unPoliceYrMind

Do you ever return to a building, a street, or a tree and feel like you can measure yourself against it by how different it appears to you in light of the ways you have changed since you last saw it?  This article on BLDGBLOG reflects on the ways we experience ourselves in relation to spaces of the built environment.  On my West Coast trip last week, I walked around the Getty Center in LA, and I had a richer experience of it compared to the many times I had visited it before, once or more almost every year for the past seven years.  However, the idea of “self-measurement” is delusional, because measures of the self are always socially constituted.  On my visit to the Getty, all of my thoughts were shaped by my interactions with my traveling companion, Chris Buck. For example, he said something that dramatically changed my experience of the Getty’s space — he drew my attention to the workers in the Getty’s garden, who were producing that luxurious built space for the tourists to gaze upon in order to feel as if they too can enjoy the leisurely pleasures of LA’s elite.  What from one perspective I see as pretty flowers and trees, I also see from another perspective as the use of exploited labor to produce a fleeting appearance of public access to the affects enjoyed by the wealthy.  But I don’t know, maybe they are not being exploited and they love their jobs.  I probably should have just talked with them, instead of taking close-up pictures of bees.  (See my pictures at Flickr of the Getty and other built environments in LA, SD, and SF).