Oregon Humanities Fall/Winter 2008

Cover of Oregon Humanities Fall/Winter 2008
Kathleen Holt
EDITOR
Raina Hassan
COMMUNICATIONS ASSISTANT
Jennifer Viviano
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Leigh van der Werff
COPY EDITOR
Editorial Advisory Board
Tom Booth
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Debra Gwartney
Julia Heydon
Marianne Keddington-Lang
Guy Maynard
Win McCormack
Camela Raymond
Kate Sage
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Curt Yehnert

Oregon Humanities, a journal of ideas and perspectives about the humanities, is published triannually by the Oregon Council for the Humanities, 813 SW Alder Street, Suite 702, Portland, Oregon 97205.

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Civilizing Space

Artist and urban planner Tad Savinar on the small gestures that make a city a good place to live

Interview by Tim DuRoche

Artist, playwright, and urban planner Tad Savinar is a thoughtful inquisitor who traffics in shrewd visual commentary and compassionate storytelling. Throughout his thirty-year career, he's generated a remarkable body of vibrant work, from public memorials and transit designs to wry conceptual works on paper--animating a lively dialogue around the civically valuable belief that art can inspire. Trained originally as a visual artist, Portland-based Savinar has been concentrating his efforts since 1991 on large-scale urban design, as well as serving as a member of lead design teams for transportation projects, inner-city revitalization designs, and urban-waterfront redevelopment plans. He has been spotlighted on National Public Radio, and his work has been published in Landscape Architecture, Vanity Fair, Vogue, the New York Times, and other publications. He also co-wrote the play Talk Radio with Eric Bogosian. Savinar is represented by PDX Contemporary Art, which exhibited his most recent gallery show, Not Just a Pretty Picture, in September 2008.

Savinar recently sat down to talk with Portland writer and composer Tim DuRoche about design and public conversation, the improvisational act of living in a city, and the civilizing process of learning to create, recycle, and renew social capital--twenty feet at a time.

DuRoche: You've worked as a conceptual, idea-based artist and as a playwright, an art form where you have direct interaction with an audience. Do you see those things as mutually exclusive from planning or landscape architecture? Is there a common fuse that joins these things for you?

Savinar: I think all of my work, whether it's public or planning or studio work really has to do with acknowledging respect for the viewer, acknowledging that whether they are standing in a gallery or riding a light-rail vehicle or walking down a street or sitting in a theater, they deserve a certain level of respect for their intelligence. And I guess my work tries to make their experience of life better. I don't mean that I know what's best for people but more that my work tries to make people more engaged, more thoughtful, and to actually acknowledge their presence. In other words, I'm not interested in a big painting that yells at somebody.

DuRoche: So, there's a level of mindfulness that goes into how you approach that work.

Savinar: And, that's . . . how do I say this respectfully? There's not a lot of that around. There is a lot of "me, me, me. I want to design the thing so that I can take a picture of it, so I can get another job and then take a picture of that thing and then get another job." I'm really interested in the thing and its place in the world. How it functions and how it provides for people, the audience, the viewers, rather than using it as a stepping stone to another project.

DuRoche: Would you consider there to be a civilizing process in this?

Savinar: I would like to think so.

***

DuRoche: You are working on the transit mall for downtown Portland right now--actually re-conceiving the visual experience in twenty-foot increments. I think this is interesting, because in a way, you're looking at a microcosm of how and what we experience in the built environment.

Savinar: I wondered if there was a way to actually look at every single block face or every microclimate within every block face to see what was going on: whether it's the ability to see east towards the river or the ability to see west towards the tree canopy of the Park Blocks or whether it's hearing a water fountain that's at Standard Plaza.

DuRoche: So, you're really telling multiple stories. In essence, you have the potential for multiple narratives speaking to multiple audiences on each block.

Savinar: Right.

DuRoche: If good cities are grounded in conversation, as Ralph Waldo Emerson suggests, is interaction one of the reasons to do this? Are you trying to create an atmosphere for conversing with the city--for knowing your neighbor, understanding public space, experiencing the street?

Savinar: Well, I think that walking past a building that is all black glass or has a stone wall allows for zero transparency of what's going on inside. It basically says, "I don't care about you" to the person walking by. So, the person says, "Well, they don't care about me" and even thinks, "Am I insignificant, or are they a jerk?" Neither one is a good question to ask. Whereas if someone walks by a building with a number of active storefronts and sees things for sale that have been made by a human or people having a conversation or an interesting sign graphic or a lovely plant that's in bloom--I think all of those kinds of things make the person walking down the street feel as if they were included in the conversation. It's not an "us versus them." They are simple gestures, but I think the goal is to be honest, transparent, and bring things down to the human scale and not look at a city as an isolated picture on a photo board that shows only the top stories of buildings in very little [detail]. That's not the experience we want someone to have. We want someone to have the experience of walking down a street in their city as a participant in the conversation. It's very much like my visual work. I don't want to make a big blank canvas that yells at somebody, that makes them feel as if they are not a part of it. I want to have content and imagery within the artwork that has a dialogue that says, "You're part of my world. We're all in this."

***

DuRoche: For your [2006] show at PDX Contemporary Art you said, "Our cities are becoming richer and more complex with every day and our lives must continually reinvent themselves to keep up with the opportunities and constraints of such environs." Do you think it's important to rediscover and reclaim silence?

Savinar: We have a behavior that seems to be prevalent in Portland. I call it antisocial behavior. There appears to be a segment of the population who chooses not to obey walk and wait signs, not from the standpoint that the laws are not for them, but more as a gesture of aggression. It's almost a "go ahead, try and run me over." It seems to be willful and calculated. This is all conjecture, but it is not uncommon in Portland to have the green light--I don't mean the yellow light--and have somebody step into the crosswalk in defiance of that, fully aware that you will stop the car and let them go. I always kind of note this as an indication that they probably don't feel in control over their part of the dialogue of the city, for some reason or another.

When you talk about the complexity of cities, how do you deal with someone who is blatantly aggressive at disobeying the common rules of civility and telling you that they're doing it at the same time? What is our response supposed to be? Are we supposed to be permissive and let it go? What is the proper social action?

DuRoche: In planning a mall, writing a play, or designing a public memorial, which you've also done, what is different in terms of the public process or the participatory process of making sense of a community's reaction to an event?

Savinar: Well, in a memorial, there is usually a group of people who are associated with it, either who directly went through a tragic experience or lost loved ones or working partners in some kind of tragic event. They are the undisputed authorities on the tragedy of that event, not the factual tragedy but the emotional tragedy. So, how you respect that part of the equation--and as a designer, look at how you can tell the story of that tragedy in a physical form that will be valid for a hundred years--is a challenge.

DuRoche: Would you like to believe that civility and courtesy rank high in a town like Portland?

Savinar: I gave a speech once at the annual meeting of travel agents of Oregon. I talked about how they could do all the marketing they wanted, but it was the gas station attendant, the baker pulling the muffins out of the oven--it was whomever people from out of state encountered--who were really defining the state. If people had a good experience with that, they moved here, because 62 percent of people who move to Oregon first visited while on a vacation. And then they get here and there's no courtesy card, there's no rulebook. How many people will move to this area, not only because they like the culture of that interaction and respect the scale of that interaction? How many will bring their bad habits with them? That will decide, really, the future of the place, whether there is an assimilation or whether those who come really are able to respect what is here--but also get on board with the program.

***

DuRoche: I think our love of public process speaks to the sort of Yankee town-hall meeting mentality that founded Portland. And I think it comes through in the two schools of thought approaching how government works: You have your collaborative, barn-raising school, and you have your vending-machine approach to local government, where you pay your taxes and you get your stuff out.

Savinar: I joke about it, but it used to be that if some businessman had a great idea, he would be smoking his cigar and walk into the mayor's office and say, "Mayor, we've got to build this park here." The mayor would say, "That's a great idea," and he'd write the check and that would be it. Now, you can't smoke a cigar in City Hall, and you probably have to go to the receptionist before you can see the mayor and then get on the agenda to meet, and then you have to have so many people in the room so that everyone hears the story. And then you have to have a public process. So, is it better or worse? It's probably about the same, you know. The old way had some bad ideas that probably shouldn't have been funded, and the modern way probably screens out a lot of good ideas because they never survive or they're oatmealed to death.

But it takes hundreds of years and thousands of mayors and it's always a revolving process. Just look at the last fifteen years, how the Internet and technology have impacted our lives. So, who knows what's next? I think some things we have to believe in and say, "This is forever" and build sidewalks with nice materials and that kind of thing. Then, with other things, sometimes you have to say, "Well, that didn't work, but we tried." I think we have to kind of try a little bit of everything.

Tim DuRoche is a Portland-based writer, musician-composer, installation artist, arts and culture advocate, and Portland Center Stage's community outreach manager.

© 2008 Oregon Council for the Humanities