Laura Sanchez entered Central Expressway in the predawn pumped on world beats. It was her stand against the ethnocentric rise of the radical right across the globe. She knew it was absurdly ineffective: one woman in a car trying to change the world simply by what she listened to. It was ridiculous. And yet it still felt good--far better than listening to some Nazi-loving ethnocentric Hitler wanna-be from the Netherlands in a story on NPR or her own bigoted president here in the good ol' U.S.A. Not my president, she corrected herself. It was important to not accept an evil reality even if it was only a rejection of it through thought. Mind mattered. She believed that. There is an energy that we all send out, and I intend to send out a freaking wall of love against the hate.
The confluence of LBJ & Central was never pretty. Well, architecturally speaking, it was quite extraordinary. Laura was amazed each time she passed by or through it. Right now it towered and sprawled against the the blue-green sky as day slowly edged over the eastern horizon. Called the "High Five" for its five layers, the interchange included 43 bridges, the highest of which is twelve stories tall, which lay thinly across massive single-post supports that were made of precast concrete molded into art-deco designs with single stars at the capitals. The columns were painted terracotta and green and were quite striking. And according to her father, the new interchange definitely had improved traffic flow over the old partial clover leaf that predated it. Yet, two major freeways converging in a massive metropolitan area like Dallas was never a pretty thing, traffic-wise. As Coit entered Central a bit beyond the modern marvel, she jockeyed for position. She was pumped on her beats, crouched over her steering wheel, ready for the new day. This was her day. She was making a stand for all that was beautiful. Cultures and communities converging like the lanes of this interchange. Her play list contained music from South Africa, Morocco, Haiti, Thailand, even North Korea. Her generation was different. They didn't hate. They didn't isolate. They didn't ignore large overwhelming realities, such as global warming. If the world survived until they took over, maybe everything would be alright. She was certainly ready for the fight.
And then all the tail lights ahead of her shined that awful brighter red. She hit the brake slow and steady and watched the speedometer drop. It was stop and go, stop and go--well, almost. Just when traffic almost came to a stand-still, it would move slowly forward. She kept thinking, alright, here we go. But then nothing really happened. After a couple of miles, her speedometer actually hit zero. The freeway traffic had solidified, frozen in place like cooled lava. She sat there looking at the scattering of buildings at Royal Lane and Central in the early dawn.
There were two ugly low high-rise structures. Two squat examples of early 80s architecture--late modernism. The architects clearly were no longer committed to modern ideals, but also clearly not ready to adopt post-modernism. Functional and uncommitted these buildings were.
The structure to the south was the more tolerable of the two. Four stories tall, it sat perpendicular to the freeway and retained a few features of 1950s modernism: an asymmetrical design, ribbon windows, a cantilevered roof at the top, long horizontal runs of exposed concrete indicating where the floors were. A yellow brick veneer filled in between the concrete and the ribbon windows. It reminded Laura a little bit of Le Corbusier's long high-rises, like Unity d'Habitation, but with a lot fewer intricacies and details. The architect clearly knew the notes but was too lazy to play them.
The building to the north was pure ugly. 1980s cheep. It was basically four stacks of Villa Savoy piled three high to make a squat version of a cube. It was a white box with three rows of black ribbon windows. It was clear the walls were prefabricated and set in place by a crane. If there was an architect at all, he was as involved in his work as a bag boy at a grocery store. In life, the architect might have done better than landing a minimum wage job at the McDonald's drive-through, but his attitude didn't show it. He was probably boinking his secretary and driving home to some ugly suburban three-story French chateau wanna-be atrocity in Plano. That was clearly the kind of guy he was. No imagination. No zeal. Just going through the process of life, rather than living it. No integrity--that much was clear. No architect with a conscience could do that to the vocabulary of Le Corbusier and go on living.
These were Laura's thoughts as the traffic stood still.
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