TRAVIS SHAFFER: RESIDENTIAL FACADES
August 12, 2010 - September 5, 2010
Opening Reception: August 12 | 6 - 9 PM
Institute 193, Lexington, KY
Eleven Mega Churches, Thirtyfour Parking Lots, Fortyone Walmart Supercenters, Every Church in Fayette County and finally - Residential Facades. Travis Shaffer, a recent MFA graduate from the University of Kentucky, has spent the past two years documenting various aspects of America’s less-than-enthralling architectural landscape and development through his steady production of photographs, books and portfolios. His most recent project, Residental Facades, visually recalls the austere photographs of Berndand Hilla Becher, but is distinctly local in its treatment of Southern suburban architecture and the unnerving anomaly of street-oriented residential facades without doors or windows.
In anticipation of the World Equestrian Games, Lexington has entered a period of breakneck development and infrastructural improvements that will have long-lasting effects on our community.Shaffer’s work paints a sobering picture of unchecked development but is able to disguise its social and conceptual critiques in symmetry, line and form.
More photos from the exhibit are available at Shaffer's web site. His Eleven Mega Churches is worth a look, too.
The houses in the pictures were likely built without doors or windows on a street facing facade. They began life that way.
ReplyDeleteIt's a different story with houses that once had street facing windows and doors that were later removed and covered with siding. Plenty of examples of this may be found by driving down streets like Culbertson, Oak and Ekin. The front steps remain but they don't lead to anything but a wall. These properties have a large negative impact on the appearance of the whole block and on the neighbors' property values.
You don't see this as much on streets like E. Spring or E. Market. The city has an ordinance that prevent removing all of the front facing windows and doors. It's not the zoning ordinance and it's not the building code. The only ordinance that comes into play here is the historic preservation ordinance. A little more than 10 years after its enactment, you're starting to be able to tell which areas are in districts and which are not, even if you don't have a map.
This exhibit reminds me of James Kunstler's comments about post- WWII American houses being "like television sets, only the front matters, and it only matters insofar as it can broadcast some cartoonish image of what we want others to think. The rear is where the plug comes out. The everyday environments of our time, the places where we live and work, are composed of dead patterns. They infect the patterns around them with disease and ultimately with contagious deadness, and deaden us as they do. They frustrate our innate biological and psychological needs - for instance, our phototropic inclination to seek natural daylight...the consequences are rather serious: a world outside the confining walls of the home that nobody cares about, a country made up of places that are not worth caring about, and a nation that is not worth defending."
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