates inter-disciplinary performance. He is an Associate Professor (Reader) at the University of Plymouth.

Bibliography

Barber, Stephen. (2002). Projected Cities: cinema and urban space. London: Reaktion Books.

Barber, Stephen. (2014). Performance Projections: film and the body in action. London: Reaktion Books.

Careri, Francesco. (2002). Walkscapes. Barcelona: Editorial Gustavo Gili.

Chtcheglov, Ivan. (2006). “Formulary for a New Urbanism”. In Situationist International Anthology. Edited and translated by Ken Knabb. Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets.

Conrich, Ian. (1999). “Trashing London: the British colossal creature film and fantasies of mass destruction” in British Science Fiction Cinema. Edited by I. Q. Hunter. London: Routledge.

Debord, Guy. (1995). The Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zero Books.

Debord, Guy. (1998). Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Malcolm Imrie. London: Verso.

Debord, Guy. (2004). Panegyric Volumes 1 & 2. Translated by James Brook & John McHale. London: Verso.

Debord, Guy. (2006). “Theory of the Dérive”. In Situationist International Anthology. Edited and translated by Ken Knabb. Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets.

Deleuze, Gilles. (2005). Cinema 1: the movement-image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. London: Continuum.

Furuhata, Yuriko. (2013). Cinema of Actuality: Japanese avant-garde filmmaking in the season of image politics. Durham & London: Duke University Press.

Gibson, James J.. (1983). Senses as Perceptual Systems. Westport: Greenwood Press.

Gombin, Richard. (1975). The Origins of Modern Leftism. Translated by Michael K. Perl. London: Penguin.

Heddon, Deidre & Misha Myers. (2014). “Stories from the walking library.” Cultural Geographies 21 (4), pp.639-655.

Ingold, Tim. (1993). “Globes and Spheres: the topology of environmentalism”. In Environmentalism. Edited by Kay Milton. London: Routledge.

Jameson, Frederic. (1984). “Progress versus Utopia; or can we imagine the future?” in Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation. Edited by Brian Walls. New York: New York Museum of Contemporary Art.

Jameson, Fredric. (1997). “Postmodernism and Consumer Society”. In Studies in Culture: An Introductory Reader. Edited by Ann Gray and Jim McGuigan. London: Arnold.

Jameson, Fredric. (1988). “Of Islands and Trenches” in The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971-1986, Volume 2: The Syntax of History. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Land, Nick. (2011). Fanged Noumena: collected writings 1987-2007. Falmouth: Urbanomic.

Levine, Caroline. (2015). Forms. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Mension, Jean-Michel. (2002). The Tribe. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. London: Verso.

Mock, Roberta. (2009). Walking, Writing & Performance. Bristol: Intellect.

Mulvey, Laura. (1981). “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”. In Popular Televison and Film. Edited by Tony Bennett, Susan Boyd-Bowman, Colin Mercer & Janet Woollacott. London: BFI.

Negarestani, Reza. (2008). Cyclonopedia: complicity with anonymous materials. Melbourne: re.press.

Powell, Anna. (1997). Deleuze, Altered States and Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Sinclair, Iain. (2002). “London: Necropolis of Fretful Ghosts” in Science Fiction/Horror: A Sight and Sound Reader, ed. Kim Newman. London: BFI Publishing.

Smith, Phil. (2010). Mythogeography. Axminster: Triarchy.

Sobchack, Vivien. (2004). Carnal Thoughts: embodiment and moving image culture. Berkeley: University California Press.

Wark, McKenzie. (2008). 50 Years of Recuperation of the Situationist International. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.

Wark, McKenzie. (2011). The Beach Beneath the Streets. London & New York: Verso.

Wark, McKenzie. (2013). The Spectacle of Disintegration. London & New York: Verso.

Wells, H. G.. (1918). World Brain. London: Methuen.

Wrights & Sites. (2006). A Mis-Guide To Anywhere. Exeter: Wrights & Sites.

#Phil Smith #Mythogeography #Psychogeography #University of Plymouth #University of Exeter #Wrights & Sites

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architectnews · 4 years ago

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Platform Design District, Culver City

Platform Design District, Los Angeles Building, Californian Residential Units, United States Architecture Images

Platform Design District in Culver City

Mar 3, 2021

Platform Design District

Architect: Abramson Architects

Location: Culver City, Los Angeles, California, USA

The Platform Design District was built on an abandoned and blighted, a shuttered used-car dealership sat dormant on a forgotten semi-industrial parcel adjacent to Culver City’s edgy Hayden Tract. The site’s colorful history dates back even further, to the 1900s when it served as a major railroad station and freight yard. Rather than turn its back on the past, the design and retail hub celebrates the city precinct’s recent past in all its sometimes gritty charm.

Sparking a Revival Once considered an “unpolished gem” by the development team and architects, the reimagined site is now a convergence of fashion, art, and culinary talent. The Platform complex spans six buildings and features a central courtyard along with other garden nooks interspersed throughout. Its one-of-a-kind architectural setting is a resurrection of prior operations, celebrating its uniqueness through various architectural diversities while holding true to a definitive overall vision.

Who are the clients and what’s interesting about them? Runyon is a culturally curious real estate group based in Los Angeles, with projects across the globe. Driven by a passion for bringing people together to experience the best in food, design, fashion, and culture, Runyon owns and manages properties, develops retail and restaurant concepts, and advises some of the most dynamic, independent brands today. The Platform was their first ownership venture.

Before reaching out to their first batch of Platform tenants they created a wish list of 100 potential brands that would attract them personally. Using hand-written invitation letters to explain their vision was an unconventional move, but it worked for them.

What was the brief? The project site selected by the Runyon Group was an abandoned car dealership on 4 acres of land in an abandoned and blighted area of Culver City. Situated in between the Helms Bakery District, Downtown Culver City, and the new metro line station, this area had fallen behind and was in need of life. The client wanted to create a destination where they personally would want to spend time.

What are the Retail/Dining Components? Juxtaposing New with Repurposed.

The Boxcar – In the early 1900s, the site served as a railroad station frequented by freight trains. After its closing, the lot became a junkyard littered with abandoned boxcars. Inspired by this piece of history, the designers envisioned the Boxcar building as an homage to the stacked and scattered freight cars. The iconic Boxcar building welcomes guests, tenants, and community members to this dynamic new neighborhood.

Two of the complex’s signature restaurants are housed within its ground floor while three creative lofts, above, are now home to leaders in entertainment, media, health, and fashion.

Washington Arts – Existing street art, which adorned the vacant site, inspired the bold graffiti art style of the Washington Arts building. The mural-clad structure houses an upscale restaurant, artist lofts, and parking. The artwork breaks up the parking facility’s massing while providing a place-specific focal point.

Landmark Repair Shop – Designer shops and renowned chefs are tucked thoughtfully behind the Boxcar building in the more human-scaled Landmark Repair Shop. Recalling the structure’s past life, the last vestiges of repurposed automotive bays are juxtaposed with modern appointments, introducing glass storefronts where roll-up garage doors once existed.

The Bunker – An existing building, previously utilized as parking and storage for the defunct car dealership, is reintroduced to accommodate retail and additional parking. The new single-story steel storefront structure creates architectural cohesiveness between the Bunker and its neighboring buildings.

The Greenhouse – Traveling back towards the highly-trafficked street frontage, the elevated Greenhouse guides visitors into a grander community-scale. Explorations into the abandoned freight train lot provoked the design team who studied reference images of industrial remnants covered by the unbridled growth of wild grasses and flowers. Since opening, the Greenhouse has attracted one of the city’s most popular new rooftop restaurants.

The Showroom – The sixth and final space that defines the Platform is the Showroom. Repurposing the existing automotive showroom into an ideal storefront ultimately attracted an “eco-chic” clothing line to the location. The original car dealer sign pole and frame are incorporated into the design.

How have they responded to the Pandemic? The Platform was the first GTHR SAFE property in Los Angeles, implementing a best-in-class safety standards across the entire office/retail/dining facility. Bjorn Schrader (a Partner with Abramson Architects) is a founding member of the organization and is working with Runyon Group to implement this new class of certification.

What were the solutions? Charred wood, poured concrete, pebbled siding, corrugated metal, and rusted steel make up much of the material palate. These materials were chosen to coordinate with the design narrative and for their relatively low maintenance and cost-efficiency.

The use of art as a material is prevalent throughout the complex. The original project site had been abandoned for some time, and it served as a canvas for beautiful street art on its exterior walls. The designers wanted to commemorate this with a mural on the parking structure. This also aides the design by breaking up the massing of the parking structure and serves as a focal point from inside the complex towards the parking. The commissioned mural is by popular artist Jen Stark.

Platform Design District in Culver City, California – Building Information

Abramson Architects

Project size: 220000 ft2 Completion date: 2016 Building levels: 3

Photography: Benny Chan

Platform Design District, Culver City images / information received 030321

Location: Culver City, Los Angeles, Southern California, USA

Culver City Buildings

Contemporary Culver City Architecture

Second House in Culver City Architects: FreelandBuck photograph : Eric Staudenmaier Second House in Culver City

The Culver Steps Design: Ehrlich Yanai Rhee Chaney Architects photos by Eric Staudenmaier Photography and Paul Vu Photography The Culver Steps

Vespertine Culver City Building, L.A. Design: Eric Owen Moss Architects image courtesy of architects office Vespertine Culver City Building, L.A.

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Los Angeles Architecture Links – chronological list

Architecture Tours Los Angeles by e-architect

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Gardenhouse, Wilshire Boulevard, Beverley Hills, CA Design: MAD Architects image Courtesy architecture office Gardenhouse Wilshire Boulevard

Mirror House, Beverly Hills Architects: XTEN Architecture photos : Art Gray Mirror House in Beverly Hills

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Comments / photos for the Platform Design District, Culver City page welcome

Website: Culver City

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suzanneshannon · 5 years ago

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Free Books for Learning and Getting Started with Cloud-Native .NET Apps

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philipholt · 5 years ago

Text

Free Books for Learning and Getting Started with Cloud-Native .NET Apps

If you haven't been over to the Architecture section of the .NET site lately, I'd encourage you to go check it out. There is a TON of free learning content, books, code, and more!

Containers for Beginners

Intermediate - Cloud-native microservices

If you have about an hour, you can try out this new Learn Module for free - Create and deploy a cloud-native ASP.NET Core microservice. you can do it ALL in the browser with no software installation!

This module explores completing the coupon service, adding it to the existing solution, and deploying it to the multi-container Kubernetes cluster.

Learning objectives

Examine existing ASP.NET Core microservices running in Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).

Implement a new ASP.NET Core microservice and containerize it.

Publish the Docker image to Azure Container Registry (ACR).

Deploy the Docker container to the existing AKS cluster.

Free Books

Everyone loves free books. There are a number of free Cloud-Native Free Resources to download.

Cloud-native e-book - Formats: PDF | Online

gRPC for WCF Developers e-Book - Formats: PDF | Online

Serverless apps e-book - Formats: PDF | Online

Understanding the pros and cons of serverless development

Learning how to approach serverless architecture

Example implementations of serverless apps

.NET Microservices e-book - Formats: PDF | Online

ASP.NET Core e-book - Formats: PDF | Online

Updated to .NET Core 3.1! This guide provides end-to-end guidance on building web applications using ASP.NET Core and Azure.

The audience for this guide is developers, development leads, and architects who are interested in building modern web applications using Microsoft technologies and services in the cloud.

We have even more free Books and Guides coming , I'll share them very soon! Check out https://dotnet.microsoft.com/learn/dotnet/architecture-guides for more.

Free Books for Learning and Getting Started with Cloud-Native .NET Apps published first on http://7elementswd.tumblr.com/

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180abroad · 6 years ago

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Day 176: In Bruges

After a somewhat heated evening---both literally and interpersonally---it was a fresh new morning, and Jessica and I were champing at the bit to go out and explore the historic heart of Bruges.

Not having saved anything for breakfast, we caught a morning bus to the city center and began hunting for a cafe. Even on the relatively unremarkable outskirts of the old town, we could instantly feel the history-laden aura of the cobbled streets and gabled brick storefronts.

We soon found the perfect breakfast stop: a trendy coffee-lover's espresso bar called---appropriately enough---I Love Coffee. It was expensive, but arguably worth the price. There was an intimidating selection of flavors---enough to require a multi-page table menu---plus a lot of charming little touches, like using espresso filters for door handles.

Coffee and muffins consumed, we were ready to continue on to the city's iconic market square, just a couple blocks away. From outside the espresso bar's door, we could already see the bell tower piercing up through the skyline.

We've seen a lot of beautiful market squares in Europe, but Bruges' has to be one of the prettiest. Standing there, it was one of those moments where I was hit by a sudden wave of renewed awe and appreciation for the fact that we were actually in Europe.

Jessica noted that the shops and houses lining the square don't actually stand in straight lines. Some sides bow in while others bow out. Jessica half-jokingly bemoaned that---charming though this was---it made it virtually impossible to take a pano shot without it looking unfairly distorted.

We spent the rest of the morning wandering around the town and poking into shops---mostly chocolate shops.

Finding a chocolate shop in Bruges is a bit like finding a winery in Napa---it's hard to walk 20 yards without finding one. The big companies like Godiva and Leonidas have huge shops on seemingly every street corner, and the space between the corners is littered with smaller independent shops.

We poked into one of the first smaller shops we saw, and even their selection was overwhelming. The lady tending the shop was more than happy to explain what everything was and help us fill a pick-and-mix box, though she wasn't able to tell us much about where the chocolates actually came from. I imagine there are plenty of factories in the country pumping out generic chocolates for all of these little shops to sell as their own, but even mass-produced Belgian chocolate is pretty dang good.

We were especially impressed by the huge variety of chocolates every shop had to offer. Apparently, it’s a popular trick in Belgium to make chocolates that look like rusty old tools. And apparently it’s also popular to make much more adult-themed chocolates and display them prominently in the shop windows---right next to cute Disney-themed chocolates.

And all the while that we walked around, we couldn't get over just how picturesque the place was. Even with all the tourists. Marketers and guide books love to call Bruges the "Paris of the North," and with all its canals and old architecture, it's not hard to see why. Still, I'd argue that Bruges stands well enough apart. It can't compete with Venice in terms of sheer grandeur or history, but it has done one thing that Venice couldn't---remain a socially and economically vibrant city in its own right.

In the sea of Bruges's many excellent and reasonably good chocolate shops, there are a few chocolateries that stand out from the crowd. One of the ones that stands out the most is The Chocolate Line. It's mentioned in all the guidebooks, and Jessica had gotten a recommendation for it from our host as well.

The Chocolate Line has a gastronomic, borderline-hipster aesthetic, and it specializes in single-origin chocolates as well as chocolate pralines with bold flavors like wasabi, Coca-Cola, and hemp seed.

I should probably clarify a bit of terminology. Pretty much everywhere in the world except Belgium, the word "praline" refers to a broad class of confections made from nuts and sugar. In Belgium, however, a praline is what we would call a chocolate truffle or bonbon.

We didn't buy any of their chocolates just then, but we made a note to definitely come back when we didn't have quite so much lugging-around time left ahead of us. Jessica was especially interested in the hemp chocolates---for a friend, of course.

Continuing to enjoy the fairy-tale cityscape, we made our way over to the De Halve Maan Brewery, the last continuously family-owned brewery in Bruges. The brewery has been a local institution for generations, but it gained new international fame in recent years for creating the world's first beer pipeline.

While waiting for our tour time, we enjoyed a tasty---if somewhat pricey---lunch at the brewery's outdoor café. We each got a glass of Brugse Zot Dubbel, one of the brewery's current mainstays. A dubbel (meaning "double") is a slightly darker beer than the standard blond or enkel (”single”) beer---comparable to a German dunkel. The name Brugse Zot comes from an old Flemish term meaning the Bruges Jester, a centuries-old nickname other Belgians used for the people of Bruges.

The tour started in a glass-walled room containing the brewery's four mash tuns. Every drop of De Halve Maan beer goes through one of these tuns and is fermented on-site before being piped out to their modern facility just outside of town for aging and bottling. It was almost exactly like visiting a whisky distillery, which makes sense since the first step of making whisky is technically making beer.

Stepping back a bit, we learned a bit about what makes Belgian beer unique. Unlike in the ultra-conservative breweries of Bavaria, it is common for Belgian brewers to add seasonings like cardamom and orange peel to their beers. A Bavarian would say that such adulterations are simply made to hide the faults of an inferior beer, to which a Belgian would reply, "What's so wrong with adding more ingredients if it makes the beer taste better?"

While I can't say that I necessarily prefer Belgian beers to Bavarian ones, I can certainly appreciate their spirit. And they can be very, very good.

We also learned a bit more about the Belgian beer terminology of enkel, dubbel, tripel, etc. Essentially, it has to do with the amount of grain used to make the beer. The more grain you add to your mash, the heavier and more alcoholic the beer will be. Dubbel and tripel beers don’t actually have exactly double or triple the amount of grain as a regular beer, but they do have more---enough to raise the ABV from around 5% to 7% or 9%, respectively. Double and triple beers tend to be darker, but that's only a stylistic choice determined by the ratio of toasted and untoasted grain used in the mash. If a brewer wanted to, they could make a pale 9% ale using all untoasted grain or a dark 5% one by using all toasted grain.

As late as the 1950s, Belgian beer was still being transported by horse carts from the breweries to the taverns. This meant that no one brewery could distribute their beer very far, and every town had its own local brews. With the arrival of supermarkets and delivery trucks in the late 1950s, only the best (and best-marketed) breweries survived.

While De Halve Maan beer is still brewed and given its initial aging at old brewery, the company now buys its malt from suppliers. Similarly to most of the Scotch whisky distilleries we’ve visited, that allowed De Halve Maan to convert the old malting rooms in the attic into a museum and visitor center.

Inside the old malting oven, we came to a narrow spiral-staircase leading up through the chimney and out onto the roof for a gorgeous view of the town and the brewery below.

Around this time, the movie In Bruges somehow got brought up. I sheepishly admitted along with nearly everyone else that I had seen the movie before. Apparently, though, the people of Bruges love the movie. Not necessarily because of its quality---though it is a great film---but because of what it's done for local business. Much like Inverness after the premier of Outlander, Bruges has seen an explosion of tourism year after year since In Bruges was first released in 2008.

After ducking under a remarkably low doorway into the next room of the visitor area, we Learned a bit more about the beer pipeline as well. It runs 3km underground from the historic brewery to their new bottling facility just outside the city center.

Inside the pipeline are five separate conduits: two to send the beer out from the brewery to the bottling plant, two to bring fresh water back from the plant to the brewery, and one filled with sensors for detecting leaks. The pipeline lies about five feet underground and was dug using very expensive laser guidance systems to minimize the amount of damage that had to be done to the streets---sort of like endoscopic surgery for the ground.

A little further on, we actually got to see all the various conduits feeding into the end of the pipeline.

The reason for building the pipeline was simple. Demand was increasing beyond what the brewery could handle at the original plant. There was no room to expand, and the ceaseless caravan of De Halve Maan tanker trucks were already a blight on the old town’s cobbled streets. The company could shut down their operations in the original building and move everything out to their new plant, but that would be tantamount to killing a valuable piece of the city's history and culture. Faced with that alternative, the city finally approved the brewery's five million Euro pipeline as a the least-bad solution.

We also saw a display of Belgian beer glasses. This is another point where Belgian and Bavarian beer traditions diverge. While not entirely standardized, Bavarian beer glasses are quite predictable. Lagers come in a plain, slightly flared glass, and weissbiers come in a tall, curvy glass. Unless you buy a liter, in which case it comes in heavy, dimpled pitcher disguised as a glass mug.

Belgians generally favor the "tulip" style glass, with a stem, wide bowl, and narrow mouth. Each brewery makes and promotes its own special variation of the design, however, and a true purist wouldn't dream of drinking Brewery A beer from a Brewery B glass. I guess being a Belgian beer purist requires either a narrow palate or a spacious cabinet.

Back in the gift shop, I picked up a special-edition Straffe Hendrik quadrupel ale as a gift for my dad. Our guide had done an effective job talking it up during the tour. It is a very dark, 11% ABV ale that has been finished in port wine casks to give it a distinctive twist. Apparently, it can be aged for up to ten years to bring out even more of the dark berry flavors from the port wine casks.

(De Halve Maan's standard tripel and quadrupel ales use a more traditional style compared to the Brugse Zot beers and are sold under the name Straffe Hendrik in homage to the head of the family's previous generation.)

The tour completed, we decided to rest our feet and enjoy a glass of their blond ale in the bar before heading out to explore the city some more. We enjoyed the beer (though I preferred the dubbel), but I was a bit miffed when I headed to the bathroom and found that there weren't any stalls that men were allowed to use---only urinals. Apparently the brewery has a "no number 2s" rule for their patrons.

Anyway…

We soon came across a German Christmas store, much like the one we'd missed in Nuremberg. Jessica insisted that we go inside, and I admit that it was fun and incredibly nostalgic to see all the traditional wood and glass decorations.

Taking a roundabout route through parts of the old town that we hadn't seen yet, we eventually made it to the Burg Square.

Just a block away from the market square that serves as the economic and touristic hub of the old city, the opulent Burg Square is the town's civic and governmental heart. There are some historic buildings you can tour, but we decided to give them a pass. It was getting late in the afternoon at this point, we were reaching the limits of our sightseeing energy for the day, and---frankly---my gastric situation was getting a bit distressing. Of course, I could have just paid to use a public restroom, but that would require me to not be a cheap, stubborn jerk when I'm frustrated.

And anyway, there was one more place we absolutely wanted to see before it closed.

While the Chocolate Line is Bruges's number-one choice for experimental gastro-chocolate, Dumon is the place to go if you want classic chocolates done extraordinarily well. Rick Steves recommends them highly, and they're featured in one of his TV specials on Bruges.

There are a few Dumon shops sprinkled around the old town, and the one we visited was charmingly cozy. We had to go down a handful of steps from the street just to get inside, and the shop itself is little more than a landing at the head of another set of stairs going down to the little factory in the basement. Half of the shop is taken up by the counter, and two small groups of visitors are enough to make the place feel crowded.

We asked about making an a la carte box with the flavors we were most interested in, but they were only offering a menu of specific assortments. I can see the reasoning from the business's side. When you have dozens of different chocolates you have to make every day, it would be a nightmare to have to guess how many of each kind you'd have to make. And, as the lady behind the counter pointed out, the assortments encourage you to try out different flavors that you might be surprised to find you like.

Kindly, though, they will let you swap out a few chocolates here and there if there's anything you absolutely can't stand (or can't have because of allergies).

Back home, we talked with host as we heated up our dinners. We'd gotten permission to use her microwave, and we'd picked up some ready-meals from a convenience store before heading back. We learned that in the Middle Ages, the Atlantic Ocean came right up to the edge of Bruges instead the current coastline eight miles away. A church right near where we were staying also doubled as a lighthouse.

We also learned that the local dialect of Flemish is considered hard to understand by other Belgians–even to the point of requiring subtitles when people are interviewed on TV. Apparently it is actually a blend of standard Flemish (similar to Dutch) and Scandinavian. Probably due to Viking settlers along the coast during the Middle Ages.

And, most importantly, we got to meet her delightful chocolate Labrador named Louis.

There was still more Bruges for us to see, but that would come later. Tomorrow, we would be touring the stunning city of Ypres, near the French border, and the surrounding WWI battlegrounds of Flanders Fields.

#180abroad #bruges #belgium #travel #europe #de halve maan #beer #canals #chocolate #medieval #architecture #history #it's a fairytale town

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puffpiecesband-blog · 8 years ago

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A small band playing little places in tiny countries: Puff Pieces European tour report

By Amanda Huron

Behind the show space in Erlangen, Germany. Photo credit: Tilman Dominka.

When you’re a little band few people have heard of and you go on tour, you get to play a whole variety of strange, unpredictable, wildly variegated places. Like the time my band Impetus Inter played in a tiny metal mobile home in Biloxi, Mississippi in the dead heat of summer, 1995, packed with punks: the sweatiest show, I think, I’ve ever played. Or the time a few years later that my band the Stigmatics played a gazebo in a riverside park in downtown Little Rock, Arkansas, cool breezes drifting in off the water and the kids dancing like crazy and my Arkansas grandma watching from a little ways off. Larger venues, of course, have their own benefits. But there can be something special about a small spot.

When Puff Pieces toured Europe this past spring, we were lucky to play a number of little, interesting spots, most of which were also explicitly anti-capitalist and anti-fascist. If you’re a small-ish band thinking about heading to Europe, you might want to consider these places, too.

The storefront show space Handstand und Moral, Leipzig.

A note, first, on the money. What made it all work financially is that every place we played but one guaranteed us a certain payment for that night’s performance — mostly between 200 and 300 Euros. When we added up all those guarantees, plus the money we hoped we’d make selling our records and t-shirts, we figured we could just about cover the cost of our plane tickets, rental car, musical equipment rental, and all our other travel costs, including food (minimal, since most of our meals were provided, see below), gas, and tolls. We did not hire a driver, as most bands who tour Europe seem to do, and this saved us a lot of money. (As the person who did almost all the driving, I can say it was also fun driving all over Europe, on highways without speed limits and tiny crooked cobblestone streets.) If we hadn’t broken down in Poland (that part was less fun: terrifying, in fact) and had to pay for a tow, and missed that night’s show in Brno, Czech Republic, we would have broken even, and actually made a bit of money on the whole endeavor.

Poster for the show, Cafe Siroko, Ceske Budejovice, Czech Republic.

This is one of the ways in which touring Europe, as a small band, can in a weird way seem more feasible that touring the U.S: in Europe, even the little spots can provide guarantees, even for little bands. Now, I will say that it was not always clear where that money was coming from each night. Some nights, enough people came to the shows that the money was clearly made at the door; other nights, fewer people came, and the promoter seemed to pull the money out of thin air, or his bank account, or some secret cash reserve the venue maintained. Regardless, every night but one, we were paid the guaranteed amount.

It also helps that in Europe, if someone puts on a show for you, they feed you dinner before the show, usually homemade and delicious, put you up in someone’s home or a nearby hotel (I was surprised by how often the promoter paid for us to stay in a hotel or hostel), and feed you breakfast the next morning, before sending you off on your way. All this support seems sometimes to be because there is more state support for the arts and for life in general, which trickles down to these little spots in the form of no rent, or state-provided grants, or even just people who have the time to work on these spaces because they are receiving some form of government welfare and therefore have to spend less time at waged labor. And sometimes it seems to be because of a long history of successful organizing against the state, in the case of the many places we played that started out as anarchist squats and had been able to adapt and survive over time, and were adept at operating on the sly and on the cheap, so as to be able to funnel more of the money from the door and the bar to the touring bands.

On to the shows.

Sleeping bag repair on the patio outside JuKuZ.

Erlangen: JuKuZ

JuKuZ stands for Jugend Kultur Zentrum, or Youth Culture Center, a pleasingly generic name for an odd little space in an enchanted locale. This little structure is in the middle of woodsy fields, crouched along a stream, far from any other buildings. It used to be a restaurant, but then the restaurant went out of business, and somehow a bunch of anarchist punk kids got ahold of it, and now the city just lets them use it to do their thing, which consists of punk shows, films, feminist meetings, political talks, and such. The night we played, two sweet fellows cooked up delicious spinach lasagna for both bands, which they later sold at the show for two Euros a slice. There was a bar, and beer. There were nature walks to be had all around. There was breakfast provided the next morning on the patio overlooking the stream, and flyers everywhere against fascism, against Fortress Europe.

Parking lot with socialist housing, Prague. Building #7 is on the right.

Prague: 007

I’d assumed, going in, that 007 was some sort of James Bond reference. In fact, this was a punk bar in the basement of one of twelve apartment buildings that make up a state-subsidized student housing complex on a hill above the historic city. The buildings are numbered 1 through 12, and each building has a club or bar in its basement, named for its building number. We were in building 7, so our club was 007. Building 11 had a bar named Club 011, and so on. You might like the pretty historic Prague architecture and the strolls across the famous Charles Bridge, but I prefer the socialist housing complex built around the massive parking lot, adjacent to an enormous unused stadium and surrounded by abandoned structures of fanciful glass and concrete. If you play at 007, you can wander off for a walk through a lovely wooded park nearby, threaded through with the ruins of castle walls, that stretches down the hill to the central city, and later the bar will feed you vegan pizza.

Entrance to Warsztat, Krakow.

Krakow: Warsztat

Warsztat, which means “workshop,” is a scrappy warehouse one block from the Vistula River. We arrived early, casting about for the promoter, who wasn’t yet there. A young chap we ran into explained that a bunch of guys on the second floor were training in street fighting in order to beat up Nazis. Nazis march openly in the streets in today’s Poland, and if you hadn’t heard, the U.S. is not the only country these days to be turning fascist. (In fact we were shocked, on this tour, that no one once asked us about the current U.S. political situation. We realized it was because they are all so mortified by their own political situations.) Anyway, turns out this was an anti-fascist fight club practicing upstairs from the show space. We wandered away for a bit for a walk, and when we returned, we found a gaggle of thuggish dudes sprawled about the entrance. One guy’s face was all bruised up: the fight club guys on break. Later that night, one of them seemed to be guarding the door of the show. I guess I’m glad us wimpy punks had some protection. It was a pretty tough-guy scene, but somehow we sold a few records.

The club under the train tracks, Vienna.

Vienna: Venster 99

This is a punk bar built into the viaduct of an overhead train track, really a genius place to put a loud rock club. The two gents working the spot were voluble crust punks, one a Croatian on pins and needles because his wife was at home, about to give birth any minute. The kind promoter fed us delicious stew. The bathroom was filled with flyers for our friends’ bands’ upcoming shows, and also flyers in many languages about the importance of consent. After we played, a tiny woman grabbed me in an enormous bear hug as I hopped off the stage, her eyes gleaming with joy. Mike talked to her for a long time: turns out she was a witch, who recognized the magical nature of our music, which made me pleased.

”Punk is also up to us.” Behind La Comedia Michelet, Paris.

Paris: La Comedia Michelet

To be precise, this show took place in Montreuil, a suburb just east of Paris. La Comedia was a nice shitty little dive of a punk bar, and one of our best shows all tour. The place was packed, and there were lots of older women there, toughened old punk ladies maybe in their 60s, which I took as a good sign. A French band called The Stratocasters opened up, my favorite band we played with all tour, wearing matching suspenders and playing jumpy, funny, strange music. The show was raucous, drunken, seemed just on the verge of explosion.

The stage before the show, Kiel.

Kiel: Fahrradkino

Kiel is in very furthest north Germany, right near the Danish border. This show spot was nestled in a maze of studios that had once been an art college, which was then abandoned, and was then taken over by squatters in order to do art projects, and has now gained a semi-official status, as the city shrugged and, as in the case of Erlangen, seemed to say, “okay, kids, do your thing.” The complex is currently home to about sixty different art and social projects. No one pays rent. There’s a lockbox nailed to a tree out front where they can all access the key in order to come and go. The name of the particular studio space where we played, “Fahrradkino,” means “bicycle cinema,” so named because it used to be a spot where people showed films using electricity generated by bicycle. Typical anarchist punks! The opening act for our show that night was a vegan barbecue in the central courtyard. The next day we drove a few miles out to the Baltic Sea, just because we could.

On the Baltic Sea.

Hamburg: Hafenklang

The famous Hafenklang! A former squat, right on the river Elba by the now-fancy warehouse district. You can tell this place has been around forever because of how incredibly well-organized it is. Before you play, the cook cooks all the bands an amazing vegan meal made up of many separate components, including potatoes and and fake meat stew and various salads and corn on the cob, and you all sit around together at a big table and eat. The sleeping quarters are right next door to the show space: each band gets its designated key to the sleeping area, on a lanyard, so you can come and go, taking pre-show naps at will. (Incredibly, the drivers get their own, smaller and quieter room, since they have to wake up the next day and drive. Like I said, this place has been around a long time and they've figured out how to do things right.) The show was lovely: many people came, and many women with shining eyes came up to buy records from me afterwards, and later in the night the DJ put on Mission of Burma, and as I reeled around the by-then-empty dance floor to “Academy Fight Song,” I knew I’d attained utter life perfection, if only for a moment. Breakfast was provided the next day at noon, back in the bar.

Potsdam. We played inside that darkened open doorway, to the left.

Potsdam: Black Fleck

Last show of tour, and one of the best. The spot was called Black Fleck, although maybe it’s now better known as “the venue formerly known as Black Fleck,” because it seems to keep changing names in order to somehow evade the authorities. Anyhow, it’s in the ground floor of a grand old squat, which is maybe a former squat, it was hard to tell what was going on there, quite, as we were led through warrens of rooms up to the kitchen where a giant shepherd’s pie awaited. It was the perfect show for ending the tour: the little place was packed, and people seemed to really get the music, and we sold the last of our records. We decided to give away the last of our t-shirts, as we didn’t want to pay to ship them back to the U.S. (they hadn’t been selling well: warning: don't make red t-shirts), and that turned out to be a delightful exercise, trying to match all these differently-sized people with the right sizes, everybody tickled to be getting something for free. Commerce can provide an opportunity for communication, but giving things away for free is magic.

Playing at La Comedia Michelet. Photo credit: Sasha Ivanovic.

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afishtrap · 8 years ago

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This article examines the significance of dialogues present in the safeguarding of a particular urban site: the "36 Commercial Streets Quarter" in Hanoi, Vietnam. These dialogues expose both the contemporary needs of local inhabitants and the agenda of the government with regard to architectural preservation. Similarly, the dialogues allow for residents of this historical quarter to react to and contest the preservation practices being used on site. This contrast between the views of the government and of local residents reveals how various notions of architectural preservation — in particular, an indigenous sense of preservation and the colonial influence present in the "modern" practice of preserving the past — depict the true nature of Vietnamese culture in its postcolonial state.

Alexandra Sauvegrain. "Dialogues of Architectural Preservation in Modern Vietnam: The 36 Streets CommercialQuarter of Hanoi." Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review, Vol. 13, No. 1 (FALL 2001), pp. 23-32.

An official capital of one sort or another has existed in Hanoi for more than one thousand years. However, the city only began to develop at an accelerated pace in the fifteenth century, when the commercial quarter of the 36 Streets grew in order to cater to the needs of the adjacent citadel, or royal encampment. At that time the streets of the area were modeled after the social organization of traditional villages, where single trades were often practiced.

Each of the streets in the quarter is today comprised of rows of shop houses, known as "tube houses" (fig. 4). 4 Aside from these ubiquitous live-work structures temples, and communal houses are also scattered around the quarter (fig. 5). 5 The elongated tube-house form was developed in response to the practice of seventeenth-century imperial administrators to tax the width of shop fronts. For merchants to continue to attract customers without paying a lot in taxes, their storefronts by necessity became very narrow (figs. 6, 7). Such rules also meant that as a family grew, its house would deepen, since houses could not grow taller, "supposedly to prevent any attempt on the life of the emperor as he was carried around in a palanquin."

[...]

Such repositioning of historical awareness is important in terms of the nation's architectural preservation discourse. The notion of architectural preservation clearly predated the arrival of the French in Vietnam, as can be seen by precolonial imperial codes which contained a number of references to the preservation of old buildings. However, such references did not carry the modern aspect that related architectural preservation to historical consciousness.10 For example, the Annamite Code had 21 different groups of laws. Articles that can be interpreted as guidelines for the preservation of buildings can be found in sections referring to civil law, under the subtitle "rice-fields and habitations"; on ritual law, under the subtitle "sacrifices and etiquette"; and on construction law." But the relative scarcity of articles relating directly to architectural preservation suggests that this imperative was aimed not at defining cultural difference between states (since such a concept did not exist), but at establishing an ideology based on respect for social rank.

[...]

This state position toward heritage preservation would also seem to assume a heritage narrative that fixes the architectural representation of tradition in one historical moment. According to the same October 2000 VIR article, "day-to-day life in the Old Quarter for many of its residents has not changed since the first foundations were laid in the fifteenth century."15 This statement ignores the reality that all that remains of the fifteenth-century quarter is its pattern of clogged narrow streets. Meanwhile, actual commercial and daily activities have changed to cater to visitors and residents, no longer to the citadel.

[...]

Rabinow has pointed out that an "anti-nostalgic attitude toward the modern world" already existed during the nineteenth century.26 Indeed, some writers of that time, including Charles Baudelaire, were already insisting there was "no right to despise the present."27 As Janet Abu-Lughod has said, "tradition can only be defined from where we stand."28 In other words, a present approach to architectural preservation should take into account the tensions and exchanges between an existing static built heritage and the present social life of the people, their desires and problems. From this point of view, the recognition of a traditional way of life associated with a building should concentrate on a process rather than the preservation of a fixed entity. According to Abu-Lughod, such a process can be called "traditioning," or the "creative recycling of existing forms, rather than either its rigid adherence to old ones or its invention of totally new ones."29

Today, Hanoi's Old Quarter reflects various layers of architectural style, reflecting Chinese, French, vernacular and contemporary Vietnamese influences. All of these must be considered when dealing with preservation issues. Brandi and Giovannoni's theories have long promoted the view that all the various historical moments that create or modify cultural heritage must be taken into account in a preservation project. Furthermore, all the actors that "influence space by acting on the built environment" and "crystallize time in it" should also have a say in preservation decisions, Castells has written.30

As explained earlier, the 36 Streets Quarter is made up of narrow streets delineated by long tube-like shop houses, pagodas, temples and communal houses; all would seem to be worthy of some attention architecturally. Yet, interviews with inhabitants reveal different motivations than those of the government when it comes to the preservation of these houses and other cultural elements. In particular, their interest seems to be based more on a desire to preserve their life-styles and businesses than any modern sense of heritage awareness.

#vietnam #architecture #urban planning #anthropology #research #jstor

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watchilove · 6 years ago

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Ulysse Nardin is getting a breath of fresh air! The doors of 10, quai du Général-Guisan opened on the new Ulysse Nardin flagship store last Thursday: a completely new space measuring 2000 square feet, entirely dedicated to the Maison’s collections. Located in Geneva, the capital of prestige watchmaking, this new storefront promises to be the key boutique of the Le Locle-based brand, with a new contemporary architectural concept entrusted to architect Bertrand Fairerol, founder of BF RETAIL DESIGN & ARCHITECTURE in Paris and London. Without being too literal, the sea is invited into the heart of this bright and airy project by playing up the concepts that evoke it. Like a slice of a panorama, the new Ulysse Nardin store concept follows a natural order: the sea below, the sky above, and the horizon that separates them.

Ulysse Nardin Boutique Geneva

Two years after Patrick Pruniaux took up the helm of the company in September 2017, Ulysse Nardin is still riding the wave of modernity: new life has been brought to the brand through the new crown jewel of its boutiques, in the heart of a historic building and just a few steps away from the bustling Rue du Rhône, an area housing the stores of the biggest names in luxury. While Ulysse Nardin has operated a store in Geneva since 2000, it goes without saying that this new address will be a complete 360 for the brand. As a matter of fact, together with the Moscow and Shanghai stores, the Geneva boutique is Ulysse Nardin’s most important to date and the only one in Europe—for the moment—to feature this new architectural concept.

Ulysse Nardin Boutique Geneva

“It’s a perfect location, which Ulysse Nardin chose to showcase its creations,” explains Françoise Bezzola, Chief Marketing Officer of the brand. “Our new retail concept is younger and more dynamic than before, and follows a brand rejuvenation strategy that started close to two years ago. It features subtle marine nuances, which have been characteristic of Ulysse Nardin since its beginnings, and will be rolled out in all retail locations. We must remember that Ulysse Nardin is a 95% wholesale brand, whose strength comes from its exclusive network of retailers. Ulysse Nardin runs only a few stores worldwide: Dubai (open June 2019 with the new concept), Shanghai (open June 2019 with the new concept), Beijing (open August 2019 with the new concept), Moscow (two new stores with the new concept planned in 2020). That is why it is so important to feature architecture in line with the message we want to send our clients, one that allows us to offer them an experience on par with our ambitions.”

Starting in August, the very first visitors to the Geneva store discovered a spacious, airy, well-arranged boutique with an impeccable flow and clarity. The space is laid out in several areas: client reception, showcases, and product discovery, along with a VIP room.

Playing up both contemporary and natural styles, using refined, raw, patinated or brushed materials on which time can leave its trace, Ulysse Nardin achieves a bold contrast with the facades of the historic building. The space features an array of details as a nod to the watchmaker of the seas: display counters in raw stone (a mineral composite smooth in certain areas and textured in others) reminiscent of submerged rocks; unique translucent light fixtures in blown Murano glass, suspended like drops of water falling from the sky; display cases and screens that evoke the air and the horizon; touches of blue that echo “Ulysse Nardin blue,” and by extension the blue of the sea; and finally, sand-colored oak wood that reconciles surface, depth, and the shore… The entire concept brings us above and below the water, in a chic and zen ambiance. The design is vibrant, in complete contrast with its color and density. The sea and water in all its forms are widespread throughout the boutique, dancing in a ballet of transparency and light. Movement, reflections of light, and transparent/opaque contrasts were conceived to provide an impression of lightness and elegance. A deep dive into where time is suspended.

#gallery-0-7 { margin: auto; } #gallery-0-7 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 25%; } #gallery-0-7 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-0-7 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } /* see gallery_shortcode() in wp-includes/media.php */

AN ODE TO NATURE – FOUR NEW FREE WHEEL MODELS

Dancing center stage in this ballet of nature, timepieces are laid bare on the display counter. These new additions by Ulysse Nardin, all FREE WHEEL models, each feature a different watch face. The ode to nature and to the elements continues, with the FREE WHEEL dials made of aventurine, osmium, Carbonium® Gold and tinted straw, each referring to an element of the boutique as if to give a final touch to this new environment.

Aventurine, the translucent, dark blue quartz, evokes the surface of the ocean at night, when the stars are twinkling and reflected by the thousands.

Carbonium® Gold, a carbon composite with black, gray and golden marbling, recalls the raw material of the display counter, smooth in certain areas and textured in others.

Straw marquetry, whose every blade has been split, cut and prepared by hand by master craftspeople, catches the light of the boutique in shimmering and muted black beams.

The fourth FREE WHEEL is decorated in osmium. The rarest, densest and most stable element in the world, osmium shines in silvery blue, reminiscent of the translucent glass lamps suspended like drops of water.

Ulysse Nardin Boutique Geneva

Sea, sand, and minerals

The sea: the movement of the waves, the color blue… these nuances are called to mind through the blue rugs and translucent beige resin flooring. Between transparency and opacity, reflects and matte finishes, sharpness and flow, water is conveyed through various types of glass and resins.

The tables evoke the mineral aspect of rocks, polished by the swells breaking against the reef, while curving white carpets encapsulate the sand, emerging from the sea as an islet.

Sky and air

This intangible element forms the atmosphere. Light is filtered through it by water, ever present in its various forms: clouds, rain, mist… As if suspended, a set of glass panels in varying degrees of translucency filters soft, diffused light in the background. The architect also added hanging glass light fixtures that represent drops of water, along with a textured ceiling to depict the presence of clouds.

Horizon

The horizon is treated as an element in its own right. Where the water and the air meet, this band borrows codes from both these elements: materiality/immateriality, transparency, overlapping, movement, depth.

Ulysse Nardin Boutique Geneva

You can visit the boutique at this address:

Ulysse Nardin Boutique 10 quai du Général-Guisan 1204 Geneva +41 22 740 10 11

Ulysse Nardin Boutique Geneva

A new architectural concept for Ulysse Nardin in Geneva – Ulysse Nardin Boutique Geneva Ulysse Nardin is getting a breath of fresh air! The doors of 10, quai du Général-Guisan opened on the new Ulysse Nardin flagship store last Thursday: a completely new space measuring 2000 square feet, entirely dedicated to the Maison's collections.

#lifestyle #news #Ulysse Nardin #Ulysse Nardin Boutique Geneva

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codeonedigest · 2 years ago

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Advantages of Storefront Reference Architecture SFRA Explained for Salesforce Programmers

Full Video Link https://youtube.com/shorts/fB78Tgi5EYQ Hi, a new #video on #salesforce #sfra #benefits #advantages of #storefrontreferencearchitecture #cloud is published on #codeonedigest #youtube channel. @java #java #awscloud @awscloud #aws @

Storefront Reference Architecture (SFRA) is just that–a reference architecture or a departure point that combines industry best practices and expected out-of-the-box commerce functionality in a web storefront that can serve as the foundation of your new Salesforce Commerce B2C site. Commerce Cloud Storefront Reference Architecture (SFRA) blends proven methods in site creation, promotion and…

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touristguidebuzz · 7 years ago

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Inside Priceline Group’s Diss of Trivago — The Backstory

Earlier this year, the German hotel search site Trivago downplayed actor Tim Williams because he was becoming too much of a star in the site’s seemingly never-ending stream of television commercials. Revenue has since shrunk. Coincidence? Trivago

Skift Take: What do a debate over landing pages, the acquisition of Momondo, a shift into hotel software services, and regulators forcing changes in online travel agency contracts have in common? Each of those seemingly unrelated things may have pushed Priceline to toggle back its spending on Trivago.

— Sean O'Neill

It’s a boom time for trying to fathom the bust-up of Trivago.

For several years, the Expedia-backed hotel-search company had been gaining share of the combined Priceline Group and Expedia Inc. advertising budgets.

In 2013, Priceline and Expedia spent only 3.4 percent of their ad budgets on Trivago, according to estimates by Cowen & Co., an investment bank. By 2016, they spent 9.5 percent.

The two giants liked how Trivago’s TV ad campaign gathered an audience primed to buy and how the website’s user experience did a cost-effective job of converting shoppers into buyers.

As is now relatively well-known, something went wrong for Trivago in 2017. It went from double-digit, year-on-year growth, to a likely bleak forecast for the first half of 2018.

We’ve noted that Priceline pulled back on its spending. The most popular explanation for this was that Trivago had changed its algorithm in a way Priceline didn’t like, prompting a retaliation.

Priceline is the winner in the dust-up because it is now spending less per referral it gets from Trivago than before. That’s because Expedia dialed back spending, too.

But Priceline probably pulled back for other reasons, too. Here are a few worth noting:

Booking.com’s Landing Page Issue

Priceline Group’s biggest brand Booking.com has wanted visitors referred from Trivago to land on one of its search result pages, not on a listing for an individual property.

Since last winter, Trivago has been pushing online travel agencies to use property-specific landing pages.

During Trivago’s second-quarter earnings call with investors, CEO Rolf Schromgens said its users get “disturbed” when they click a button about an individual listing on its website and end up on a site such as Booking.com that shows an array of new hotel choices.

Trivago penalized companies that did that by giving them a lower landing page score in its complex calculations for determining how it presents rates on its website.

Using Trivago for an Ottawa hotel search for late January, we found a hotel for sale via a few links. The Booking.com link took us to a search result landing page showing the hotel along with many other properties. The Expedia link took us to the individual property’s listing.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the first Booking.com offer appeared on the second page of search results, well past many Expedia and Hotels.com offers.

The big brands prefer to show visitors multiple hotels to try to push them into booking more expensive or otherwise more profitable options. Repeating the search on Kayak, both the Expedia and Priceline links went to search result pages, not individual hotel listings. Repeating the trick on TripAdvisor, Expedia and Priceline links also went to search result pages.

In short, Priceline does not want any company to penalize it for its choice of metasearch landing-page architecture.

The Momondo Factor

Priceline’s acquisition of Momondo may have affected its thinking about Trivago, too.

Earlier this year, Priceline acquired the travel metasearch company for $550 million.

While the deal closed in July, just as it accelerated its Trivago pullback, the prelude to the deal may have prompted a change in Priceline’s thinking.

First, while Momondo’s revenue still is heavily focused on airplane ticket sales, the brand needs to compete with Trivago in hotel reservations to become more profitable — given the typically greater commissions in hotels. The acquisition thus made it less sensible for Priceline to fund a competitor indirectly by buying ad space on Trivago.

Second, Momondo, like Kayak did years ago, found traction with brand advertising campaigns.

In a Skift Research report earlier this year on Priceline’s Competitive Position in 2017, Momondo’s managing director Pia Vemmelund talked about how Momdondo had created a formula of successfully entering a market with a TV blitz and being successful as they followed up with digital marketing that became cheaper thanks to the brand awareness.

So the Momondo purchase may have indirectly prompted Priceline to choose to shift a few percentage points of budgets out of vertical travel metasearch and into brand TV advertising.

Priceline may be putting Booking.com on TV in 30 countries more aggressively because Momondo’s approach reminded them of a lesson about effective marketing. Trivago faces a double whammy: It is losing many Priceline dollars to TV, and the TV spending will, in turn, diminish the effectiveness of its own TV spending.

Another factor: Priceline may have been concerned that Ctrip’s acquisition of Skyscanner last winter might mean more aggressive competition in metasearch.

Trivago’s Hotelier Services Push

This year, Trivago began in earnest to woo hotels to use it to reach consumers instead of using the online travel agencies.

While the effort is still too young to bear fruit, it could eventually cause headaches for Priceline Group’s online travel agency brands — whose commissions are generally higher than the effective cost of direct hotel distribution through Trivago.

Trivago created a subsidiary that focuses on the marketing, sales, and maintenance of its business software services and technologies that hotels use to improve their conversion on it. The company also rolled out updated functionality for its suite of tools for hoteliers to help them be savvier in making bids. Neither of the Priceline metasearch brands, Kayak or Momondo, made a comparable effort.

The company was looking to ramp up its “instant booking” product, called Trivago Express. It was looking to add custom retargeting of users by audience type. It was considering experimenting with hotel storefronts for chains, similar to the airline storefronts Skyscanner has been testing.

By undercutting Trivago now with a pullback in ad spending, Priceline may have slowed down Trivago’s ability to broaden its marketplace by populating real competition from hoteliers. This point relates to the next one.

The Breakdown in Hotel Rate Parity

Trivago’s potential to undermine the online travel agency model gained a tailwind as European countries changed regulations in the past few years. Watchdogs forced Priceline and Expedia to loosen their contract provisions and allow hotels to distribute different rates in various places.

So-called rate-parity provisions remain in place in the U.S., but in a parallel trend, the major U.S.-based hotel chains recently reworked their contracts with Priceline and Expedia to allow them to offer cheaper or more advantageous “loyalty rates” outside of the online travel agency websites and apps.

These trends mean that hotels now have more flexibility to compete with the online booking channels on Trivago as a way to boost direct bookings.

In practice, only a few hotel chains have made this leap, including, Melia, Pacifica, and SBE. But the more that hotels advertise better direct rates via Trivago and similar channels, the less competitive online travel agency offers become.

Hotels Haven’t Filled the Gap Left by Priceline

Priceline Group had made a bet it could partly withdraw from Trivago’s auctions without hotels rushing in and taking business it left behind.

So far, it bet right. According to the third quarter earnings call, hotels are still not rushing into Trivago.

Trivago has repeatedly explained away why hotels don’t rush in to participate by blaming them for having poor technology. The company recently took steps to offer new software to fix this technology gap.

But technology is likely but a small issue among many why hotels have been wary of metasearch.

A more central problem is that the online travel agencies appear to still punish hotels for not giving them their best rates.

Major online travel agencies hire Web scraping companies to scan rate changes for hotels worldwide, tracking when a hotel’s direct rates beat, match, or undercut the ones the agencies offer.

When a hotel undercuts it, the brand typically sends in its market managers to rap on the knuckles of hoteliers who asserted themselves. A brand may also punish the property by suppressing its listing in the sort order of its search results to lower the booking volume, though connecting the dots is hard to prove in any given case.

The online travel agencies may also use “steering” tactics as retaliation. One tactic is to bid on Google AdWords keywords that the hotel likes to use and then place ads in premier positions on Google’s search results page to point users to another similarly named property. But connecting the dots is hard to prove in any given case.

Hotel Cat and Mouse Game

Against this backdrop, there is a cat-and-mouse game being played out between the online travel agencies and hotels on Trivago.

Some hotels have taken a cautious approach of at least occasionally breaking with the rates they offer on third-party channel prices by specific room type for specific stay durations and lead times, such as by undercutting rates on third-party channels for last-minute reservations but not for ones a month out.

Our admittedly unscientific test searches suggest this happens most often in intensively competitive markets, such as Paris, Berlin, and Rome.

About 20 percent of hotels try this, according to a European Commission survey earlier this year. One Web-scraping service estimated anonymously that the figure might reach as high as 40 percent on any given day in popular markets like Rome and Paris.

The cat-and-mouse game has intensified because of the spread of affordable revenue management software and other tools.

In the past, hotels did a mediocre job with direct bookings. But today’s new tools are letting hoteliers be smarter. Companies like Sabre offer hotels more sophisticated booking engines that do a better job of converting customers who come direct.

Companies like Duetto offer hoteliers insights into both repeat and new shoppers and help them customize merchandising content in their booking engines. In other words, hoteliers can increasingly adjust room type sort order, packages, and upsells along with pricing depending on who is shopping. That, in turn, makes their investment in direct booking campaigns more sustainable as a commercial strategy.

All of these efforts mean hotels are converting direct bookings better now than before. Hotels are looking to take the next step of exploiting customers’ varying intent and willingness to pay. That effort requires contact with the customer’s data.

If Trivago could help them get that data and direct bookings, they might flock to it.

Hotels still need data-based assurance that their efforts to drive business through Trivago and similar direct channels are worth the risk of retaliatory tactics by the Booking.com’s and Expedia’s of the world.

It’s not straightforward for the typical hotel to calculate if Trivago and similar channels ultimately drive more revenue and reduce customer acquisition costs than the online travel agencies. Those calculations require levels of technological and commercial savvy that most independent hotel operators still lack.

Trivago might tilt the balance toward hotels if it adjusted its model.

Yet not all are convinced. “The problem is that Trivago isn’t Google or TripAdvisor, and doesn’t enjoy a true upper funnel position,” said Oz Har Adir, CEO of FindHotel. “It has to ‘hard sell’ these sponsored positions to hotels and that’s an expensive effort that will take years to materialize, years Trivago doesn’t have.”

Paid Search Is Past Its Prime

The above explanations merely touch on a variety of factors that may explain why Priceline chose to toggle back on advertising on Trivago this year and what may come next between the companies.

The most important context in understanding Trivago’s potential to bounce back is that paid search is becoming less effective for many travel advertisers.

A few years ago, paid search was by far the most effective channel because buying brand keywords was relatively cheap and produced a lot of leads.

But that’s changing, partly as Google increases its rates by 5 to 7 percent a year, partly as consumers shift to mobile and respond better to native ads than text-based ones, and partly as AdWords bidding auctions have reached a saturation point.

In response, enterprise advertisers, such as hotel chains managing 500 or more properties, have a heartier appetite than ever for metasearch as an alternative.

Last month a survey of 120 enterprise advertisers by digital marketing agency Koddi found that, on average, metasearch was a more productive channel for them than paid search, retargeting, display, and email.

The survey was not scientific. But a majority of the respondents were not clients of the firm, which specializes in metasearch marketing. And the survey results dovetail with what Skift has heard from other industry consultants recently.

Increased spending on metasearch is a rising tide that could lift Trivago along with other players.

After all, Trivago remains brilliant at the acquisition of quality traffic.

Bloodied but Unbowed

Much depends on Trivago’s next move. Its investors will pressure it to do everything it can to get back into the good graces of Priceline, like an addict cut off from their opioid prescription.

Exhibit A: Booking.com is widely considered to be better at converting customers than most other online travel agencies. So Trivago will feel a gravitational pull to make sure Booking.com’s listings appear high in the sort order, to maximize its revenue.

If Trivago goes back for a Priceline Group fix, expect it to become rare to see hotels get the “best deal” slot or other premium placements in search results even when the direct hotel offer is significantly cheaper.

Suspicions that Trivago was tilting in that direction arose on October 27, when the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority said that it was investigating the manner in which Trivago displays information to customers, including how hotels appear in its search and how hotel discounts are applied.

Maybe the company will be bold and take the Priceline slap as an opportunity to break out of its dependence on the global duopoly for growth.

To simplify, hotels once sold all their comparable rooms at the same rate. By selling a commodity product, the Booking.com’s of the world won by outspending them on creating a simpler and better-marketed shopping experience for consumers.

Yet if hoteliers could differentiate their products better and display different offers in different channels to different shoppers, they could retake some control. Trivago could profit if it helped.

In the meantime, the search by analysts, journalists, and investors for the right mix of reasons why Trivago stumbled is reminiscent of Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 movie Rashomon, a look at the shifting nature of truth. Expect the debate to continue for some time.

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rollinbrigittenv8 · 7 years ago

Text

Inside Priceline Group’s Diss of Trivago — The Backstory

— Sean O'Neill

It’s a boom time for trying to fathom the bust-up of Trivago.

For several years, the Expedia-backed hotel-search company had been gaining share of the combined Priceline Group and Expedia Inc. advertising budgets.

In 2013, Priceline and Expedia spent only 3.4 percent of their ad budgets on Trivago, according to estimates by Cowen & Co., an investment bank. By 2016, they spent 9.5 percent.

The two giants liked how Trivago’s TV ad campaign gathered an audience primed to buy and how the website’s user experience did a cost-effective job of converting shoppers into buyers.

As is now relatively well-known, something went wrong for Trivago in 2017. It went from double-digit, year-on-year growth, to a likely bleak forecast for the first half of 2018.

We’ve noted the most popular investor explanation for Priceline’s pullback: Trivago made changes to its algorithm that Priceline didn’t like, prompting a retaliation. Priceline is the winner in the battle because it is now spending less per referral it gets from Trivago than it did prior to the dust-up. That’s because Expedia dialed back its spending, as well.

But Priceline probably pulled back for other reasons, too. Here are a few worth noting:

Booking.com’s Landing Page Issue

Priceline Group’s biggest brand Booking.com has wanted visitors referred from Trivago to land on one of its search result pages, not on a listing for an individual property.

Since last winter, Trivago has been pushing online travel agencies to use property-specific landing pages.

Trivago penalized companies that did that by giving them a lower landing page score in its complex calculations for determining how it presents rates on its website.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the first Booking.com offer appeared on the second page of search results, well past many Expedia and Hotels.com offers.

In short, Priceline does not want any company to penalize it for its choice of metasearch landing-page architecture.

The Momondo Factor

Priceline’s acquisition of Momondo may have affected its thinking about Trivago, too.

Earlier this year, Priceline acquired the travel metasearch company for $550 million.

While the deal closed in July, just as it accelerated its Trivago pullback, the prelude to the deal may have prompted a change in Priceline’s thinking.

Second, Momondo, like Kayak did years ago, found traction with brand advertising campaigns.

So the Momondo purchase may have indirectly prompted Priceline to choose to shift a few percentage points of budgets out of vertical travel metasearch and into brand TV advertising.

Another factor: Priceline may have been concerned that Ctrip’s acquisition of Skyscanner last winter might mean more aggressive competition in metasearch.

Trivago’s Hotelier Services Push

This year, Trivago began in earnest to woo hotels to use it to reach consumers instead of using the online travel agencies.

Trivago created a subsidiary that focuses on the marketing, sales, and maintenance of its business software services and technologies that hotels use to improve their conversion on Trivago. It also rolled out updates and new functionality for its suite of tools for hoteliers to help them be savvier in making bids. Neither of the Priceline metasearch brands, Kayak or Momondo, has made a comparable effort.

The company was looking to ramp up its “instant booking” product, called Trivago Express. It was looking to add custom retargeting of users by audience type. It considering experimenting with hotel storefronts for chains, similar to the airline storefronts Skyscanner has been testing.

The Breakdown in Hotel Rate Parity

These trends mean that hotels now have more flexibility to compete with the online booking channels on Trivago as a way to boost direct bookings.

Hotels Haven’t Filled the Gap Left by Priceline

According to the third quarter earnings call, hotels are still not rushing into Trivago. Priceline Group had made a bet it could partly withdraw from Trivago’s auctions without hotels rushing in and taking business it left behind. So far, it bet right.

Trivago has repeatedly explained away why hotels don’t rush in to participate by blaming hoteliers for having poor technology. The company recently took steps to offer new software to fix this technology gap.

But technology is likely but a small issue among many why hotels have been wary of metasearch.

A more central problem is that the online travel agencies appear to still punish hotels for not giving them their best rates.

Major online travel agencies hire Web scraping companies to scan rate changes for hotels worldwide, tracking when a hotel’s direct rates beat, match, or undercut the ones the agencies offer.

When a hotel undercuts it, the brand typically sends in its market managers rap the knuckles of hoteliers who asserted themselves. A brand may also punish the property by suppressing its listing in the sort order of its search results to lower the booking volume, though this is difficult to prove in any given case.

The online travel agencies may also use “steering” tactics as retaliation. One tactic is to bid on Google AdWords keywords that the hotel likes to use and use ads in premier positions on Google’s search results page to point users to another similarly named property.

Hotel Cat and Mouse Game

Despite this backdrop, there is a cat-and-mouse game being played out between the online travel agencies and the hotels on Trivago.

Our admittedly unscientific test searches suggest this happens most often in intensively competitive markets, such as Paris, Berlin, and Rome.

The cat-and-mouse game has intensified because of the spread of affordable revenue management software and other tools.

If Trivago could help them get that data and direct bookings, they might flock to it.

Hotels still need help to see that their efforts to drive business through Trivago and similar direct channels are worth the risk of retaliatory tactics by the Booking.com’s and Expedia’s of the world.

It’s not easy for the typical hotel to calculate if Trivago and similar channels ultimately drive more revenue and reduce customer acquisition costs than the online travel agencies. Those calculations require levels of technological and commercial savvy that most independent hotel operators still lack.

Trivago might tilt the balance toward hotels if it adjusted its model.

But not all are convinced. “The problem is that Trivago isn’t Google or TripAdvisor, and doesn’t enjoy a true upper funnel position,” said Oz Har Adir, CEO of FindHotel. “It has to ‘hard sell’ these sponsored positions to hotels and that’s an expensive effort that will take years to materialize, years Trivago doesn’t have.”

Paid Search Is Past Its Prime

The above explanations merely touch on a variety of factors that may explain why Priceline chose to toggle back on advertising on Trivago this year and what may come next between the companies.

The most important context in understanding Trivago’s potential to bounce back is that paid search is becoming less effective for many travel advertisers.

A few years ago, paid search was by far the most effective channel because buying brand keywords was relatively cheap and produced a lot of leads.

But that’s changing, partly as Google increases its rates by 5 to 7 percent a year, partly as consumers shift to mobile and prefer native ads to text-based ones, and partly as AdWords bidding auctions have reached a saturation point.

In response, enterprise advertisers, such as hotel chains managing 500 or more properties, have a heartier appetite than ever for metasearch as an alternative.

Increased spending on metasearch is a rising tide that could lift Trivago along with other players.

After all, Trivago remains brilliant at the acquisition of quality traffic.

Bloodied but Unbowed

Much depends on Trivago’s next move. Its investors will pressure it to do everything it can to get back into the good graces of Priceline, like an addict cut off from their opioid prescription.

Maybe the company will be bold and take the Priceline slap as an opportunity to break out of its dependence on the global duopoly for growth.

Yet if hoteliers could differentiate their products better and display different offers in different channels to different shoppers, they could retake some control. Trivago could profit if it helped.

0 notes