Re-imagining the city: To reveal, interpret and reconstruct the experience of place

Re-imagining the city:

To reveal, interpret and reconstruct the experience of place

by Elizabeth Kuehnen

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Re-imagining the City: To reveal, interpret and reconstruct the experience of place Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree, Master of Fine Arts in Communications Design, School of Art and Design Pratt Institute May 2011 New York, NY

Edvin Yegir, Primary Advisor VISITING ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, GRADUATE COMMUNICATIONS DESIGN

Mark Sanders, Secondary Advisor VISITING ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, GRADUATE COMMUNICATIONS DESIGN

Katya Moorman, Secondary Advisor VISITING ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, GRADUATE COMMUNICATIONS DESIGN

Michelle Hinebrook, Secondary Advisor ASSISTANT CHAIRPERSON, ADJUNCT INSTRUCTOR, GRADUATE COMMUNICATIONS DESIGN

©2011 Elizabeth Kuehnen

Jeff Bellantoni, Chairperson ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, GRADUATE COMMUNICATIONS DESIGN

Bachelor of Arts, Political Science, 2004 New York University New York, NY

Elizabeth Kuehnen, MFA Candidate 5

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Contents

11 AN INTRODUCTION 15 JUSTIFICATION 16 DELIMITATIONS 17 PROBLEM STATEMENT 19 ANTECEDENTS 25 CONTEXT 43 REDUCE 71 REVEAL 89 REFLECTIONS 94 FURTHER DIRECTIONS 98 BIBLIOGRAPHY 101 THANK YOU

Abstract Statement New York City provides visitors and residents a multiplicity of characters, viewpoints and histories. Many of my investigations isolate, fragment and abstract specific patterns, places and events in order to interpret from my subjective viewpoint. I hope that by re-imagining the city I can offer a prism through which people can reflect on their own experience of place.

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“Deep down, at the very core of the American psyche, they know too that they are unable to make sense of the landscape around them, that someday a stranger may come and see the jewel they missed, and after seeing it, will take it away. Yet for all they distrust their own ability to verbalize what they see and know and think about the ordinary landscape around them, they do feel for it, and in fact they seem to love it very deeply.�

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John Stilgoe, Outside Lies Magic

An Introduction

I love New York City, and I feel a sense of peace, belonging and attachment when I gaze around me at the character of the buildings and streetscapes. I grew up in a beautiful town in the suburbs, but once I moved to the city when I was twenty-one, I realized how much character the streets, buildings and neighborhoods could have.

Since New York is a very pedestrian city, I am constantly impressed by the street art found on the walls of old buildings, and hidden doorways and various nooks and crannies found in the older settlements. My hometown, like most suburbs, consists of long main roads and shorter side roads, and you need to take the car to get anything done. While the town has a character of its own and I lived there for twenty-one years, it’s not something I grew a strong attachment to.

Both of my parents passed away by the time I was twentyone years old, and settling in the city was a way to grow roots somewhere. The city became a constant character in my life, and I’ve grown an attachment to it that I can’t fully explain. Also, in my attempt to research the lives my great-grandparents who immigrated to New York through Ellis Island, I’ve discovered an even deeper connection to the city. Many generations of my family have lived and worked among the city walls, and walked the same streets I travel every day. Thus my intention with thesis work is to tell a story about my connection to New York City, and to offer unconventional ways to interpret the everyday urban environment.

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Thesis Path

The following is a chronological account of the references, thoughts, explorations and projects created while working towards my thesis. Early in the process I was mainly concerned with preserving the character of the city, but at a later stage in my thesis path, separating the desire for preservation from my investigations became more fruitful for me. I realized that my thesis was not about visual integration but more about the image and personality of the city. I know that change is ok; in fact it’s what the city needs, and on the streets of Manhattan, history is constantly being rewritten by every passerby.

While my work began by focusing on surface characteristics of the visual environment, it evolved into a deeper investigation into the meaning of place. Broader investigations at the city level led to zooming in to the more specific level of the city street, and then focusing on the layers of meaning behind the walls and windows of one building. After investigations into psychogeography there are two phases in my process: reduce and reveal. The “Reduce” phase involves abstraction of form to discover how parts fit together and to gain a better understanding of the streetscape. “Reveal” has to do with uncovering the layers of history at a particular place in the city to communicate to others.

In the reductive phase of my thesis, I created a series of progressive simplifications and abstractions of the streetscape. The progressive abstraction was a meditation on the city; I wanted to explore what I love about the city and simplify the visual information down to its purest form. I was searching for a deeper understanding of what it is about the city that I’m drawn to with visual and audio experimentation.

Through this analysis, I realized that I needed to include my own context – to explain where I’m coming from and 10

the color of glass that I’m peering through. Personal and culturally significant experiences come to life through stories and I discovered storytelling as a vital way to illuminate and anchor us to place, and wrote a series of stories about places in Manhattan.

A compelling written narrative enhances visual storytelling. There are many layers of history behind every

building we pass on the streets of Manhattan, and many of these places remain unmarked. I began to ask myself, how could I uncover these layers and this narrative in order to communicate to others? Uncovering the past lives of a building completely transforms the experience of place and I want to capture that feeling. One story in particular informed my capstone project – a large-scale installation depicting the 1920 Wall Street bombing, which reveals the meaning behind the damage that still remains on the marble walls of the building. In this way I am revealing the mysteries of the city landscape to communicate to others.

Detail from Wall Street installation

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Justification

My intention is that my reconstructions of place offer a methodology for others to explore the cityscape. We are immersed in the city; it envelops us. Even though the island is relatively small, when you are lost in its midst it’s easy to feel like the city is endless, like being in the middle of a dense forest with the tallest trees towering above you.

Many of my investigations attempt to understand the complexities of the built environment – to find meaning in confusion, order from chaos.

Place has character, context and many points of view.

How can designers engage with the multiplicity of narratives, as well as physical attributes of space, to evoke a sense of place? Just like a perceptive writer can provide a vivid sense, an artist or designer can transform, fragment, isolate and reconstruct in order to provide an entirely new experience of place. In my thesis work, I am playing with the experience of place in the city to reveal a richer, more multilayered environment than only looking at the physical space itself. As philosopher Jacques Ranciere said, our task is “to make our own poem with the poem performed in front of us.”1 Maybe once I find poetry hidden in the cracks and shadows of New York City and in the dialogue between viewer and environment, I will find parallels in other cities around the globe.

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While my work doesn’t have this explicit goal, uncovering historical and cultural narratives on city streets fosters a unique sense of place for visitors and residents, and an interest in preserving the local flavor.

Artist Edward Hopper had a way of creating a feeling that was entirely his own creation but it still represents the place in a powerful way. So much so that people have made efforts to restore the Greenwich Village building that he depicted in his painting, Early Sunday Morning. His work provides an example of how I would like to provide historical context that anchors us to places in the city, and to capture the essence of a place to communicate to others.

Edward Hopper, Early Sunday Morning, 1930, oil on canvas, 35 x 60 in.

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Delimitations

My thesis is not about nostalgia for the way things were in New York. Residents and visitors are constantly transforming the city, and I’m more interested in looking at how we see the city in the present moment.

Understanding the underlying history will help to have an informed viewpoint on the current state of the city, but I’m not concerned with keeping things the way they are or bringing us back to an earlier time.

Also, I’m not trying to place meaning where there is none.

I’m not interested in making the everyday more beautiful or creating new mythologies of place, just to understand that the quotidian is enough. I’d like to uncover the truth in what is already there, and find my own meaning in the city I’m surrounded by every day.

This is not an investigation of urban design. Although street pattern and mapping does affect our experience of the city, I am only concerned with place as a specific entity. Instead of navigational strategies I am looking at distinct units such as the city block or one address for a thorough exploration of place.

This is not a study based on my personal experiences alone. It is important that I explore my experience and cultural influence in my work, and it has been a valuable process of discovery. However, looking outside of myself to shared cultural knowledge and experience is also meaningful for a designer who seeks connection with a community. I am interested in unlocking the secrets of the built environment, with a history that is shared.

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Problem Statement

My intention with my work overall is to develop my own narrative about how I find meaning in the complex environment of the city, and to offer alternate ways to experience it. For my exhibition, my focus was on translating the communication of the built environment with photography, illustration, sound and typography in an immersive experience of space and place. I transformed the exhibition space and immersed people in a new experience of the city by reconstructing various perspectives and narratives of place.

The investigations fragmented and isolated certain scenes, places and events in the city, then re-contextualized through subjective interpretation. I interpreted the language of the city landscape and offered new ways to bring personal meaning to complex environments like the city. Each component of my thesis exhibition was a model for a site-specific, permanent installation that propose unconventional ways to experience the everyday city environment.

“ One of life’s most fulfilling moments occurs in that split second when the familiar is suddenly transformed into the dazzling aura of the profoundly new.... These breakthroughs are too infrequent, more uncommon than common; and we are mired most of the time in the mundane and the trivial.

The shocker: what seems mundane and trivial is the very stuff that discovery is made of. The only difference is our perspective, our readiness to put the pieces together in an entirely new way and to see patterns where only shadows appeared just a moment before.”

Edward B. Lindaman, Thinking in Future Tense

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Antecedents

Edward Hopper’s paintings tell a beautiful and complex narrative about the city streets, and his work relates to my investigations into the essence of place. In Early Sunday Morning (image page 18) he tells an intimate story about a specific block in Greenwich Village, and completely devoid of people the feeling of the street is palpable. I began working with one street – Rivington in the Lower East side – because I wanted to get to this intimate level of understanding. I wanted to learn what elements combine to create the feeling and character of this street, and as a designer how I can communicate that to others.

Psychogeography: an expression of an experience of the street.

In the Fifties an organization called Situationist International coined the term psychogeography, which can be defined as an expression of the experience of the street.

Memoires is a book created by Guy Debord and Asger Jorn, which documented the negative public reaction of Debord’s latest film. The book is also a psychogeographic map of Paris, detailing Debord’s journey before forming Situationist International. This book inspired me for Ella, a psychogeography of New York City. The delicate placement of type with dripping ink patterns creates the texture of an imaginary landscape and is reminiscent of a journey along a path.

Spread from Memoires, designed and written

by Guy Debord and Asger Jorn, 1959 17

The Experience of Place by Tony Hiss opened my senses to all of the elements that create the atmosphere of the street. This book also reinforced my curiosity about how the experience of a place would be altered with the slightest change. Based on this investigation I created a map that documents all of the sensory characteristics of Rivington Street in the Lower East Side.

John Stilgoe is a Harvard professor and author of many books on the art of exploring. In his courses he guides students through their everyday surroundings, encouraging them to see objects in both the built and natural environment in a new light. He wants them to ask why these objects are that way, and delve into the historical significance to uncover their mysteries and meanings.

My investigations throughout the city relate to this work, because I am most interested in that feeling of transformation when you learn the layers of history and narrative of place.

Richard Tuttle works with the simplest shapes and abstracts form in such a basic way to create dynamic, balanced compositions. His work brings up many questions I have on the value of abstraction. I see cityscapes in this work so in that way does it communicate a message in its simplicity? With Edges, Tuttle engages the viewer with a pure experience of shape, color and repetition. The Meditation Project is my attempt to apply this theory to the city, to abstract it to its simplest form so that the viewer’s only distraction is the mind.

Richard Tuttle, Edges, 1999, suite of 13 color aquatint etchings, 12-1/4 X 12-1/4 inches each 18

Julie Mehretu, Stadia II, 2004, Ink and acrylic on canvas, 108 x 144 inches

Artist Julie Mehretu’s colorful and active canvases overlay abstracted architectural features such as columns and facades with charts and city maps seen from different perspectives. Her paintings relate and inspire the work I’m doing because she uses architecture and the city as a point of departure. She has described her paintings as “story maps of no location”, and she creates an experience of an imagined reality that is suggestive of personal geography.

London artist Laura Oldfield Ford is attracted to the in-between spaces in the city, designed for social interaction but that become unregulated zones for the dispossessed. She creates drawings and produces a zine that is a polemic against regeneration as well as a documentation of its processes and human effects. In an interview with Mute Magazine she explains, “The work is not nostalgic in a sentimental way but more influenced

by Walter Benjamin’s thesis on history, about shards of messianic time hidden in the built environment waiting to be realized.” Her work relates to my intention to 19

capture the essence of the street, uncover its hidden narratives, and to express the experience of place through drawing and other documentation.

Laura Oldfield Ford, Leamington Spa to Hastings, drawings from her zine Savage Messiah, 2009

Brooklyn artist Aakash Nihalani places tape in geometric shapes in the streetscape. Nihalani gives New Yorkers a chance create a new space within the existing space of the everyday world, to enter freely and unexpectedly disconnect from their reality. He uses the rectangular shapes and blocks that are the visual language of the city to draw attention to forgotten dimensions and overlooked layers, and offers pedestrians a new way to see the lines that they are surrounded by every day.

Aakash Nihalani, 2010

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In the diagram Form Qualities of the City, Kevin Lynch simplifies our visual world to nine different illustrations.

He created a system of navigational tools that people tend to use in the city, depicting simplified concepts with abstract forms. He described the illustrations with names like “motion awareness”, “time series” and “form simplicity”. Lynch suggests that the strength of mental image we have of our hometowns depends on whether the place offers a richly detailed and well-defined experience. Based on this project, I began creating a symbol archive with recognizable forms, patterns and interactions in the city. I am very interested in pattern recognition of our surroundings, which Lynch describes as an area’s “legibility”, and also created a sound installation – an audio experience of four neighborhoods – to explore this concept.

Kevin Lynch, Form Qualities of the City, 1960

Performance artist Jeremy Dalmas creates audio tours that infuse the city with mystery and adventure. He started in Golden Gate Park in San Fransisco, and by popular demand created an audio tour for the southwest part of New York City. The listener downloads the audio and begins at the start of the tour. He takes you through back streets and down staircases, through parks, sometimes providing true historical facts and other times embellishing a little. He makes the experience of the street so intimate amidst the hustle and bustle, and unearths some hidden creatures and forgotten stories along the way. In a similar way, I would like my work to encourage a playful approach to the city and gives the participant a new sense of wonder while walking through ordinary surroundings.

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Josef Hoffman, Untitled Cubist Sculpture, 1902

Untitled Cubist Sculpture, by Viennese architect Josef Hoffman was part of the inspiration for my capstone project depicting the 1920 Wall Street bombing. He used abstracted geometric forms reminiscent of the city landscape, and they interact in the space creating light and shadow and reconstruct a dark, dramatic image of the city. Cubism is a technique that takes a subject, abstracts, fragments, and redefines, and then reconstructs the subject with multiple perspectives intact.

This was an appropriate style to explore to tell the story of America’s first age of terrorism.

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Context

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Psychogeography

An underlying theme in all of my work, many projects based on psychogeography are precedents to my own investigations. Psychogeography is an umbrella topic for many different things: the personal experience of the street, the alternate experience of the street enabled by another person (an artist or performer), or an artist who aggregates many people’s experiences.

The experience can include emotions, atmospheres, encounters with people, play, and letting the contours of geography guide you. Another topic entirely is the memory map – recording all of the associations you have with a place – which depends on the strength of mental image of a place (discussed further in “Four Neighborhoods”).

Found maps based on psychogeography

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The Naked City, Guy Debord and Asger Jorn, A map of Paris highlighting overlooked paths through the city

In the late Fifties the French intellectuals and artists that made up the Situationist International were contemporaries of the Beat generation in the US. In their unconventional map of Paris, The Naked City, Guy Debord and Asger Jorn offer an entirely new perspective on the experience of place. With the map they offer an antidote to being “swept along by crowds... bound by an artificial imperative of speed... rushing toward sites of alienated production or consumption�.2 The work of the Situationists focused on the interaction of human behavior with art, culture and the urban environment.

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The Situationists conceived of psychogeography as a critique of urban geography. They rejected the traditional experience of the street, which they considered part of the spectacle itself – a reaction to the expressionless, cold modern glass towers. They also rejected Le Corbusier’s Modernism because of its insistence on homogenous architectural structures and spaces that left little adventure in their chance and exploration. They proposed a more organic and spontaneous encounter with the city landscape.

Debord describes the theory of the dérive: “In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.”3 I am really interested in the concept of dérive – freely experiencing the city then expressing the insight gathered from the process.

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For a studio course I used a game to formulate a project around – exploring our everyday lives as a Rube Goldberg machine. Every human interaction is an exchange of some sort – whether it is a traditional purchase or exchange of materials, knowledge or assistance – and like ripples in a large body of water, these interactions have an effect that extends far beyond our awareness. I wanted to reveal this process that is constantly in motion around us and create a shared psychogeography with the community. As an experiment, I drew the word ‘hello’ on a map of Manhattan and walked to sixteen points, observing and documenting these interactions. This culminated in a poster with all of the visual artifacts that represent this series of observations. As an extension of this project, I also created posters in the vernacular of street flyers to post on the sixteen points along the path.

Rube City! A shared psychogeography This project was a great opportunity to connect with the community in Manhattan and be out on the streets experiencing everyday life as a series of connections. There were many fascinating fortuitous encounters and it was a great learning experience to investigate the everyday activity on the city streets. For example, in a park on the Lower East Side, I observed a religious performance with a large group of people dressed in Colonial robes.

The singer was dressed in a different color robe and she preached and sang as the rest of the group swayed and played drums. Her passion was palpable and quite moving, and a small crowd gathered on the street to observe.

Like this example, I found many examples of the community coming together to enhance each other’s lives, and I can imagine the influence of these actions from one person to the next.

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I created a psychogeography of New York City in the form of a book, through the eyes of a girl who is searching for something she lost sometime... somewhere. Inspired by the films “Pickpocket” and “Diary of a Country Priest” directed by Robert Bresson, I developed a book with a short script I wrote and bound it with four metal brads along one side in the style of a movie script. I wanted to capture the peace and transcendence representative of Bresson films in high contrast, black and white photography.

When she wakes up from a long and disorienting dream, she realizes that everything she had been looking for is already within and around her.

Each photo lingers on the location where the girl is searching. Early in the book the perspectives are looking up and out above the buildings and along the street, but once she wakes up from the dream the photography is more still and contemplative, looking straight at building facades and details. The book feels like a film. Typography broken up line by line, almost falls from the page, and headers are half cut off at the top of some of the pages. All of these elements are meant to evoke a sense of mystery, longing and confusion, then after she wakes up from the dream life seems to make more sense. In the end the mystery is solved and there is a sense of peace and completeness, as though her perseverance through chaos and confusion created a new harmony.

...she realizes that everything she had been looking for is already within and around her.

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This page and overleaf: spreads from Ella, 9 x 15 inch book with images of New York City and short film script.

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Rivington

My work on the psychogeography of the city sparked my interest in the visual information in the streetscape specific to different neighborhoods. I decided to focus on the more specific level of the city street for a deeper investigation into the built environment.

Nine years ago when I moved to the city from the suburbs, I was immediately impacted by the vibrant culture, street art and architecture. New York is a walking city, and I found myself absorbing the color, texture and character of the street along my path. I knew there was something beautiful about it that I couldn’t quite explain. Street artists like Swoon and Banksy make the city speak a new language while exposing truths about culture and politics.

The integration of art with the crumbling old building and layer upon layer of posters and paint create juxtaposition of old and new. Their illustrations, stencils and wheat pastings combine with the building facade to engage the observer in the experience of the street.

The Lower East Side neighborhood is one of the last areas of Manhattan that still contain this concatenation of influences, vibrant energy, and eclectic visual languages.

I wanted to engage with a community and understand the character of a specific locale, so I decided to focus on Rivington Street. This street has unique characteristics because of the tug-of-war between its original, essential New York City character and gentrification by young professionals. In the process of analysis, I met long-time New Yorker Charlie Cohen who gave me his insight on the Lower East side neighborhood. I have always had the assumption that gentrification was a problem for the city, and this experience was my first realization that residents actually might like the effects of gentrification on their community. The following is the story of meeting Cohen: 34

Freeman’s Alley collage

I was standing in Freeman’s Alley taking photos and an old man approached me and said, “If you give me 25 cents I’ll let you take my picture.” When I looked confused he repeated himself. I was still confused so then he said, “This alley used to be full of bums. They used to say, if you give me 25 cents I’ll let you take my picture.” I didn’t really know what to say, but for some reason I asked if he lived around here.

He said, “Yeah, I own this building right over here.” and he cheerfully led me over to the area where you could see the backside of his building. Since he had owned the building since 1969, we talked about the history of that area. He told me about the Southern Italian immigrants that lived there when he first bought the building, and all of the artists squats surrounding the area. He told me about the origins of the Bowery Mission and Salvation Army in the late Nineteenth Century, and the massive drug problems in the Eighties. Now the neighborhood is attracting more people with money and there are galleries cropping up everywhere. This has been a trend since the New Museum opened a few years ago, Cohen explained, and these recent changes have been very positive for the community.

This was a chance encounter and a revealing connection with a long-time Rivington Street resident. Engaging the community to learn its history and culture is valuable for any investigation, and it was transformative for my work.

Speaking with Cohen made me challenge my previously held assumptions about the place, and what follows is a more objective analysis exploring the visual character of the neighborhood.

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In The Experience of Place, Tony Hiss’ sensory investigations opened my eyes to all of the senses that create a feeling of atmosphere. For example, the smells, sounds, climate, angles of buildings where patterns emerge, how sunlight creates space (relating to the height of buildings) are all factors that contribute to our experience of place.

Also, the awareness of previous uses and historical changes tie in to this sensory experience, and creates a desire to maintain authenticity. For example, the sensory experience of Grand Central station contributed to its preservation when the city wanted to tear it down in the Seventies.

Also, the tragic loss of Penn station was the driving force behind the creation of the Historical landmark commission in New York City.

To capture the essence of the neighborhood I took an audio recording of the different atmospheres I felt along Rivington Street with the intent to analyze and learn from these transitions. I walked from one end of Rivington Street to the other with a tape recorder to capture the feeling of atmospheres at different junctures. I “ At moments when the boundaries flow found it really interesting that there together, perhaps even disappear, a were three distinct atmospheres on different sense emerges... our sense this one street, because of the width of of ourselves now has more to do with the street, profile of businesses, and noticing how we are connected to the people and things around us - as part changes in population. of a family, a crowd, a community, a species, the biosphere... Through one system of perception we see ourselves as observers of an environment composed of separated objects, but at the same time, through another system of perception, equally active, we look for ways in which we are connected to or are part of our surroundings.”4

Tony Hiss

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Freeman’s Alley: a unique alleyway that is shared by all of the adjacent buildings. Charlie Cohen shared his stories of the neighborhood transitions from immigrants and flop-houses in 1969 when he bought the building to the community board’s current friction with cabaret nightclub the Box nextdoor to his building. To solve the problem he let the Box purchase a few flats in his building closest to the club.

When i told him I was interested in historical preservation, he asked why? This neighborhood used to be a mess. He told me bums would line the alleyway and say if you give me 25 cents I’ll let you take my picture. Since the New Museum was built a lot of galleries have popped up in the area bringing with them a new population.

the box

the new museum

this interaction would be interesting to study (new museum visitors and employees and bowery mission)

charlie cohen’s building

bowery mission

soccer field where my cousin plays her league soccer games -she lives on the Upper East and I was always impressed that she came all the way down here to play soccer.

there are some great benches alongside the field where you can hang out and watch the game, or stop and eat a sandwich.

Ale et Ange - the owners of this mens clothing boutique just moved into the neighborhood from down near Canal.

They are very happy to get more foot traffic on Rivington.

Th sy do fa ce ar

freeman’s sporting club

Rivington Street

my husband gets his hair cut here, but the clothes they sell are way overpriced.

*you can definitely still hear the traffic from the Bowery from here. It has an effect on the atmosphere of the street, making it a little more intense.

I wonderif the guys from the Rivington House ever stop by or what if any interaction they have.

You see them on the street walking or rolling around in their wheelchairs.

there’s a park between christie and forsyth streets with odd signage painted on the pavement

there is always interesting street art on the wall next to Sue Scott gallery at 1 Rivington.

Bowery

The wall outside the gallery is like a gallery in itself.

Charlie Cohen told me that this used to be the Mills hotel in the 60’s and 70’s. He said the neighborhood was a drug den in the 80’s.

Rivington House for people living with HIV - seems like an excellent community organization

It’s called M’Finda Kalunga Garden the sign also says that its maintained by volunteers through Green Thumb. It’s a NY compost project demonstration site.

Christie

Forsyth

Eldridge

Portion of Rivington Street documentation map containing observations, experiences, colors and textures

As I crossed Orchard Street, I noticed a distinct change in feeling and began to investigate. I realized that the buildings are significantly closer to each other on this part of the street, and it creates a protected, almost isolated atmosphere. In a map I captured the interactions I observed, personal anecdotes and memories, and details of the neighborhood, combined with my photography of the area containing typography, colors and the tactile experience.

Memories, anecdotes and interactions with the community provide a richer experience and more informed investigation. Also, weaving in my own experiences and associations with different locations on the street anchors me firmly to place. In this process I have encouraged myself to sharpen my senses, especially sight, to truly discover the environment. Once I awaken my senses to the mysteries and curiosities the landscape provides, I can further reveal and communicate what I’ve learned to others.

Rivington Street color and texture study (opposite)

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Reduce 41

Drawing based on photography of a Lower East Side storefront

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Built Environment as Sign System The cityscape communicates through its world of environmental and cultural artifacts at many levels: the broad view of the city as a whole, the neighborhood, the city block, and the specific building level. I am examining the communication of the built environment at each of these different levels, so for this discussion the following definition is useful: The built environment includes man-made structures or arrangements in the environment that operate on levels of function, aesthetics and meaning.5 The built environment is a complex sign system, with its comprehensiveness, myriad interpretations, and subtleties.6 Some of the things that create communication in the built environment are architectural details, overall shapes and patterns, vernacular street art and design, eclectic shop signage, paths, and contours.

Drawing is a process of discovery and exploration of form that can help to understand these complexities. Paul Klee’s Pedagogical Sketchbook diagrams in detail the many points, lines and planes that are available to the artist simply from referencing our movements through the environment. One of my first assignments at Pratt was to find a structure in our walk to class and create a modular pattern out of it. The concept originated in the Bauhaus philosophy, and more specifically Klee’s philosophy that “Through observation of the smallest manifestation of form and interrelationship, he could conclude about the magnitude of natural order.”7 This book inspires me to make sense of the ordinary landscape and reveal its mysteries to others.

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My interest in the exploration of form in the everyday landscape led to curiosity about what creates beauty in the city. Beauty is the synthesis of dimensions, and a feeling that everything is interconnected.8 What creates this sense of completeness? Why do some streetscapes feel more beautiful, and does this increase the connection I feel to my surroundings? The components don’t have to match perfectly, but an eclectic mix is only beautiful when the elements create harmony.

For this investigation I focused on the communication of one section of Rivington Street to understand more about harmony of the built environment and how it contributes to the character and beauty of the street. I needed to understand more about what creates a beautiful and visually integrated streetscape.

I imposed my own order with a layer of code, mapping the three-dimensional environment onto the environment itself. Objects and details in the streetscape are the signifiers of the locality, and simplification of these forms reveals the underlying structure and relationship of parts.

By exploring the line relationships and patterns of one section of the street I began to analyze the shape interactions in the drawings. Through drawing I am able to learn about every curve and contour, and actually feel the relationships of space.

I realized through this process that it is difficult to define the strength of communication specific to one street because of variable interpretations of the built environment. There is no simple way to determine what creates character and meaning in a streetscape through the investigation of form alone. However, simplification is essential in the process of uncovering layers of meaning. This increased my awareness of the multiplicity of viewpoints of the city, and that there are many factors that contribute to the complex relationship between the viewer and environment.

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Selected drawings from the progressive simplification of the Lower East Side streetscape

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Progressive Abstraction

People primarily remember patterns in the abstract and can identify different places based on this mental map or internal photograph. In Image of the City by Kevin Lynch he compares three cities – Boston, Jersey City and Los Angeles – and goes through a scientific process of interviewing residents to gather their visual impressions of the city.

To Lynch and other urbanists concerned with the lack of intelligibility of our cities, form was the property that would overcome the alienation of modern cities.9 In an urban planning context, legibility is defined as the quality that makes an area easy to visualize and navigate, which means clear boundaries and strong visual character.10 I began to think of the city in a different way – in terms of the layout of the streets, contours and signifiers that make a neighborhood distinctive. I wanted to study how the legibility of the neighborhood creates stronger mental imagery and therefore more of an attachment to place.

I intended to create a symbol archive for recognizable forms, patterns and interactions in a city using abstract illustrations to give meaning to concepts that city-dwellers experience every day. I thought it would be interesting for a water tower to be labeled “hope” and other objects could represent other ideas based on resident’s feelings about their surroundings.

Combining icons drawn from the streetscape with words from Jane Jacobs, The Life and Death of American Cities, gave the objects an entirely new context, seeing them through the lens of urban transition.

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Selected pages from my journey into abstraction using the form of a streetlamp on Rivington Street

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“We come to know in art that we do not clearly know where we will arrive in our work, although we set the compass, our vision; that we are led in going along, by material and work process. We have plans and blueprints, but the finished work is still a surprise. We learn to listen to our voices; the yes or no of our material, our tools, our time.�

Anni Albers On Designing

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Selected colored pencil memory maps of Rivington Street, created with symbols from abstraction studies

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Theory states that if an image is abstracted enough, then there is more room left open for the unrepresentable and that involves the viewer more. Since I’m working a lot with abstraction and exploring its communication value, one of my questions is: Does complete abstraction communicate by allowing viewers to insert themselves into what they are looking at? Using these abstracted forms as a starting point, I created a few drawings with colored pencils based on my simplification of the streetscape. Using the abstract grid and symbols I recreated my personal experience in a series of memory maps of Rivington Street.

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I wanted to see this work entering the community itself, and to design a site-specific application of my abstractions, symbols and drawings. I want my work to point out existing but otherwise unseen narratives in the environment, and offer a way of organizing the input of visual sensory information.

My abstractions of the streetlamp led to an isometric shape (a triangle and rectangle), held out into the environment to frame a particular viewpoint of the street – a reference for the underlying forms and patterns. By creating a frame that references patterns of the built environment, I am attempting to organize its visual language and provide a lens to simplify and understand its complexities.

At this point I had not found a concrete application for these investigations, but as I explain in the next section I discover a useful direction and temporary conclusion to this process.

The culmination of shape and abstraction studies is an isometric shape held out into the street that frames some underlying pattern, or otherwise unseen object or narrative 58

As I continued to explore processes to bring simplification and meaning into the complex environment, I realized that Times Square is a great place for the opportunity to test my hypothesis.

Nowhere in New York City are so many different visual languages competing for space. There is no coordination or integration of signage with the architecture, and when there is such a saturation of billboards, communication ceases to exist.

If we simplify our surroundings do we actually understand more about the environment and get more out of the experience? Can we bring more of our personal meaning when the visual noise is reduced? Robert Venturi observed in Las Vegas, “Communication dominates space as an element in the architecture and in the landscape.�11 The same dominance of signs occurs in Times Square at a pedestrian scale. How can we shut off the noise in order to have an inner journey instead?

There is scientific proof that openness in our surroundings contributes to better mental functioning.12 Olmstead and Vaux, the landscape architects that designed every hill and rock arrangement in Central Park, did a lot of work on the needs of human experience in an urban environment. They determined that open space provides tranquility and rest to the mind, something that you cannot get from buildings.13 In an open place that allows our subtle perception to function, we can reflect and encounter our inner reality. How do we achieve the same openness in a canyon of excessive noise and light like Times Square?

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Meditation Project

I propose an installation in the middle of Times Square that offers visitors a quiet space for reflection and meditation amidst the chaos. Meditation is a five thousand year old practice that allows people to experience their surroundings in a new way. The New York Times reports that “those who meditated for about thirty minutes a day for eight weeks had measurable changes in gray-matter density in parts of the brain associated with memory, sense of self, empathy and stress.�14 The installation will offer people the opportunity to use abstraction and simplification as a means to interpret the built environment of Times Square.

In this proposal there are three viewpoints facing isometric shapes floating in the environment. The frames use the existing geometry in the streetscape, but disconnect and rotate it to re-imagine the fixed architecture in new orientations. The technique of meditation is to clear the mind of all visual noise, so it is significant that the frames block out as much visual information as they are framing.

Each one of these isometric shapes contains possibilities for different connections within and in-between the Times Square environment, revealing existing patterns and creating new ones.

The proposed installation will encourage viewers to disconnect from their everyday reality and enter a new spaciousness in the middle of Times Square. The frames reduce the environment to its simplest form (squares, rectangles and triangles) and use these abstractions on site, encouraging people to meditate on the visual information that is there but also encouraging a playful approach – to imagine what could be there. By reconstructing the existing form in new configurations it can 60

Two possibilities for the installation. Modelmaking process to determine the form of the Meditation Project in Times Square.

Stand-alone frames gave way to a more unified gestural form connecting the seats and viewpoints.

“ Human beings not only discern geometric patterns in nature and create abstract spaces in the mind, they also try to embody their feelings, images and thoughts in tangible material. The result is sculptural and architectural space, and on a large scale, the planned city.“15 Yi-Fu Tuan

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Sketches using the isometric shape to frame patterns in the Times Square environment.

Blocking out this visual information will create space and open up the opportunity for meditation.

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Four Neighborhoods

The experience of the street is like poetry through the eyes of a perceptive observer. The following is Kevin Lynch’s interpretation of the Beacon Hill neighborhood in Boston: The distribution of brick sidewalks, of corner stores, of inset doorways, of ornamental ironwork, of trees, to some extent of black shutters, all hammer home the uniqueness of the front side and of its distinctions from the back. The concentration and repetition of such themes, and the level of maintenance evidenced in polished brass, fresh paint, clean pavements, and well-furnished windows, have a strong cumulative effect, which adds a certain vitality to the image of the Hill... ornamented, highly maintained structures saying upper-class; of sunlight, street trees, and flowers, brick sidewalks, black shutters, and inset doorways; of maids, chauffeurs, old ladies and fine cars on the streets.16

I wanted to capture the sounds of different neighborhoods in Manhattan as described by the residents themselves, so I created an audio installation that isolates the sense of hearing to offer a mini-experience of the city. I recorded ambient sounds and conducted interviews with longterm residents in four Manhattan neighborhoods, chosen based on their unique street pattern: Wall Street, Lower East Side, Greenwich Village and Chelsea. It’s rare to have the opportunity to “stop and listen” – to eliminate the dominance of the visual sense and really hear New York City without the usual sensory overload. The four separate audio tracks played in four corners of a small room. In the center of the room you faintly hear all four recordings, then as you walk closer to each corner, you hear the individual neighborhood louder than the others.

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In recorded interviews with long-term residents I asked questions based on Lynch’s study: (they adapt slightly for each interview) 1. What first comes to mind, what symbolizes the word [your neighborhood] for you? 2. Please draw a quick sketch of map as if you were making a rapid description of the neighborhood to a stranger, covering all the main features. 3. When you are commuting to work or doing errands in the neighborhood, describe the sequence of things you see as you picture yourself making the trip. 4. Do certain streets have a particular feeling? Do you enjoy walking down some streets more than others and why? 5. What parts of your neighborhood are most distinctive?17 I combined short moments of these conversations with ambient sounds from interior and exterior environments into audio tracks each about a minute and a half long.

Each audio snippet in the collage is meant to be a clue – not to reveal too much, but paint an abstract picture of the neighborhood. For the exhibition, I transformed this project to isolate each of the four neighborhoods and thus give each individual experience more clarity. Two audio players each were attached to pedestals, mapped out based on the location in Manhattan. Headphones gave people the opportunity to shut out the noise around them and be immersed in the sounds of the neighborhood in a reconfigured experience of Manhattan.

On top of the pedestals are abstraction drawings based on the antique street lamps iconic to Manhattan’s historic neighborhoods. I wanted to minimize the visual input and provide a glimpse into the process of re-imagining the city. The drawings mirror the audio recordings as a methodology to explore the streetscape, abstracting and fragmenting small moments of the city experience and re-combining them from my subjective viewpoint. The intention of the audio experience is to allow the listener to be immersed in the rich sounds and descriptions of the different locations and to reflect on their own experience of place in the city. The installation was a psychogeography of the city in audio form.

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Exhibition, audio installation

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The process of abstraction allowed me to analyze the visual and audio information of the city – the city street was my laboratory for experimentation. Reducing the visual language to its simplest form led to the meditation project, which gives people the opportunity to reinvent the city and disconnect from the ordinary landscape. In a similar way, the audio installation isolates the sense of hearing to depict an experience of the city that is otherwise difficult to focus on. The concept of place has been broad for these investigations – the city as a whole, then neighborhood and street level. The following work deals with place as a specific building, or as a defined entity on the city street – one address for example, or even one wall.

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Place as Anchor

On March 25th, 1903, my great-grandfather Demetrio Berna arrived in New York from Naples, sailing on the S.S. Ravenna, according to the ship ledger in the Ellis Island archives. In the ledger it asks for his name in full, his age (eighteen), his last residence (Reggio in Southern Italy), and if he was in possession of thirty dollars and if less, how much (he had $12). Since he couldn’t write in English, all of this information was transcribed by the immigration official. Question number ten is “Whether going to join a relative, and if so, what relative, the name and address”. He replied “cousin Antonio Ravella, 2390 Arthur Avenue, New York City”.

I remember my mother taking me to Arthur Avenue for the first time when I was seven years old. That neighborhood in the Bronx is a cultural anchor for many ItalianAmericans, and the shops have been preserved like a street museum. Giant stacked tins of olive oil decorate the street corner across from the clam house, covered with a blue awning that is shockingly bright against the plain gray street. A little further down the road is Madonia’s bakery, with fresh crusty loaves of Italian bread speckled with sesame seeds piled high in the window. Arthur Avenue is also one of the last places where you can watch fresh pasta being rolled out for your dinner.

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S.S. Ravenna ship ledger, 1903 Detail with address of Demetrio Berna’s final destination in New York

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Dutch designer Jan Van Toorn writes, “...culture is redefinition, re-interpretation, and re-invention; a way of exploring and mapping the world again and again and telling stories about it – commenting on the way it is, or seems to be.”18 I would add, also how we want it to be.

I’m fascinated by this concept in relation to the city – the constant re-writing of the city’s story by every passerby.

People create the narratives of place to understand and explain its complexities in context, and it is from these stories that the city comes to life.

I began to write stories about my personal and cultural context in New York. In Space and Place, Yi-Fu Tuan’s writing and references reinforce the vivid sense of place you can achieve with a perceptive writer, and I wanted to illuminate places in the city that relate to my experiences.

The most interesting thing to me about these locations is that chances are you would walk right by without a second glance. When there is personal meaning embedded within the walls of a place, it completely transforms the experience. Through written and visual storytelling, I would like to capture that feeling.

When there is personal meaning embedded within the walls of a place, it completely transforms the experience... I would like to capture that feeling.

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Arthur Avenue

If you were visiting this neighborhood for the first time, the following story about my memory of Arthur Avenue might illuminate something about the place, provide a richer experience, or conjure up images of an ItalianAmerican tradition. The following is a story I wrote: Clutching her mother’s hand, a seven-year-old girl bundled against the cold steps into a warmly lit store on 187th Street in the Bronx. The tiny bell jingles. “Buon Natale”, an old man says as he nods at the mother and her little girl. In the back of the shop an even older man winds large doughy pasta sheets through a steel press. They come out the other end soft and paper-thin. The man looks up as if he knows them – maybe he does. Her mother knows exactly what she’ll order – four boxes of handmade ravioli for the family Christmas party, and after less than two minutes of cooking she’ll serve them with a simple tomato sauce to her little girl, cousins, grandparents and the whole boisterous family.

New York City is the front door of the United States, where millions of immigrants like my ancestors traveled to access the land of opportunity. I don’t know why or how all six of my Italian great-grandparents ended up living within a fifteen-block radius of each other in the Bronx, especially since they all came from different regions in Italy, but it anchors me firmly to a particular place in the dense landscape of New York.

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My grandparents and great-grandparents took great pains to assimilate once they arrived in New York just after the turn of the century, and as a result our family lost much of the Italian language and customs. Artifacts like the Ellis Island documents preserve place as an important cultural heirloom, and someday I can point out to my children and grandchildren the places where their ancestors lived. I can also tell them the stories that have been passed down through generations of my family, and place will anchor us to these memories.

However, nowhere on Arthur Avenue or in the surrounding area is there a marker or memorial that explains to passersby the importance of this neighborhood for people of Italian descent. How can these rich historical narratives be translated into a memorial on-site that reveals the layers of meaning in the neighborhood?

“ Places represent living embodiments of the collective memory of vital historic events that help determine a sense of co-belonging, of deep unity between people and nature and between individuals, families, and larger communities; of mutual interdependence that connects all of us together as a fundamental characteristic of humanity.�

Luigi Fusco-Girard

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Urban Palimpsest

When we walk through a neighborhood or past a building, we appreciate it on a visual and kinesthetic level, but when we develop a deeper understanding of the place by learning the layers of history, it alters the experience of being there. For example, when I discovered that Andy Warhol’s Factory was in a building that I walk by every day in Union Square, it changed the feeling of this portion of my walk. I had never noticed the building before, and now I started noticing how odd and beautiful this building is, and thinking of all the people who have passed through its doors to star in a film or just be seen. The following is a story I wrote about Andy Warhol and his troubled muse, Edie Sedgwick: 76

Andy and Edie, 1965

Andy Warhol moved the Factory to the sixth floor of 33 Union Square West in 1965, the same year he met Edie. An unusual building for it’s era, it still stands out on the block because of the intricate terra cotta details on the facade and a large minaret on the roof. Max’s Kansas City was around the corner on Park Avenue South. Andy’s friend Lou Reed played there regularly with the Velvet Underground, and Andy’s crowd of artists, scenesters and followers became a fixture in the back room of the club.

Edie Sedgwick’s entry into the New York scene was explosive.

When she entered the room, people revolved around her like planets orbiting the sun. Andy claimed her as his muse and christened her his “Superstar”. She wanted the Hollywood dream Andy promised and he cast her in many of his films.

After returning from a Paris gallery opening in May 1965, Warhol asked his scriptwriter to write a script for Sedgwick, “something in a kitchen – something white, and clean, and plastic.” The resulting film was “Kitchen”, one of the many in which Edie would wander about the set with some fuzzy purpose having unintelligible conversations with other actors.

Although Edie’s magnetism made the films an underground success, most of them were never screened outside of the Factory.

Whirling onto the Factory scene was Edie’s escape from her troubled childhood, and drugs pushed her further away from her problems. Many people, including Bob Dylan, were at odds with Andy about the way he objectively watched - and filmed - her demise. Edie tried to get closer to Andy emotionally but he remained cold and detached. Their relationship deteriorated by the end of 1965, when she was already heavily dependent on drugs. She died of a massive overdose at the age of twenty-eight. In a short time she became a vital component of the Factory and a cultural icon, but her star burned too bright as it seared the night sky.

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The Andy Monument, Rob Pruitt, 2011

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Two weeks ago, a life size metallic chrome sculpture depicting Warhol with a camera hanging from his neck and a Bloomingdale’s shopping bag appeared in front of Warhol’s old Factory studio.

As I walk by I hear the surprise of people who are just seeing it for the first time, “Is that Andy?” as they walk closer, or “Who’s Andy?” kids ask, as their parents try to explain who the artist was.

This work is a very subjective interpretation of the legacy of Andy Warhol by artist Rob Pruitt, but it is successful in that it memorializes the cultural icon and its location reveals the layers of his story. Many people will make the fascinating discovery, as I had earlier this year, that one of the locations of his Factory was on Union Square, and maybe that will generate more curiosity about his work and the art world he thrived in. The Andy Monument succeeds in transforming my experience of place, but I wonder what would Andy think?

Some people are certain that he would have loved it. Maybe this is how he would have most liked to be remembered - shiny and larger than life.

John Stilgoe has been teaching a course at Harvard on the art of exploring for over thirty years. His teaching depends heavily on the history of the built and natural environments, and he sees elements in our surroundings as portals into larger concepts or moments in time. Manhole covers, for example, are a relic of a historical period when New York City was dotted with cast-iron foundries that produced everything from decorative railings, staircases, doors, lampposts, boot scrapers, and manhole and coal chute covers. In the thousands of miles of sidewalks in NYC you can find the names of these foundries with handiwork from as far back as the late eighteen hundreds intact.19 It is this spirit of inquiry about the landscape – built and natural alike – that turns a daily walk into a fascinating exploration.

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NEW WALL BETWEEN PILLARS

13 W X 8’ H

Designers can reveal hidden narratives of place, but unlocking the secrets of the built environment requires a balance of nuance and complexity. One story can have many different interpretations, and the knowledge we gain can be completely different depending on the perspective of who is telling it. While researching historical places in New York, I discovered an event that seemed to echo a lot of the issues with terrorism that we deal with today. The following is the story I wrote about the event, titled “America’s First Age of Terrorism”: At noon on September 16th, 1920, a wagon passed by lunchtime crowds on Wall Street in New York City.

It stopped across the street from the headquarters of the 5’ J.P.HEIGHT Morgan OF bank at 23 Wall Street, on the Financial COLLAGE District’s busiest corner.

(2” FROM BOTTOM,Inside, a timer-set detonation sent1’100 pounds of dynamite SPACE FROM EDGE with heavy, cast-iron sash weights tearing through OF WALL AROUND)the air. The bomb was an incredibly cruel device that killed 38 people and seriously injured hundreds more, but it merely pocked the firm’s impenetrable marble walls.

The crime was never solved. Labor radicals and anarchists were implicated but never indicted. Beverly Gage, in The Day Wall Street Exploded writes, “Far from being an era of placid reform, the turn of the century was a moment in which the entire structure of American institutions – from the government to the economy – seemed to be up for grabs, poised to be reshaped by new movements and ideas.”20 The 1920 Wall Street bombing was the worst act of terrorism in New York until September 11th, 2001. J.P. Morgan was the most powerful symbol of capitalism at that time since the bank had provided loans to keep the Great War going, but most of the victims were innocent bystanders who made a modest living and did not symbolize American capitalism at all. The marks defiantly remain on the J.P. Morgan building to this day – “the stigmata of capitalism”21 – only blocks away from the site of the worst terrorist attack in history.

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Wall Street Installation

To memorialize this event, I created a site-specific installation that depicts the 1920 Wall Street bombing. For the exhibition, I took this project to human scale by increasing the size of the model threefold. The work takes photography of a three-dimensional object – the site of the bombing at 23 Wall Street – from many different angles, fragments and redefines it and then places is back in a three-dimensional environment to tell a new story. I took each photo at different angles of the building, fractured them at the seams of the building, then collaged the pieces and hung them at different angles from the wall in the composition.

The sepia tone is meant to evoke the historical era, and the fragments of the building still damaged from the blast are placed in the forefront so that the gesture of the work speaks of the explosion.

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Photography: Richard Hall

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Photography: Richard Hall

The viewer is invited to interact with the piece by moving around to experience different angles, and to see different perspectives of the story. On the backside of the fragments, I provided a full account of the terrorist attack – the story above – in different typographic voices. Projected text onto the building adds another layer of meaning and visualizes the communication of the built environment. For the projection I wrote, “They felt injustice then, but now their protests will fall on deaf and vengeful ears.”

The projection was positioned at a distance of fifteen feet so that as people walk through the space they insert themselves into the installation, and into the story. This contributes to the feeling of energy of the city and allows the subject matter to come to life.

My goals when transforming the piece to a larger scale in the gallery space were to communicate the bombing more through the gesture and narrative, and encourage interaction. I created a tactile experience through fragmentation, color and texture that evokes a sense of explosion and invites people to touch and turn the pieces. I wanted to create an experience – to really immerse people in the place and my subjective interpretation of the events on that day. I wanted people to see the photography of the damaged walls of the building, fragmented in this striking composition, and immediately understand the story.

WALL STREET INSTALLATION VIEW FROM ABOVE 7’ WIDTH OF COLLAGE

SKYLIGHT WALL CORD 1

6 in

CORD 2

6 in

CORD 4

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Drawings and photos 6 in CORD 3 from installation 83

The Wall Street installation created an experience that uncovers the history of the urban landscape, and it reveals a richer, multilayered environment than only looking at the space itself. When you walk by the marble walls of 23 Wall Street, the pockmarks are still visible from the bombing in 1920 but there is nothing to memorialize this event, pay respect to the violent era in American history, or bring awareness to the loss of life that occurred. There is a complex and layered story behind the marks on this wall, and looking deeper into our surroundings uncovers this fascinating history. In this way I can offer people unconventional ways to see and understand this place.

In the art of exploration course, John Stilgoe encourages his students to see things that they wouldn’t notice otherwise, and wonder about them, from faded inscriptions on building facades to the reason a statue is facing a certain direction. “I emphasize that the built environment is a sort of palimpsest, a document in which one layer of writing has been scraped off, and another one applied.

An acute, mindful explorer who holds up the palimpsest to the light sees something of the earlier message, and a careful, confident explorer of the built environment soon sees all sorts of traces of past generations.”22 The urban explorer is mindful to go beyond what the visual characteristics are, to investigate why. Even what seems like accidental patterns that appear on surfaces through abandonment, wear or decay have a story to tell.

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Conclusions

In this thesis I’ve explored three main concepts: psychogeography as a methodology to explore the experience of the city landscape; abstraction as a means to simplify and create open spaces, to find order in the chaos; and storytelling as a method of revealing personal, cultural and historical meaning in the built environment.

Psychogeography opened up the possibility of an explorative, experimental approach, and was the vessel that allowed me to navigate towards abstraction and simplicity. By stripping the city environment down to its simplest form I was then able to find an approach to reveal the complexities. When I realized that the city couldn’t easily be simplified, I began to approach the multiplicity of meanings hidden in the built environment. Although the process of weaving in my personal experience was essential for the growth of my thesis, I want my work to be relevant for the community it investigates. It is meaningful to uncover a shared history that is relevant to all people, and powerful to communicate that narrative through both written and visual storytelling.

All of the work I’ve done is based on increasing my awareness of everyday surroundings – making discoveries, documenting and communicating them to others. This awareness, or willingness to be immersed in the narrative of place, underpins the whole thesis. The overall processes can be summarized as follows: Awakening the senses to immerse myself in the area of study; Analyzing the visual and audio information; Research to reveal layers of history of place; and telling these stories. Through this process I’ve realized that as a designer I can reveal hidden narratives of place, to transform the experience of ordinary environments.

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The two projects in the exhibition represented two main themes of my thesis – to reduce and reveal.

There is an inherent duality in the two installations – on the one hand I’m revealing layers of complexity and on the other I’m taking away. The audio installation, paired with the abstracted drawings of the streetlamp, offered a reconfigured experience of Manhattan through isolation and reduction. The Wall Street project reveals a layered narrative, America’s first age of terrorism, discovered from the marks that remain on the side of the building walls.

In order to communicate the experience of the city, it was important for these projects to be site specific. I needed to create a unique experience for the viewer in order to express another one. Like their reflection in the city itself, these installations can only be fully experienced when you are in the space. For this reason, it was of utmost importance to document the reactions to the work, and feedback I received. The most positive feedback I received was when someone told me that everything was there, and didn’t require any explanation.

The audio project was successful in re-imagining the city, and there is a great value in filtering out visual sensory information. However, I would like people to have a stronger sense of place with each audio track. No one I asked could guess the neighborhood based on the audio experience alone, and while this wasn’t the main intention, it would enhance the experience if there were stronger clues communicating the essence of the neighborhood through sound. The drawings complemented the audio collages because of their similar intention of abstracting

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the city. They are a visual reflection of the audio work – an abstraction of one element in the streetscape, iconic to all of Manhattan, while the audio project depicted individual neighborhoods.

Feedback on the Wall Street installation led me to believe that I captured the feeling of transformation of place, in the gallery space and also the Wall Street building where the bombing occurred. After learning the story, people will never feel the same way about that place again.

It was surprising how many people were shocked and didn’t know about the event. The installation revealed a hidden narrative in the built environment that people wouldn’t otherwise be aware of.

Also, the movement of pieces in Looking also is an action the wind was absolutely essential. which confirms or modifies The viewer interpreted the shifting the distribution of the projection while they were placed visible, and that interpreting directly within it. After reading the the world is already a text on the backside of the outer means of transforming fragments, out of curiosity a few it, reconfiguring it. We all people ducked under the second observe, select, compare, layer of fragments to see if there interpret and relate what we was text written on the other side.

This made the project successful observe with the many other for me because my intention was things we have observed on to encourage interaction with the other stages, in other kind work. of spaces, and to make our I think balancing the complexities own poem with the poem of the streetscape and my need for performed in front of us.”23 simplicity characterizes my work.

Jacques Ranciere As a visual storyteller, I’ve begun thinking of myself as a conduit for important stories that are yet untold. Reducing the visual information that surrounds me is essential to understand it, and provides a methodology for approaching the deeper meanings of place. My work is about transforming our experience of place, and place making is about redefining the streetscape.

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Further Directions

In my exhibition, the two installations took experiences of the city streets out of context and into a gallery space.

My ultimate intention is to apply these investigations to the streets themselves. For example, an audio installation could capture sounds on the neighborhood streets in real time and play them back in an abstracted audio collage in one central location. Or the audio tracks could remain in an accessible location in the neighborhood where they were recorded, providing a new experience of their surroundings for residents.

The Wall Street installation attempted to memorialize an event that is largely invisible in the history books, but hanging in a gallery space it does not have the kind of impact that a public memorial would have. Ideally this work would be installed on or near the site of the bombing, constructed out of a durable metal. Instead of hanging fragments, it would be sculpted from the ground. The multiple perspectives would still be intact, and with the story woven among the fragments the piece would reveal the narrative hiding behind the marble walls.

There is so much in our everyday environment that we are unaware of. For example, when you walk through New York City, you probably aren’t aware that six hundred feet below, a group of men called Sandhogs are blasting through one hundred feet of bedrock a day to create the city’s third water tunnel. With the intention to make their invisible work visible I began working on a proposal for a public monument, and a memorial to all those who have lost their lives since the beginning of construction. For site of the monument I chose the above ground location in

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Central Park where, deep underground, the last section of the water tunnel with connect to those existing and will finally provide water to all of New York City after fifty years of construction.

The challenge with memorializing a person, place or event is that there is usually such a complex narrative with multiple viewpoints that it requires a complete museum exhibition. This is the direction that I would be most interested to explore. For example, the Wall Street installation could mark the entrance to a Museum of the City of New York exhibition that educates the public on this violent era of American history. The form of the installation approaches the problem of multiple perspectives, which is most challenging for memorials. Instead of moving around the hanging fragments, people would be able to walk through them to access the full exhibition.

I would also like to use this research for a comparative study in other cities, to continue to study the relationship between viewer and environment, and to understand more about the character of the built landscape and its meaning for people who orient themselves within it. I would like to offer another way of understanding the city; for other urban explorers who are puzzled at the multitude of complexities I would like to create a methodology for finding our own paths and creating our own history while also revealing the narratives already existing around us.

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Endnotes 1 Jacques Ranciere lectures, European Graduate School website, http://www.egs.edu/faculty/jacques-ranciere/lectures/ 2 Debord, Guy, archives of the Situationist International http:// www.notbored.org 3 Hiss, Tony, The Experience of Place. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990, 21-22 4 Ibid 5 Brubaker Chovanec, Tina, “Meaning through form and context: Two Dimensional Translations of the Built Environment”, VCU Thesis, 7 6 Ibid, 3 7 Klee, Paul, Pedagogical Sketchbook, trans. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy (Germany: Bauhaus Books, 1925; reprint, London: Faber and Faber, 1984), 8 8 Fusco Girard, Luigi, “Innovative Strategies for Urban Heritage Conservation, Sustainable Development, and Renewable Energy” Global Urban Development, Volume 2, Issue 1, March 2006, 4 9 Forty, Adrian, Words and Buildings: a Vocabulary of Modern Architecture. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2000, 56 10 Lynch, Kevin, Image of the City. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960, 2 11 Venturi, Robert, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, Learning From Las Vegas. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1972, 12 12 Hiss, Tony, The Experience of Place. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990, 38 13 Ibid, 48 14 Parker-Hope, Tara, New York Times Blog, January 28, 2011, “How Meditation May Change the Brain”, http://well.blogs. nytimes.com/2011/01/28/how-meditation-may-change-the-brai n/?scp=2&sq=meditation&st=cse 15 Tuan, Yi-Fu, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977, 17 16 Lynch, Kevin, Image of the City. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960,167 17 Ibid, 141 18 van Toorn, Jan, “A Passion for the Real”, Design Issues, Volume 26, Number 4 Autumn 2010, Massachusetts Institute of Technology 19 Scraba, Jo “Manhole Covers and Other Art Underfoot” Pratt Institute Thesis, 2001 20 Baker, Kevin, New York Times Book Review of The Day Wall Street Exploded by Beverly Gage, February 19, 2009, http:// www.nytimes.com/2009/02/22/books/review/Baker-t.html 21 Ibid 22 Stilgoe, John R., Outside Lies Magic: Regaining History and Awareness in Everyday Places. New York: Walker and Company, 1998, 6 23 Jacques Ranciere lectures, European Graduate School website, http://www.egs.edu/faculty/jacques-ranciere/lectures/

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Annotated Bibliography Baker, Kevin, New York Times Book Review of The Day Wall Street Exploded

by Beverly Gage, February 19, 2009,

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/22/books/review/Baker-t.html

Aided in research while creating the Wall Street installation.

Brubaker Chovanec, Tina, “Meaning through form and context: Two Dimen

sional Translations of the Built Environment”, VCU Thesis

Provided clarification of semiology and a useful definition of the

built environment.

Debord, Guy, The Society of the Spectacle. France: Buchet-Chastel, 1967

trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, New York: Zone Books, 1994

A book that has inspired and informed my entire thesis path.

Debord, Guy and Asger Jorn, Memoires, 1959

See Antecedents Forty, Adrian, Words and Buildings: a Vocabulary of Modern Architecture.

New York: Thames & Hudson, 2000

In this book I discovered Kevin Lynch’s diagram, Form Qualities of

the City Fusco Girard, Luigi, “Innovative Strategies for Urban Heritage Conservation,

Sustainable Development, and Renewable Energy” Global Urban

Development, Volume 2, Issue 1, March 2006

An article on the value of cultural preservation.

Hiss, Tony, The Experience of Place. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990

See Antecedents Jacobs, Jane, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random

House, 1961

I used words from this book to pair with abstracted symbols relating

to the mental map of an area.

Klee, Paul, Pedagogical Sketchbook, trans. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy (Germany:

Bauhaus Books, 1925; reprint, London: Faber and Faber, 1984)

This book provided a new framework for looking at the ordinary

landscape.

Lynch, Kevin, Image of the City. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960

The investigations in this book inspired the audio installation as

well as the form abstractions. In addition, I was impacted by Lynch’s

poetic description of the Beacon Hill neighborhood in Boston.

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Mute interview with Laura Oldfield Ford, November 25th, 2009

http://www.metamute.org

See Antecedents The Naked City at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychogeography

See Antecedents Parker-Hope, Tara, New York Times Blog, January 28, 2011, “How Meditation

May Change the Brain”, http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/28/

how-meditation-may-change-the-brain/

Aided in research while creating the Meditation project Scraba, Jo “Manhole Covers and Other Art Underfoot” Pratt Thesis, 2001

My first inspiration and realization that my thesis can be about the

ordinary landscape.

Situationist International archives, http://www.notbored.org and

http://www.nothingness.org

Archive of Situationist texts.

Stilgoe, John R., Outside Lies Magic: Regaining History and Awareness in

Everyday Places. New York: Walker and Company, 1998

A beautiful text inspiring people to go out and experience the world. van Toorn, Jan, “A Passion for the Real”, Design Issues, Volume 26, Number 4

Autumn 2010, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

A critique on the current state of graphic design.

Tuan, Yi-Fu, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 1977

A text with references that inspired me to write stories about my

experiences in the city.

Venturi, Robert, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, Learning From Las Vegas. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1972

Analysis of Las Vegas signage, research for the Meditation project.

White, Norval and Elliot Willensky with Fran Leadon, AIA Guide to New York

City, 5th Edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010

In this book I discovered the story of the 1920 Wall Street bombing.

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Thank you.

To my husband Dean: For your support, patience and love.

Alex Liebergesell For being truly inspiring. I hope to one day be able to use language in the gifted way that you do.

Mark Sanders For reminding me to push myself. Your perspective has taught me so much about design, and also reminds me that I have so much to learn.

Michelle Hinebrook For your unique perspective. Thanks to Color Workshop I am not afraid to use color, and lots of it. I enjoyed seeing your process as a fine artist, and thank you for encouraging me to develop this inclination in myself.

Edvin Yegir For your trust and keen insights.

Katya Moorman For your conversation, support and positive spirit.

Sandie Maxa For Seminar. I am so fortunate to have taken that course, developed my voice as a critic, and read, absorbed and discussed so many brilliant authors with you.

Jean Brennan For truly caring. I am inspired by your balanced perspective and open-minded approach to design.

Jeff Bellantoni For the opportunities you have given the inaugural MFA class.

For those of us who needed it, you gave us somewhere to focus our unique efforts.

My classmates: For your talent, intelligence, laughter and friendship.

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