Manuel Tardits, French architect co-founder of an agency – Mikan, which means mandarin – in Japan, and unrepentant traveler offers us, through his sketchbooks, an architectural ‘Road Trip’ in the American Southwest (II/III).
Twenty days in August with an American friend along the Interstates and Freeways: Arizona, New Mexico, West Texas. Discover everything without forgetting the predecessors; Europeans: Chateaubriand, Tocqueville, Morand, Baudrillard, Wenders, etc… or Americans: Frederic Remington, Albert Bierstadt, Georgia O’keefe, Ansel Adams, Laura Gilpin, Donald Judd, Ridley Scott, etc. ; without forgetting that we will pass by roads where others have passed and that our wonders and our discoveries of the Sublime are neither the first nor the last. Above all, without forgetting to enjoy your own moments in the splendor of the Southwest. Way, way, way and wonders.
From the city
The big ones – Phoenix, Tucson, Albuquerque, El Paso – depressed me with their empty vastness. A world of the grid that organizes the plans for the car, queen of depopulated city centers and kilometer-long suburbs where everyone isolates himself in his property. Small ones like Taos or Santa Fe, when tourism does not reinforce the undeniable charm of their old centers with the risk of glassing it, centers sometimes marked by a Hispanic square, are demolished, just as empty. Smaller still – Marathon, Marfa – are only fragments consisting of a few blocks: only the extent of the grid changes.
The ridge of the Grand Canyon, some beautiful adobe churches with very sculptural curves and the restaurants are the only places, the only moments where I had the feeling of seeing people, something of a community. In contrast, the European or Japanese city is a praise of density and outdoor public space. Here the suburban emptiness of the American southwest, human as it is, seems dehumanized, very new or very battered.
This emptiness is the price of the welcoming comfort of houses, when the norm allows it, or of public interiors: in Phoenix the magnificent library of Will Bruder is a true haven of freshness, where many readers take refuge… many of whom are those . who read nothing there; it must be said that it is 44°C outside, certainly closer to the asphalt!
From utopia
Those that are made, in other words built, if they still remain beautiful, have aged and the ecology of the desert is full of wrinkles: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West is a body of wood, rocks and concrete, almost hollowed out, superb with enthusiasm and determination, however emptied by the years and the Covid.
Arcosanti by the Italian-American Paolo Soleri, with its amphitheatres and concrete vaults with Promethean accents, dominates a canyon with power and grace… But, planned for 5,000 inhabitants, it has only 80 and the bronze bells cast on site by the community. by artists and sold in the store are the bigoted sisters of those from… 1970! Moving although not very compatible with the ecology of the place, beautiful cypress trees are planted between the buildings: Soleri, from Turin lost in the north of Arizona, must have had his moments of depression to allow such an import!
Earthship by Mike Reynolds, whose living walls are made of earth and recycled tires facing north, also uses thick polystyrene boards as insulation… Earthship, a series of vessels placed in the rigors of northern New Mexico, which some visit as a catechism, full of paradoxes. Architect Rick Joy in Tucson, a designer and builder of simple and beautiful adobe projects, has abandoned this technique, which has become too expensive in his own words…
Anthropocene: the fate of the word is recent although the current generation is not the first to worry about our relationship to the finite world… But the unfinished communities and ecological dreams of New Mexico and Arizona are worth thinking about.