ideal ecology. It opted for hard technologies, exaggerated all dimensions, gambled on
heaven and hell... Eco-architecture, eco-society...this is the gentle hell of the Roman
Empire in its decline.
Modern demolition is truly wonderful. As a spectacle it is the opposite of a rocket
launch. The twenty-storey block remains perfectly vertical as it slides towards the centre
of the earth. It falls straight, with no loss of its upright bearing, like a tailor’s dummy
falling through a trap-door, and its own surface area absorbs the rubble. What a
marvellous modern art form this is, a match for the firework displays of our childhood.
They say the streets are alive in Europe, but dead in America. They are wrong.
Nothing could be more intense, electrifying, turbulent and vital than the streets of New
York. They are filled with crowds, bustle and advertisements, each by turns aggressive or
casual. There are millions of people in the streets, wandering, care-free, violent, as if they
had nothing better to do—and doubtless they have nothing else to do—than produce the
permanent scenario of the city. There is music everywhere; the activity is intense,
relatively violent, and silent (it is not the agitated, theatrical activity you find in Italy).
The streets and avenues never empty, but the neat, spacious geometry of the city is far
removed from the thronging intimacy of the narrow streets of Europe.
In Europe, the street only lives in sudden surges, in historic moments of revolution and
barricades. At other times people move along briskly, no one really hangs around (no one
wanders any more). It is the same with European cars. No one actually lives in them;
there isn’t enough space. The cities, too, do not have enough space, or rather that space is
deemed public and bears all the marks of the public arena, which forbids you to cross it
or wander around it as though it were a desert or some indifferent area.
The American street has not, perhaps, known these historic moments, but it is always
turbulent, lively, kinetic and cinematic, like the country itself, where the specifically
historical and political stage counts for little, but where change, whether spurred by
technology, racial differences or the media, assumes virulent forms: its violence is the
very violence of the way of life.
SANTA BARBARA
On the aromatic hillsides of Santa Barbara, the villas are all like funeral homes. Between
the gardenias and the eucalyptus trees, among the profusion of plant genuses and the
monotony of the human species, lies the tragedy of a utopian dream made reality. In the
very heartland of wealth and liberation, you always hear the same question: ‘What are
you doing after the orgy?’ What do you do when everything is available—sex, flowers,
the stereotypes of life and death? This is America’s problem and, through America, it has
become the whole world’s problem.
All dwellings have something of the grave about them, but here the fake serenity is
complete. The unspeakable house plants, lurking everywhere like the obsessive fear of
death, the picture windows looking like Snow White’s glass coffin, the clumps of pale,
dwarf flowers stretched out in patches like sclerosis, the proliferation of technical
gadgetry inside the house, beneath it, around it, like drips in an intensive care ward, the
TV, stereo and video which provide communication with the beyond, the car (or cars)
that connect one up to that great shoppers’ funeral parlour, the supermarket, and, lastly,
Jean Baudrillard 209