CIPHERS (United States, 2010)
With his aerial photography of American urban areas, the German photographer Christoph Gielen reveals a number of their underlying paradigms. The American city is a phenomenon that is based on auto use. It is an expression of the ‘bigger is better’ attitude that went with the unrestrained investment in home ownership and commercial real estate, in an era when distance and gasoline prices were hardly a consideration. The central question Gielen poses to us is this: is this type of urban design tenable? And, implicitly: what should future-oriented urban planning look like?
