Lost In Place

Rebecca Solnit proposes that being lost is “a psychic state achievable through geography”. Humankind shares a desire to get lost, in order to escape, to find oneself, or to find a sense of belonging. Just as drudgery and devotion to place is embedded in our culture, longing for distance seems embedded in our nature. But being lost takes on a number of forms.

There is the desire to be lost for discovery. People hope to lose themselves in search of the new, of reinvention. They embrace the unknown. They shed one skin in order to don another. It’s the kind of being lost that children find in playing. It’s a kind of being lost that is vanishing with all that terrain labeled terra incognita.

I worry now that many people never disband their armies, never go beyond what they know.

-Rebecca Solnit

Solnit suggests that our modern places and landscapes are suffocating our ability to get lost for discovery. Media, fences, networks, and design, are cutting off and disembodying the unknown. And as architects, we’re at the forefront of the problem. It would seem that a world caught up in design and communication has created a new sense of being lost.

We now find ourselves so often lost in longing. With so many opportunities available to us, at such costs that we can never obtain them, we are always in search of more. It’s a similar form of losing oneself, but now instead of seeking the unknown, we seek those things we know as distant. When shiploads of city dwellers packed up and left in search of more, they headed for the prairies. The railroad and the government promised ample opportunity, cutting no costs in spreading the word. The prairies were founded in the spirit of getting lost.

In this way, place making and a sense of getting lost, are intertwined. But there are two ways of being lost that create entirely opposite senses of place. The first is to be lost as in never knowing truly where you are. You are physically lost in place, attempting to recreate where you came from. You are detached from the here and present, from the inherent qualities of the landscape. Your sense of place emerges out of where you came from, and what you expect.

Or you could be lost because you’re absolutely immersed. You are, in this way, lost to the outside world like a set of keys, but entirely present wherever you are. Solnit quotes Walter Benjamin as he states that being lost is “to be fully present”. It might have been the captives who found this sense of being lost, or the farmers who wholly dedicated themselves to a new land and new life.

The Prairie Landscape, as in the introductory chapter titles of both Solnit’s “A Field Guide to Getting Lost” and Raban’s “Bad Land: An American Romance”, presents an “Open Door” through which to get lost. But some exploration might discover that much of the place created in being lost, was in longing and detachment, rather than discovery and immersion.

The qualities of place come from two paths, those inherent and those inscribed. The prairies are built on a strenuous convergence between the two. We find the cultural qualities, the longings and preconceptions that followed the founders, inscribed on the landscape. And those qualities that are embedded in the landscape can be read on the people themselves. They are the qualities that pass from one culture to another, revealing the unavoidable truths of the place.

The Lightness of Place

Nearly a hundred years after they were born, the accidental nature of their conception still haunts these towns. Their brick work has grown old, the advertisements painted on the sides of their buildings have faded pleasantly into antiques, yet they seem insufficiently attached to the earth on which they stand. Leave one in the morning, and by afternoon it might easily have drifted off to someplace else on the prairie. Such lightness is unsettling.

- Jonathan Raban, Bad Land

As towns were founded across the prairies like rest stops on a road trip, each town came into the world teetering unsteadily on its land. Someone, somewhere else, conceived of it, pinpointing it on a map and claiming it by name. The roots in these towns grow shallow and wide. They reach east to the eager emigrants leaving Europe, and west with the ambitions of the railroad. But at its center, the town lies as though the slightest gust of wind might have it wither and blow away.

This incredible lightness of place is both a Western and Modern phenomenon. So often have I felt detached from place, from the physical geography of place. In a globalized world where the architecture and culture of one place bleeds into that of another, place is becoming increasingly homogenous. Place hovers lightly over the landscape it’s built on. It is neither here nor there, but everywhere.

In the Prairies, the manufacturers, surveyors, and railroad officials exemplified this homogeneity with the systems they laid over the landscape. They painted the prairies with a lexicon of mass-made, pre-manufactured, and imported illusions that eroded from the harshness of the landscape.

In addition to the lightness of our insignificant being, the temporal nature of the prairie has rendered its places impermanent. They have seen the decay of their buildings and crops alike. Entire towns have washed up like shipwrecks on an unforgiving sea. Their ruins slowly dissolve into the grass. Amid a scattering of ghost towns, our presence takes on an entirely moral stature. It is one that’s unique to the new world, where place is founded with ideas rather than traditions, and is cast in loose soil, beneath a temperamental sky.

But in contrast, the lightness of place has caused an immense weight on the landscape. Our treads degrade much slower than we do. And they’ll shape the landscape for longer than we can perceive. This is the imperceptible weight of our lightness.

Over Terra Incognita

This is a story about Place Making. From a landscape that was once read as placeless, to a new kind of placelessness inscribed upon it, the Canadian Prairie is a region that inherently asks us, what is place, how is it created, and how to do we value it? There is a fine line between a sense of belonging and being lost, a possibility that they are one in the same, and a fear that we are losing our ability to sense either.                                                                                                                                    

These are the stories of a cast of architects, each with particular motives, and a complex web of forces that came together to create places where there were none before. In the act, they built a new kind of placelessness, no longer empty, but filled with ambiguity. In its relatively short written history, the Canadian Prairie is a microcosm of our placeless existence. It witnessed the mass movement of an expanding population, opening its doors as a “new” or “final frontier”. It is a place built entirely by people who came from elsewhere, carrying the weight of previous lives and expectations, and hoping to start anew. It’s a place built on the pursuit of opportunity, preceded by an image, and founded in a gamble.

This is a story that questions our modern paradigm of place, but looks with optimism upon the human spirit. It explores our ceaseless drive to create, to withstand hardship, and potentially to rediscover what we’ve lost.