Category Archives: Built Environment

A Floating Ruin (The Ferryboat)

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Coronado has lost an old friend. The ferryboat San Diego has been abandoned along the shores of the Sacramento River, in a little known slough leading to Decker Island. The San Diego was most recently used as a liveaboard vessel in the rivers of Northern California with graffiti painted along her sides. Efforts to bring her back to San Diego to be used as a dinner theatre or museum failed repeatedly.

(from “History Matters”, the newsletter of The Coronado Historical Society, Spring 2008)

And she is still there, not far from the northern approach to the Antioch Bridge. She is a shock when you first spot her, looking like the perfect location for a cheap horror film.  The effects of time have given her a haunted look, but she is eminently useful as just an exquisite ruin. I wanted desperately to get closer, perhaps try to board her, but she is moored next to private property.

This site made me think of an old photographic series of mine depicting architectural ruins, mostly from the mid 20th Century.  Cliche or not, ruins are irresistible to me.  Their persistent depiction through Art History, the framing of them as parks and attractions, their status as public assets, all show that the ruin ‘fetish’ has always been common.  →

To experience a ruin is to experience a sublime wherein what dwarfs us is not space, distance, darkness or weather, but rather, time and all its attendant cosmic mysteries. We go to these places to remember and pay respect to the past, yes, but also for the exhilarating feeling of omniscience that comes from being reminded of our proper context, globally and cosmically.  We confront death, but this omniscience seems to include acceptance.

Hero ruins like the San Diego (or the abandoned Salton Sea resorts shown above) are great, but the same exhilarating feeling can for me be derived from a modest overgrown foundation or an anonymous slab in the desert. →

Are they a cliche? Perhaps, but for me, it’s their depiction that can get cliche. With all that omniscience, confronting of death, exhilaration, etc., photography’s  mediation can’t help but have a trivializing effect compared with a primary experience.  A ruin is not just a view, but something best walked through, listened to, and examined foot by foot. ♦

Dry Lake Bed Sprouts Travelers’ Oasis

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clark mountain, ca

Now this is what I moved West for- the chance to get to know places like the Ivanpah Valley, where the settlement of Primm stands as a punch line counterpoint to the surrounding Mojave desert landscape, forming a perfect theater of the absurd and the sublime. →


whiskey pete’s-looking south

‘Settlement’ seems as good a term as any to describe Primm.  It’s first and foremost a rest stop, but because it sits on I-15 just over the NV state line, it has 3 distinct resort/casinos, 2400 hotel rooms, an outlet mall, and various gas stations and fast food joints.  There’s also housing for the workers and a natural gas fired power plant nestled in the hills to the west.  The accident here is the intersection of the state line and the 15 right at the north end of the Ivanpah dry lake bed, one of those bright hot places where the road goes straight for miles. →


buffalo bill’s

My favorite jewel in the Primm crown is Buffalo Bill’s: a 15 story, multi-tower 1200 room hotel done in the traditional red barn board and batten style, all encircled by one of the world’s highest roller coasters (couldn’t forget that part).  This thing should have a giant Foghorn Leghorn affixed to it. →


buffalo bill’s, looking west

Sharing the stage with the architecture, doing their best to steal the show in fact, are the barren Clark Mountains, great mounds of stacked fans, random outcroppings, and cascading buttresses, all with that vaguely gothic aspect typical of Mojave mountains.  Next trip I think I’ll actually stay in Primm and take a day to walk into them. →


whiskey pete’s

Whiskey Pete’s, on the other side of the freeway but served by a nifty monorail, employs the more typical toy castle design strategy. The Primm Valley Resort?  I guess it’s supposed to be in the Southern plantation style. A little piece of Kentucky brought to the desert. I can almost smell the fresh cut grass and minty ice tea! ◊


primm valley resort

 

I Have Seen the Kingdom

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Driving  from Death Valley to Las Vegas, I pass through the strange town of Pahrump, NV.  As I approach one of the town’s main intersections, I spot a structure that appears to be made out of spare parts from the toy castle hotel where I’m staying in Vegas (The Excalibur). As I pass by I look over and see the sign: “The Kingdom Men’s Club” (!).  I quickly decide to make a stop in Pahrump.  →

I park across the street in the lot for the podiatrist and Remax Realty. The Kingdom appears to be open for business, but just a few cars around.  I’m shooting it, but cautious.  It looks like the kind of place Tony Soprano would hang out if he was in town. I’m trying to avoid detection by the video cameras outside, so I don’t go as close as I might like.  One can only imagine what goes on inside the place. →
As I continue shooting, my feeling of amusement gives way to one of uneasiness.  The Kingdom is creeping me out, I admit it.  Perhaps it’s the site, Pahrump’s relative isolation in the Nevada landscape, etc.  I wonder if the Kingdom thing goes beyond just the architecture.  I can’t help conflating the cheap architectural fantasy with the actual place and what I imagine to be the very dismal proceedings within. In the end I am left with a vague feeling of shame for everyone involved.  Should this ‘everyone’ include me too?  ◊

Images & Text © 2010, 2011 Mark Luthringer

My Home For 7 days

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I recently returned from a trip to the Las Vegas area, where my base of operations was that pinnacle of Lego Castle architecture, the Excalibur Hotel and Casino. It was 26/night off peak, though they do their sneaky best to get your money in other ways.

The Excalibur has an especially surreal aura resulting from the fact that it mimics not merely a castle, but a toy castle. I think the design team may have included a group of third grade boys.  The Lego thing is of course just laid over the usual rectangular cinder block volumes of  brutal scale.

The Excalibur’s closest neighbors are the Luxor (giant pyramid, Mies-from-Egypt theme), Mandalay Bay (Polynesian Trumpian), and New YorkNew York. The MGM is diagonally across the strip and thus may as well be 1/2 a mile away. Surprisingly, poor weather prevented me from venturing further up the strip on this trip.


Despite my distaste for the place itself, I am utterly fascinated by Las Vegas. From the hypothetical passerby’s standpoint, it’s a horror show, site of the some of the most appalling and annoying behavior control anywhere. But visually speaking, the surreal, the symbolic, the epic and the absurd are everywhere in almost overwhelming abundance. Frame up something remarkable, take a few steps or look in the other direction, and there’s something equally  remarkable.

Among my goals for this trip was to explore Vegas and, hopefully, define my response to it.  I see it as an epic subject, the leading edge of a slow-motion societal train wreck with, appropriately enough, incredible visuals. The challenge is to go beyond simply partaking of the visual feast, to somehow convey what it means to me.

This has led me back to one of my earliest photographic approaches, shooting people on the street, a la Garry Winogrand. Except this time,  I’ll be able to apply the power of digital collecting and a typological approach to it. This work will be the subject of an upcoming post.  Other upcoming Vegas trip posts will cover: an excursion to Death Valley, my impressions of the new City Center, my infatuation with Primm, NV, and one especially notable subject found in Pahrump, NV.