Arnar Skarphéðinsson
COYOTE URBANISM
Los Angeles is a city of many identities. Once the vision of the future of the American city defined by the promises of personal freedoms in the form of the sprawl afforded by cars and suburbs, Los Angeles is now the paradigmatic urban symbol of late-stage capitalism; a city in peak denial. Consumerism, media, and tourism shape a hyperreality sustained by the careful choreography of ever-larger spectacles. Today’s image of LA relies on nostalgia, serving as a final bastion of the dying American Dream. Underneath the projected image exists a storied history of expropriation and a resident population obscured and unacknowledged in the city’s pursuit of “progress”.
Still from the movie
Still from the movie
As wealth disparities grow larger, the material conditions required to maintain the status quo grow more and more desperate. Bureaucratic technologies cultivated and tested abroad find their way back home to American cities. The constant drone of circling helicopters serves as the ever-present reminder of a society built upon an inherent distrust in others; surveillance filling the void of mutual care. Privatization and privacy grow increasingly at odds with one another and performance outranks substance. Fortification becomes the response to urban decay.
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Architecture, as an institution whose very existence depends upon appealing to concentrations of wealth and power, has always been complicit in the service of structural inequality. Issues such as ownership, rent extraction, access, labor, ... are left outside the accepted definition of architecture, rendering architects incapable of enacting material change. Rather, this architectural “dark matter” functions as the predominant undercurrent that silently shapes and defines our built environment, serving capital above all. The result is a commodified urban landscape that alienates all who inhabit it.
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Our thesis project is a short, animated film that serves as a speculation and anthropological critique of the neo-liberalization of the city; in other words, the commodification of architecture, and in turn urbanism. We explore this concept through the urbanism of Los Angeles as a city formless in nature, instead tied together through individual experience and identity. By giving shape to the forces of capital that define the city, we formalize the formless, revealing the city as a perpetual process of extraction and commodification.
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FILM SYNOPSIS: The familiar landscapes of Los Angeles have been dominated by unfamiliar machines. As the infrastructure of the machines grows and dominates the urban fabric, on the ground, a solitary coyote's home becomes the next frontier of development. Pushed out of his home, the coyote wanders wearily looking for a place to rest. Disparity and spectacle shape the urban landscape, competing for dominance, leaving little room for our coyote.
Still from the movie