Spanish-born, Rotterdam-based artist Lara Almarcegui’s Guide to the Wastelands of Flushing River — at Ludlow38 on Manhattan’s Lower East Side — carves an interdisciplinary niche at the intersection of photography, urban studies, and performance — a terrain every bit as ambiguous and enticing as the urban spaces documented in her work.

For her first solo exhibition in the U.S., Almarcegui turns her attention to the Flushing River in Queens.  The river bears the scars of last century’s discarded urban agendas: partially buried under Flushing Meadows Corona Park, sliced up by multi-lane freeways, fragmented and mostly abandoned following the decline of industry along its banks.  Almarcegui has exhaustively researched and photographed its litter-strewn remains, and her photos are displayed in a hypnotic slideshow projected on the gallery wall.  They are also printed, with explanatory text, in a pamphlet which gallery visitors are “invited to pick up [to] explore these sites at their own leisure”.

Guide to the Wastelands is the main attraction here, but taken in context with the other works on display (particularly Construction Materials Sao Paulo City, in which she catalogs the relative volume of building materials used to construct the city), the selection reveals a broader interest in the physical stuff that composes the built environment, and the voids that remain when it is removed.  Mostly, this interest is communicated through photographic documentation.  But the inclusion of a portable brochure reveals a hint of the political in Almarcegui’s didactic intent, as if to say “take a guide, get out of your apartment and go see the site for yourself — before developers drop cheap condos on it.”

This gesture places places the work in a lineage of conceptual artists who engage audiences by prompting behavior; Almarcegui’s approach is simply re-tooled for the soft-power, facebook era.  The more we know about the Flushing River (or the Gowanus Canal or Pennsylvania Avenue Landfill), the more likely we are to advocate for its sensitive reweaving into the urban fabric of New York.  Compared to the work of other international artists, Almarcegui’s work is not glamorous.  But by exposing the forgotten spaces in our midst, it just might be more important.

Lara Almarcegui
on view April 17 – May 16, 2010
Opening Hours: Friday – Sunday, 1–6pm and by appointment

All images: Lara Almarcegui,
from Guide to the Wastelands of Flushing River, Queens, New York City, 2010
courtesy the artist and Ludlow 38, New York

As with all review and opinion pieces posted on Urban Omnibus, the views expressed are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Travis Eby is a recent graduate of the Yale School of Architecture. He loves his stoop in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn.

Friday night I braved the cold to attend the opening reception for “Designing the Myrtle Avenue Pedestrian Plaza – Pop Up Exhibition and Workshop,” sponsored by the Myrtle Avenue Brooklyn Partnership and the Myrtle Avenue Brooklyn BID. The event brought together neighborhood residents, business owners, committee leaders, and designers to start a dialogue about the re-design of one of Brooklyn’s most underachieving public spaces. More specifically, it introduced ideas solicited by MABP in the fall after the DOT selected the site for inclusion in the NYC Plaza Program. My attendance was not impartial; I live in the neighborhood and want to see something good go in.

Today, the Myrtle Pedestrian Plaza is a windswept bit of postwar ‘urban renewal’ between Hall and Emerson, Myrtle and Willoughby Aves in the Clinton Hill section of Brooklyn.  Its defining feature is a service road that provides access to suburban-style parking for the single-story retail facing Myrtle. The public spaces – a bench here, a patch of grass there – feel less like a gathering space and more like leftovers at the base of equally anonymous towers.

Most of the submitted proposals had the right instincts to address these problems: create defined spaces, remove parking, encourage a variety of activities at different times of day and year, and incorporate sustainable design features both high tech (solar panels) and low (trees). I found more successful those entries that considered the quality of the space in terms of use and narrative, rather than relying on overly formal gestures to enclose the plaza.

Surprisingly, there was a degree of consensus on the features people want: benches, trees, and markets were all high on the list. There was less agreement on aesthetic sensibility, but it was telling that the MABP was running a slideshow of contemporary – mostly European – precedents (some personal favorites: this, this, this, anything by them). My hope is that when the DOT finally selects an architect, all parties involved aim for this level of quality. Each of these projects creates a unique sense of place by enhancing adjacent urban programs, and in turn complimenting activity with bold, contemporary materials and colors. Each proves that good design need not be overly fussy, expensive, or difficult to maintain.

Further, each avoids the cliché kit-of-parts (think old-timey lanterns and planters) that afflicts most small public space projects in New York. The High Line is one notable exception to this rule, but so were its funding, and the enormous amount of publicity it received. But if the various stakeholders in the Myrtle Pedestrian Plaza think big, there’s no reason they can’t come to a design that grabs the spotlight too.

The Myrtle Avenue Brooklyn Partnership is hosting a workshop on Saturday, February 13th, from 12-5pm. Visitors can check out the pop-up exhibition space at 352 Myrtle Avenue and give their feedback on the proposed ideas.


Image courtesy of the Myrtle Avenue Brooklyn Partnership via Flickr. As with all review and opinion pieces posted on Urban Omnibus, the views expressed are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Travis Eby is a recent graduate of the Yale School of Architecture. He loves his stoop in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn.

Tuesday night at Metropolitan Exchange, John McLaughlin, Director of Environmental Services for the NYC Department of Environmental Protection, presented the lecture “Restoring Brooklyn’s Pennsylvania and Fountain Landfills” as part of the Freshkills Park Talks lecture series. The landfills – on Jamaica Bay, near JFK – were opened in the ’50s, closed in the ’80s, and capped and rehabilitated in the ’00s.  While they look like pristine parkland today, they represent a dark chapter in New York’s environmental history: both sites are listed as Class 2 Inactive Hazardous Waste Sites, which means that beneath their surfaces lie unknown quantities of toxins like benzene and dioxin.

Much of McLaughlin’s talk was Landfill 101: he described the type of membrane used to cap the toxins (40mm plastic), the varieties of topsoil chosen to cover the cap, and the plant species used to repopulate the site. He described the difference between landfills receiving municipal solid waste (like Freshkills), and those receiving more insidious toxins, like Pennsylvania and Fountain.  What lies inside a landfill determines its capping and effluent strategies, but interestingly, it also determines the site’s potential for eventual reintegration into larger sociological and political networks. For instance, public access to the sites is currently a flashpoint between DEP and representatives of East New York. The former want to make sure the site is absolutely safe before opening to the public; the latter want to secure open space for one of Brooklyn’s most park-deprived communities.

I found McLaughlin’s definition of ecological restoration salient: “the process of assisting the recovery of an ecosystem that has been degraded.” I couldn’t help but think of the parallel to urban ‘ecosystems’ like Detroit or the South Bronx – different kinds of sites where designers’ efforts are similarly needed to restore damaged ecologies, via a delicate intervention strategy like that described by McLaughlin. Landfills are simply the most egregious of past misdeeds, and therefore symbolize the daunting scale of our challenges.

As with all review and opinion pieces posted on Urban Omnibus, the views expressed are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Travis Eby is a recent graduate of the Yale School of Architecture. He loves his stoop in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn.

Almost 35 million vehicles use the Holland Tunnel each year to pass between New Jersey and Manhattan under the Hudson River. Probably very few of these drivers think twice about the inner workings of the piece of infrastructure that makes their commute not only easier, but possible.

Lucky for us, Heather L. Johnson let curiosity get the best of her. The result is Air and Blood at Soho’s Glowlab, a tiny gallery on Grand St. “exploring the convergence of art, technology and the urban environment.” In thread on linen, Johnson recreates historical plans, sections, and perspectives of the tunnel, then adds color-coded arrows to illustrate the principles that govern its suprisingly complex engineering. Also included are diagrammatic representations of Johnson’s Vespa – her preferred mode of travel through the tunnel. The representation style is consistent and vaguely biological, and suggests that complex networks govern our lives at multiple scales.

Certainly the subject matter is timely: the High Line and Second Avenue Subway (among many others) have infrastructure on many people’s minds. But equally compelling is the painstaking production process evident in the works. The more intricate threadwork pieces took Johnson several months to complete, and even the tiny textual pieces scattered on the walls took several hours a piece. Like the slow-this-and-that movements leaving organic greens on every dinner plate in New York, Johnson’s work betrays a hint of nostalgia for a time when laborious infrastructure projects (and their pre-CAD documentation) were an indication of civic pride.

If the Holland Tunnel is, as Johnson suggests, a “communal urban lung,” it serves as a fitting point of departure for a body of work that “fixates on the circulatory nature of urban movement, [on] the connection that urban inhabitants, either transient or permanent, have with overarching public transportation systems.” The greatest power of Air and Blood might be that it prompts us to reconsider the paradigm that has left so many city parcels hostage to cheap (and yes, fast) development. Case in point: the banal hotel going up across from the gallery, which also happens to be one of the first buildings commuters see after exiting the Holland Tunnel.

Air and Blood at Glowlab (30 Grand St., Manhattan) is on view until November 8.

As with all review and opinion pieces posted on Urban Omnibus, the views expressed are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Travis Eby is a recent graduate of the Yale School of Architecture. He loves his stoop in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn.

Top image: Heather L. Johnson, Squeeze (1 of 2), 2009, thread on linen, 10 × 28″. Contact Glowlab to inquire about the availability of this work. Bottom image: Heather L. Johnson, Push-Pull, 2009, thread on linen, 6.5 × 8.25″. Contact Glowlab to inquire about the availability of this work.

THE PROVENANCE OF BEAUTY. from Sunder Ganglani on Vimeo.

Gentrification is good; gentrification is bad.  Gentrifiers bring resources to neglected communities; gentrifiers displace longtime residents.  A gentrified neighborhood is better / worse off than it was before.

There is no resolution on this issue, and there probably never will be. There’s also no shortage of opinions. The latest is from New York’s The Foundry Theatre, whose newest project entitled The Provenance of Beauty cleverly merges theater, city, and social commentary. It takes as subject matter and setting one of the city’s most storied and notorious districts: the South Bronx.

The Foundry’s production relies on a staging technique that is simple and innovative: the play takes place entirely on a bus, originating and terminating on 121st St. in East Harlem then moving through the Hunt’s Point and Mott Haven sections of The Bronx. One performer (Sarah Nina Hayon) rides with the audience; she assumes a number of characters to contribute live vocal anecdotes to compliment a chorus of recorded voices – all penned by poet Claudia Rankine and delivered to the audience via personal headsets. The narrative is composed of historic vignettes and anecdotes about specific sites along the route, and Rankine’s pointed commentary about gentrification (and the audience’s role in it) largely corresponds with specific public spaces the bus encounters. One memorable episode concerns the conflicting aspirations of the Giuliani administration and neighborhood residents regarding the creation of Barretto Point Park on the East River [site of the Floating Pool -ed.]

What is most exhiliarating about the roving stage is the way normally unnoticed urban characters and happenings become a part of the performance – a fresh attempt to realize the conceit of city as theater and theater as city. The mother with a stroller waiting at a crosswalk, the well-kept and not-so-well-kept buildings – even the mundane pause at a red light – all contribute to the action unfolding on the headsets. The effect prompts a sharper awareness of the rich fabric of associations we experience every day in the city.

This awareness, combined with the distance introduced by the headsets and tinted windows of the tourbus, is unnerving, and I found myself wishing that the recorded narrative would have relied on this subtle tension to prompt audience reflection. Instead, the script at times resorts to the kind of damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t accusations common to the discourse on gentrification. It seems to assume voyeurism on the part of the audience, as if to say you can never know the South Bronx because you’re not from here – how dare you try?

To be sure, this provocation may be intrinsic to Rankine’s theatrical intentions. But it seems to overlook what makes the South Bronx unique: namely, an ability to repeatedly reinvent itself and thrive. As a friend pointed out afterward, what ultimately makes Provenance compelling is that the South Bronx itself is so compelling: the architecture, the music, the food – above all, the streetlife. Surely the borough that nurtured Kool Herc, Edgar Allan Poe and La Lupe (whose theater and home show up on the tour) has the capacity to integrate newcomers without losing the character that has made it special and continues to inspire creativity of all kinds.

Ultimately, viewers must decide for themselves which bits of narrative resonate and which grate; in short, the performance demands that each viewer arrive at a relationship with the South Bronx on her own terms. If The Foundry’s innovative conception of city-theater prompts this internal reflection, it would be despite its reliance on those aspects of gentrification discourse that we’ve heard before. But it could well foster new imaginative modes of engagement with the built environment and the social relations it structures – and point a way forward for the theater, for the South Bronx, and for New York.

Performances of Provenance of Beauty are at 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. on weekends between September 5th  and October 25th. Reservations: www.thefoundrytheatre.org or 866.811.4111. Tickets: $35.

Read more reviews of this performance:

+ The Village Voice

+ The Daily News

+ WNYC


As with all review and opinion pieces posted on Urban Omnibus, the views expressed are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Travis Eby is a recent graduate of the Yale School of Architecture.  He loves his stoop in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn.