Catching Up With the Hyatt Regency Atrium

Anyone interested in time travel should take the opportunity, if they can, to linger awhile in the lobby of the Hyatt Regency in San Francisco. Just two short escalator rides up from Drumm Street, opposite the Embarcadero BART stop, it is widely held to be the largest atrium in existence. Designed by architect and property developer John C Portman, it was built in the early 1970s, at a time when NASA’s Apollo space programme was winding down while greater emphasis was being placed upon the creation and maintenance of orbiting space stations. What you find yourself straining your neck to fully appreciate is a space ark fashioned out of raw concrete.

The Hyatt Regency is the perfect embodiment of a space that has been ‘hollowed out’: everything clings to the inside edge of its vast interior. Instead of having to negotiate mazes of corridors superimposed on each other from floor to floor, all rooms are accessed by a series of tiered balconies that run around the space’s inner perimeter. Instead of a central enclosed core of elevators and stairways, its points of access have moved out to the very periphery of the building, placing it as far as possible to the outer corner of the atrium.

From the outside it looks like nothing at all: just a series of introspected concrete grids, slits and ledges, its overall shape defined by the gap left between existing structures. In this respect it looks forward, not to the worlds of Logan's Run and Battlestar Galactica, but to the urban fortresses Frank Gehry created in Los Angeles during the early 1980s, such as the Goldwyn Library.

At the same time, the Hyatt Regency’s design looks back to the work of architect Morris Lapidus, responsible during the 1950s for a fantastic line in resort hotels, such as the Fontainebleau in Miami Beach. ‘You want to have fun,’ Lapidus said of his creations. ‘Don’t try. You are in my hotel. You’re having fun.’ Lapidus piled excess upon excess. To visit one of his hotels was to find yourself inside a movie: each experience was shaped and structured as a series of cinematic illusions. The lobby of the Fontainebleau, for example, was famous for its spectacular grand staircase that led nowhere. The building practically had the experience for you. Not surprisingly, John Portman started his design firm at the same time as Lapidus was creating movie sets in which his customers could act out lives that were removed from their lives. We can trace a similar line of thinking to a statement made by John Portman in 1976.

‘Architects in the past have tended to concentrate their attention on the building as a static object,’ he wrote in The Architect as Developer. ‘I believe dynamics are more important: the dynamics of people, their interaction with spaces and environmental condition. We must learn to understand humanity better so that we can create an environment that is more beneficial to people, more rewarding, more pleasant to experience… Buildings should serve people, not the other way around.’

Two executives in white shirts, bound for one of the Hyatt Regency conference rooms, brushed past me while I was taking these photographs. ‘It was fantastic,’ one said to the other excitedly. ‘He presented all our issues in one thirty-second deliv.’ But that’s another story.

‘Mondo Mancunia’ On Hold

I very much regret to announce that, for health and safety reasons, all live music events at the Shunt Vault have been suspended for the next two weeks. This suspension will include ‘Mondo Mancunia’, the four-day residency curated by Graham Massey due to start on Wednesday October 1. You can only imagine, given the small amount of notice we have been given, what a bitter disappointment this news has been to all the participants in ‘Mondo Mancunia’. New dates for the residency are being discussed at the moment, however, and I hope to be able announce details on ‘Mondo Mancunia Redux’ in the very near future.

In the Compound with Naut Humon and Li Alin

Spent the last few hours in San Francisco down by the water’s desolate edge, near Candlestick Park, to visit Recombinant Media Labs’s new temporary home at ‘the Compound’, a building in an industrial park where Naut Humon , doyen of the city’s emergent Industrial performance scene, once ran regular nights of sensory overload. ‘The double doors used to be flung open,’ he recalled, pointing at the Compound’s tall entrance, ‘and the audience would be greeted by smoke and lights and noise pouring out of it.’ The cops, it seems, rarely bothered to come out here – and still don’t, if the chain link fencing, fly tipping and scavenging are anything to go by.

The Compound is now providing a temporary home for Recombinant Media Labs: a high definition multi-channel audiovisual system known as ‘Surround Traffic Control’. Featuring ten large video projection screens arranged to form a full 360-degree aspect, this enclosed performance space is also equipped with an awesome 16.8.2 horizontal and vertical sound diffusion system, capable of earthshaking volume levels, but with the lightest and subtlest of response. Flexible enough offer any number of playback possibilities, RML’s capabilities can also be scaled up or down to fit all types of rectangular space, thereby offering access ‘processes that expand the aesthetic and technological boundaries of panoramic installation, surround cinema, and immersive a/v performance'. Artists who have already worked with RML include Morton Subotnick, Biosphere, Ryoichi Kurokawa, Pole and Semiconductor.

Naut is currently working with singer and artist Li Alin on developing a touring version of the RML, which should be visiting Europe in the next four or five months. They are also developing a repertoire of songs as Careen Ajar – I heard a rough live mix of one played back over the RML’s impressive sound system and it has a physicality to it you won’t want to miss.

From nights of aggressive splendour at the Compound to the RML, Naut Humon has continued to explore the senses, not so much as individual conduits to experience, but as a unified field of merged effects. You longer see with your eyes and hear with your ears in the depths of RML’s playback facilities: you perceive with your whole body.

Pictured from the top down: Naut Humon and Li Alin at the RML desk, KH feeling out the space, and outside the Compound with Naut and Li, giving us an elegant impression of what 21st Century trailer trash should really look like.

Welcome to Mars at the Other Cinema

The above are just a few of pictures taken by Kitty Keen during last Saturday’s Other Cinema presentation at the ATA on Valencia Street. ‘Paranoia in Orbit’ marked the start of the OC’s 24th season, and the audience was treated to free champagne and donuts to mark the occasion. Watching Craig Baldwin prepare the cinema was a small education in itself: multicoloured Acme Move-e-lites were plugged in behind the bar area, a giant inflatable alien was set up beside the screen and an amazing selection of movie clips set running to welcome an enthusiastic crowd of guests. Craig himself introduced the evening, laying down the subtle spirit of informed strangeness that underscored the proceedings.

I am pleased to report that my presentation of material from Welcome to Mars was extremely well received: thanks in no small degree to the fantastic electronic soundtrack put together by Simon James and the visual montage assembled by Bruce Woolley of the Radio Science Orchestra. I’m hoping to bring this 35-minute presentation to London in the very near future.

Megan Prelinger Shaw’s lecture on how the US aerospace industry used science-fiction illustrators to help sell themselves to the public after the establishment of NASA in 1958 was particularly revealing. Her book on the subject, due out next year, will definitely be worth waiting for. Meanwhile the Soviet bloc propaganda footage artist John Davis had brought back from a recent residency in Moldavia brought whoops and cheers from the audience, although for entirely the wrong reasons; Elvis looks great, even when his presence is meant to signify the inevitably destructive contradictions of capitalism.

From the top, Kitty Keen’s camera has caught a couple of moments from the ‘Welcome To Mars’ presentation, Craig Baldwin laying it all down for the assembled guests, plus Ken Hollings in spirited conversation with celebrated author and magus Erik Davis just before the ATA doors opened. Also present but not photographed: Rick Prelinger of the Prelinger Archive. More on him in a future post.

Homage to the Other Cinema

Anyone in or around Valencia Street in San Francisco this Saturday might like to know that I am reading extracts from ‘Welcome to Mars’ at the Other Cinema during its first presentation of the autumn.

I’ve been looking forward to this event since it was first arranged with Craig Baldwin earlier in the summer. I am huge admirer of his work and enjoyed my previous visit to his underground laboratory, beneath the sidewalks of the Mission district at Easter 2007. For more details on the reading, please check either the Other Cinema website or Google Calendar. In the meantime I cannot resist reprinting Craig’s copy for the evening in its entirety.

‘Kook-expert Ken Hollings jets in from London-town for the North American book-launch of his "Welcome to Mars", a sub-pop Cult Study of Fifties America, on the bizarre intersection of cybernetics, behavior modification, atomic weapons, and UFOs, highlighting how these currents were refracted through the visual surfaces of popular culture, domestic design, and suburban living. Responding from the US side, Megan Shaw Prelinger, representing her own forthcoming book "Another Science Fiction: Advertising the Space Race", recalls the Eisenhower years with a fascinating flight through a pictorial history of aerospace ads, retrieved from her own SoMA library. For the third leg of this Cold War re-visitation, local A/V artist John Davis returns from, yes, Moldavia, with the media-archaeological remains of the very last Soviet newsreels, reflecting on this same period, but from the other side of the "Iron Curtain"! He screens the most astonishing agit-prop artifacts, and in fact performs an original sonic score, to a particularly uncanny iteration of Soviet Surrealism. Paranoia in orbit.’

The Other Cinema is at 992 Valencia Street, San Francisco, CA 94110 – telephone (415)648-0654. Fun starts at 8.30pm. Admission is $6.00. Bring everyone you’ve ever met in your entire life.

RAND Online

A recent post on that magnificent online fun palace of the mind, Boing Boing reminds me that an MP3 of my RAND documentary for BBC Radio 3, ‘All Your Tomorrows Today’, is available from Speechification.


For more info on the fascinating enigma that is RAND, see my blog post for Wednesday July 30, 2008 ‘RAND Corporation on Radio Three’ under Live Media.

Nature Red in Tooth, Claw and Breakfast Nook

Bruce Gilchrist of London Fieldworks has sent me this image from their latest project, ‘Super Kingdom’, an installation of luxury show homes for animals in the ancient enclave of King’s Wood, Challock in Kent. This particularly forthright bird box for the unreconstructed masses is indentified by Bruce as the ‘Stalin’ show home – the deliberate inversion of Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International being, one assumes, a particularly sardonic comment on the historical fate of the European avant-garde. Similarly, their Mussolini bird house contains echoes of EUR, otherwise known as fascist Italy’s Third Rome.

In every dream home, a mantrap: in the past animals have usually shown more taste than humans in their choice of habitat. Bruce Gilchrist and Jo Joelson have a subtle way of reminding us that we’re really not that much different from the beasts in the field – we simply have bigger weapons. Go to the LFW gallery page for more images.


‘Super Kingdom’ opens on Sunday September 21 and is a Stour Valley Arts commission and is free to the public and open at all times. But you’d better go in disguise.