 DIPLOMA STUDIO FOUR |
Manhattan Pier 40This year the studio looked at New York. The project explores the development of a park at pier 40 on the Manhattan waterfront. The brief originates with a competition organized by the local community board to raise public discussion on the role of open ground in the city. Earlier proposals for the site have spanned from public green space to entirely commercial development. The board recognizes that the likely outcome in the current regime of public funding will necessarily be a mixed development, based on a social/commercial partnership. The competition focusses on the appropriate and sustainable mix of contemporary Agendas and uses for a park, and on the role of public policy and forums in the course of its development. The park projects of Tschumi's La Villette and the Latz's Duisburg are among the many enquiries conducted into the meaning of the urban park in the last days of the twentieth century. Clearly, nineteenth century notions of civic propriety, of leisure, and of beneficial nature, predicated on idealised oppositions of town and country, are unsustainable, and yet the projects of that age continue to be highly used and apppreciated, even in the state of relative decay they now suffer. The new world, the Americas, and particularly the West, framed many of the ideas of landscape, nature, wilderness, frontier and individuality that continue to be deployed as stereotypes and standards for the present. From Thoreau's Hymn of Walden Pond, to the panoramic canvasses of the Hudson River School, to the carved gigantism of Mt. Rushmore, and to the declaration of Yellowstone and Yosemite as national monuments, American writers and artists strove to find an apparatus of imagination and representation sufficient for the unparalleled extensity and promise of the new world. The parks of Olmsted, and the parkways of Robert Moses brought these developing mythologies into the realm of the city, and modernity. Rachel Carson's silent spring, the love canal, Three Mile Island and a host of other warnings collapsed the bubble of romance that joined extensity to free development, and introduced the daunting constraint of co-dependence that characterizes the new views of nature as environment and ecology. The site works of Robert Smithson or James Turrell, the dark films of David Lynch or Sam Shepard, the frontier novels of Cormac Macarthy and others, register the unease of the present conditions and put forward alternative strategies to the grand unitary mythologies of the past. These and other lines of enquiry have served as a baseline from the Pier 40 proposal. The unit spent a week in New York in November, then worked on general strategic proposals, finally developing detailed schemes from one or more key building elements. The projects set out to explore what sort of public terrain would constitute the 'park' of the early twenty-first century. Most accepted the position that the redemptive and social control aspects of nineteenth century civic parks of green drives and vistas continue to be well provided for, even if they are now much changed by commercial and performative agendas. The emphasis of most projects has been on hybrid programmes where the experiences of social encounter, individual recuperation and physical situation have intersected with 'everyday' urban uses, so as not to be seen as segregated or compensatory. Leisure, the notion that pleasure exists outside the productive or structured territories of life, has been firmly rejected.
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