in·fra·struc·ture n.
An underlying base or foundation especially for an
organization or system. The basic facilities, services, and
installations needed for the functioning of a community or
society, such as transportation and communications systems,
water and power lines, and public institutions including
schools, post offices, and prisons.
megas*truc*ture: Self-contained shaped designed form,
self-autonomy building with multi purpose functions. (4)
The present research is going to try to identify and
describe certain spaces and its logics. Also how is it that
they are an un-avoidable condition to Manhattan and its
framing landscape. The first part gives a context by
defining attributes and then how they play between each
other.
Condition: landscapes that are developed without the direct
intervention of the manufacture, they are artificial
accidents of infrastructure interventions. They become
megastructural in their conception, they are not
manufactured by small human based operations but developed
by the excess of the big interventions of the monumental
services for the city. I am interesting in dealing with
these kinds of landscapes shaping by the open-sky
infrastructure.
Picturesque and romantic view point: these are the
landscapes that frame Manhattan. Disposal of (non human, non
manufacture) machinery waste or industrial gigantic waste.
Physical description: open immense lands, particular quality
and identity performed by the exposition to the effects of
time (x-ray character of the accumulation in an archeology
sense) they are transparent to time.
Conformation: they are conformed by the overlaying of ruins
and the non-desired effects of megastructural interventions.
Limits: they are delimited by infrastructures, they are
spread as the organisms that generated them: dispersed areas
performed by linear systems. The highway as an
infrastructure, measures the landscape, while divides,
delimits or starts a new landscapes.
Scale: the megastructural condition of its scale: they are
the result, they are artificial, so the big scale is an
indirect operation and a result at the same time. They can
be measured in the scale of city articulations and with no
mediation. Open spaces that are the result of the
megastructure of the services for the city. But at the same
time, they are surfaces of contemplation and contrast of
Manhattan (object: the city, versus, surface: the land).
Density and low density are unified by these spaces,
abandoned, non-places, which are full of the quality of the
presentness of their absence (of what they have but they are
not). The absence condition of having ruins of Manhattan and
being something empty at the same time.
Size: these are spaces big as cities. Immense and immediate
lands (without mediation but the one of the measurement of
the highways).
Color: brown-green predominant, with metal corroded
infiltrations (tending to become red or brown).
Context: infrastructure, highways, ports, railroads.
Height: predominant horizontal, they are conformed by all
the horizontality of the city waste.
Composition: brown-lands, wetlands, waterfront lands..
Layering accumulation and dispersion of objects of the city
that became land by the process of accumulation. Any tall
condition is going to be minimum compared by the
accumulation of the horizontal layering.
Direction: no direction predominant because they are
horizontal surfaces that spread guided by the tensions of
the chance and posterior bigger structural change.
Surface: They become horizontal non-differentiated lands.
Operations expanded to the field. Works of measurement with
the strange landscapes. (The artist Robert Smithson tries to
deal with these problems by trying to measure these kinds of
vague landscapes -see further sections).
Legal: lands of preservation. Lands of antique contamination
by industries and cannot be used unless decontaminated.
Political: in between city and suburb. Places without
jurisdiction either because the way they grow or appear in
the borders of the city, but they have no clear belonging.
Geographical: next to dense areas, next to industrial areas.
Sociological: places of contrast. Places that became used at
first by workers. Today are closer to poor developments.
Subject: the subject is secluded from these spaces.
Inhabitability of the place, the non-domesticity of these
spaces is what made them useless. Measurements projects by
Robert Smithson are in a way attempts to seize, domesticate
them (they are analyzed in forward sections).
"Robert Moses shaped the city and its sprawling
suburbs...influenced the destiny of all the cities of
twentieth century America. Robert Moses shaped New York....
His power was measured in decades. For forty four years
(1924 to 1968) he held power...without including many other
indirect constrictions, Robert Moses built public works
costing twenty seven billion dollars." (3)
“.... Immediately after World War II, Robert Moses began
ramming six great expressways simultaneously through the
city's massed apartment houses.....He was America's greatest
road builder, the most influential single architect of the
system over which rolled wheels of America's cars...To build
his highways, Moses threw out of their home 250.000
persons....He tore out the hearts of a score of
neighborhoods, communities the size of small cities
themselves, communities that had been lively, friendly
places to live , the vital parts of the city that made New
York a home to its people.....By building these highways,
Moses flooded the city with cars. By systematically starving
the subways and the suburban commuter railroads, he swelled
that to city-destroying dimensions. By making sure that the
vast suburbs, were filled on a sprawling, low density
pattern...based on the car instead of mass transportation,
he insured that that flood would continue for generations...
that NY would be an area...in which transportation...would
be irritating, life consuming concern for its 14,000,000
residents." (3)
The dynamitation of the rocks as a method in the connection
with the Bronx represented the reflection of the effects in
the intervention. The Cross Bronx Expressway changed the
flourishing South Bronx into a desolate area the prototype
of the decline. In 1946 he developed plans for crossing
Manhattan in the Upper, Middle, and Lower zones with
expressways. (One of his ideas was to develop a straight
elevated highway across the empire state's 6 and 7th levels.
Finally In 1966 he was removed from his positions except of
one: the Bridge authority)
The violent interventions together with the concentration of
power to make the decisions, made this interventions
impossible to deal with the identity of a place. All these
movements implicate destruction of the existing and
completely replacement. Replacement for the new means, the
kind of substitution that I am describing in further
paragraphs. These big movements of Moses represent the
modern archetype, and may be that is the reason why Le
Corbusier was for this kind of violent interventions of the
monumental. The modern condition of formal homogeneous
repetition represents the condition of replacing one thing
with the other in the paradigm of the ideal progressive
time. The violent interventions have to do also with the
destruction. The ambition of Moses to transform the
Manhattan’s grid he did not like, produced terrible problems
in the limits of the interventions. The interventions place
brakings in the grid that were not worked out. The bridges
brake through into the city without caring over where or
what were displacing, generating undesired spaces,
landscapes of today's opportunity.
"For decades to advance his own purposes, he systematically
defeated every attempt to develop a rational, logical,
unified pattern.... His highways and bridges were awesome
-taken as the whole the most awesome urban improvement in
the history of mankind.... but no aspect of those highways
and bridges and tunnels was as awesome as the congestion
they generated. He had built more housing than any public
official in history, but the city was starved for housing,
more starved if possible, than when he started building, and
the people who lived in that housing hated it ...almost as
much as the policemen, and this is saying a great deal. He
had built great monuments and great parks, but people were
afraid to travel to or to walk around them." (3)
"The waterfront was the first place to become marginal,
peripheral. There, they were the slums. (Not a people
condition, but an area, that was considered to be an urban
phenomenon. The transformation of the waterfront places also
had to do with an infrastructure element: the highways. The
networks started to appear in the 20 to 30's and then after
the WW2. Before only there were waterways and railroads the
only traffic. The industrial cities had ports and the
inclusion of the flexibility of the truck affected the
landscape of traffic also. New physical planning for the
city. There were formed Regional Planning Associations RPPA
(Lewis Mumford one of the founders). Franklin Roosevelt
supported the initiative and also the highways. (He was then
formal major of New York) The Broker State stared here, the
government was now thinking as a real estate developer. (New
Deal)" (3)
The role of Moses in New York history, without any doubt
incremented the physical contrast between the city as an
object and the remain, the unspecific sites of accumulation.
The violence of the interventions has to do with the fact of
the big of the insertions and how the city could manage to
absorb them. The spaces that resulted to be out of the
container of the City, become even more divided since the
spread of infrastructure sky-open operations. The hard
limits of the basements of the bridges inserting and
violating Moses' undesired Manhattan grid represented
opportunity for desegregation and contrast. These spaces
become injected with what the infrastructure refuses and
rejects from the City.
"Parks and Parkways were developed and they started to give
identity to USA and had to do with the individuality and
independency of the car. Olmstead Parkways were designed as
urban promenades: intercity: city as nature. After they took
a completely new dimension out of this plan.
Is interesting the contrast between Olmstead operations and
Moses. Even though Moses worked on top of Olmstead plans,
their uncontained operations and the scale of the insertion
of cars infrastructure without taking care for the insertion
of these big artifacts, determined the careless of the
remaining of the destroyed articulation with the city." (3)
"Robert Moses: the power broker, he managed to obtain for
New York funds enough for developing new roads: the New
Deal.... The waterfront was appropriate for the collective
highway experience.
He transformed New York to be an immense network of
highways, parkways and expressways.
He transformed the crowded New York into another thing. He
developed the use of the car as a main transportation means,
discarding the access of buses to certain viaducts,
parkways, etc. Today this planning is still present in many
basic problems: subsides to the gas and the facilities for
acceding a car industry that is competing with the
environment. The price of the gas is part of this system and
collaborates to the consumption of units per cars." (3)
The problem of the car also has to do with the new scale
this machine introduced to the city. All the infrastructure
devices for the car has to do with the violent of the
interventions. The aim to produce continuity for the car
means discontinuity for the city, and for the pedestrian
landscapes. In-between absence areas.
"Water was his favorite: New World has to do with the excess
of water. Riverside Park (East Manhattan). Olmstead plans
for the parks provided a basis for the new developments of
Moses. He demolished slums near
waterfront to the development of these parkways ion the east
coast. He was president of the
Tribough Bridge Authority: lots of money available. His
plans are extremely controversial. His parkways were
attempts to destroy the grid of the 19th century. There was
an irreconcilable relationship between the existing and the
new, the contrast for the new as an ideal condition of the
modern. With the success of the industry of the cars after
the boom of the WW2, he committed to construct only highways
that ion a way attempt to destroy the cities, because they
were placed without compensation in the green or scene
parkways." (3) He developed the
landscape of Manhattan as the parkways related to the
skyscrapers scale and the big bridges and the viaducts and
ships. He had a quality for thinking in big. Le Corbusier
and Gideon supported these interventions especially in the
context of the intervention of the Rockefeller center. The
riverside expressways were adopted in many places out of
NY.
"These interventions injected a large scale of urban
infrastructure never seen before. President Eisenhower gave
another stimulus to the highways connections and networks
1957.There was segregation appearing from these
interventions and he was surprised for the results. Inject
breath spaces. The interstate highway network leaded to the
dismantled of the existing cities, and the creation of
instant cities. " (3)
The undesired Landscape generated by Robert Moses is the
construction of memory of what New York came to be.
Landscapes of contrasts and accumulation. Accumulation, that
is border generated by the violent insertion of the scale of
the infrastructure. Tensions about the same scale that can
only be accumulated in these careless borders of the
marginal. The marginal that ironically contains the missing
memory of what was suppose to be framing or conserving as
memory. The missing memory of what was displaced (framed)
and replaced, substituted.
TIME
We have the condition of the time attached to the
accumulation that these space produce. Time that these
places can inscribe trough accumulation; that is the way
they can produce identity while their expansion; their logic
is consistent even in their growing. This last condition is
contradictory to the condition of the postmodern city where
accumulation is no possible and logics are all the time
substituted by the new.
SUBSTITUTION
There is no place for substitution, because the tensions are
accumulated, not replaced. In the object, the new replaces
the tensions of what was before, so no memory can survive.
The condition of the modern American city is the
replacement, the substitution. The condition of the formless
undesired landscape is the identity of the displaced by the
historical writing and imprint of the accumulation.
Unmotivated from any kind of symbolic representation, the
accumulation describes archeologically the tensions and
strata of its generation. The contrast with the object is
the replacement and the symbolic contained substitution of
the non-contextual and non-historical respect of the new.
Olmstead's Central Park is an object as a new artificial
designed landscape -or should we say landscaper,
megastructural building- contrasted by the undesired
marginal infrastructure landscapes of Moses, which I am
developing in further sections.
mem·o·ry: the faculty of retaining and recalling knowledge;
recollection. (7)
ACCUMULATION
The artificial landfill of Fresh Kills in Staten Island is
an example of the way the displacement of the historical
writing of World Trade Center may illustrate the condition
of accumulation versus substitution. The writing in this
context would be the representation of the processes that
shape the professional response to the events of 9-11. The
ruins of the World Trade Center were displaced to Fresh
Kills and relocated without any thinking, but only the
un-motivation of a symbol that only a landfill can resist.
Fresh Kills may contain in the future a memorial area, and
may be is going to deal with the archeological strata
recovery of the parts of the WTC. But, by this moment,
unclassified rests of the building are being accumulated in
the landfill as anything else. This unique ironic
displacement that include rest of victims of the disaster of
the terrorist attack, is going to bring additional meaning
to the accumulation, serving as an unique reference for
memory by this condition. This event clearly represents what
I am seeking for: displacement that the city wants to get
rid of, garbage, that becomes ironically the best material
for motivating identity and memory of the object of the
city, becoming its marginal but framing undesired landscapes
of accumulation. The interesting point is about this
undesirability of the object, its marginal condition.
Because is when memory or history can be inscribed without
motivation of the symbol of what society wants from them. It
is pure manifestation and writing (inscription in the
accumululation) of the past.
In contrast we have the object of the city: motivated with
the desire of citizens. The need for the symbolic postmodern
condition of the representation of the pervasive persuasive
system. The object becomes a place where the replacement is
the unique condition for the advance in time and growing in
density. Substitution of identity in places that become
impersonal but completely motivated by new representations.
The object can only subsist by being substituted by other
objects: replacement of the new. This is the fear one has
with the future of the Site of World Trade Center. The site
seems to be be-coming the place for the replacement, for the
continuity of the desire of the American city: substitution
with the new. Could be this the reason why nothing can be
done there? The paraplegic contradictory condition of being
a model for the American city and being unable to deal in
this case with demanded "democratic" memory. People in this
democracy are asking for individual representation, people
have the desire of its symbolic motivations to be
represented there. This can only be satisfied with symbolic
representations that can only replace the past, and not add
anything else to the existing but replacement with the new.
Substitution of WTC may come by these tensions, but by this
way memory will never be addressed. If substitution takes
place within the tensions of the real estate market with
symbolic representations of the disaster of 9-11, memory
will not be addressed, but more motivation of symbolisms.
Another condition of accumulation would be convenient for
the site, but is not part of the focus for the paper but
framing some contextual actual problem for the discussion.
The landscape of the surrounding measuring Manhattan. The
twin towers becoming the landscape Fresh Kills in a way is a
continuum story. Lands where the tensions are disposed. As
New Jersey, Staten Island is also the frame of Manhattan as
it is Brooklyn, Bronx in other ways. The landscape for the
measurement and the seize of the horizon in this open
waterfront lands. From these lands you can measure
Manhattan. From the site of the landfills one can see the
site of the Twin towers and in this way represents a
relation in the way as a memorial. The towers icons of
Manhattan become suddenly the earth of an island that also
frames Manhattan.
THE SEARCHING FOR THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL BY MEANS OF
UNDERSTANDING THE DIFFERENT:
The sublime
\Sub*lime"\, v. i.
(Chem.) To pass off in vapor, with immediate condensation;
specifically, to evaporate or volatilize from the solid
state without apparent melting; -- said of those substances,
like arsenic, benzoic acid, etc., which do not exhibit a
liquid form on heating, except under increased pressure. (7)
Sublime refers to an aesthetic value in which the primary
factor is the presence or suggestion of transcendent
vastness or greatness, as of power, heroism, and extent in
space or time. It differs from greatness or grandeur in that
these are as such capable of being completely grasped or
measured. By contrast, the sublime, while in one aspect
apprehended and grasped as a whole, is felt as transcending
our normal standards of measurement or achievement. Two
elements are emphasized in varying degree by different
writers, and probably varying in different observers: (1) a
certain baffling of our faculty with feeling of limitation
akin to awe and veneration; (2) a stimulation of our
abilities and elevation of the self in sympathy with its
object. The element of magnitude in beauty was noted by
Aristotle, and given by him a prominent place in tragedy.
But the earliest extant determination of the sublime as a
distinct conception is in the treatise ascribed to Longinus,
but now supposed to be of earlier date (first century C.E.).
In modern philosophy, it was given special prominence by
Edmund Burke in his Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful
(1756) and Henry Home in his Elements of Criticism who
sought a psychological and physiological explanation.
According to Burke, it is caused by a "mode of terror or
pain," and is contrasted with the beautiful (rather than
being part of the beautiful). Kant also distinguished it as
a separate category form beauty, making it apply properly
only to the mind, not to the object, and giving it a
peculiar moral effect in opposing "the interests of sense."
He distinguished a mathematical sublime of extension in
space or time, and a dynamic of power. Most subsequent
writers on aesthetics tend to bring the sublime within the
beautiful in the broader sense insofar as its aesthetic
quality is closely related to that of beauty. (7)
The potential of these lands abandoned to be seen as
a potential field of operations. The quality of these spaces
is to be constructed with the absence of manufacture. They
are developed with the otherness, with the excess of the
city of Manhattan. To study the ecology of these spaces and
its evolution is to study the conditions of the present.
They develop all the time ruins of history, and that is why
they can collect identity. In the
context of the analysis I will introduce as help for the
description and interpretation to the frame, the concept of
desire:
"Desire is modeled in transgression against form and the
forces for desublimination, but at the same time subliminal
act of incorporation and identity
derived from the non formal condition." (2) "I think people
se the manufactured object, by virtue of its untouched
quality, as a perfect object. (These qualities became from
the machine) And as it the model for the craft object
-rather than something that predated it -all craft objects
become failures in respect to it. I am interested in objects
that try to play up that schism -between the idealized
notion behind the object and the failure of the object to
attain that.-" Mike Kelley Formless (2)
The city has certain chaotic form, but Manhattan has certain
grade of homogeneity, especially if we think it as an object
that can always be clearly delimited. The landscapes I am
referring to has no form or cannot be delimited: neither
named, but artificially and imprecisely, that is the reason
why, I am not putting a name to the problem, to be able to
keep on moving, thinking and not freezing, making the
problem static, but dynamic all the time. They have no
limits, although they are the frames for the object: they
put a certain limit to the landscape. They are result of
machine infrastructure conditions, in this respect they are
not worked out, but they become developed by the forces of
the context of non-manufactured places. (Places that perform
pure form and rationality in its independence).
Robert Smithson: "A TOUR OF THE MONUMENTS OF PASSAIC: NEW
JERSEY"
The dialectical space. (1)
Un*sublime: or becoming non-sublime:
The condition of un-motivation of the desire of pleasure.
The non-transcendent condition of the immediate. The
antithesis of the beautiful, or considered beautiful by
society. In this context what is considered interesting and
has the potential to be twisted to another level or concept
of what could be perceived as beautiful. In the context of
this research, non-beautiful or to be more specific,
un-sublime would be an ironic metaphor for what society
understands as ugly. Again, may be an state for seeking and
understanding other aesthetics or processes. Understanding
tensions and developments and the problem of the city as an
object and its surrounding as unshaped framings. Something
to be unfolded, to understand some problem, may be this is a
seeking for some different approach to what could be
considered beautiful. Cultural convention and processes
shape our taste or discerning to form our concept of beauty.
To unfold these ready solved conventions in looking after
other conditions is the objective of the paper. Turning the
unfolding in an understanding and the understanding into a
level of beauty. The true is beautiful for the modern, what
is true today may have no sense, but to understand something
in some context may have more sense. No judgment but
discrimination between qualities of a problematic.
Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey are an attempt of Smithson
to change the perspective of a vision. To unfold logics and
shift our perception. Earthworks, manufacture of the
artificial soil. The unitary chaos condition of the resulted
landscape. Machines, dinosaurs post industrial city. Ruin of
the fountains. A parking lot that divides the city in half
may also be part of the scope, interventions of lands of
loose qualities. The dead light of the Passaic afternoon
desert became a map of infinite disintegration and
forgetfulness. All sense of reality has gone, illusions.
All these problematic overlap with the problems I
have been describing and with the perspective I want to
introduce about the non-subliminal condition of these
landscapes of accumulation. New Jersey is the land of odd
confusion, the lurking across the land. The city of the
industry is as an immeasurable spread thing that is about
land, not object. But, at the time, is able to measure the
object of Manhattan.
Measure problems: they are immense and immediate at the same
time. The difference is that Robert Smithson interventions
and the spaces themselves are measured with the same
material. This implies other scale of operations and
functions in the site, but they are different and they have
form, they are not a desire for the formless.
OLMSTEAD AND THE ARTIFICIAL CONSTRUCTION OF AN
OBJECT-LANDSCAPE:
New York and the internal framing that Central Park
proposes: it is a delimited, designed and clear, precise and
beautiful picturesque landscape. On the contrary, the
discontinuity of the suburban landscape of New Jersey, that
is not yet suburban but the in between city and suburb
landscape, is thus because of the in between isolated
formless areas of land.
"Inherent to the theories of Price and Gilpin, and in
Olmstead's response to them, are the beginnings of a
dialectic of the landscape. Burke's notion of "beautiful"
and "sublime" functions as a thesis of smoothness, gentle
curves, and delicacy of nature, and as antithesis of terror,
solitude, and vastness of nature, both of which are rooted
in the real world, rather than in a Hegelian ideal." (1)
"Price, Gilpin and Olmstead are forerunners of a dialectical
materialism applied to the physical landscape. Dialectics of
this type are a way of seeing things in a manifold of
relations, not as isolated objects. Nature for the
dialectician is indifferent to any formal idea." (1)
Making a counter argument to this passage in Robert Smithson
writings, I would propose Central park is in itself a
construction with limits, borders (if they did not exist
before, they were forced). For Smithson, his artificial
interventions are the result for the tensions of the region
that are shaped and placed, but if we consider the hard
limits and the nature of the intervention, it is not so
unfair to believe that the park was conceived with all the
premises of a building in itself. The park in the context of
Manhattan is not a park but another building with similar
characteristics of the skyscrapers: sectional programming,
lots of infrastructure needs, tall (in this case in
horizontal) and thin (wide). Central Park proposes
horizontal and levels relations to the city, with all the
problems an object can have.
"Olmstead parks exist before they are finished, which means
in fact that they are never finished; they remain carriers
of the unexpected and of contradiction on all levels of
human activities, be it social, political, or natural." (1)
As a gigantic building, Central Park develops relations with
Manhattan as any other of its megastructure (4). Again,
turning back to the object of the paper, the condition of
megastructural intervention in a landscape, in these cases,
produces the tensions for the exclusion. Again, the contrast
in Manhattan after an intervention of this scale is what
remains segregated. Is in this case, the landscape of
outside the island that is out of the intervention, is out
of the problem of the self contained object-building-megastructure
of Central Park. Is at the same time internal frame for the
object that measures its own landscape looking to its
inside. From outside, one cannot notice the presence of
Central Park, the object of Manhattan has the presence of
its clear borders. And Central Park is inside, contained and
self-sufficient. Outside are the remaining and the result of
the intervention. Even though Central Park develops clear
and evolved relations with the city of Manhattan, this work
tries to set up a different perspective for constructing an
argument. Central Park is an unique and very well developed
intervention, but I am trying to set up a basis for making
another argument of what is outside its limits and by the
contrasts Central Park represents to the lands I am working
with.
PARADOX-APORIA of modern measure by James Corner. The
relationship with the environment seems to be constructed
upon dichotomies and oppositions that cannot seem to find a
common measurement.
"Everything here is real and pragmatic, and yet is all the
stuff of dreams too....America is utopia made actual."
Baudrillard (2)
Violence, indifference and estrangement. Misfortune, stress
symptoms of a dismeasure, symptoms of radical inequity and
incongruity between things that comes as much as from the
land as from social conflict. On the surface, America is a
carefully measured landscape of survey lines: highways,
railroads, ports, and channels. They are all efficiently
laid out with ingenious indifference to the land, crossing
different landscapes with cold indifference, as Moses
interventions of replacement. Although there is a
qualitative determination: there is a spatial determinations
of survey, analysis of size, scale and interval continue to
surface the land, but these determinations are made without
knowing the site of operation.
In "FORMLESS, a user's guide” by Rosalind Krauss et Yve
Alain Bois (2), there are many points of contacts and
overlapping in the descriptions of problems around the
nature of these lands and their descriptions of its logics
by the comparison with artist that work out similar
problematic.
IDENTITY contradiction of these problematic:
Without determinate form, it has the identity of the
historic narrative. Overlaid information about past actions:
the identity of the modern ruin, the post industrialism
produced these "ruins" during the modern progressive time.
Jackson Pollock by superposition renders landscape tensions
that remain its identity even though its accumulation of
work: quality of these lands. Smithson tries to measure
these landscapes with the same material they are made, they
same scale of operations and with same devices by which they
are produced (machinery). Pollock and his horizontal
overlaying of filters of accumulation that conforms these
landscapes and bring their identity. Subliminal condition of
mapping time and evolution. Formless of the imagining and
capturing of these spaces that is interesting. The non-shape
due accumulation. The formless of the horizontal condition
and their becoming landscape.
HORIZONTALITY:
There is no part even no whole, everything belongs to the
formless and the horizontal. Any object in the landscape
becomes to the horizontal accumulation or a deformation of
the horizontal accident repeated. No object condition to the
landscape. No relation between part and whole. There is no
part or whole, but a field without limits. The object cannot
appear as an object, it belongs to the ground by
accumulation. Horizontality makes something appear as a
deformation in that continuity of the field.
ENTROPY condition:
Own condition of adding disorder and chaos and remain
similar in general quality as a landscape.
In its growing it keeps its ability to perform the
homogeneous quality of the disorder, winning entropy and
identity in the accumulation. They have an increasing
condition of chaos that solves in the accumulation ordering.
They become with the time their own. Consistency
homogenization of the waste.
THRESHOLD
The threshold is not an operation that can be practiced
because there is no entire object. The condition is the
constant blurring of the threshold into the whole as a
quality of its consistence.
In the process of this presentation
conditions of formal qualities were addressed to
inform certain kind of undefined places -landscapes- and
their relation, by contrast to Manhattan the -object- city.
The duality of the reading and description of this relation
is a way to introduce the problematic. Even though, I
believe there are many unresolved contradictions and
graduations in the faced project to continue to work with.
The places of non figure and horizontality exists today and
are not developed due to a vague condition of its political
logic, that the city cannot take care of. The pressures of
the market are still not dangerous to this immune lands.
This characteristic remains its logic and identity at the
same time, until the shift in the perception of these spaces
come with the conviction enough to produce a qualitative
change. I believe in these places as opportunities for
changing the condition of the American city to a new
condition of growing by accumulation and not by substitution
of the new.
This is the way the city could deal with its own history and
memory: by a consistent accumulation that performs the
identity of a place. Is interesting during the analysis the
founded contradictions between what the city produces, what
are their excess and how the excess cannot be absorbed and
are kept apart and, contradictory, they become the forgiven
identity of what they are suppose to be kept apart of.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
1-Nancy Holt: "The Writings of Robert Smithson", New York
University Press, NY 1979.
2- Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss: "Formless, a user's
guide", Zone Books, New York, 1997.
3-Robert A Caro: "The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the
Fall of New York", Vintage, New York 1975
4- Reyner Banham: "Megastructure: Urban future of the Recent
Past", Gustavo Gilli Ed., Barcelona, 1978.
5- James Corner and Alex S. MacLean: "Taking Measures Across
the American Landscape."
6- Gilles Deleuze: "Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation",
Portmanteau Press, New York, 1992.
7- Definitions: www.dictionary.com
8-Evolution of Manhattan Waterfront Activities at the book:
Ann Buttenwieser: "Manhattan Water Bound. Manhattan
Waterfront from the seventeenth century to the present.",
Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, NY, 1999
Bayonne Local Redevelopment Authority: "Building for a
Future" Brochure, City of Bayonne, New Jersey.
One of the most violent and
interesting intervention in Manhattan is probably the net of infrastructure that
divides the city through the Washington Bridge system of highways that run
across underground Manhttan without entering into the City.
