Diseño y comisariado de la exposición “Other Urban Landscapes”

PIONEERING AN OPEN ACCESS TO THE CITV CITV ANO ART CROSS-DIALOGUES E NEW YORK ARCH 3308 ARCHITECTURAL THEORV-THURSDAV 1.00-4.00 PM -CORNELL AAP NVC CLASSROOM -INSTRUCTOR. MARIA F. CARRASCAL CLOSING SESSION ANO PRESENTATION OF "OTHER URBAN LANDSCAPES" 1-4 PM DIC 6 Using as reference the project "New Urban Landscape", which was a series of publications in single sheet newspaper format created by the lnstitute far Art and Urban Resources during the 1970s to communicate the artists' alternative and genuine perception of the changeable cityscape of Downtown Manhattan, a team of future architects will present their own publication "Other Urban Landsca pes", on their critica! understanding of the city-culture binomial in present-day New York. GUEST CRITICS: PAUL FABOZZI -VISUAL ARTIST, PROFESSOR OF FINE ARTS ST. JOHN'S UNIVERSITV MARGARITA CALERO -SENIOR LEAD ARCHITECT PXWE WEWORK, PH D CANDIDATE ETSAS, PHOTOGRAPHER SERGIO PARDO -ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR NVC DEPARTMENT OF CULTURAL AFFAIRS-PERCENT FOR ART PROGRAM SPECIAL GUEST: ALANNA HEISS-DIRECTOR OF CLOCKTOWER PRODUCTIONS, FOUNDER OF MOMA PS1 AND THE INSTITUTE FOR ART AND URBAN RESOURCES CORNELL AAP ARCHITECTURE, ART, PLANNING NVC 26 Broadway, New York, NY 10004. AAPRTISTS Pioneering an open access to the city situates us in a time when the dialogue between city and art was very much alive, exploring new and innovative fields. A lesser-known part of New York history constitutes an important source of knowledge for current theories and practices on creative city regeneration. During the 1970s, set against a dramatic backdrop of economic crisis, artists found a way to recycle their valuable urban environments and expand the confines of the public and cultural experience. They pioneered advanced research on the growing inactive/obsolete spaces of the city, and developed advanced methods to appropriate them for their purposes. New artistic platforms emerged from which the symbolic production was locally reformulated and the sites invaded were reactivated. Additionally, pioneer bottom-up and top-down procedures, actions and policies for expanding access to the city were then first tested. In 1971, the brochure for the artistic event from which the Institute for Art and Urban Resources was born stated that “by allowing its artistic community involvement in urban landscape, disused and abandoned areas can be meaningful space.” This perception was embraced by other artistic organizations such as City Walls, the Public Art Fund, the Municipal Art Society, Creative time Inc., or the Athena Foundation, which, in their early years, would start an extraordinary recycling and reactivation of the social and urban decaying fabrics of New York City, while forging its public and cultural identity and its sophisticated conception of urban heritage. From the artistic invasion of SoHo to these experimental performances in the broader obsolete cityscape, this course covers a period around the 1970s revealing a city that would become more “alternative”, “public”, “temporary” and “cultural” than ever before. Pioneering an open access to the city ultimately articulates a debate on the relevant role of creative communities in the development of contemporary cities, equally applicable today. It connects the iconic 1970s with the present context of creative city-making, where the micro scale, low-tech, lowcost practices and the engagement with culture and society have again re-emerged. // The course combines lectures, bi-weekly readings and debates on current theories of creative city-making, and visits to pertinent sites in Manhattan, Brooklyn or Queens. Coursework includes research presentations on selected topics, and a photo-essay for an expected course exhibition using the strategies of pamphlet art –an updated version of the “New Urban Landscape” newspaper by the Institute for Art and Urban Resources (1975-1977). Bridge, Craig Konyk and Steve Lamb, 1987. Art on the Beach 8 (1978-1987). Creative Time. Photograph by Thomas Griesel. The Arts and City Planning, American Council for the Arts, 1980. New Urban Landscape, IAUR, 1975. The Socrates Sculpture Park, 1988. Photo Essay Street Art, NYC DCLA, 1969. Art on the Beach, CT, 1980. Ten Downtown, SoHo, 1968. CORNELL UNIVERSITY College of Architecture, Art & Planning, 26 Broadway, 20th Floor, NY, NY 10004 December 10, 2018 Re: Dr. Maria F. Carrascal Pérez Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura Universidad de Sevilla Av. Reina Mercedes, 2 41012 -Sevilla, Spain To Whom It May Concern: As the Gensler Family Sesquicentennial Executive Director of AAP NYC, I was pleased to welcome visiting professor María Carrascal to Cornell University’s New York City center (AAP NYC) for the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning this fall ’18 semester. Professor Carrascal was invited to Cornell University expressly to teach on her research topic, which focuses on creative urban practices in New York City during the 1970s. Appointed Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Architecture for the period of August 16th through December 31st, Professor Carrascal taught an advanced seminar entitled "Pioneering an Open Spaces to the City: City and Art Cross-dialogues on Space from the New York of the 1970s.” The course was an offering in ARCH 3308: Special Topics in the Theory of Architecture. The final review for the course was held on December 7th with a successful exhibition at AAP NYC: “Other Urban Landscapes”. It included the participation of special guests: Alanna Heiss (founder of MoMA PS1 and the Institute for Art and Urban Resources), Paul Fabozzi (Acknowledged Visual Artist and Professor of Fine Arts), Margarita Calero (Senior Lead Architect at Wework, PxWe, NYC) and Sergio Pardo (Associate Director of the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs Percent for Art Program). Professor Carrascal was engaged in a number of related activities during her teaching, including field research, documentation, and organization of visits to pertinent cultural and institutional agencies. She also participated in academic events programmed at AAP NYC. We have benefitted greatly from Professor Carrascal’s intellectual and academic contributions this semester. Thank you for making her participation at Cornell University possible. Should you have any questions, please contact me via e-mail at [email protected] or at my New York City office, 212-497-7597. Sincerely, Robert W. Balder Gensler Family Sesquicentennial Executive Director Cornell University 26 Broadway, 20th Floor New York, NY 10004 E-mail: [email protected] ed u –BASED ON THE 1975 PUBLICATION PROJECT “NEW URBAN LANDSCAPE” BY THE INSTITUTE FOR ART AND URBAN RESOURCES– ARCHITECTURE ART PLANNING NYC CORNELL OTHER URBAN LANDSCAPES #6 GREG KELLER –NIGHT VISION– Night Vision explores the contemporary urban landscape in the context of its night. New York City at night presents new urban conditions where time, ephemerality, rhythm, and experience become abstracted, distorted, and perceptually changed by effect of the dark of the night in battle with the light of streets, buildings, and technological artifacts. Night Vision aims to catalogue these new experiences through the technique of long term exposure photography, an experimental practice formed by Étienne-Jules Marey and Georges Demeny originally for scientific study of movement and rhythm that continued with light painting by artists in the 70s and in contemporary photography. This photographic approach that these artists and scientists took towards understanding movement and rhythm are appropriated in Night Vision to reveal patterns and the “rhythm of the night” of New York City, describing different experiences such as the stillness of otherwise busy streets, moments of intense gathering, horizontality versus verticality, and overall uncover the phenomenology of otherwise intangible perceptions. Through these methods Night Vision ’s objective is to investigate the city at night as characterized by a different energy and spirit inherent and unique to Manhattan. Documenting the dynamic relationship between people, architecture, space, and the night through an appropriately abstract and sensory method builds an argument about how people behave, wayfind, see, hear, and make choices differently in New York City at night versus during the day. Through the lens of Night Vision, the city begins to break itself into several distinct experiences that redefine behaviors and actions. By extrapolating these experiences into different compositions within the project, an understanding of the city at night is read through its vision as all a new city, an anticapitalist city, a still city, but a city still. A NEW CITY “At night... the streets become rhythmical perspectives of glowing dotted lines, reflections hung upon them in the streets as the wistaria hangs its violet racemes on its trellis. The buildings are shimmering verticality, a gossamer veil, a festive scene-prop hanging there against the black sky to dazzle, entertain, amaze.” - Frank Lloyd Wright, The Disappearing City 1932 When the profile of the buildings above merge and abstract themselves into series of glowing squares and rectangles; when those patterns of windows, lights, and streets are arranged in such a way distance becomes secondary; when the relentlessness of these patterns and rhythms visually begin to recompose themselves to conceive a city again: this is the city at night. While New York City during the daytime is often a commonly predictable visual experience, at night the city offers itself anew and reorients, or disorients, its inhabitants. The regular light of storefronts to one’s immediate side, velocity of car headlights to the other, framed by the periodic streetlamp, backed by the “shimmering verticality” of the upper lights of unknown buildings in the distance. This is the visual landscape which Night Vision proposes is the kit of parts with which the city becomes redefined. The aural landscape mirrors these moments with consistent rumblings, inexplicable sounds, irregular hums and overheard conversation which in tandem to the visual aspects of Night Vision help complete a whole portrait of how a new night city is created. The project follows new ways of thinking about the city through alternative visions such as Gordon Matta Clark’s City Slivers (1976), which documents video of the city through manufactued thin frames. Through this technique, Matta Clark offers a new reading of New York through small slices of its experience, selectively presenting some aspects of the city while blocking and removing others. Night Vision documents the city towards a new reading in the same vein of reflection through moving image, a reimagining of the urban landscape under the influence of its night. AN ANTICAPITALIST CITY “I love New York, even though it isn’t mine, the way something has to be, a tree or a street or a house, something, anyway, that belongs to me because I belong to it.’ —Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s 1958 New York City revolves around money. As SoHo transformed over the past decades from a more open and accessible artists hub into a higher end luxury shopping destination, so has the one’s proximity to the cores of the city been alchemized into a series of transactional opportunities. Yet night reexamines the capitalist agenda. What does it mean to move through the city when all the shops, stores, souvenir shops, tourist traps, and banks are closed? Who does the city belong to now? The city’s proud identity as the trade and finance capital of the world becomes homeless alongside the ones who sleep on the streets and subways, while people picking through trash, hopping subway turnstiles, and moving uncaringly across empty avenues undermine the capitalist city of the day and give birth to an anticapitalist city of the night. Night Visions inquires into this night landscape in a way parallel to 1962’s The Wastelands of New York City , which acted an a preliminary investigation into the nature of commercial slum areas and their potential for redevelopment. Accordingly, the city at night presents itself as rather than a tangible and finite area of land in conversation with value but instead as a whole period of time and space open to flexible change and offering alternative futures. A STILL CITY “Cut off as I am, it is inevitable that I should sometimes feel like a shadow walking in a shadowy world. When this happens I ask to be taken to New York City. Always I return home weary but I have the comforting certainty that mankind is real flesh and I myself am not a dream.” - Helen Keller, Midstream: My Later Life 1929 The city barren of cars, closed parks, and empty squares is the expected condition of a city at night, yet these conditions often oppose the values and identity of the place. People at night behave differently due to this stillness and quiet, moving in tighter knit groups, beelining for destinations, ignoring daytime pedestrian standards, and largely abandoning a typical sense of surroundings. While William H. Whyte’s Social Life of Small Urban Spaces offers an analysis of how people behave and interact on sidewalks and plazas, how would his analysis differ if looked at through a dichotomy of day versus night? The social life of nighttime urban spaces as affected by its relentless stillness is explored through Night Vision where the urban fabric blends with time to give perspective into unexpected scenarios and lives of the night. A CITY STILL A Happening is an assemblage of events performed or perceived in more than one time and place. Its material environments may be constructed, taken over directly from what is available, or altered slightly; just as its activities may be invented or commonplace... The Happening is performed according to plan but without rehearsal, audience, or repetition. It is art but seems closer to life. “ - Allan Kaprow, Some Recent Happenings 1966 A new vision of New York City as defined by its night mode must acknowledge the landscape as remaining true to the character and qualities of a city. Some aspects endure from day into night: taxis still roam, stoplights and crosswalks still cycle, and most publicly, Times Square’s flashing advertisements and lights flicker seamlessly from dusk till dawn no matter the audience. Through the filter of the technological artifacts which pervade contemporary city life, the everyday construction of perception is altered. Perhaps the phrase about New York as “the city that never sleeps” is really about its environment, buildings, and light. Night Vision approaches this restless city looking for its identifying happenings, a term coined by Allan Kaprow to refer to public experiences with performance, encounters, and their evolutions. As a project and documentation, Night Vision embodies the essence of a happening, as a series of recorded spatial conditions and the bodies and things which inhabit and perform within the different scales of the city. Night Vision is a gesture which aims to present a new look at our contemporary city and its life,exposing its intangible atmospheres and attitudes to its urban realities and happenings. -GREG KELLER, 2018 ARCHITECTURE, ART AND PLANNING NYC CORNELL PUBLICATION FOR THE COURSE: “PIONEERING AN OPEN ACCESS TO TEH CITY. CITY AND ART CROSS-DIALOGUES ON SPACE . NEW YORK IN THE 1970S” “New Urban Landscape” was originally a series of publications in single sheet newspaper format created by the Institute for Art and Urban Resources to communicate the artists’ alternative and genuine perception of the changeable cityscape of Downtown Manhattan. Artists such as Klaus Rinke, Dan Graham, Peter Barton, Lucio Pozzi, Max Neuhaus and architect Bernard Tschumi were part in this project. They used conceptual photography, happenings, environmental art and other small site-based projects to express their ideas, which were finally captured in these publications. In present-day New York, a group of architects of the future, aware of this publication and of the valuable source of knowledge that the 1970s would be for current creative practices, create their own “Other” Urban Landscape publication based on their critical observations of the city-culture binomial. Instructor: M.F. Carrascal | ARCH 3308 ARCHITECTURAL THEORY ARCHITECTURE, ART AND PLANNING NYC CORNELL UNIVERSITY Director of AAP NYC: Robert W. Balder 26 Broadway, New York, NY 10004. –BASED ON THE 1975 PUBLICATION PROJECT “NEW URBAN LANDSCAPE” BY THE INSTITUTE FOR ART AND URBAN RESOURCES– ARCHITECTURE ART PLANNING NYC CORNELL OTHER URBAN LANDSCAPES #3 CHARLY KRING SOUVENIR CITY