Matthew Stadler is the author of four novels and the editor of local publishing house Clear Cut Press. He also is active in the visual arts world (he co-curated last fall’s Portland Modern group show at Disjecta), organizes a popular dinner-speaker series for visiting authors called The Back Room, and writes for magazines like Dwell and Artforum. He also is a frequent speaker.
In addition to all this, Stadler has developed an enduring fascination with Beaverton, both its individual history and offerings as well as the wider suburban American transformation going on today. Stadler calls Beaverton “…a cul de sac of ghosts amidst rivers of traffic.” But he also believes fervently in this suburb’s ability—like any place or work of architecture—to reinvent itself as something beautiful.
Stadler spoke of this and other related topics in a recent speech in Seattle now available to watch and listen to online, which I heartily recommend.
“We need beauty to compel our resourcefulness,” he says early in the lecture, “even if it is only as a political tool so that we can solve the landscape’s many deficiencies. Because beauty is an instrument of persuasion. Without it we become dispirited and cynical and we let valuable resources go to waste.”
At the same time, Stadler cautions, “This not a criticism of architects who make ugly buildings. Nor it is a call for them to make more beautiful ones. Beauty is made by us, not by the object. This is a call for the culture that uses buildings to work harder to engage them and to in essence generate their beauty.”
Stadler’s lecture was full of Beaverton beautiful photos by Shawn Records, some of which were also included in the Oregon Biennial at the Portland Art Museum. (I profiled Records in The Oregonian as well.) Records’ photos often document places of historical significance, such as the site of the first trading post in the area. At first, I thought the photographs were ironic, because in many cases Records profiles with great beauty the parking lots, bland suburban boulevards, and decaying freeway overpasses which collectively represent quintessential suburban sprawl. But when I heard Stadler’s words about mining beauty from unexpected places, the sincerity of the images clicked even more. (All the enclosed images in this post are Records'.)
Stadler says reinventing yesterday’s ugly building as tomorrow’s gem is what societies have done for thousands of years. “I can marvel at how the poisonous castles of Europe became beautiful,” he says. “Art and writing made them that way. Similarly, huge imaginative resourcefulness turned centuries of hostility toward the woods into a broad secular worship of wilderness. The chronicles of early naturalists, and the art and writing that followed have shaped the logic and beauty of wilderness.”
I don’t quite agree that art and writing conferred upon any architecture a beauty people had not bequeathed in the past. I believe this is a more gradual, ephemeral process. Still, the identification of beauty in unexpected or under-appreciated places is precisely what art and literature are all about—at least to me.
“Cities like Beaverton,” Stadler adds, “are now seeing the first naturalists of sprawl: intrepid urbanists who make the trek out into the wasteland, saddled with a polemical agenda to either decry the ugliness…or declare the beauty…of this landscape. But I don’t count myself among them. Beauty and ugliness do not inhere in landscapes. They are dynamic, perpetually reinvented aspects of use.”
There are probably a lot of counter-arguments one could make about finding and re-affirming beauty in a place like Beaverton. It’s the patterns of use that are ugly, the terrible traffic and auto-everything patterns at the expense of the pedestrian. And there is the oppressive ubiquity of chain stores as well. But I love that Stadler and, by extension, Records, are engaging a place right in their back yard that most of us fellow urbanites don’t travel to without ample practical reason—like the need for a new CD player, or to visit an old relative. I also love to see people from artistic backgrounds get thoroughly involved in the ongoing public discourse and dialog about our local built environment. We need the architects and builders to get the buildings actually made. Yet if more novelists and photographers were thinking about Beaverton or Portland, not only how to improve urban and suburban places alike but also how to see them anew, we’d all be better for it.
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