Ridgemont Typologies: the Banality of our Surroundings
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 04.20.07
Perhaps one of the reasons that change comes slowly is that, like with apples and tomatoes, where we used to have diversity and variety, now everything is the same and we are afraid to change. We no longer understand how anything could be different because everything we live with has become a monoculture.
Photographer Mark Luthringer demonstrates this with his series of "typological arrays", which have an "inherent ability to depict prevalence and repetition make it the perfect technique for examining the excess, redundancy, and meaningless freedom of our current age of consumption". There are arrays of cars, cellphones, signs, house entries (which I find the most interesting, where did that come from?) Ridgemont is his imaginary, ahistorical name for the everysuburb. See them at ::Mark Luthringer or in San Francisco May 31-June 29 at 3A Architecture.. via ::Daily Dose
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Nice photo essay - The choice of photos should be expanded to include more than the usual suspects. There is as much stagnation in the world of snob appeal. In fact, where cost is less of an issue for the shopper, uniformity becomes is more damning.
Hey! You know what? A lot of gothic architecture looks the same too!
Some of these are so stupid. Way to go on pointing out that all trucks look similar! That's why they are trucks, and not something else.
It's like photographing the leaf of every species of maple tree and stating that nature is so boring.
While I understand his point, I do not think that his photography stands up to in-depth scrutinization.
All he has shown is that objects with similar functions often take on similar forms. This is not unique to suburbia, and I don't have a problem with it.
The first gallery really hits you. Taillights. I mean wow, just think of the monotony. They're on every car, in the same place, and they all look and work the same.
And what a good thing that is!
All this gentleman has done is to demonstrate that objects with the same purpose tend to look the same. Otherwise known as convergent evolution. And by his logic, the human form itself is both redundant and repeated to excess. Maybe more of us should have webbed hands; I really don't know how you please a bored design fetishist. But I guess if a person's employ has it sketching a hundred different coffee tables a day, it might come to feel that way. At any rate, this collection, by itself, documents more cultural diversity than has ever before existed. For two hundred thousand years, all we had were flint axes, and they all looked the same! Monoculture is only for those who want it, or, apparently, who want to maunder in a vaguely dissatisfied way about it.
I like the idea and the work. In the case of the house entryways, though, it is very clear that these are all from one suburban "development," because they are not just similar, but identical. You know the type--400 new homes from the $280s, and you get your pick of not one, but two different designs.