Building Blade Runner

Abstract

In Febuary, 1990, at a public lecture series on art in Los Angeles, three out of five leading urban planners agreed that they hoped someday L.A. would look like the film Blade Runner. The audience, safe and comfortable in the Pacific Design Center, buzzed audibly with concern. One could practically hear rumors starting, that it was time to sell that condo by the beach, and move to Seattle. Two of the designers gave specific examples. They loved Santee alley, a bustling outdoor market in the downtown garment center, also not far from the homeless district. Of course, that general area is slated for urban renewal anyway, so this was a safe comment. It is easy to root for the horse once it is off to the glue factory. Another planner, architect for the powerful Community Redevelopment Agency, praised the Interstate Savings and Loan logo atop the new eighty-storey office building on the main library grounds downtown. It reminded him favorably of Blade Runner. That drew an audible hiss, so he added that in thirty years that bank would be out of business anyway, and the logo would be gone. Then he admitted that he had approved the logo because there was no way to stop businesses from getting permits to put one on buildings downtown (the governing rule, set up by the downtown redevelopment agency, allows for logos, though the full title of a company is considered invasive ambience over advertising). He was saying, in effect, why not allow free enterprise to show its face honestly, without the seamless camouflage? We need more than cityscapes and skylines, he and the others were suggesting. Apparently, we need the rude aesthetics of an immigrant market, but imagine it safely barricaded between buildings hundreds of feet high. We want to return to a fanciful version of the urban ghetto, back to cluttered industrial imagery, away from the simplified urban grid. We need Blade Runner (or do we?). The film Blade Runner has indeed achieved something rare in the history of cinema. It has become a paradigm for the future of cities, for artists across the disciplines. It is undoubtedly the film most requested in art and film classes I teach, whether to environmental designers, illustrators, fine artists, photographers or filmmakers. When it came out in 1982, many critics called it the success of style over substance, or style over story. But the hum of that Vangelis score against the skyline of L.A. in