I have a fascination for Freeways. Before I learned to drive as a teenager in LA, I dreamt I would drive around a curve and go faster and faster until I found myself flying. The architect Lawrence Halpern said, “Each exit ramp offers a different visual as well as kinesthetic sensation. It is the experience of an effortlessly choreographed dance.” The architect’s wife, Anna Halpern, was my dance teacher. I danced with her.We danced the “City Dance” all over San Francisco mixing architecture and dance. I also danced with a group that was devoted to Isadora Duncan and her exploration of what it would be like to dance as the ancient Greeks did. The idea came to me that the columns and spans of the freeways are visually akin to Greek temples. I explored the idea that Freeways are like Temples of Transit. Duncan got inspiration from ancient Greek culture to look at dance in a new way; I depicted the freeway structures on canvas as Temples as a critique our current cultures worship of car culture.
Joan Didion wrote that the Freeways are “the only secular communion Los Angeles has.” Another author, David Brodsly wrote, “Every time we merge with traffic we join our community in a wordless creed: belief in individual freedom, in technological liberation from place and circumstance, in democracy of personal mobility. The LA freeway is the cathedral of its time and place. Perhaps the archeologists of some future age will study in seeking to understand who we were.”
Living things and plants are intrinsically a part of these transport corridors. For several years I walked around the freeways in Seattle where, people enjoy the nature in and around these structures. Pockets under the freeway made space for people to skateboard or climbed the columns. I encountered a lot of people who made their homes under the over passes as shelter from the rain. Today in LA, commuters are frustrated because they are stuck in their cars, standing bumper to bumper for hours on end. Someday, I hope, people will look out from the windows from of driverless cars, being run without hydrocarbons, and gaze at the beauty of these shapes and forms, the lines and curves of the transportation infrastructure that frame the landscape.
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