New York no longer makes sense. And like everything in New York, it all comes back to real estate and the politics of space.
It doesn’t make sense to live here (rent is too high), or work here (most can work anywhere), or, really, to play here (no regular bars left in Manhattan.) New York is absurd in every way these days. There are millions of square feet of vacant retail, office and residential space, yet few outside of chains and huge companies can afford any of it. The last relatively charming and affordable neighborhood in Manhattan has devolved into self-parody, and people are making the best of it: hanging out in Times Square, the Financial District or the East Village in reclaimed spaces such as old theaters, barber shops or fast food joints.
This jolly absurdity takes center stage in the exhibition Architecture Now: New York, New Publics on view at the Museum of Modern Art (Moma) in New York. Featuring 12 recently completed projects from around the five boroughs, the show is based around the somewhat broad but forgiving theme of “public”.
“We wanted to ask, ‘What is public-ness? What are public amenities today?’” Martino Stierli, Moma’s Philip Johnson chief curator of architecture and design, said. “Public is a different concept in New York and America than in, say, Britain. We want to understand where architecture and society are today in terms of ‘public’.”
The diverse set of approaches are not all “public” in the classical sense of being owned and operated by the government. Often in New York today, public space is discussed in an outmoded, 1960s idea of what “public” means. Moma is offering a more contemporary, more complicated relationship to the concept. In fact, it uses the word “publics” in order to highlight the difficulty in even pinning down a single notion of public.
The strongest thread in the show shows up in several works that highlight how little sense New York makes. Young designers – often self-initiated – are imagining how New York can be better while embracing the constraints of the city in novel and strategic ways. “These projects are not speculative. They have real sites, and many of the design ideas behind them are scalable,” Evangelos Kotsioris, an assistant curator at Moma, said. “We wanted to see what younger and experimental architectural practices in the city are actually doing today.”
New York-based design firm New Affiliates (along with architect Samuel Stewart-Halevy) had to navigate the bureaucracy of New York’s private and public sectors as it built its experimental greenhouse project Test Beds, which uses discarded pieces of full-scale mock-ups of skyscrapers to make greenhouses for community gardens. New Affiliates’ pilot project in the Edgemere neighborhood of New York’s Rockaway peninsula was completed, but not without a delicate orchestration of many players. In fact, at one point a chunk of building facade was held hostage by the glass fabricator, who refused to release it from storage without six times the agreed-upon fee.
At first, Test Beds seems like it makes no sense: it is a monument to the absurdity of New York today, like an out-of-context found-object sculpture. But upon further review, it makes perfect sense in the context of New York today: the designers are intervening in a system (real estate and construction) that is far too big and complex to change. They offer a new way of engaging. It is an opportunistic, almost parasitic relationship that takes smaller offcuts and redirects them to the community gardens of the Rockaways. The team built a board game for the Moma show that simulates the process of this self-initiated project that they fundraised for: finding full-scale mock-ups, acquiring them and finding a home for them, all timed perfectly.
“We wanted to foreground emerging voices that are solving real problems,” Kotsioris said. “These projects look at what is already there in the city – such as communities, architecture, infrastructure, monuments – and build upon those, rather than seek to create something entirely from scratch.”
Several other projects operate with this attitude of working in clever ways to “hack” into larger systems or augment them with a layer of design improvements. The architectural design studio Agency–Agency and Chris Woebken designed a self-initiated series of sculptural “prosthetics” that turn fire hydrants into water fountains and sprinklers for public use. Suggesting improvements for public infrastructure overlooked by the city, the design and architecture studio Only If’s self-started research on public pools led it to an unsolicited design proposal to renovate the People’s Pool, a wild Morris Lapidus-designed public pool in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood.
Started as self-initiated studies as part of research fellowships at the Institute for Public Architecture and then the Regional Planning Association, Peterson Rich Office (Pro) has been working with the New York City housing authority (Nycha) and its residents for several years to propose design solutions that address the daily problems that residents are dealing with at existing Nycha complexes.
These types of interventions even extend to the digital realm. Brooklyn-based educational technology nonprofit Kinfolk used augmented reality to superimpose new monuments over old colonial statues, such as at Columbus Circle, where it replaced Christopher Columbus with Gen Toussaint Louverture, a leader of the Haitian Revolution. The speed and effectiveness with which digital intervention took hold highlights the need to think critically about how new technologies can propose alternatives to the often-ossified physical public realm.
New York, New Publics also features beautiful and clever cultural projects, such as architecture and design firm SO – IL’s community-oriented gallery Amant, as well as a pair of engaging public art projects: Adjaye Associates’ mosaic murals at the headquarters of 1199SEIU and Olalekan Jeyifous’s neighborhood-specific murals in New York’s subway stations.
The show addresses the need for building with nature in the city – and shows some successful examples. Staten Island’s Freshkills Park, designed by James Corner Field Operations, and a collaboration by SWA/Balsley and Weiss/Manfredi with Arup to design the Hunter’s Point South waterfront park in Queens show that New York has not lost its focus on public green space, while CO Adaptive’s Mercury Store is an adaptive reuse project that uses mass timber to cut its carbon footprint drastically. nARCHITECTS’ Jones Beach Energy & Nature Center was reclaimed from a 12.5-acre Robert Moses-era concrete parking lot that was broken into gravel and used as a base for an elevated and resilient new landscape.
The projects in the show have these common threads, but visitors can find their own as well. New York, New Publics offers a broad look at how New York’s best designers are working in the public realm in new and exciting ways, and brings it together in a way that publications, especially online, cannot, given the high signal-to-noise ratio of social media.