Emma Pfeiffer

Architecture for Revision

Emma Pfeiffer Advisor: Rosalyne Shieh Readers: Caitlin Mueller, Enrique Walker

The roar of the Grand Central Parkway diminishes as you descend the bridge into Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, picking up speed. The flat park unfurls before you as you pedal. Your eyes, and your bike, follow a shallow trough that veers North. Turning onto this path, the clatter of gravel is audible, along with a nearby conversation, and a distant clanging. The soft and scattered shade of trees is cut by the edge of a roof, into whose cover you pass. The Unisphere glints in the distance. One concrete arch, and then another, crosses your route; you weave between them, in and out of the cover of the long roof. You lock your bike near the concession stand where three paths converge. Someone is selling souvenirs. Between the rows of bathroom stalls you see several cranes lowering something enormous and yellow, slowly, to the ground. You walk up the ramp and join the others to get a better look over the rooftop.

This thesis designs a thirty-year period of change for Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, in Queens. As the site of two World’s Fairs, in 1939 and 1964-5, this park has been the locus of cyclical remaking in successive images of projective corporate optimism. Today, there exist twinned structural and cultural imperatives to disassemble the New York State Pavilion, the single untransformed structure remaining from the 1964 World’s Fair. Constituting this project are a set of strategies for designing in the aftermath of architectural hubris, which foreground congruous and ongoing processes of assembly and disassembly. With a score, a video, and a set of documents, this thesis attempts to set into motion a version of the next thirty years in which Flushing Meadows reprises its role as holder of public imagination as it denies a view of a finite future.

Both images are courtesy of the author.