Interactive Display about Orange County
on Display in Irvine, California
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Featherly Park orange grove in
Orange County.
CLUI Photo.
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The CLUI delved deeply into
Orange County (the notorious "postsuburban" county
south of Los Angeles), for an exhibition commissioned by the
Beall Center for Art and Technology at the University of California
in Irvine. The exhibition, entitled Curious Orange: Points
of View of the Landscape of Orange County, featured twenty
sites in the County, selected from over 100 sites unearthed
during research conducted during the previous year.
The invitation to create this exhibit was of
special interest to the CLUI given the nature of the subject,
a region that is rarely physically examined in a comprehensive
manner, though it is often discussed critically, and the opportunity
to work with some new and promising exhibition technologies.
Orange County is sometimes cited as one of the
most advanced forms of American landscapes: the state-of-the-art
dense, homogenous, affluent, high-tech, mall-centered, franchise-studded,
car-oriented, master-planned community of the future. This,
some theorists say, is where many of us are headed if things
keep going as they are now. Whether or not this true, Orange
County is indeed an advanced and sophisticated landscape with
clearly superlative qualities. Nearly 3 million people live
in this community defined by a county line that forms
a rectangle roughly forty miles long and twenty miles wide,
mountains on one side and ocean on the other. The CLUI set out
to describe the systems that make this place work (water, waste,
transportation, communication, etc.), how it looks, and what
it might mean, to its denizens, and to the rest of America.
The final display consisted of four projections,
and four trackballs mounted on stands in front of each projection
wall. Using the trackball, visitors could choose sites to examine
in detail from a projected satellite image of Orange County.
Each of the 20 sites, indicated by an orange dot on the satellite
image, was depicted through video, shot from a static digital
video camera from a fixed location. There was also a text caption
for each site.
"The hype about interactive technologies is a
bit tiresome," said exhibit coordinator Matthew Coolidge, "but
the truth of the matter is that it is possible now to get closer
to the experience of actually seeing a place using a large projection
format, and to creating a sense of exploration and spatial organization
by using a hyperlinked map or satellite image. This seems to
be the logical progression for some of the space displacement-type
programming we produce."
CLUI field researchers logged over 3,000 miles
in the County over the research period, to collect the information,
photographs, and video tape for the exhibit, and to conduct
site visits and interviews with representatives of these locations.
The exhibition was on view from May 5-June 17th, 2001.
Sites portrayed in the exhibit were chosen to
represent the structure of Orange County - the infrastructure,
and the extrastructure - to provide a cohesive and compelling
portrait of the County as a place.
Starting with the most apparent and prevalent
form of land use in the County, the exhibit addressed housing
and residential development by representing two extremes of
this phenomena. In southern Orange County, where the most space
remains for future development, Ladera Ranch is one of the larger
master-planned developments currently under construction, and
expresses the trend towards denser, neotraditional developments
that attempt to build-in a sense of community and common space.
In addition to building in this sort of "new urbanist" style,
Ladera Ranch is connecting all the houses with a cable intranet
that creates a parallel, electronic version of the community,
with local discussion groups, community events postings and
the like.
On the other end of the housing spectrum is the
60 year-old El Morro Village mobile home park, which is a row
of trailers right on the beach, on the otherwise upscale coast
near Laguna Beach, and Crystal Cove, a nearby cluster of old
Irvine Ranch beach shacks that are still occupied by full-time
residents. These two communities represent some of the last
vestiges of old Orange County beach life, and both are about
to disappear, as the land on which they rest, beneath the encroaching
new housing developments, is now a state park.
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One of the "situation" rooms lying in wiat at the Orange
County Emergency Operations Center.
CLUI photo.
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Nothing creates a sense of community better than
a shared disaster. So the exhibit showed sites within the county
where officials train and prepare for all sorts of possible,
and inevitable calamities. At the North Net Fire Training Center,
for example, emergency crews, including fire departments from
all over the County, emergency medical technicians, and urban
search and rescue teams, train for events such as fires, earthquakes,
and associated structural collapse. And at the Emergency Operations
Center, a hilltop facility visible from many points in the eastern
parts of the County, on top of Loma Ridge, officials from the
Emergency Management department of the County keep this county-wide
command center ready to take control in the event of an earthquake,
terrorist attack, or accident at the San Onofre nuclear power
plant (located just outside the County). In addition to extensive
communication capabilities, the EOC has stores of fuel, food
and water, and can serve 140 emergency authorities in self-contained
mode for up to two weeks.
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The collection of communications towers on top of Old
Saddleback, the highest point in Orange County, is visible
from much of the County.
CLUI photo.
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As a society dominated by high-tech industries
and high-tech living, communication infrastructure is of special
importance in Orange County. This infrastructure was represented
in the exhibit by the Santiago Peak Transmitter Site, located
at the highest point in Orange County, the 5,687 foot Old Saddleback.
The peak is surmounted by a cluster of over 50 antennas and
20 support buildings that take advantage of the broadcast range
offered by the high altitude. Also, the earthstation for the
largest cable company in the County, Cox Communications, was
shown in the exhibit. This modest building with ten large satellite
dishes, is the portal through which the signals from broadcast
satellites flow, before they are pumped out to about 40% of
all cable subscribers in the County.
Many of the distinct nodes in multicentered Orange
County are centered around large shopping mall complexes. Fashion
Island, in Newport Beach, is a good example of this development
practice, as it is one of the early commercial anchors in the
master plan of the Irvine Company, the privately-held corporation
that owns one-sixth of Orange County, and operates out of its
headquarters at 550 Newport Center Drive, overlooking Fashion
Island.
The other end of consumption is, of course, excretion,
and thus the waste stream of the County was represented in the
exhibit as well. For dumps, the Prima Deshecha Landfill stood
out, as though not currently the busiest of the three active
landfills in the County, it has the most growth potential, and
covers the largest area, at a dramatic site in South County
that even has ocean views.
For liquid wastes, two connected sewage plants
treat most of the wastewater in Orange County. Plant #2 is larger,
and is located on the coast, where the five mile-long offshore
outfall pipe seems to not quite be long enough, as Huntington
Beach is often closed due to high pollution levels. Water Treatment
Plant #1 is in appropriately-named Fountain Valley.
Manifestations of the local economy on the landscape
of the County were addressed through a number of representative
sites, including Disneyland, which with 15,000 workers is the
largest employer in Orange County. Aerospace has been at the
heart of Orange CountyÙs economy since WWII, and continues to
be important today, from Raytheon in Fullerton, to Boeing in
Anaheim and Huntington Beach (Boeing is, in fact the second
largest private employer in the county). To represent Aerospace
in the exhibit, the more obscure and intriguing Capistrano Test
Site was selected. This is a remote, 2,700 acre R&D complex
in the hills at the edge of Camp Pendleton, operated by TRW's
Defense Space Systems Group. It was built up dramatically to
support space-based weapons systems in the 1980's, and is still
at work on advanced and powerful chemical laser systems, as
well as radar and propulsion systems.
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The interior of the massive hangars at the former Tustin
Air Station are said to contain their own weather system.
CLUI photo.
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As is so often the case, the current development
patterns, and the establishment of the high-tech economy in
the County, owes much of its existence to the military. Two
major military sites created in WWII are in closure limbo right
now. The former Tustin Air Station has two massive hangars that
were built to house Navy blimps during WWII. At 1,000 feet long,
the hangars could hold several blimps each. Their use for this
was brief though, as blimps were taken out of active service
by 1950. The 1,600 acre base evolved into the largest Marine
Corps helicopter base in the country, until it closed in 1999.
Among the proposed uses for the hangars now are as soundstages
for the film industry. The Hollywood film Pearl Harbor
recently filmed in one.
The larger and more controversial of the two closed
air bases is El Toro. Until the closure of the base in 1999,
El Toro was the largest Marine Corps air installation in the
western United States, with fighter jets training over the Pacific,
and over ranges in the Imperial Valley and beyond. Even before
the departure of the Marines the debate about whether to turn
the base into a commercial airport has been perhaps the most
talked about land use issue in the County. Nearby residents,
concerned about traffic and noise, oppose the new airport, while
residents who live in the generally affluent communities near
John Wayne International, the only major airport in the County,
are in favor of El ToroÙs conversion. In the meantime, the 4,700
acre base, still owned by the Navy but leased to the County,
is nearly entirely devoid of activity.
The military is still active elsewhere in Orange
County. The Seal Beach Naval Weapons Station is the Navy's primary
munitions storage and loading facility on the West Coast. About
100 ships are loaded and unloaded here every year, either at
the wharf on the edge of the base, or at sea, with weapons transported
by barge and helicopter. The 5,000 acre base was established
in 1944, and contains 127 earthen munition storage magazines,
all of which are in use. Nearby, the Los Alamitos base is the
other active military base in Orange County, and is used by
all branches of the armed services for logistics and training.
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The hilltop Deimer Filtration Plant , one of the largest
in the workld, filters water that comes from the Colorado
River Aqueduct, before it flows into a pipeline that takes
water south-bound, supplying 40% of Orange County with
its drinking water.
CLUI photo.
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Other sites featured in the exhibit included the
AES Power Plant, the only major power plant in Orange County,
which otherwise gets its power from outside the County; the
Central Jail Complex, which is the largest of the three correctional
facilities in the County, and is located in the County seat
of Santa Ana, conveniently across from the County Court house;
the elaborate water supply engineering project that uses wastewater
to recharge the aquifer; the Gypsum Canyon bulk products area,
one of two large quarries with cement and asphalt plants, where
loose material is extracted and processed, supplying the material
for the roads and buildings of the County's new landscape; the
southern end of highway 241 near Mission Viejo, which marks
the abrupt end of Orange County's toll road network, the only
toll road system in the state; and an orange grove that may
be the largest remaining orange grove in Orange County, where
the trees are harvested by a commercial farming company, which
sells the oranges overseas. The County, of course, gets its
name from the oranges that were grown throughout the region.
The largest agricultural crop by far in Orange County today
are nursery plants, used for landscaping in the new developments,
and decorating the new homes.
