THRESHOLDS 49: SUPPLY

“If it looks like a…and acts like a…” by Veronica Smith
Thresholds Vol. 49, Spring 2021
MIT Dept. of Architecture, Distributed by MIT Press

This visual essay looks at structures referred to as “towers” in Los Angeles insofar as they fit the proportional and contextual requirements of towerhood despite their non-conformity to expectations of scale and form. The “kind-of tower,” most ubiquitously appears in LA’s oil infrastructure – namely, its many derricks and accompanying built artifacts used to camouflage them. If we read oil, as a horizontal material with a legible silhouette and we read the tower as a state of vertical exception in a city of sprawl… how might legibility be obscured when they are paired? A body of historical research and a series of sculptural objects explore iconic and indexical representations of oil, offering multiple readings of proportion and verticality.