City Museum - St. Louis

I had never heard of it when we arrived in St. Louis a few days ago on vacation. But after we had toured the massive St. Louis Arch, Michelle noted that one of the brochure's she picked up had flagged City Museum (CM) as a must-see. We did so.

It turns out you don't just 'see' CM - you experience it. And once you've experienced it, a kind of imprinting seems to work on you, like an embedded chip or something. CM is a strange place. When you arrive, they don't give you a map of the place with a list of things to do. Instead, you start wandering around trying to figure out exactly what you've let yourself and your kids in for. You wouldn't be surprised if Tim Burton walked past or Willie Wonka himself appeared suddenly.

CM is nothing like the McDonald's-style danger-sanitized kinds of playgrounds that surround us. Want to know what current legal contours are surrounding children and public spaces? Don't bother cracking a book - just look at playgrounds. They may be colourful but most of them are as boring as a B-grade reality show (or any reality show, for that matter).

Are you afraid of heights? CM will scare you with a dangling school bus and passenger door that opens, wire 'tunnels' six stories in the air, and wire cages that you climb inside balanced precariously on the edge of the 10-storey roof. Are you claustraphobic? CM will push your limits with tunnels under the floor, a labyrinth cave area with tiny passages, and twisty wire-cage climbing spaces. You can't quite get the sense of height in this photo we took but if you look close, you'll see kids looking out of the bus door (there is a wire barrier so your kid won't go flying out but it does little to ease the sense of hazard you instinctively feel).

Founder, Bob Cassilly, wanted a place where you would be pushed slightly off-balance, where things would verge on the edge of control. CM is a massive art installation you get to climb in, on and around. Here's a quote from a land use website:

At times integrating elements of the factory (like the spiral shoe slide that runs through it) into the spaces, at other times boring holes through it, or slicing rooms into smaller and smaller spaces, it is an architect-less architecture of accretion, excavation, and evolution. Each environment is an expository riff on form and materials, materials that were found and repurposed, clustered and flayed, from industrial remnants, to parts of other buildings, to fully formed period environments. Tight spaces shaped like dinosaur guts, galleries of gargoyles, aquariums, monstrous mosaics, plazas, stalagmites, chutes, slides, caves, chambers, mezzanines.

I haven't stopped thinking about it since we left. The idea of re-purposing a post-industrial landscape has intrigued me for a long time. Many cities, including Hamilton, have spaces ideally suited for novelty and creative re-development. City building isn't about starting from scratch - you have to work with what you have, mix it up, add some new, re-think some old.

And there is more good news. Cassilly is working on Cementland - a 54 acre abandoned cement factory that is being prepared for more craziness, including water, pitch-black caves, and more high-in-the-sky terror. I'll definitely be visiting.

Cultural Operating System

I was reading the April 2007 issue of WIRED tonight while supervising the final exam for my World Civilization course and came across the phrase 'cultural operating system.' While cultures are not software programs, I understand that the idea is intended to help us understand that there are identifiable factors that shape how a culture looks and feels and thinks.

This includes the micro-cultures of organizations and businesses and, like the operating systems on our computers, is invisible to most people (advance apologies to the Linux/Windows/OSX combatants for whom that isn't the case). Designing for change in organizations includes raising cultural operating systems to a conscious level and understanding how to re-shape those systems.

Individual ingenuity is critical but if it is seen as an isolated function, it will have limited impact in most cases. Understanding and learning must occur at the scale of both the personal and collective. The relationship involves applying your personal ingenuity capacity to the right part of the larger system at the right time, learning the moves of the surfer to approach a much larger entity in a way that leads to success rather than disaster.

And there aren't any legitimate out-of-the-box ways to do that. There are simply too many factors. But that doesn't imply we are without the means to actually influence change. There are disciplines and styles of thought and action we can employ. We need both the hard science and the imaginative in this process, learning a style that gives us the footing of an ingenuity artist.