Within the fabric of the design of populous human environments there persist abandoned places that exist tenuously, places that will be erased or otherwise rendered inaccessible as inconvenient icons of an earlier time. These are the silent urban remnants towards which we demonstrate considerable ambivalence. Although they readily prompt complex questions concerning design, purpose, and most importantly, of waste, my personal feeling is that these artifacts can comprise a rich and compelling archaeology of loss and suggest a visual compression of time.
Commissioned in 1917, Fort Ord Army Base was by the time of its closure in 1994 the largest basic training base in the country, leaving to abandonment three thousand buildings. Testimony to the environmental problems stemming primarily from the use of lead-based paint, about half of these building still stand today. Over the last two years I've visited the base about sixty times to explore the challenge of photographing this remarkable place so saturated in right angles and the pattern repetition of these many structures. I welcome Club members to venture with me into several key sites within this area of 28,000 acres. Attention from security is light, and technically the base is now public land (there is also a State university campus operating in the central area).
Some sites to be included in our field trip are: the boiler facility, the abandoned movie theatre, the olympic swimming pool facility, the abandoned military housing, and my personal favorite, the military jail.
Charles Anselmo
Trip Leader
