Category: Archive

The physical infrastructure of Foley Square and its surrounding blocks established the tone for the evening of November 17th, the date that marked two-month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street and was dubbed the (inter)national day of action. While the square was overflowing with people, the makeshift placement of barricades reinforced the physical boundaries of public space and that the protesters’ actions were limited. NYPD helicopters, floating above the crowds of Foley Square, echoed this sentiment, as the enduring thumping of the blades (beating against the air to stay afloat) served as an inescapable reminder that air space, too, was subject to restriction.

Among the features of the movement that have garnered the most attention – e.g. its horizontal decision-making process, widespread populist appeal, and lack of specific demands – perhaps the most perplexing and seemingly contradictory has been the movement’s ability to make fluid the relationship between physical space of Zuccotti Park and a more metaphorical space that the movement has occupied via the internet and social media. The combination of physical occupation and subsequent reporting of this physical gesture on the internet infused the small park with meaning and caused the movement to spread nationally and internationally.

In In Search of the Public, a conference organized by PUIC five years ago at Princeton, Mario Gandelsonas spoke about public space and the role of “moments” in achieving place. He said, “’In search of public moments’ refers to time, which is the dimension where the city has always lived, at the point where it becomes space… Before public places can emerge, urban moments must first be possible. This quintessential element of urban environments is both the origin and the precondition for the public. It proves the context for the accidental encounter with the other—the meaningful moment of contact across difference—which is precisely what maintains the field of social enjoyment.”[1]

The city has always lent itself to the notion of place, with accidental encounters between diverse groups of people anchored to physical space. In the context of Zuccotti Park, the coupling of the physical and the virtual has transformed the notion of place, and the effect of face to face contact is amplified by social media. But with the forced removal of protesters and restricted media coverage of the eviction, the municipality confiscated the physical and virtual place (and time) of these occupants– swiftly sanitizing Zuccotti Park from the traces of “place” and “urban moment” left by these individuals and erasing a fluid narrative of the hours until the final removal.

[1]  Mario Gandelsonas, “In Search of the Public Moment: The Architecture of the Contemporary Urban City,” In Search of the Public: Notes on the Contemporary Urban City edited by Mario Gandelsonas et al, 17.

Photograph by Paul Weiskel via The Atlantic.

On June 8, 2011 PUIC hosted the Watershed Atelier on the domain of water in 21st century architecture, urbanism and infrastructure with presentations from a range of disciplines. As a whole, the workshop reinforced the importance of bridging between the detailed technocratic language of water and the spectacular pleasures and dangers of water at its many scales.

The need for outreach was present in Anthony Acciavatti’s discussion of pamphlets that teach residents about the dangers and best practices for living behind a levee and in Antoine Grumbach’s discussion of the role that the watershed of the Seine could have in giving identity and cohesion to the sprawling communities in the territory of the Seine. As several participants mentioned, the improvement of water’s domain in the future will depend on assembling the political will necessary to realize any such project, thus placing architects in the role of liaison with the public in addition to their role as designers. At Los Angeles in early 2012, the group of scholars and designers will continue the discussion of the ways that they can use their aesthetic expertise to alter the relation of environment, power and resource use at the architectural, urban and infrastructural scales.

To start the day, Mario Gandelsonas presented PUIC’s work on soft infrastructure and a case study on slow infrastructure in New Jersey followed by a series of ‘provocations’ aimed at framing the discussion about water. Graciela Schneier-Madanes of CNRS Urban Water Research Network presented the idea of a “water language” able to span the many constituencies, many types of water, and a brief history of the way regulation of water has already shaped the urban environment. Princeton University PhD student Anthony Acciavatti continued the excavation of the influence of government on development through the management of water in his presentation of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in the Mississippi River Basin. Geographer Antoine Fremont, of Systèmes Productifs, Logistiques, Organisation des Transports et Travail, presented a freight-based urban typology of the city and its relation to rivers through history, ending with a proposal for intermodal transportation infrastructure along a city’s edge. Joy Knoblauch, Princeton PhD candidate, examined the aesthetic regimes of the hybridization of urban and agricultural elements in the New York City watersheds and in urban agriculture in Detroit, Michigan, Shenyang, China and Brooklyn, New York.

In the afternoon session, the discussion turned from provocations for design to design proposals themselves. Antoine Grumbach of Antoine Grumbach et Associés presented his work on the Grand Paris project to connect Paris and Le Havre into a unified region connected by transportation infrastructure along the 300 kilometers of the Seine. Henri Bava of Agence Ter presented a project for Hamburg which would similarly connect it with its hinterlands with an urban shipping port of flood-ready islands. Shifting gears, Veolia Environment representative Robert Bozza provided a glimpse of the practices of global capital which select and guide novel approaches to water use and waste management at the 300,000 person company, active in 73 countries. Moving to a local perspective, Pierre Mansat, Adjoint au Maire de Paris, and his colleague Dominique Alba, Director of APUR, described projects to bring Parisians into closer, cleaner and more fulfilling contact with water along the banks of the Seine and through projects to cool citizens in the summer. Ending the day’s presentations, Diana Agrest of Cooper Union presented drawings of water features highlighting their potential to be sources, sites and contexts for design, ranging from Crater Lake to the Bering Strait.

In his closing remarks, Jean-Louis Cohen diagnosed a return of utopianism in the day’s discussion, but the mixture of disciplines, readings, and designs presented in the atelier are far from the pure utopias of the 20th century. The conversation at the atelier chose not to seek tabula rasa, technocratic solutions to the problems of water, infrastructure and environment. Instead, the participants were committed to solutions which are incremental, as well as politically and economically entangled in complex realities of industry, demographics and predictable disasters. In this, the day was typical of a new thread of architectural discourse suited to an age that accepts that everything that seems natural is largely constructed, that the environment depends on capital for its growth if not for its design, and that politics requires the production of aesthetics which can compel its various constituencies. It’s an age that grew up with such theoretical contradictions, and is now launched on asking, so what? How do those realizations help us to help ourselves? Where an earlier generation might have blanched at the instrumentalization of theory, the current conversation begins with the enrichment of the field produced by theory, and then continues with a robust base against which proposals can be tested. Exploring the domain of water in the 21st century is one part of figuring out how to approach a context wherein all solutions are incremental and always already politically and economically entangled in complex realities of industry, demographics and predictable disasters.

*Joy Knoblauch is a Ph.D. Candidate in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture, focusing on the interaction between architecture, government and population. Her dissertation argues that the newly softened institutional environments of the Great Society era were sites of biopolitical research, shaping a new direction for the discipline of architecture toward an enriched understanding of the heterogenous occupants of architecture. She has a Bachelors of Architecture from Cornell University, a Masters of Environmental Design from Yale University and she has worked in architecture offices in Ithaca, New York and San Francisco, California. Knoblauch’s research is supported by the National Science Foundation, the Centre Canadien D’Architecture and the Fellowship of Woodrow Wilson Scholars.*