The Architecture of Nowhere: Psychic Topographies of the Inland Empire
This photographic essay was inspired by Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. It probes the sub-/exurban landscape of the Inland Empire, a sprawling area to the immediate east of Los Angeles, interrogating its psychic topographies through five ecologies, each represented by a photograph. Like Banham, the author is a British academic mediating his experience of Southern California through his own eyes and written expression.
Under sub- and exurban spatial neoliberalism, no-one can hear you scream. Go due east from Los Angeles along the Foothill Freeway, or through Foothill Boulevard, or down the San Bernadino Freeway and you are driving in the Inland Empire, an endless exopolis of contradictory, populated nowhere. While spatial transformations wrought by global capital often results in a kind of ‘emptying out’ of the ‘meaning’ of an area — think, for example, of the vast abandoned tracts in Rust Belt cities such as Detroit — the landscape of the Inland Empire is one in which, beyond one’s individual experience, broader meaning was seemingly never there in the first place, at least to the self-situated eyes of the unfamiliar visitor. What there is though is the sense that there’s not even the non-primary ‘there’ in “there is no ‘there’ there”. Walking (socialised as I am to this being a ‘normal’ act) becomes a ‘thing’: there’s no-one else on the streets, and the alternative without a car is the bus which ferries you, hourly but irregularly and without printed schedules, from one strand of external anonymity to the next, to the chain restaurants and the strip malls, to the big box stores and the auto dealerships, to the destinations which are in themselves an absence of place.
Ecology One: the parking lot. Behind me, the studied ‘friendliness’ of the wait staff inside the ‘Irish’ pub and grill. In front of me, the manifestation not merely of car culture, but of the peripheral dark shadow of the Angelean Autopia which so fascinated Reyner Banham. Removed from the ecosystem of Los Angeles, out here in the Inland Empire itself there seem to be five (rather than four ) ecologies. This parking lot, as an example of this first ecology, lies in front of me empty and moronic: a monument to spatial plenty and a seeming manifestation of practices disconnected from the ‘urban’ or the ‘social’.
Ecology Two: the Transit Center. For those who cannot afford the lifestyle which the parking lot connotes. This is the architecture of public transportation as a service of last resort, as a scrap handed down from above, rather than as a signifier of ‘freedom’ or of pleasure. Novelty architectural flourishes in 90s colours, bored transit ‘police’ to prevent ‘undesirables’, no shops, not even a vending machine. All the buses coalesce here, hourly-ish on the Pulse, increasing skeletal connectivity in a landscape unsuited to networks. Surrounded by nothingness, the commuter trains sporadically ferry away those who need to go to Los Angeles, alternating with mile-long freights. Neoliberal capitalism meets the retro-futurist echoes of the underbelly of the suburban LIFE magazine dream, the promised land.
Ecology Three: the foothills and their freeways, in this case the Arrow Route. The route is wide, and half-road, half-street (a stroad in pejorative planning parlance), the telegraph poles a wistful cry from a more spatially-specific time. Likewise the disused interurban streetcar route which ran nearby, now repurposed as a running track for vampiric parents taking their daily workout: no transportation utility here anymore, just the neoliberalisation of the body, a dynamic of continuous, physical self-improvement. The Uber and Lyft drivers ferrying flexibilisation, atomisation and cool, A-to-B efficiency. Sporadic new build housing developments — gated perhaps — flanking the freeways. The feeling of reviewing of the food and service on Yelp!, or saying “I’d love to go to Europe someday?” in the manner of a question.
Ecology Four: the motel room. The comfort and familiarity stemming from its place in the American imaginary, often always the same. But then the reality unmoored from this, the permanent living next to the constant noise of traffic, the long-term residents servicing the kitchens of the chain restaurants one has to cross the freeway to get to. The farcical swimming pool, the hum of the fridge, the constant children, the laundry room.
Ecology Five: the drive-thru. “If you see a Baker’s”, a Californian friend tells me, “you know you’re in the Inland Empire. And you can get the Twin Kitchen Combo”. The only customer arriving on foot, a 2 km hike from the motel room. Spatial specificity manifested in utilitarian hard tacos, a burger and a shake, served beneath a friendly-fonted logo, behind a novelty modular Spanish revivalist facade.
I leave and find the only bar — via Google Maps — another 2 km walk. It is early afternoon, sole customer, I drink one beer and with a sense of growing unreality watch the person working the bar performing the act of working the bar by cleaning the bar in front of me. I walk back to the Transit Center: the saga of nothingness continues.
