trans-contemporaryredeployment ofanarchitecture

This publication examines New York City through the lens of Gordon Matta-Clark and attempts to leverage his interests, working methodologies and means of documentation to address contemporary problems. Three charged sites have been identified to test his ideas and speculate on the potential of new digital media to generate interactive and pervasive effects. The locations are situated along a 10-mile trajectory through Brooklyn and exemplify the volatility currently being experienced in the outer boroughs of New York. Along with three research-based texts, this publication documents the sites and presents hypothetical interventions for each.

1970/2009: Corollary Urban LandscapesGordon Matta Clark’s particular blend of architecture and anarchy resonated well within the deteriorating urban land-scape of New York City in the 1970’s. With the stock market crash of 1973 and the ensuing economic turmoil, the city was ripe for creative interventions that challenged traditional notions of physical and societal structures. Stagflation—the combination of high unemployment and inflation—put thousands of New Yorkers on the streets and caused over one million residents to flee the city. The exodus left in its wake an unstable urban landscape characterized by vacant housing stock and deteriorating fragments of industry.

Now, as the global economy experiences another recession, many of the problems faced by New York City thirty-five years ago have re-emerged. The crisis of 2008—described primarily as a financial one—has had major implications on architecture and the built environment. Businesses struggling under economic pressure downsize or fold, leaving empty space in their wake. Landlords struggling with defaulted payments avoid necessary improvements and maintenance work. Developers unable to secure loans halt construction and table new projects.

Some symptoms of the recession are the same now as they were in the 1970’s. Empty storefronts, for example, have become commonplace throughout the city, especially in the outer boroughs. But in many other ways the respective crises have played out very differently. Whereas New York in the 1970’s was characterized by government-funded demoli-tion projects under the banner of Urban Renewal, today there is greater pressure for preservation and adaptive reuse.

The urban landscape experienced by Gordon Matta-Clark was shaped by the process of demolition and marked by the residual scars of that act. Exposed firewalls are probably the most familiar example of this; their brick elevations register the imprinted silhouette of former structures. These stand as a testament to unrealized plans; they represent urban renewal without the creation of anything new.

Demolition rarely occurs these days without a specified plan, and exposed firewalls have become less common than they were when Matta-Clark produced his show Wallspaper. Instead, during this recession, scaffolding has spread throughout the city with the same promise of development that demolition once offered. In a faltering economy, minimal construc-tion activity leaves these metal frameworks inactive; there are few workers to use them or to take them down. Ironically, they have become indicators neither of growth nor destruction; they are merely symptomatic of frozen development-the contemporary phenomenon that paralyzes derelict spaces throughout the city today.

So, whereas Gordon identified the prevailing process of demolition and appropriated the idea for his own work, contem-porary solutions must recognize—and respect—the lack of demolition today. Vacant buildings can no longer be physi-cally cut because they are rarely condemned. The buildings can, however, be activated and exposed by corollary means to reveal the past and suggest an optimistic future.

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1970 2009:

tal coverage: 10.0 miles

In its early installments, the experience of video art was conceived in the model of the cinematic experience. The differences in structure, narrative and time indicate a need for video art to diverge from this conception. The experience of video art is more closely aligned with painting and sculpture in that the time spent with a piece is dependent on a personal connection with the work and the space it occupies need not be dependent on a standard gallery or theater setting.

Projected video in the contemporary city explores the potentials of video art as a media, not bound by the spaces of display, and thus a publicly accessible art form. Interventions in the urban realm have the potential to become driving forces of community awareness and involvement activating and charging vacant spaces and surfaces.

Many recent projects foster a successful interaction between the public and larger urban issues. Atelier In Situ, an architecture collective, presented a project addressing the roles industrial relics play in post-industrial cities. Projections focused the attention of the larger community on Grain Elevator No.5 in Montreal as a site slated for demolition due to an increase in residential development. By physically projecting on the surface of the enormous structure they were able to add “a dimension of possibility and potential to the grain elevator’s public image… bringing the past into dialogue with the present through a process of accumulation (and layering) of meanings with the aim of imagining new futures.” (Bonnemaison, 136)

Krzysztof Wodiczko, another projection artist has worked on several projects that challenge the monumental-ity of buildings to suggest the alienation and inhumanity of social interaction in present day urbanism. He sees the projections as technological prosthetics, which are used to re-engage and reconnect people to each other and the spaces they occupy.

Other recent video projections have challenged notions of architectural identity. Video allows for the deface-ment of a building by graffiti without actual damage. As a result, a counter culture attitude has defaced the Berliner Dom, assuming an immense scale and striking effect. Blogs and Video sites keep track of these grow-ing trends and their coupling with music and dance cultures. Multimedia performing groups such as Urban-screen or Sweatshoppe have been using digital projection and scripting technology to challenge traditional understandings of architecture and art in the public realm. Technology is used to transform both the identity of the visual and the physical form. Facades become sites of dynamic interface and buildings can transcend stylistic boundaries. Thus challenging the public’s understanding of architecture as part of a public spectacle.

The movement toward interactive video pushes the awareness of the occupants. In her work, Abundance, Camille Utterback abstracts the movements that occur on a plaza to a web pattern projected on the architec-tural icon (a Richard Meier building) as part of a collective visual record. These types of installations personal-ize space and emphasize the importance and role of public space and public art within the city.

As an artist who forcefully inserted himself into the urban fabric of the city it is easy to draw comparisons and see the potentials in the digital within Gordon’s legacy. His projects strived to achieve a community involve-ment and awareness similar to some of the aforementioned works. While Gordon’s interest in video came from a source of documentation rather than becoming the art object; he saw film as a means to record his actions. Interactive video and projection allows for the “playing” of the video to become an urban action, cap-turing the passive passerby.

Spaces of Contemporary Media:digital projection in contemporary art

“Anyone who flirted with the art scene in the 1970s still remembers snoring through a first encounter with experimental film and video.” –Blake Gopnik

As a guerilla artist, the searching for and documentation of chosen sites became a large portion of his work. Gordon’s documentary investigations through photography and film began early in his career. Because each project was unique, each also lent itself to vari-ous types of documentation. A progression from gathering informa-tion and documenting a site, to suggesting movement as a cinematic experience, and finally staging a single photograph to exist beyond the physical presence of the work, his documentation is how he intended the public to experience the projects. His films tend to be documentary, explaining the action, the transformation, and the destruction of a house, and are able to capture the perfor-mative dimension. His final photographs, the photo collages, became works of art in themselves, dealing with the physical per-ception of the human being in a particular situation within one of his structures.

In his earlier work, Pipes, Gordon displaced the functional interior parts to the exterior in order to blur the boundary of the wall and expose the movement of the pipes through the building. Through photography, he was able to pull the pipes out from the wall, and install them in such a way that they retained a relationship to the actual referent, yet became exposed and clear to the public.

As he gained photography skills, he was able to relate his physical actions to his photographic, cutting, manipulating, and creating. In Wallspapers, Gordon worked with surfaces, abstracting his docu-mentation of sites and created a complete surface from surface frag-ments. The single surface was hung from ceiling to floor, creating an ambient setting for the display of several removed wall chunks. Manipulating his photographs, he was able to “shift the building-body analogy from viscera to skin,” allowing him to conjure “some other imagined space closer to reveries and dream” (Diserens, 58). This freedom with photography allowed him to manipulate for the creation of suggestive illusions.

Although his final collages are individually beautiful, many have questioned whether these documents fully record his physical inter-ventions. The change of medium, from physical to photograph, transfers the experience to an illusion. His particular choice of views support his mysterious aura. Even as the works became more archi-tectural, Gordon continued to investigate photography as a means of both documenting his work, and creating more. Documentation was integrated into each project, and it is clear that he had a specific intent with each of the final collage photographs. Gordon believed that “they had to be beautiful to survive art” (Diserens, 134).

The example of Gordon Matta-Clark provides a working model for new interventions within the city, and modern technology provides a more interactive and pervasive medium with which to work. Matta-Clark confronted moments of neglect within the city, drawing attention to them through documentation and carefully orches-trated building cuts. In the context of mass demolition, his maneu-vers were strikingly precise and beautiful. Destruction was taken as a given (most of his buildings were condemned) and his interven-tions made the most of that.

Gordon Unplugged:working methodologies

“This is some kind of art work, isn’t it? The thing we really want to ask him is how he did this” (Diserens,12).

The questionable nature of Gordon Matta-Clark’s artwork is preva-lent in the majority of his projects. His ability to orchestrate mas-sive destruction, with his “guerilla bravado” and infinite charm, yet not be caught by the authorities only contributed to his mysteri-ous and impressive persona. He believed it was “within the rights of the artist to improve the property, to transform the structure in the midst of its ugly criminal state into a place of interest, fascina-tion, and value” (Diserens, 12).

Amidst the economic turmoil of the 1970’s, Gordon was able to (il)legally discover sites within which to perform. He embraced the deteriorating environment and used it as a three-dimensional canvas. The city became Gordon’s studio, as he found sites within the fabric for his interventions, manipulations, and improvements. Challenging the rigidity of the gallery, the common spaces and methods for the display of art, Gordon claimed a new canvas. “Why hang things on the wall when the wall itself is so much more challenging a medium?... A simple cut or series of cuts acts as a powerful drawing device able to redefine spatial situations and structural components…there is a kind of complexity that comes from taking an otherwise completely normal, conventional, albeit anonymous situation and redefining it, retranslating it into over-lapping and multiple readings of conditions past and present. Each building generates its own unique situation” (Diserens, 19). Instead, Gordon performed within existing buildings, on facades and surfaces, with discarded materials. His questioning carried him through his lifes’ work – paying close attention to the selec-tion, intervention, and documentation of each site-specific work.

In searching for potential sites, Gordon saught typical structures with historical and cultural identities. Sites were found within neighborhoods where buildings were being destroyed for “improvement,” as in the South Bronx, the Beabourg area in Paris. Upon beginning a project, he studied both the history and con-text of each structure, and used this to inform his orchestrations. The final determining factor in choosing sites, was the “degree to which (his) intervention could transform the structure into an act of communication – a way to capture the passive, isolated con-sumer” (Diserens, 182. His sites all dealt directly with social condi-tions of the immediate community, his actions becoming perfor-mances – theatrical gestures within a space.

Atlantic Yards is a desolate stretch of land in one of the most energetic and congested areas of Brooklyn. The adjacent subway station at the intersection of Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues is the third largest transit hub in New York City, servicing ten different subway lines and the Long Island Railroad. The surrounding land value is high and developers have clamored over the few available plots of land. The site known as Atlantic yards is the largest and most hotly contested of these parcels, and has been subject to an aggres-sive campaign by the developer Forest City Ratner.

The proposed scheme for the 22-acre site includes 16 high-rise commercial and residential buildings, and a basketball arena designed for the recently acquired New Jersey Nets. Despite the support from several key politicians, the project has provoked fierce resistance from current residents who object to the use of eminent domain to transfer their private property to a private, albeit large and powerful, developer.

Lawsuits and community pressure has done little to impede Forest City Ratner. With doubt lingering about the project’s viability, preparatory sitework began in 2007 and available properties have been bought up and left vacant. The effect of this maneuver, called “developer’s blight,” is to freeze a community and encourage deterioration until the remaining tenants choose to leave. The prevailing condition of the site is therefore a peculiar one—somewhere between total opportunity and total wasteland.

The neighboring context is charged with the dualities facing many contemporary developments in New York. On north side of the yards is new commercial and retail center sponsoring generic architecture and the consumer lifestyle. On the southern edge of the site, in contrast, there are a number of old industrial buildings and apartments claimed by eminent domain and slated for demolition. A decrepit warehouse sits between these two disparate conditions, with a large and visible wall without windows.

In an effort to give voice to the community and raise awareness to the significance or beauty of these buildings a video projection is proposed to allow community members to “voice” their opinions in writing on the surface of this wall. Based on a sign posted at the actual site stating “Atlantic Yards is _____________,” The intervention allows for the community to fill in the blank in a very public way.

how it works: The statement “Atlantic Yards is __________” will be filled in by any member of the commu-nity using two different means. The first draws input from a website where users can type and format words for remote display on the warehouse’s blank façade. Alternatively two stations on either end of the site (one at the intersection of Atlantic Ave and 6th Ave and the other on the other side of the yards at Pacific St and 6th Ave) would offer individuals the ability to make their mark on the building in a more immediate and tactile way. Each digital signature station would capture people’s handwritten responses, rasterize them and project them in real time onto the building surface. As entries accumulate over time, they would be cycled onto the wall and made available for discussion and review on the project’s website.

Similar to the Atelier in Situ project, Projections, in Montreal “the projections form an ephemeral architec-tural project-event: the images spontaneously and momentarily appear then disappear” (Bonnemaison, 143) giving a visible voice to the community, and respect to the existing structure.

atlantic yards // digital etching

(attllaannttiicc >> ccccccooooouurrtt))

digital etching

Brooklyn Bridge Park is planned to extend 1.3 miles across the borough’s post-industrial waterfront. The 87-acre zone includes six piers and forms a continuous band that extends inland to the Brooklyn-Queens-Expressway. The site originally hosted New York’s busy shipping industry and a ferry station at the end of Fulton Street. But throughout the 20th century the site declined along with these activities, becoming completely inactive in 1983.

Discussions began in late 1990’s to decide how the site might be productively used. The Port Authority’s threat to sell the land for commercial development caused a fury of local involvement and resulted in a new community development corporation and plans for a public park. Over the past decade, the plans were solidified and construction of the park is currently underway. It will host a series of outdoor activities within a system of walkways, lawns, playgrounds, and sports fields.

One of the major obstacles to development in the area since the 1950’s has been the presence of the BQE, which forms a 60-foot vertical barrier between the waterfront site and the affluent neighbor-hood of Brooklyn Heights. The new design addresses this barrier logistically by expanding and articulating entrances to the park, but the opportunity for this surface to participate in the park’s dynamism has not yet been addressed.

Similar to the Masstransiscope project first developed in the 70s and recently rehabilitated along the Q train this project plays on the ability for movement to construct cinematic effects. It also draws upon Matta-Clark’s use of the filmic sequence in his representations and his emphasis on motion to express the temporal qualities of a place or piece of work. This project extends this logic with the use of digital technology to create a dynamic interactive experience.

how it works: The project uses the digital technology of interactive video to follow the movement of a person in the park. This activates an animation of a person tumbling on the blank surface of the wall under the BQE. Similar to the work of Karolina Sobecka in her project Sniff, an infrared-sensitive camera would be used to monitor the street and sidewalk and track the position of visitors to the site. The animation would then dynamically respond to the speed, location and direction of users.

brooklyn-queens expressway // playmate

(find)(find) objectobjec

Furman Street

(use) objectj

playmate

Row

(usee) objeect

admiral’s row surreal living

Admirals Row Houses are a string of ten houses built for the Navy’s high-ranking officers and families along the outer perimeter of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Trapped at the intersection of the NYCHA Farragut Houses, the edge of the Brooklyn Navy Yard-turned-Industrial Park, and a baseball field, the Admirals Row houses display over 40 years of neglect from their government institution. In their decrepit state, all that remains are shells – and even those are quickly deteriorating. Built between 1864 and 1901, the neighborhood included tennis courts, an ice skating rink, parade grounds, and gardens, and a brick and iron enclosure, creating the sense of isolation.

In early 2000’s, the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation slated the buildings as beyond preservation, and initiated a plan to demolish the houses and replace them with a large supermarket and parking lot. The Land-marks Conservancy quickly responded and attained a structural engineer to assess and inspect the remaining buildings on Officers Row. Due to the actions of several historic preservation groups, the houses remain untouched.

Examining this situation in the context of present-day, the houses present an interesting analog to Gordon’s work in the 1970’s. In a reversal, these houses were in good condition in Gordon’s time but have since fallen to disarray. Given the natural deterioration that has already occurred in the houses, photographic documentation captures these altered spaces as byproducts of neglect. Deemed as trash to the development corporation, an artistic act could bring hope and draw from their fantastically doomed bodies. An action onto this site would prove worth-while in the reinvention of an ephemeral act in drawing attention and giving a second life to these abandoned structures.

Due to the hazardous nature of the site and the unlikely restoration of these homes anytime soon, projected video provides a unique opportunity to bring about a new life to these structures. This project aims to engage the entire strip of the site projecting light and images on the interiors of the windows facing the street to allude to life inside.

// surreal living

how it works: The interior light projections would only be on during dusk or nighttime, and would operate on randomly occurring dimmers. There would be one projection for each window that would change in brightness, creating a human-izing pulse for the buildings. The slow visual heartbeats of the buildings would increase public awareness and present these structures as a living part of the community.

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tim liddell irina chernyakova danielle sanchick