-C.S.

A selection of videos from blocks in Manhattan

What is MyBlockNYC?
Alex Kalman: MyBlockNYC is a site that allows users to share videos on a map. It’s an interesting balance between a video sharing website and a new kind of map, and we are still asking ourselves which one is primary. You can explore the videos geographically — through a video’s location on a map of New York City — or thematically — through basic thematic categories like food, or sports, or transportation, or crime.

It started with a very simple idea: we found ourselves excited by the constant capturing and sharing of little moments in people’s daily lives. Yet the platforms for hosting, sharing, organizing and presenting these videos are limited: they don’t put the individual videos together in a way that says something larger or builds them into a cohesive language. The impulse to use MyBlock isn’t just “Oh, I heard about this video; let me find it and watch it.” The impulse is “I’m interested in this idea or this part of town; let me explore that.” The idea of exploration is very important to us.

Alex Rickard: On most video sharing websites, if you want “A,” you type “A,” and you get “A.” There is no sense of exploration beyond “A.” Those sites are big buckets into which everyone can pour material and then dig through to find videos to watch.

Kalman: With MyBlock, we wanted to do something more meaningful with user-generated videos. We had the idea that the moments people document on video and share are the building blocks, in a way, of a new city, one that can be explored by anyone in the world.

Users can start to take trips through areas based on their interests. And they can also define their own landscape, they can build their own city that’s an amalgamation of so many different personal visions and interpretations – as opposed to the singular perspective of a Hollywood film about a city. Taken together, these multiple moments create the whole picture of a community.

The various ways to search MyBlock content include thematic categories such as food, sports, crime, community, news, work, landscape, landmarks and music. Additionally, users can search based on the age and sex of the filmmaker, whether he or she is a local or a tourist, and other identifying characteristics. MyBlock is currently developing finer grained categories of searchability.

So, it differs from a narrative film about a city and it differs from the current crop of video-sharing websites. How does it differ from other mapping platforms or sites?
Rickard: Some people have compared MyBlock to Google Maps. We love Google Maps; we love Street View; these are incredibly powerful tools. One way to characterize the difference is that with Street View, you can see the cars parked on a particular street or the fronts of buildings; you find the closest subway station or which side of the street a restaurant is on. But does it give you a sense of the life or cultures or communities in that neighborhood? On MyBlock, you can go behind the visible surface to get an idea of the life of a certain block: what it sounds like, what people look like, what kind of action is going on. We’d like to add an experiential and explorative dimension to mapping that hasn’t existed before.

A selection of videos from the Morris Park neighborhood of the Bronx

It also seems to have an archival sensibility. What makes it distinct from other databases or archives of urban images and storytelling?
Rickard: We want the site to become a living archive of the city, documenting neighborhood change over time. I think that is going to be an immense resource for future historians and for people curious about how places change.

Kalman: I’m not sure I’ve come across databases of information that are as visually seductive as MyBlock. The stories contained within it will certainly be of value to, say, a sociologist gathering information, but its value also comes from being fun, engaging entertainment. It’s great for kids; it’s great if you’re bored; and it’s great as a source of a certain kind of data about how we live now. For me, it’s important to mix the high and low. That’s why the fact that MyBlock was included in Talk To Me at the Museum of Modern Art was so exciting for us. For an institution of high art to be displaying videos made by high school students in the Bronx demonstrates the way an interface such as this can create opportunities for distinct communities to intermingle in ways they otherwise might not.

Click image to play video

Tell me about your partnerships with the schools.
Kalman: As we were developing the concept for MyBlock, we started thinking about the teenage journey through New York City and the richness of that experience. We felt it was very important to include teenage voices. And we also felt that in this age of the prevalence of video technology, it was important for teenagers to understand the potentially powerful uses of creating their own media.

So we thought to ourselves, how wonderful would it be if making a MyBlock video – a mini-documentary about your block – were a homework assignment for students? It would be an opportunity for high school students to represent their own identity as part of the community. And so we approached the Department of Education, which advised that we create some relationships with schools and test out our crazy idea. So we did that, and based on what we learned we created a curriculum and lesson plan. The program is designed to be flexible enough to accommodate any school’s preferences or limitations. If they don’t have cameras, we loan them cameras. If they don’t want to spend a whole semester on it, there’s an abbreviated version that takes a couple of weeks. If they don’t have any money, that’s okay because the program is free.

Image excerpted from "The Field Guide to Street Filmmaking" produced by MyBlockNYC for New York City public high schools | Illustration: Victor Kerlow

Rickard: As of now, we’re working strictly with public schools. Most of the students have never picked up a video camera before. One teacher expressed to us that after seeing her students’ videos, she had a far better grasp of what they go through every day.

Give me some examples of students and the kinds of videos they made.
Rickard: One powerful example is Jamal’s video. He was one of the high school students in our pilot program who has since become one of our interns. He made a really strong video about a murder that took place in his building. It documents the crime scene, the community’s response, and provides this incredible firsthand access and a deeper level of awareness about our city and its inhabitants’ daily experiences.

Click image to play video

The curriculum you developed invokes the “civic possibilities of video.” What does “civic video” mean to you?
Rickard: Maybe this is overly romantic, but I think of uploading a video to MyBlock as means of participating in the defining and redefining of our city. It’s almost like a way of voting, of taking responsibility for a full and true representation of who is in our city, what our city is like, what we like and don’t like about the way our city is.

I also think that humanizing issues — including personal perspectives on urban challenges like crime — can be a very effective way of addressing problems. Video is a tool that can bear witness to social conditions in powerful ways. When harnessed properly, it can be very powerful.

Why else do you think making videos is an important skill for young people to learn?
Kalman: Video can travel all around the world within a matter of moments, and the language of moving images is universal. And many, many people have this tool in their pockets that can create video, that can create hard proof of what happened in a given situation – like the documentation of police tactics with Occupy Wall Street, for example.

Rickard: And beyond bearing witness, there’s video’s potential for citizen journalism. I think the key thing about video is its accessibility – both for creators and consumers. Everyone with a cell phone has the capacity to document his or her life, so let’s give each of them the tools to craft that documentation into whatever it wants to be, whether that’s advocacy-based citizen journalism or a memento of a first date.

MyBlock’s inclusion in Talk to Me seems to put it in a group of technological innovations that foster the communication between people and objects. What does that mean to you?
Kalman: A lot of the objects in Talk To Me had a very specific application, like here’s a pair of shoes that make you seem taller or here’s a pill that makes your poop different colors in order to diagnose you with various diseases. But MyBlock differs from those projects in that it doesn’t really have a precise and singular goal in mind; it’s very open-ended.

Rickard: MyBlock is about the city speaking for itself, citizens speaking for the city. Talk To Me took all that communication and re-inscribed it within the museum. The installation was a large touch screen monitor that was positioned like a drafting board. Museum visitors could physically play and drag around the map of New York, then zoom into a particular block and have it come to life within the walls of the museum.

Kalman: And I liked the ways in which MyBlock knocked down those walls, in a sense. In the context of Talk To Me, MoMA wasn’t just a temple of high design and art for the presentation of artefacts selected by curators. And it wasn’t like a spotlight on this precious design object. Any moment, uploaded by anyone, anywhere in New York City could be found within the museum’s walls. In a way, we flooded the museum with New York City.

Click image to play video. For this video, a MyBlock user visiting from Singapore recorded himself in Times Square proposing to his girlfriend via a series of iPad notes. He then brought her to the Talk To Me exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art and watched as she selected the video and experienced the proposal on the MyBlock kiosk in the gallery. When the MyBlockNYC team learned of this plan, they made sure to document the unfolding of events themselves; watch their video here.

When and why did the emphasis on the block as the organizational framework for these place-based videos emerge?
Kalman: When we started to narrow down our vision, we started to ask ourselves,  “what is the tangible unit of New York City?” An entire world exists on a block of New York.

Rickard: I think the idea was to work with the preexisting organization of the city and not try to pin drop or abstract it, but to facilitate the predefined associations.

Kalman: Exactly. Integration into the city’s landscape as it is experienced was important for us. Most map services use the concept of the pin drop to denote location, but the pin drop is not a tangible aspect of urban experience, it has no preexisting relationship to the architecture or layout of the city.

What do you think the users of MyBlock can learn about New York City from exploring the content on the site?
Kalman: It’s less about the facts and more about the nuances of place. One example is a Japanese woman who had previously lived in New York and missed it terribly when she returned to Japan. Someone shared the site with her, and she let us know that she started crying when she was checking out the site. Finally, she said, there was a way to reconnect emotionally with a place she loves.

Rickard: New York is such a diverse place. When you see a video somewhere else on the internet, even if it is labeled as taking place in New York, there is no immediate way to juxtapose it to another view of the same place or some other geographic relationship. But with MyBlock, users can look at one block and see the interplay of all these different worlds within finite locations.

Kalman: And (as long as its not pornographic or inappropriate) it isn’t controlled or dictated by any editorial voice.

Do you think this way of engaging with images and stories of New York challenges some of our assumptions our iconic city and the ways we are used to imagining it?
Kalman: I think so far what’s it’s doing is re-affirming the common notion of New York as having this raw energy, this amazing mix of unique strong characters that makes itself known to you as you walk the city’s streets.

Rickard: I think that we also get really excited with the idea that politicians and policymakers could use this website to get a better sense of what is going on in the city. The statistics and data points that generally guide daily decision-making at City Hall are limited by their lack of faces or tangible personal experiences. Another way it could be used is simply to get a better sense of a neighborhood, whether you’ve lived there your whole life or you’re a visitor preparing to do an apartment swap.

Where is the project going next?
Kalman: We’re trying to figure out how to take this simple idea and start to focus on what our users want, as well as how this can be actually used beyond entertainment and exploration. So the next steps are to develop ways to help people use the site to improve their understanding of some aspect of New York, lo learn what the city’s like from a first-hand perspective.

Rickard: It’s at the proof of concept stage right now: we needed to design it, get it out there and see how people use it. Now, we are really excited to optimize what we have launched. I think once we figure how it can work best for New York City, we are excited to bring it to other cities, both in this country and around the world. We want to continue to mature our search engine and how people filter through this content, and to find more practical uses for the site. I think that right now it’s fun, it’s entertaining, it’s leisurely, it’s art. But the next step is to get some practicality out of it for our users without weakening our commitment to art, self-expression and exploration.

Alex Kalman, co-founder of MyBlockNYC, is a first-generation American. The son of a graphic designer and magazine editor from Hungary and a writer and illustrator from Israel, Alex grew up walking the streets of New York with his eye on the vernacular. Alex is a founding member of renowned New York City production company, Red Bucket Films, whose features, shorts, docs, and commercial works show in theaters, festivals, galleries, and publications around the world. Alex currently lives in New York City.

Landscape designer, teacher and writer David Seiter has been researching the city’s underappreciated plant life and finding ways to highlight its value. Seiter is the founding principal of Future Green Studio, a firm that works “to reveal the nuances of our urban landscape in subtle, poetic ways that provide clues to the complex ecology of cities.” Here, he presents “Profiles of Spontaneous Urban Plants,” an effort to champion the ecological and aesthetic benefits of informal vegetation, and shares the Studio’s beautiful and charming series of illustrations, based on traditional botanical classification drawings, of the wild urban plants found surrounding their Gowanus office. (Click on any of the images to launch a slideshow.)

- V.S.

Dandelion, highlighted | 3rd Street, Brooklyn

Although we tend to think of our cities as concrete jungles, our post-new urban environment is awash in plant life. This becomes especially apparent when you begin recognizing all the wild urban plants that have taken root along roadsides and chain-link fences, between cracks of pavement, and within vacant lots, rubble dumps and highway medians. Spontaneously propagating, these resilient plants find distinctive niches to thrive in and inhabit our most derelict landscapes. The environmental benefits of these “weeds” go widely unrecognized when, in fact, this often invisible urban ecology can offer a fresh perspective on how cities perform.

With that in mind, we staged an intervention to reveal the overlooked nature of urban weeds to the passerby: we painted rough, bright geometries onto the sidewalk along 3rd Street in Brooklyn, outlining spots where spontaneous urban plants have made a home. Using a typical street paint yellow, we drew circles around particularly important weeds that have emerged up through our sidewalks and tree pits – essentially taking a highlighter to the streetscape. Most people walk by unaware, only to stop for a brief second to consider why someone would be drawing attention to the weeds in the sidewalk. Sometimes, observant urban wayfarers linger long enough to glimpse the inconspicuous museum placard identifying the plants name, origin and characteristics.

“Profiles of Spontaneous Urban Plants” is a project conceived by Future Green Studio, our landscape urbanism firm based in Gowanus, Brooklyn. Our studio seeks to make urban interventions that reveal the nuances of our urban landscape in subtle, poetic ways that provide clues to the complex ecology of cities. Working out of a post-industrial neighborhood replete with sidewalk cracks, remnant gravel vestiges and dead end streets, overgrown urban weeds are ubiquitous in our daily experience.

Commelina Communis (Asiatic Dayflower)

Eragrostis Pectinacea (Tufted Lovegrass)

In colloquial terms, of course, these plants are most commonly referred to as “weeds,” but are also known as “invasive,” “alien” and “exotic.” Culturally, the prevailing usage of “weeds” relegates these urban plants to an inferior botanical category because humans did not intentionally cultivate them at the particular site in which they have appeared. It is an understandable human reaction, as we have been taught, generally, that things which require little to no effort to grow, create, or maintain are worth less. But competing perceptions of certain plants reflect the need to think differently about the stigma we attach to these weeds. For example, Dandelion is perceived by suburban homeowners as an omnipresent lawn invader. But by children Dandelions are seen as a thing to play with, and by urban foragers they’re understood as food.

The term “invasive” denotes the biologically aggressive and exceptionally hardy characteristics of a plant, habitually denounced for taking over natural areas and stifling biodiversity. In non-urban conditions, these plants can at times be destructive on rural ecosystems. Monocultures of Tree of Heaven (Ailanthus altissima) or Common Reed (Phragmites australis) have been known to alter radically existing landscapes and wildlife habitats. With many invasive plants dispersing seeds multiple times throughout a season and with seed counts in the thousands per plant annually, the potential for a quick colonization of rural and suburban sites is a major concern.

The prolific nature of these plants, which makes them so dangerous in certain areas, also makes them incredibility successful in our urban ecology. As such, there is a movement to categorize these plants not as weeds but as spontaneous urban plants, and to recognize their importance as a sort of renegade green infrastructure, thriving in places no native plant would grow and providing substantive ecological benefits.

Future Green Studio's intervention on 3rd Street, Brooklyn

Our contemporary urban streetscapes and post-industrial vacant lots in no way mimic the Northeast deciduous forests of our past — once suitable growing grounds for native plants. Rather than trying to control our new urban ecology with the assumption that invasive species are degrading our environment, we should instead understand that without extensive maintenance of intentionally planted landscapes, most urban landscapes would quickly revert to being dominated by spontaneous vegetation. What’s remarkable about all spontaneous urban plants is the fact that they require no human assistance to assert and maintain themselves in extreme, often volatile urban conditions, while providing the same ecologically performative benefits of traditional landscape plants and street trees. Rather than seek to discard and eradicate them, we now have an opportunity to harness their benefits and tell their histories.

In the hard, difficult landscapes of contemporary cities, wild urban plants can provide real ecological benefits, and are the overlooked backbone of an emergent green infrastructure. For whether Daffodil or Dandelion, intentionally-planted or not, all plants contribute to lowering the urban heat island effect and can help address the carbon imbalance in our urban areas. Unlike many traditional landscape plants, spontaneous urban plants can also colonize disturbed bare ground, help with erosion control and slope stabilization, and be used as food and habitat for wildlife. In addition, Mugwort (Artemesia vulgaris) or Lambsquarters (Chenopodium album), for example, have phytoremediation properties and can be used strategically on brownfield sites to absorb pollutants from the soil. Spontaneous urban plants are also being rediscovered as part of our edible lexicon. Both Dandelion (Taraxacum officinale) and Common Purslane (Portulaca oleracea) are edible and highly sought after, finding their way onto plates at trendy restaurants.

Chenopodium album (Common Lambsquarters)

Ambrosia artemisiifolia (Common Ragweed)

In New York City, as with most major urban areas, stormwater retention is a particularly hot-button issue. Our storm sewer system here in New York City is completely overwhelmed, with raw sewage being released into our local waterways nearly half of the times it rains. Wild urban plants play an important role in slowing down the first flush of stormwater and reducing the cumulative impact of major storm events.

Another concept currently being explored that could utilize wild urban plants is the idea of brown roofs. Brown roofs are essentially paired down green roofs without the highly engineered soil and specialty plantings. With a much higher drainage profile, a brown roof is much simpler than a green roof, and can use the existing soil from the site – degraded or not. Although there are issues of fire safety that need to be addressed through seasonal maintenance, brown roofs include less upfront cost, minimal upkeep and a lighter weight load than green roofs. This strategy could radically transform our urban rooftops – providing all the benefits of a green roof at a fraction of the cost.

Conyza canadensis (Horseweed)

Hieracium sabaudum (New England Hawkweed)

As an extension of the street intervention, we catalogued twenty wild urban plants we found growing on our street and in our garden. Individually set on a white background, each plant was photographed as a bare-rooted, singular specimen. Heavy shadows and sharp contrast play up the sense of plant specimen as object. Detail enlargements of the flowers or seeds are inset in each illustration and are accompanied by the plants’ place of origin, habitat preference, ecological function and cultural significance.

We applied traditional modes of botanical representation to these plants, which are not usually seen as “pretty” or “desirable,” and attempted to elevate them to the status of romantic illustrations of plants like lavender or thyme you might find hanging on someone’s kitchen wall. Using this whimsical approach, we intended to recontextualize these plants while at the same time revealing their cultural history, development and usage. For our work, Peter Del Tredici’s Wild Urban Plants of the Northeast: A Field Guide was an invaluable resource and has helped set the tone for recognizing this group of plants as an important part of our contemporary urban ecology.

As our cities grow in density, population and number, our urban landscapes must be both aesthetically pleasing and ecologically productive. By utilizing wild urban plants, we can design with a palette of greenery adapted to existing urban soils, widely available and attractive to pollinators and other wildlife. An informed combination of these factors can help create a pleasant urban meadow. As much as the upfront plant selection needs to play an important role, some designing will come through the process of subtraction. By removing diseased plants, those planted too close together or even the plants that are particularly unsightly or cause allergic reaction like Ragweed (Ambrosia artemisiifolia), designers can help to make the wild urban meadow tidy and kempt – and more appealing.

Smooth Crabgrass, highlighted | 3rd Street, Brooklyn

Additional research and reporting by Patra Jongjitirat.

David Seiter is founding principal of Future Green Studio. His portfolio includes international, high-profile, large-scale urban parks and waterfronts, high-end residential garden and estate planning for celebrity clients, and green roof design and implementation. He manages a small working garden on a post-industrial site near the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn which includes green walls, green roofs, raised beds for food crops, composting and a rainwater catchment system. In addition to designing and building, David also teaches and writes about emergent trends in landscape architecture. Most recently, David taught “An Introduction to Green Roofs & Living Walls” at the City University of New York. He’s also teaching a theory course on “Productive + Performative Landscapes” in the graduate program at Pratt Institute. Currently in the works is a book about sustainable urban landscape interventions. Prior to gaining a Masters in Landscape Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania, David spent two years in Japan, where he apprenticed with a prominent garden designer in Kyoto.

Patra Jongjitirat is a research intern at Future Green Studio, helping draft its upcoming book publication Emergent Trends in Landscape Architecture. She is also devoted to the public arts organization No Longer Empty, looking at how interim uses and small-scale interventions can catalyze the revitalization of urban spaces. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Architectural Studies from Brown University.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Om Sai Mandir, 45-11 Smart Street, Flushing, Queens

Matilde Cassani is an architect and artist whose most recent exhibition Sacred Spaces in Profane Buildings is currently in its final week on view at Storefront for Art and Architecture. For this project, Cassani has amassed an impressively comprehensive archive of sites of worship in the five boroughs that are located in residential, commercial or otherwise non-religious buildings, many of which serve recent immigrant populations whose demand for faith-based community facilities far outstrips supply. The architectural improvisations that respond to this increased demand constitute one subject of Cassani’s detailed documentary study. But she’s equally interested in the urban-scale implications of this phenomenon: the distribution of religious activity throughout the city and how this maps onto a contemporary urban reality of displacement and adaptation. She has produced a series of books that represent the archive and exhibited them alongside a set of Spiritual Devices, beguilingly simple sculptural installations that attempt to distill the elements of individual spiritual practice to the commonplace yet symbolic objects — prayer mats, icons, beads or candles — that help convert secular space into something both sacred and profound. The exhibition closes this Saturday, so be sure to check it out soon. First, read on to hear Cassani’s thoughts on what a city’s sacred spaces reveal about the complex relationship of religious praxis, cultural identity and urban life. -C.S.

Matilde Cassani with one of the five books of the Sacred Spaces archive installed at Storefront for Art and Architecture.

How did Sacred Spaces in Profane Buildings come about?
The idea for the project was born three years ago, when I started asking myself where recent immigrants to contemporary cities were praying. I started looking around Italy and the first place I started investigating was actually a small village called Novellara, in a rural part of Regio Emilia. This village is the home of a lot of recent immigrants to Italy who are increasingly doing agricultural work in Italian farms, especially in the dairy farms that produce the milk for parmesan cheese.

This village has a population of no more than 12,000 people, but I found many different sacred spaces. And every year, the village plays host to a huge Sikh harvest festival, the Vaisakhi feast. Sikhs from all over Central Europe congregate in Novellara for this event.

After documenting this festival and the sacred spaces of this village, I started doing similar research and documentation in Milan, Palermo, Barcelona, Stuttgart, and then I came to New York. These days, whenever I find myself in a new city, I immediately start looking around to find sacred spaces.

How do you define what “sacred spaces in profane buildings” are?
For me, sacred spaces in profane buildings are places of worship in non-traditional sites, in buildings that have undergone a transformation of function. Many of these buildings are invisible from the outside. The interiors are what has been altered most to accommodate the needs of a particular religion’s worship practices. That improvised transformation fascinates me.

The word “profane” in this context refers the buildings being non-traditional or non-sacred. I was raised as a Roman Catholic with the idea that sacred space – the churches I would visit as a child – was always born as sacred, in a location that is precisely selected and central, with an architecture that makes it highly visible. “Profane” refers to sites not selected in this way.

Soho Synagogue, 38 Crosby Street, Manhattan

What do you think distinguishes New York City’s sacred spaces from similar environments you’ve studied in other cities?
At the beginning, I thought that since New York City has a completely different urban texture and a completely different immigrant story, its sacred spaces in profane buildings would be completely distinct from what I’ve found elsewhere. But actually the architecture of the places I found was very similar to what I found in Europe. The main difference is that in New York, there are so many more of these kinds of sacred spaces.

I’ve also noticed that New Yorkers seem more curious about their city than people are in other cities. I’ve received a lot of positive feedback from New Yorkers about this project. People here seem to be excited about seeing something they’ve never seen before. And the communities whose places of worship were documented in the project were happy to find someone deeply interested in their communities and cultural practices.

What do you think a city’s sacred spaces reveal about that city?
I think these spaces reveal the ways displaced people maintain their identity after moving from one country to another. Cultural identity is not only food and customs; religion builds identity in ways that make the sacred space a community’s common point of reference. So it’s not only religious space, it’s much more: a community center, a café, many different things together in one multi-layered space.

So what’s more important for you, the spaces or how people use them?
Both. I think the spaces reflect what people are doing inside them in interesting ways. These places are sacred and profane at the same time, public and private spaces at the same time. They are religious places but also something else.

Spiritual Devices

Tell me about the Spiritual Devices.
The Spiritual Devices are foldable and transportable boxes that contain the kinds of objects I would find during my visits to sacred spaces all over New York: cheap clocks, tape on the floor to indicate the direction to Mecca, aluminum dishes, a camping stove.

I started making the Spiritual Devices while doing an artist residency in Germany. The goal was to evoke the fact that sacred space is not necessarily stable. It’s temporary. It migrates along with the people who use it. The temporary nature of these places and the symbolic value of the objects that inhabit them – many of which are cheap, mass-produced objects you might find in a supermarket – reflect some of the displacement and exile of immigration.

There seems to be a tension between the individual scale of the Spiritual Devices and the community scale of the documentation of Sacred Spaces in Profane Buildings.
Yes. Somehow, there is a kind of contradiction between these community places – which exist for small groups of people to come together at a particular point in a day – and the individual practice of one person building his or her own identity.

The exhibition at Storefront is the first time I have shown both of these projects together. They are related, of course, but I think it’s helpful to look at them separately, to look first at the research and then to experience the Spiritual Devices.

The research process for this exhibition began when I first arrived in New York. I decided that instead of looking for sacred spaces myself, I would ask citizens to report on where sacred spaces could be found. I built a very simple website and asked people to upload pictures and different stories about these sacred spaces. I received a lot of different kinds of material: from simple snapshots taken by passersby to fascinating stories about memories of particular buildings. Some of these memories explained how it used to be a bakery or a bank; others were personal stories about going to a place to pray or to see friends. One interesting case study is the synagogue on Crosby Street that used to be a flagship Gucci store. Another interesting case is an entire street that is full of temples; a huge, religious boulevard in Flushing, Queens called Bowne Street. In some ways the street is one enlarged, sacred space that is also differentiated: Catholic Korean churches, Catholic Chinese churches, Catholic South American churches, Hindu temples, Sai Baba temples… So many communities seem to have a point of reference there.

Sacred Spaces around Bowne Street, Flushing, Queens

While people were submitting information about sacred spaces all over the city, I started to look closely at these places. Another example is one of my favorite places that I visited, the Sikh Center on Parsons Boulevard in Flushing. It’s in a formerly residential brick building, but the interior is amazingly transformed and truly beautiful. When you walk in the door you face a long corridor. At the end of the corridor is a place to store your shoes and a big box containing turbans to wear if you don’t have your own. The proper sacred space has a deep red carpeted floor that leads you to the altar, which is surrounded by musical instruments.

Downstairs you have the canteen with a huge kitchen that serves everybody who enters the temple. The third floor has rooms for some of the spiritual leaders of the congregation, and then you have another room that contains the sacred book, the Granth Sahib. In the Sikh religion, the sacred book is revered, so the way the book is treated is very important. The room where the book “lives” is actually the best, most precious and most recently refurbished room of the house. There are two beds, and it looks like a normal bedroom for humans — but it’s not for humans, it’s for the sacred books. Every day, one of the books is brought downstairs, read from beginning to end, and then taken back upstairs and put to bed.

Sikh Center, Flushing, Queens. Bottom image: the room where the Granth Sahib (Sikh holy book) is kept.

So how did you represent your research in an exhibition context?
I produced five books; each one is a survey at a different scale. The first book maps the whole city and I’ve simply listed all the sacred spaces I found, in order to investigate the dimension of the phenomenon, the relative invisibility of the sacred spaces. The second book questions the profanity or the non-traditionality of the places. It includes information about the location and context of these places, with Google Maps images and their addresses. An address like Apartment #4N really tells you something about the architecture and original function of a particular place. The third book is a collection of stories and images submitted through the website. The fourth is a reflection on the different typologies and how the sacred is adapting in different ways. In some cases the sacred space is a small flat inside a commercial building; in others an entire residential building is transformed for various activities related to worship, like the temple’s canteen, the temple itself, the apartments of the monks or priests, communal spaces, storage, etc. And the fifth book is an in-depth case study of the Sikh Center on Parsons Boulevard that I described. For the exhibition, I mounted each of the books on a pedestal and arranged a series of the Spiritual Devices on the floor, in particular relationships to the wall, the street and the books. In this way, I tried to transform Storefront’s gallery into a kind of sacred space, a system that unveils something that is both sacred and not so sacred at the same time.

An excerpt of a geographical listing of Brooklyn mosques from Book 2 of the Sacred Spaces in Profane Buildings archive. Click to enlarge.

As an architect, what do you see as the contemporary role of architecture in religious practice?
It’s very difficult to say, because it’s contradictory in many ways: these places are outside of what we consider to be architecture; they are rarely designed by architects. Yet, I think architects must reflect on the fragmentation of religious space in cities. Religious spaces are no longer a big point of reference in the centers of neighborhoods. We need to consider what that means for our cities and communities. It’s not just about the small scale of transformed interiors; it’s an urban-scale phenomenon.

In complex environments like cities, architecture becomes a container of different things, and the same is happening to traditionally sacred spaces. I’ve seen examples of communities buying what used to be, say, an Orthodox church and converting it into a Hindu temple.

Masjid Manhattan, 33 Cliff Street, Manhattan

So what do you see as the role of the city in contemporary religious practice?
I think cities are only beginning to digest what the proliferation of all these sacred spaces means. On the one hand, the increased demand for religious spaces seems to show that there’s not enough space designated for these purposes. Cities, therefore, are in the role of enveloping sacred spaces that have emerged on their own inside of non-traditional buildings. On the other hand, the fragmentation and dispersal of sacred space is making the whole city more sacred in a way. It’s no longer secular.

I think this is one of the most interesting parts of the phenomenon. Because, as I’ve said, these spaces are more than just places of worship; they are community facilities, social spaces, but also the container of a certain kind of sacredness.

And each one is different. Some are very private; some are very public. Some open, some closed. And the interiors are totally fascinating: the materials and objects found inside are often quite cheap, yet there is so much care and attention paid to these environments. It’s really impressive and often very beautiful. And in some of the older sacred spaces, you can see the story of their gradual transformation and growth in the details.

Shan Xiu Taoist Temple, 128 Lafayette Street, Manhattan

All images courtesy of Matilde Cassani and Storefront for Art and Architecture

Matilde Cassani is an architect and researcher who lives and works in Milan, Italy

Last night, Urban Design Week (profiled in last week’s Urban Omnibus feature) wrapped up with the US premiere of Urbanized, a documentary film by Gary Hustwit that introduces viewers to the key issues, projects and individuals affecting the design of cities around the world. Fresh from its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival last week, the movie played to a packed house at Landmark Sunshine Cinema, followed by a Q&A with Hustwit and three of the urban thinkers featured in the film, Brookings’ Bruce Katz, NYC Department of City Planning Director Amanda Burden and architect, critic and educator Michael Sorkin. The panelists, who were seeing the final cut for the first time, responded to the film with enthusiasm. The discussion, which was kept short to make way for the night’s second screening of the film, touched on questions of confidence in US vs. world cities (Katz, distinguishing between leadership at the metropolitan level and the national, stated that he is “phenomenally confident that we can rebuild America from the bottom up, not from the top down.”); innovations in New York (Burden pointed to the City’s ongoing efforts to activate the waterways and waterfront, to “reclaim New York as a world class harbor city.”); and what initiatives they hope to see come next (Sorkin wished for a shift of 50% of urban street space currently dedicated to the car to be given to the pedestrian; and Katz called on cities to “take our nation back” by innovating locally, working regionally and advocating nationally. “Cities are engines of change,” he concluded, “but we don’t act like it.”)

As Omnibus readers know well, the full range of forces at play in urban form is enormous and diverse enough to seem impossible to reduce to a mere 88 minutes. But Hustwit achieves the impossible, criss-crossing the globe from Mumbai to Stuttgart, from New Orleans to New York, to talk to some of the architects, urban planners, historians, artists and citizens responsible for defining or advancing the design of cities. But much more than the individuals and projects featured, what makes Hustwit’s film so engrossing is the way he distills the complexity of urban design and planning without resorting to gross oversimplification of how much thought and action goes into making our cities what they are, from the improvised construction processes of informal settlements in the megacities of the developing world to architectural innovations in the public realm to the policy choices of municipal departments of city planning. We sat down with Hustwit to hear more about Urbanized and the processes, ideas and people that shape our cities.

House models by Elemental/Alejandro Aravena | Film still courtesy of Courtesy Swiss Dots Ltd.

How did the film Urbanized come about?
During the process of making and promoting my last two films, Objectified and Helvetica, I traveled to over 100 cities and became immersed in their design communities. I became fascinated with the similarities and the differences between the cities, and in the ways some architectural or urban development project would inevitably come up in conversation in each place. I thought about that being the theme of a third film. I’ve always been interested in architecture and I hadn’t seen a film expressly about architecture in the context of the city, the design of our cities and people that shape them. At the end of the day, all three films are personal explorations into subjects that I don’t know that much about but am really curious about.

Each of the films explores a different kind of design — graphic design, industrial and product design, and now urban design and planning. What interests you about design as a subject matter in general?
It started with my interest in graphic design. Ever since I got my first Macintosh I’ve been interested in digital fonts and reading design magazines. Helvetica really came out of my being a huge fan of graphic design. I just wanted to see a film about these people whose work I love. I didn’t have any intention of making any other films, much less a trilogy of design-themed films. But the world we created with Helvetica was a world I liked and wanted to stay in a little bit longer. It was only after I started shooting Objectified that I realized how much it felt like an extension of the ideas, questions and visual style of Helvetica. That’s when I kind of saw it as a sequel and then ultimately as part of a three-film cycle.

Amanda Burden at the NYC Dept. of City Planning | Film still courtesy of Courtesy Swiss Dots Ltd.

In professional circles, there is no real consensus as to what urban design is. It’s a matter of incredibly contentious debate. Did you go into this process with a specific definition of what goes into the design of cities? How has your understanding changed over the process?
I didn’t have a specific opinion or idea or definition of urban design going into the project. I learned about all of this over the two and a half years I was making the film. I spent about six months before shooting going to conferences, talking to architects and other people in the field, asking them their opinions about the state of cities and what interesting people and projects they think define the essence of what urban design is. Each person we interviewed would suggest a few other names, and we kept going around, learning more at each subsequent step. After ten interviews I had a little better grasp, and after 30 interviews I got a much better grasp. The narrative of the film developed organically through all these conversations and what the interviewees thought was important. I didn’t start out with a thesis or agenda.

I knew right away that a film like this can’t be comprehensive. You could easily do a full documentary or more on any one of these cities. So we decided to reframe it by looking at specific issues that face all cities and then looking at projects that address those issues. But even when I watch it now I think about things we didn’t get to address — for example, we barely talked about natural disasters. We didn’t get into a project about disaster preparedness.

Protest in Stuttgart, Germany | Film still courtesy of Courtesy Swiss Dots Ltd.

I was amazed at the range of issues you were able to cover. The film moves from public art to public works to public protest. I particularly appreciated that the role of the public in the design of cities was addressed, from the building practices of slum dwellers in India or Chile to the protests of organized, politically active citizens in an advanced economy like Germany’s. Tell me more about how you see the role of the public in the design of cities in years to come.
I hope the film helps people to become more aware, more involved and more critical about the decisions that are made by both city government and private developers. I believe the public should have a huge role both informally and formally. But the idea of participatory design — of using the public as a design compass instead of just getting a reaction to projects that are already proposed — is not being employed as much as it might. It’s really inspiring when you see it happening and working, like the VPUU (which stands for Violence Prevention by Urban Upgrading) project in Khayelitsha in Cape Town.

The township of Khayelitsha, which is outside of Cape Town, was created during the Apartheid era to concentrate the black South African population at the periphery of the city. It was a dormitory settlement — workers just slept there and then commuted back into to the city for work — so there was no real economic base; it’s just houses. It’s one of the poorest and most dangerous areas of the city. So the VPUU of Cape Town started 10 years ago to look at how that settlement had been designed — both the original, formal design from the ‘80s, and also how it had informally developed — and to try to make interventions that would improve safety and combat crime in the area.

Khayelitsha township | Film still courtesy of Courtesy Swiss Dots Ltd.

They spent two years talking to residents before they even started thinking about their first plan. They trained volunteers to go out into the community and talk to people about the problems they face. The biggest priority turned out to be pedestrian walkways, which were where most crime was happening. Khayelitsha has a series of stormwater overflow channels that run through the settlement that were just undeveloped, garbage-strewn land. They weren’t lit, and harbored gang activity and all kinds of criminal activity. But those stormwater floodways were also the informal pedestrian route between the train station and the township. So what VPUU did was formalize the informal pedestrian paths, or desire lines, by paving and lighting the barren channels and turning them into these amazing walkways and public spaces. People are now turning their homes to face these routes because they’re so well designed, and that increases passive surveillance, puts more eyes on the spaces. The murder rate has dropped by 40%. It has become a great pilot program, which they’re now expanding into other townships and to other areas in South Africa. Also, they have trained the people who live in the area to maintain and program it. The project is still evolving. They didn’t just say, “here you go, we built a path, see you later” and step away from it.

What drew me to VPUU’s work was the citizen involvement, even in determining what the project would be. They didn’t come in with an answer — they didn’t even know what the question was when they came in. But they spent years finding out what issue needed a response and then came up with plans that were developed step by step with the community. They spent years designing what the intervention should be and then getting design professionals involved to implement it. That’s the kind of idea that I think should get mainstreamed. It’s not about proposing a project and getting feedback from the public about whether they like it or not. It’s getting people involved in what a project should be, or if there should be a project.

Enrique Peñalosa, former mayor of Bogotá | Film still courtesy of Courtesy Swiss Dots Ltd.

That’s a lesson that applies whether the city is in a developed or a developing country. DId you see any patterns that cut across the divides of north and south, developed and developing?
Mobility seems to be one of the main issues that drags cities down. The amount of energy and time and resources that get wasted because of poor mobility solutions, especially in places like Mumbai, or São Paolo, or any of these big cities in the Global South. Think of those famous traffic snarls. It just seems like such a massive waste of energy, waste of resources and also just a total environmental nightmare.

There are so many challenges there, but also so much opportunity, because it’s so universal. Everybody needs to get around. If there are better mobility solutions that can be scaled and mainstreamed, there’s a lot of opportunity to change the way cities operate. I don’t have the answers to those questions, but the purpose of doing a film like this is to generate questions and discussion and awareness and debate about it. Not to tie it all up in a little bow, saying here’s what we should do, go do it.

What role do you see for designers — architects, urban designers and others — in determining the form of cities? The film brings up a lot of forces that shape cities that don’t necessarily rely on design proceeses, such as political processes, for example.
Those political processes are a design process too. It’s all design: any structure of information, built environment, or government process. I think it’s all about the workings of those really complex systems; that is design. And I think it’s the role of designers to improve, change or reframe it incrementally.

The idea of imagining something differently is the kernel is what I think of as design. What really drew me to Candy Chang’s “I Wish This Was” project (which invites city residents to voice what they want to see in their communities) is how that really simple little sticker just gets people who don’t normally think about how their city is shaped to think about it. To imagine what they would want in that vacant lot, or in that burnt out building. To imagine something different. It’s about thinking differently, or being provoked to think differently about the status quo. It seems so simple, but it is just getting people to do that, just getting people to think, “Oh, what could this be? God, I wish it was…” and then fill in the blank. Just that act is so, so powerful. That’s what I think is the future of getting the public involved. It is getting them to and encouraging them to make that step.

"I Wish This Was" by Candy Chang | Film still courtesy of Courtesy Swiss Dots Ltd.

What’s next for you?
Well, we finished the film literally last week. So we’ll spend the next three months touring, screening it in different cities. I’m actually more excited about this tour than that of either of the other two films because these issues resonate in different ways in different cities. I’m really excited to see what issues face each of these individual cities and how they relate to the film. The film had its premiere in Toronto, where there’s been a whole debate about bike lanes and a lake front development. The screening sort of capitalized on all those things happening in the city and made it much more of a public debate. So I’m excited to see how the audience reacts in other cities, in the North America and all over the world.

Gary Hustwit is an independent filmmaker based in New York and London. Hustwit worked with LA punk label SST Records in the late-1980s, ran the independent book publishing house Incommunicado Press during the 1990s, was Vice President of the media website Salon.com in 2000, and started the indie DVD label Plexifilm in 2001. Hustwit has produced eight feature documentaries, including the award-winning I Am Trying To Break Your Heart about the band Wilco; Moog, about electronic music pioneer Robert Moog; and Oddsac, an experimental feature with the band Animal Collective.

In 2007 he made his directorial debut with Helvetica, a documentary about graphic design and typography. The film marked the beginning of a design film trilogy, with Objectified, about industrial design and product design following in 2009. Urbanized, about the design of cities, will have its world premiere at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival. A longtime advocate of self-distribution and directly engaging his audience, Hustwit will be self-releasing Urbanized with a global screening tour, theatrical runs, and DVD and digital releases.

Stargazing in Times Square | Courtesy of Ian Cheney

When artificial light shines upward, it bounces off particulates in the air, causing a haze — some have described it as a “luminous fog” — that prevents us from seeing the stars and skies above. As our powerfully-lit built environment expands across the planet, so does this dome of light. Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson contends that a connection to the night sky offers us a sense of “cosmic perspective” that, when denied, causes us “to not live to the full extent of what it is to be human.” The stars have inspired mythology, poetry, curiosity, inquiry and exploration throughout history. So, what happens when we lose the night sky? That question is at the heart of The City Dark, a new documentary film by Ian Cheney that explores the effects of light pollution on our environment, our society, our bodies and our psyches. (See the trailer here.)

The most obvious implications of light pollution are to astronomers. The stronger the light pollution, the harder it is to see the universe beyond. But, as Cheney explores in the film, the consequences of our pervasive use of artificial light reach much further. Biologists who study habitat disruption are tracking how city lights disorient, and ultimately cause the death of, hatching sea turtles and migrating birds. Epidemiologists are investigating the hypothesis that night shift work, and the disruptions to circadian rhythms and melatonin production that come with it, is a carcinogen.

But light activates space, improves public safety and facilitates social interaction. Light is used as art, as celebration, as tribute. We equate light with progress and achievement. So what do we do when, as Cheney says, “though we might love light, we might need the dark”? That’s where lighting designers, architects and planners can help. A darker city can come from, not just less light, but less wasteful light. Careful, thoughtful lighting design is economically and environmentally beneficial, and can help reconnect us to the majestic skies above.

Tonight, Wednesday, August 17, The City Dark is being screened at the BMW Guggenheim Lab in New York City. In anticipation of the event, we sat down with Ian Cheney to learn more about light pollution, the disappearance of the night sky and what we can do to get it back. —V.S.

Sky Village, Arizona | Courtesy of Ian Cheney

Tell us about The City Dark.
The City Dark is a documentary about light pollution — which ought to be called night pollution, if you think about it. Air pollution is pollution of the air, water pollution is pollution of the water and what we are really talking about is pollution of the night by light.

I have found that light pollution as an urban and environmental concern isn’t a topic on everybody’s radar screen. But once one mentions the disappearance of the night sky, people instantly connect. There’s something so fundamental and present to all of us about that.

Throughout the film, evocations about the poetry and mythology of the night sky interweave with scientific inquiry into the effects of artificial light on ourselves and our environment. Though a complete telling of the story seems to demand both poetry and science, did you come to the subject matter from one side or the other?
The film began much more with the intangible questions and what I might categorize as the more philosophical or spiritual question about what we lose when we can’t connect with the night sky. I knew next to nothing about most of the ecological or human health issues related to light pollution. But I knew that astronomers, of course, were worried about the loss of the stars. So it was with them that we started the film. The astronomers were the ones to point out that this topic touches a much broader range of people. But even as the film snowballed into explorations of the scientific issues, there was no way to tell the story without the intangible aspects. What we lose as individuals, as a culture, when we lose the night sky is what underpinned the whole project for me.

Is that what you hope people with take away from the film?
I’d be happy if people took different ideas away from the film. One person might be energized by the idea of writing a new lighting ordinance for their town and introducing legislation that helps preserve the night sky, whereas another might be reminded to step outside and look up from time to time, to take his kids outside the city to find darkness, or to think differently about how to design lights on a building.

We are setting up a lot of screenings this fall with a whole range of people, from astronomers to ecologists to wildlife groups, but also with lighting designers and architects who are very much engaged in rethinking the way we light our cities.

The High Line, New York | screen capture from The City Dark

Speaking of which, in the film you say “a darker city is a matter of design.” You also spend some time with Hervé Descottes, the lighting designer of the High Line. Talk a little bit about the design of a darker city, and the role that architects and designers can play in preventing light pollution.
The way we have come to light our cities, perhaps unintentionally, is extremely wasteful, haphazard and careless. The idea that light can trespass, can pollute, can be damaging, is relatively new. Maybe because you can’t hold light in your hand like you can water or garbage — if someone were spewing garbage into your window, you would object.

There’s a fair bit of generalizing and mudslinging directed towards architects and lighting designers by people who think they all just love to blast light up their buildings. Some do, and you see that walking around the city, but there are an increasing number of lighting designers that are trying to do things differently.

It’s not that advocates of “re-darkening” the city want to turn off all the lights. Hervé Descottes is one of, hopefully, a growing number of designers who are thinking about light in a more sophisticated way than we may have in the past, when we were responding to a centuries-long legacy of having too much darkness and seeing more light as better. His approach to lighting design is as much about celebrating the darkness and the shadow spaces as it is about the beauty of light. Whether that comes from a respect for the beauty of the night sky, a regard for people’s melatonin levels or aesthetic choice, I think it’s a profound and interesting shift in the way we think about lighting cities. It may seem ironic that a lighting designer would be talking about the need to use less light, but fortunately lighting designers aren’t paid by how many lumens of light they use in a design.

The International Dark-Sky Association has done a lot of wonderful work in helping people rethink the way we light our spaces, from introducing and modeling lighting ordinances to conducting nuts-and-bolts research on fixture design and how light affects space. There are so many strategies and technologies available to people that I think suggest a promising future. It’s similar to the way we talk about green design — in fact, smarter nighttime lighting is a LEED green building point, which is a sign that people are recognizing that lighting our environment means more than just the loss of the stars. We can use better lighting as a way to create different and, in the end, more livable spaces, where people will be able to sleep better, birds can find their way and we can connect to the stars.

Trespassing Light | Courtesy of Ian Cheney

You spend some time in the film talking about the enormous cultural impact of light. Light is used as art, as celebration, as tribute. Light is equated with safety, with social activity, with progress, with development. With light so often linked to positive notions, when and how did the idea of light pollution, and the need to “re-darken” the city, take hold? And does the cultural significance of light present obstacles to popular acceptance of light reduction?
It’s fascinating — even though the recent attention to light pollution paid by groups like the Dark-Sky Association is new, the idea that people think their city is over-lit is not. The introduction of new lighting technology has always made people long for the way the city used to be. When arc lighting and electric lighting were introduced in the late-19th century, people were immediately nostalgic for the quiet, orange glow of the gas-lit city. In the film we speak with Bill Sharpe, a historian of the way people wrote and created art about the night in New York City, whose book New York Nocturne documents some of the rich history of that nostalgia effect. But today, people dismiss that nostalgia as overly romantic because it looks back to something none of us have experienced. We’ve had electric lighting for over a century.

As you mentioned, there is an involved relationship between light and safety or crime. People feel safer in well-lit spaces. But when you start getting into the data about whether introducing light alone will consistently make a neighborhood safer or not, there are instances where it does and instances where it doesn’t, where light just moves crime elsewhere or even makes it easier for criminals to operate. But it’s inarguable that people continue to feel safer in the light. I suppose it’s in our genes. We don’t see as well at night — though we can see and navigate through shadowy space better than we think. It’s a complex issue, one that I only touch on briefly in the film.

What are some other ways that people are addressing light pollution through technological advances, legislation or individual action?
The way people are starting to rein in the light runs the gamut. There are volunteer measures, such as In New York City, where some people have signed on to shut off lights in buildings or on bridges at certain times during migration season. Then there are cities like Tucson, Arizona, where you can see the Milky Way from downtown because they have such a robust lighting ordinance.

Many lighting ordinances are designed to be gradual and realistic about what is expected of the community. They don’t require everyone change their lights immediately, which would be quite costly, but any new lights that are introduced have to be cut-off lights, which direct the light downwards, to the ground, where you actually need it, rather than through someone’s windows or up into space. Which is almost a boringly obvious idea, to not waste something.

When you get right down to the nuts and bolts of better lighting, it’s pretty easy to grasp, even if implementing those ideas isn’t always easy. It involves years of wrangling, because there’s money to be made burning fuel to waste light, and there’s an instinctive resistance to reducing the way we light. It often goes back to the question of crime that we discussed earlier. People think that if the city turns off lights, crime will follow. It’s instinctive.

New York City and New York State have seen their fair share of lighting measures introduced and failed time and again. Maybe a city like New York seems like too much of a lost cause, maybe there are other things to worry about, or maybe there’s real pressure coming from people with an interest in maintaining the status quo. But whatever the reason is, those efforts haven’t been able to gain traction as more than volunteer measures.

Brooklyn, New York | Courtesy of Ian Cheney

As you travelled from city to city, region to region, did you see differences in the way more vertical cities were tackling these challenges as compared to more sprawling cities?
This is a bit of a roundabout way to answer your question, but it ties in with how we think and talk about wilderness and the environment. Environmentalists and conservationists are often arguing about where to put our money and energy – should we conserve and preserve fenced-in parks as pure wilderness, where urban residents can visit to enjoy trees, bugs, birds, ponds and stars? Or — and it really shouldn’t be an either/or — should we put our energy into making the spaces where we live every day that much more green and livable? At the end of the day, there are limited resources and one has to figure out where to put one’s efforts.

That same debate applies to light pollution and the disappearance of the night sky. In a city like New York, should we put any effort into restricting lighting given how few stars we can see? Or should we put more energy into the suburbs, where you have at least a fighting chance of seeing the Milky Way? Or should we dedicate ourselves to preserving rural skies, where both urban and suburban residents can escape to see the night sky? Of course, I think all should be done.

But I do think bringing back even one more star to a city sky is worthwhile. Maybe that one star — and I’m paraphrasing a comment by Neil deGrasse Tyson that didn’t make it into the film — will be the star that catches some young scientist-to-be’s eye and enthralls him or her with the idea of becoming an astronomer. Or connects someone with the idea that there’s a larger world, which I think ultimately is the most important thing. The most profound risk we’re taking by losing the night sky is becoming a completely downward-looking species.

There’s something mesmerizing and unparalleled about a truly dark night sky. It’s hard not to get really cheesy, really fast when talking about it. And, just like seeing the Grand Canyon or a great whale, there’s something different about experiencing it yourself than seeing it on a television screen or in a magazine. But Neil deGrasse Tyson’s story of discovering astronomy through the planetarium, because he never saw the stars from his home in the Bronx, is a great example of how, on the one hand, the proxies we create for wilderness experiences, whether it’s Central Park or planetariums, are meaningful and important. Tyson wondered aloud whether, if he’d grown up on a farm, seeing the night sky every night, it would have inspired the same sense of awe that it did for him, having grown up in the Bronx.

As the night sky recedes from view, what do you think it means for our collective imagination, curiosity or inspiration? What happens when we don’t have access to that sense of awe?
It’s an experiment in progress. We’re doing this to ourselves. As a country, and now as a world, as we tip towards being a dominantly urban population, we are mostly growing up without the stars. On some level it remains to be seen what it will do to us. This whole film was in a way my own attempt to engage with some of those questions. I certainly don’t have all the answers.

I think we all gain wonderfully different things from our experiences with the night sky. For me, it has been a profound reminder of our place in space and a perspective on my own moment in the lifetime of the universe. It has made me really value what time I have on the planet, but I think that’s probably not a bad thing to value and to keep in mind, how remarkably unique life on the planet is.

At times the environmentalist community and the astronomy community have been at odds with one another, arguing about whether limited financial resources should be dedicated to cleaning up our mess here on this planet or exploring elsewhere. But I think the more we learn about outer space, our place in space and our relationship to the stars, the more it makes us careful citizens of the planet. That, weirdly, was one of the things I was most interested in exploring in the film – I don’t think it actually comes through very much at all, but so it goes. But I do think that the more we see the stars the more we actually care about our planet.

Haleakala, Maui, Hawaii | Courtesy of Ian Cheney

Are there other topics you wanted to explore further than didn’t make it into the film?
Sleep science. I would love to make a whole film about how we sleep. There weren’t really sleep scientists before the industrial revolution, so we don’t know that much about how we naturally sleep. Experiments have been done where people are locked away for weeks at a time to see how they sleep “on a natural cycle.” The results echo how sleep patterns used to be described in literature — people often sleep in two segments of time, waking up once in the middle of the night.

There is so much about a city that is a shock to the human immune system. Think about what you learn in seventh grade: animals exist in habitats and if you disrupt those habitats, the animals suffer. And yet somehow we don’t turn that same attention to our own habitat.

I realized — and I never used to think of it this way — that we keep exploring this question of disrupted habitat from different perspectives through our films. In King Corn, we looked at the way we eat and how it’s completely out of whack with how we’ve evolved to eat. With The Greening of Southie, a film about green building in Boston, we explored the physical spaces we find ourselves living in. And now we’re looking at this question of how we light our world and how it represents a real disruption in our circadian rhythm. We’ve evolved for many, many generations with certain cycles of light and dark. It’s very interesting to live in an urban environment and think about how can we design spaces to give us the things we want out of a city, which are many, and yet not make us sick or unhappy or solipsistic in the process.

Really we just take these recklessly boring topics like watching corn grow and watching buildings go up and star gazing — its not blockbuster stuff — and we try to suggest ways that they are fundamental to our lives.

For the film, you developed a letter-grade system for rating star visibility in different locations. Sky Village, Arizona (?) received an A; Times Square an F. The highest grade for NYC – at least of the areas you list in the film  — is a C+ (Staten Island). Did anywhere in New York City get a better grade? Are there any secret corners that are still good for stargazing?
I bet there are places in New York City that can rock a B—. Maybe Floyd Bennett Field? That’s where all the astronomers go. There’s also a wonderful guy named Jason Kendall who runs an astronomy program up in Inwood. He leads groups, does stargazing and meteor-gazing there.

What’s next for Wicked Delicate Films?
We got a little development grant from SilverDocs, in partnership with Whole Foods, for a film called BlueSpace, which will be a film about urban waterways around New York City. We’re looking at the idea that the city’s waterfronts and harbors — its “blue space” — should be considered as powerful and important a resource as its green space. I’m infatuated with that idea, especially given the city’s history of thinking of our water as a toilet. We’re just digging into that.

Courtesy of Ian Cheney

Ian Cheney is a Brooklyn-based documentary filmmaker. He grew up in New England and earned his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees at Yale. After graduate school he co-created and starred in the Peabody Award-winning theatrical hit and PBS documentary King Corn (2007), directed the feature documentary The Greening of Southie (Sundance Channel, 2008), and co-produced the Planet Green film Big River (2009). Ian maintains a 1/1000th acre farm in the back of his ’86 Dodge pickup, which is at the center of his recent film Truck Farm (2011). He has been featured in The New Yorker, The New York Times, on CNN and on Good Morning America. An avid astrophotographer, he travels frequently to show his films, lead discussions and give talks about sustainability, agriculture, and the human relationship to the natural world.

In late 2013, the MTA will complete a 2-mile extension of the 7 line, from its current terminus at Times Square to 34th Street and 11th Avenue. Improving transit access to the far west side of Manhattan is part of a far-reaching City plan to activate the Hudson Yards area, an “under-utilized” neighborhood in Manhattan roughly bounded by West 43rd Street, West 28th Street, Eighth Avenue and the Hudson River, with commercial, residential, cultural and public space development. The area is currently served by buses — including the M42, which received the shameful Pokey Award last year for being the slowest bus in New York — but subway access is as far away at Times Square or Penn Station. But in a time of limited financial resources and other pending transit projects that would serve already-bustling communities with comparable transportation expansion needs, how was the decision made to extend the 7 line?

In spring 2011, Alexandra Woolsey Puffer and Jeff Maki, as teaching artists for the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), posed that very question to a group of ninth, tenth and eleventh graders. CUP is a nonprofit organization that uses art and design to improve public participation in shaping the places where we live. Fast-Tracked is the latest in CUP’s “Urban Investigations,” a series of project-based after-school programs that ask high school students to explore fundamental questions about how the city works and translate their findings into multimedia teaching tools for audiences in the arts and social justice professions. For Fast-Tracked, they worked with students from the New Design High School on the Lower East Side of Manhattan who are participating in College Now, a free City University of New York program designed to prepare New York City’s public high school students for success in college. Over the course of 15 weeks, the students, led by the team from CUP, investigated how transportation planning works by talking to stakeholders, researching policy and financing, and pounding the pavement. Here, Woolsey Puffer and Maki share their students’ story of the 7 line extension and what they learned about who determines the shape and flow of our public transportation. — V.S.

Students design a subway system for aliens (L) and for pirates (R)

WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES A SUBWAY MAKE?
What’s the connection between subways and (re)development? Which comes first, the subway or the people? And why doesn’t the bus get any love? These are the questions that formed the basis of our CUP Urban Investigation in collaboration with ninth, tenth and eleventh grade students who are part of the College Now program at the New Design High School.

We began our investigation by exploring the fundamentals of mass transit. We posed the question to our students: is a subway system built for aliens the same subway system a pirate would want to use? Different riders want to visit different places, and everyone has his or her own idea of the path the subway should follow and the stops it should make. With 8 million people living in New York, there is no easy solution. Because transit needs to serve so many different types of riders, the name of the game is tradeoffs.

Access to transit, for businesses and for residents, is access to opportunity. Subways bring people to places they need to go — for work, for fun, to eat, to get home — and living close to transit increases options for all of those activities. But the longer the journey takes, the less practical it becomes, especially early in the morning or late at night, when transit service is less frequent.

By analyzing where subway stations are located in their own neighborhoods, how they are used and how they impact their surroundings, the students recognized the importance of efficient, reliable public transportation in everyday life. From that basic understanding, we began to look closely at one new subway development currently underway in New York: the extension of the 7 train westward, from its current final stop at Times Square to 34th Street and 11th Avenue.

By December 2013, this $2.1 billion 7 line extension will take riders to Hudson Yards, a 26-acre “under-utilized” area on the far west side of Manhattan. If you visit the area today, you’ll find check-cashing stops, parking lots, car repair garages, the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel and the Javits Convention Center. Few people live there and at first there does not appear to be strong demand for a new subway station. “This is the middle of nowhere,” summarized Shadiq Williams, a student at New Design High School. But a proposed redevelopment of the area will transform the MTA’s West Side Rail Yard into a multi-use residential and commercial complex — and improved access to transit is a key part of the redevelopment plan.

The Hudson Yards redevelopment area. The current/future route of the 7 line (solid/dashed yellow) and the newly redeveloped High Line (green).

WHO DECIDES WHERE THE SUBWAY GOES?
So, did (re)development follow from the plan to extend the subway, or did the subway follow the development? We turned to four people with markedly different viewpoints on transportation planning and real estate development to find out how the decision was made to extend the 7 train to Hudson Yards — and ended up with many different answers to the questions of who decides where the subway goes and how those choices are made.

Steven Spinola, president of the Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY) and a former deputy mayor of economic development, told us about the tradeoffs politicians are required to make when allocating limited financial resources. “Do we spend it on police? On education? On infrastructure? You spend it on all of them,” he explained, “but in what proportion? It’s a judgment call, but that’s what government people are elected to do.” When deciding how much to spend on improving mass transit, politicians must consider the broader implications of the proposed project. For Spinola, the redevelopment of areas like Hudson Yards and improved subway access to the neighborhood help create what he referred to as “another infrastructure” — namely, office space — and can generate construction jobs during a tough economic climate.

Students interview REBNY President Steven Spinola (L) and Pratt Center for Community Development Director of Policy Joan Byron (R)

We got a very different perspective on the issue when we talked to Joan Byron, Director of Policy, and Elena Conte, Organizer for Public Policy Campaigns, at the Pratt Center for Community Development in Brooklyn, where transportation is a social justice issue. “The short answer is that the MTA decides. But the bigger question is, who wields the most influence over the MTA?” Byron said. “Who has power over legislators? Those folks have the most input.” Byron and Conte noted that lower-income residents of the city typically don’t have a strong voice in transportation planning issues, particularly in comparison to real estate developers, and are often left with slower, less-reliable transit options.

An imbalance in efficient transit access is one of the reasons Byron and Conte are strong supporters of Bus Rapid Transit (BRT). BRT is bus service that acts like a subway, with dedicated travel lanes and platforms for efficient entry and exit. Just like the subway, you pay your fare before getting on the bus. BRT is more practical and cost-effective to build and operate than the subway — $1 million per mile to build here in New York City, as opposed to an approximate $1 billion per mile cost to build a subway — so why isn’t there more BRT in New York?

To investigate why the MTA prioritizes specific transit modes for certain sites we turned to Mark Schiffman, vice president of MTA Capital Construction, the department responsible for “mega projects,” such as the 7 line extension, the Fulton Street Transit Center and the Second Avenue subway. Mark showed us renderings of the proposed development for Hudson Yards and maps of where the subway is being extended underground, and addressed some of our questions about the new station and the process of deciding where the subway goes.

Students meet with MTA Capital Construction VP Mark Schiffman (L) and DCP consultant Sandy Hornick (R)

“It used to be that one individual, such as Robert Moses, would determine in large measure where a public works project would go,” Schiffman told us. If that one person preferred highways and bridges to public transit, for instance, then priority was given to building roads. Today, it’s harder to figure out exactly who decides; it is a process with many players and multiple steps. One key piece of the process is the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), which, as its name suggests, identifies the potential effects a project will have on the environment of the city — traffic flow, patterns of light and shadow, ecology, infrastructure and more. An EIS is required by the federal government for any project that receives federal funds. But, Schiffman pointed out, no federal funds are being used for the 7 line extension. The MTA saw an opportunity to fast-track the development by financing the project with bonds. Yet the MTA still chose to undergo the EIS process, a decision made, Schiffman told us, “to prevent one individual from playing king.”

Sandy Hornick, a consultant to the New York City Department of City Planning, elaborated on what Mark Schiffman introduced to us: the EIS process, ULURP (the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure, a public review process for zoning changes), and the “creative financing” of the project that, as Schiffman described, would “fast-track” its development. Hornick explained that the 7 line extension is being funded through municipal bonds rather than state or federal monies, which come with restrictions and long-term financial unpredictability. Distilling the complex financial processes down to their essence, Hornick summarized: “All of this development will generate a lot of revenue. And we can borrow against this future revenue and use those bonds to pay for the subway.” Other transit projects that are funded by the federal or state government receive money over a certain period of time, after which they have to hope that funding will continue so that they can proceed with construction. With this project, as Schiffman said, “the money is in the bank, so we have certainty that we’ll be able to build.”

Creating the timeline

BACK IN THE CLASSROOM AND OUT ON THE STREET
Back in the classroom, we had our field notes, the recordings and transcriptions of our interviews, and an understanding of a new vocabulary we had encountered when talking to our interviewees. Now, we had to make sense of it all. What did our stakeholders tell us about the decision-making process? What are the issues at play? The alternatives? What can we do as citizens to affect the process?

To put things in perspective, the students created a timeline. From the transcripts, we cut out process-related quotes from each of our four interviewees and sorted them chronologically, from the very beginning of the project to the present, to help us understand what actually happened across organizations and from different perspectives.

Newly informed, we decided to revisit Hudson Yards and visualize the complete process of the 7 line extension in real space. We identified “six steps” to the project: Planning, Analysis/Scoping, Financing, Rezoning (ULURP), Agreement/Memo of Understanding, and Construction. With student-drawn placards that illustrated these six phases in hand, we organized a “process-ion” along the path of the subway extension — starting at 8th Avenue and 41st Street, continuing across 41st Street to 11th Avenue, and then turning south to 11th Avenue and 34th Street. We marked each of the six steps above ground, while tracing the path of the new subway tunnel beneath our feet.

Walking the Line, the 7 line process-ion

Fast-Tracked “Process-ion” by the Center for Urban Pedagogy

The final installment of our Urban Investigation was to share the story of the 7 line extension with a larger audience. We created a newspaper to inform others about what we had learned. We included quotes from our stakeholders, our own thoughts on the project, and the drawings we created to represent the six steps of the process. The newspaper — “This is a Story of the 7 Line Extension and the Hudson Yards Redevelopment Project” — will be distributed along the 7 line and beyond. (Click here to download a PDF copy.)

Printing the newspaper

Our exploration of transportation planning in New York City was full of surprises. What surprised our students the most was the fact that there is no public vote. The messiness of real-world politics, as we learned from each interview, was a lesson in the constraints and tradeoffs that need to be made in government and public policy.

More, though, than the process of figuring out who decides, we learned that behind government process there is an entire team of dedicated public servants (and lobbyists and advocates) who are willing and even excited to talk about their work. At a stage in life where the students are trying out their adult selves, it is important to find ways to practice the role of “engaged citizen.” Elected officials really do owe us all their time and accountability — especially in cases where public input is often limited to community boards composed of appointed officials.

One student remarked that transportation issues became more legible to her when she traveled from Queens to Red Hook for a summer internship at Congresswoman Nydia Velázquez’s office. She said that the trip took longer than she had hoped it would each day, and there weren’t adequate transportation options. Her participation in this investigation into transit planning had heightened her awareness of the gaps in efficiency in her own commute and helped her imagine how to create change. We hope that by helping our students understand public process a little better, they will be more likely to take an active role in their own communities and help ensure that a diversity of voices and interests are represented as our city’s policies and plans are made.

Fast-Tracked is a collaboration of CUP Teaching Artists Alexandra Woolsey Puffer and Jeff Maki with CUP staff and students from College Now at New Design High School: Sarai Arroyo, Kharee Boyd, Lawrence Daise, Juan Garcia, Steven Meijas, Isaiah Ortiz, Dahyana Santos, Aldo Sorcia, Ronex Tse and Shadiq Williams. We’d like to thank our student crew who spent 15 weeks after school to find out who decides where the subway goes.

Creating materials for the newspaper

Presenting the final newspaper at the High Line

All photos courtesy of Jeff Maki and Alexandra Woolsey Puffer for the Center for Urban Pedagogy.

Jeff Maki is an artist-programmer in New York City and a principal collaborator with Publicworks Office. Jeff writes about the legibility of urban infrastructure and advises public and private organizations on the future of digital cities.

Alexandra Woolsey Puffer is an artist-designer in New York City and a principal collaborator with Publicworks Office. Her interests include social systems and symbolic capital.

The views expressed here are those of the authors only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

This past winter, I had the opportunity to teach a Visual Studies workshop at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation entitled “Montage City: Filmmaking as Urban Observation.” The point of the workshop was to encourage students of architecture to engage with the collection and arrangement of moving images as an exercise in interpreting the existing conditions of urban space. As a formal strategy, cinematic montage — the juxtaposition of distinct moving images to form a cohesive whole — is uniquely suited to the study of urbanism, particularly for designers learning how to propose sensitive and sophisticated interventions in the landscape.

11 students went out and documented New York locales far and wide, from City Island to Roosevelt Island, from Willets Point to the Inwood Railyards. While the methodological framework of the workshop invoked site analysis, the sites in question were not bounded in the terms of a real or imagined architectural or urban design project. Rather, the focus was on a slightly larger scale: the scale of experience that corresponds roughly to the size of a small neighborhood; or, the scale at which New Yorkers are typically able to identify a particular look and feel for a particular place.

Students were encouraged to investigate these ineffable essences in repeated visits, by shooting video of people doing things (such as shoveling snow or fixing bait to a fishing pole), of people moving through space (such as commuting on the Roosevelt Island Gondola or driving over the Brooklyn Bridge), and of details of the built environment (such as housing stock or streetscape design). Some of the sites, like Willets Point, Coney Island or Admiral’s Row at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, are facing large-scale redevelopment; others, like City Island or 138th Street in Harlem, are buffeted by subtler and slower forces of urban change. All of the sites students chose to document are undergoing some form of transformation, yet these videos are less about preserving a moment in time than about interpreting what makes a place feel a certain way.

Check out three of the student videos below:

Coney Island by Julie Jira
Julie Jira’s exploration of Coney Island opens with a subway journey to the end of the line that literally and figuratively frames her gaze on a storied landscape defined by the interaction between natural and built components: gulls alighting on docks, fishermen preparing for a catch, children playing along the shoreline. The video manages to resist the visual clichés of Coney Island without abandoning careful observation of the neighborhood’s icons: the boardwalk, the rides, the beach.

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Willets Point by Andrew Kim
For his video, Andrew Kim lit out for Willets Point and captures a mundane task we can all relate to, digging a car out after heavy snow. In the Iron Triangle, however, with its concentration of auto body shops, scrapyards and potholes and its lack of sidewalks, sewers or the kind of stormwater drainage systems found elsewhere in the city, the rhythms of daily life are highly specific. With a subtle and consistent approach to sound as a formal element, this video sketches a brief portrait of a unique urban context and repeatedly refers to the neighborhood’s points of contact — trains entering, cars leaving, airplanes flying overhead — with the city and world beyond its borders.

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Brooklyn Bridge by Alok Shetty
In Alok Shetty’s paean to a beloved landmark, the architectural iconicity of the Brooklyn Bridge coexists with its functional role as a vital part of the city’s traffic system. By cleverly switching between these two modes of looking at the bridge, underscored by his use of timelapse videography and music, his video articulates both the crucial necessity and the timeless indeterminacy of infrastructure.

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These days, most use of moving images in architectural practice seems to prioritize illustrating a potential future: the proposed result of a design project as visualized by an animated fly-through or 3D massing diagram. “Montage City” was intended to get architecture students thinking about how to use the craft of nonfiction filmmaking to look closely at what’s there already and to represent aspects of urban form and experience that are not always captured in traditional site analysis: the actions and interactions of individuals; the relationship of light and shadow; the interplay of texture, shape, pattern and line; the inextricability of the social and physical attributes of the urban fabric.

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Cassim Shepard is the editor of Urban Omnibus. He makes non-fiction media, especially films and video, about architecture and urbanism. He lives in Brooklyn.

Top image: Row 1 (left to right): Ji-Hye Ham (Hunters Point), David Anderson (City Island) | Row 2: Julie Jira (Coney Island), Mary Calvani (Roosevelt Island), Cristina Nguyen (Admiral’s Row at the Brooklyn Navy Yard) | Row 3: Alok Shetty (Brooklyn Bridge), Kooho Jung (Inwood Railyards), Rachel Barnard (138th Street) | Row 4. Andrew Kim (Willets Point), Seungwon Song (Inwood Railyards), Irene Brisson (Columbia University Campus)

Man and the Machine | Click on any image to see more of Mallon’s work

Stephen Mallon is a photographer invested in capturing extraordinary moments in the industrial landscape and the surreal beauty of the machines and sites that populate it. But the projects Mallon documents aren’t your everyday construction sites. “Next Stop Atlantic” follows an MTA recycling program that uses retired subway cars, stripped and cleaned, to rebuild underwater reefs along the eastern seabed. “Brace for Impact: The Salvage of Flight 1549″ documents the recovery of the US Airways airbus, piloted by Captain “Sully” Sullenberger, that landed in the Hudson River in 2009 after a collision with a flock of geese resulted in engine failure. In “A Bridge Delivered,” one of his time-lapse projects, Mallon shows us the delivery and installation of the new Willis Avenue Bridge, crossing the Harlem River to connect Manhattan and the Bronx. Most recently, Mallon completed “Volare,” a series of images following the construction of a new roller coaster on Coney Island. We recently had an opportunity to talk to Mallon about his work, the underappreciated beauty of engineering and how photography can provoke contemplation of industry and our natural environment — and their unexpected convergences.

An exhibition of Mallon’s series “Next Stop Atlantic” will be presented at the Look3 Festival of the Photograph in Charlottesville in June 2011, and will also be on display at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey later this summer. In spring 2012, “Brace for Impact: The Salvage of Flight 1549” will be exhibited at Webster University in St. Louis. “A Bridge Delivered” has been selected for inclusion in this summer’s Rooftop Films Summer Series here in New York City.

Volare, Coney Island | Click on any image to see more of Mallon’s work

How do you conceive of or identify your projects? What does it mean to you to be an “industrial photographer,” as you’ve described yourself in the past?

I am attracted to a lot of different subjects in the industrial world. I just finished a project documenting the construction of a new roller coaster for the Wall Street Journal. It’s the first new coaster in Coney Island in over 50 years. A few months ago, I was in Brazil on a commission to photograph on an offshore drilling platform for a series titled “Petrobras.”

I am hoping to be in a number of recycling plants over the coming months. I move from commission to commission, along with continuing my long term project “American Reclamation,” which is a series of images about material and space reuse in the 50 states.

But I am actually getting away from identifying myself as “an industrial photographer.” I realized, after framing my work that way, that people saw me as someone who was shooting only the box on a conveyor belt.

It seems that you have a particular interest in recycling and salvage. How did that interest develop?

I have been shooting industrial landscape work for almost all of my life. I got away from it during university, but in the late ’90s I started finding the antenna and the oil container really appealing again. After a meeting with a book agent to publish a collection of my work, I realized I needed a project to focus on. Recycling was a natural fit!

Next Stop Atlantic | Click on any image to see more of Mallon’s work

Tell us about “Next Stop Atlantic.” This series documents an MTA program that recycles retired subway cars by using them to create artificial reefs — “moments of violent recycling,” as you’ve described it. How did you find out about the project?

I was out scouting a location for a portrait in New Jersey when I recognized a barge loaded with subway cars sitting in a shipyard in Bayonne. The yard was owned by maritime contractor Weeks Marine. I sent them information about my recycling project, and the MTA and Weeks let me follow the subway cars out into the Atlantic Ocean. I spent just shy of three years going out on multiple trips.

The moment the car hits the water there’s this Titanic-esque moment when the water overtakes the car as it sinks. It’s incredibly fast — from the moment it’s picked up and thrown overboard for the fishes. The change from seeing steel lying on a barge out in the Atlantic to watching water rush in as it hits the ocean is quite dramatic.

Brace for Impact: The Salvage of Flight 1549 | Click on any image to see more of Mallon’s work

In a lot of your work, bodies of water play an important role. In your series “Flight 1549,” you document the recovery of the US Airways airbus that famously landed in the Hudson River in 2009 after a collision with a flock of geese caused its engines to fail. Are you particularly attracted to maritime industrial subject matter?

It just keeps calling my name. Similar to shooting objects placed on a white background or against the sky, water isolates the machine.

How did you get interested in creating “A Bridge Delivered,” your time-lapse video of the delivery and installation of the new Willis Avenue Bridge? Did you know immediately that you wanted to document it?

Weeks Marine has a construction division and they gave me a call last summer to see if I would want to come out to shoot it. I knew immediately that I wanted to document it!

A Bridge Delivered from stephen mallon on Vimeo.

Over 30,000 images comprise “A Bridge Delivered,” but in your still photographs the individual moments you capture are very precise. Did you think about these two projects very differently, or did your photographs suggest how best to portray the idea?

Yes, the process of telling a story in motion has been a change for me. I used to look for one or a few images to encapsulate the event. Now I am looking for clips, longer moments in time to keep the viewer engaged and the story running.

Practically speaking, how do you negotiate such immediate access to your subjects? How do you get as close as you do?

Having the existing body of work has made clients and locations much more comfortable. They see that other people have trusted and commissioned me in the past, which boosts their confidence.

American Reclamation | Click on any image to see more of Mallon’s work

How would like your photography to affect or inform the way your viewing public sees or considers the city and its infrastructure?

Some people are horrified about the artificial reef program, but I think it’s because they don’t know the details about how it is designed to help the environment. I am fortunate that I have been able to photograph these historical projects that are all tied to New York — my interest is in making unique images of historical moments. The response to these projects has been amazing and I am truly grateful.

What types of projects are you working on now?

I’m designing a remote camera that will let me shoot hi-res time-lapse footage from any location for an extended period of time — I’ll have more details soon! I am also conceptualizing my own proposal for an artificial reef. But that is going to take some time!

Man and the Machine | Click on any image to see more of Mallon’s work

All photos courtesy of and copyright Stephen Mallon

Most people look at work sites and machinery and see nothing more than concrete and steel. Stephen Mallon looks at them and sees both a surreal beauty and the wonder of their engineering. His work has been exhibited widely and featured on numerous websites, in print and on TV and radio, including National Public Radio, Flavorwire, The Atlantic, Fast Company, the Wall Street Journal, GQ, Wired, New York Magazine, NBC, Vanity Fair and CBS News. Stephen has traveled everywhere from Africa to Brazil, searching out artificial landscapes and industrial footprints. He has also been commissioned by a wide range of clients, including the Sunday London Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Publicis, Sudler & Hennessey, and MAYTAG. Mallon’s photos have been honored by Communication Arts 2008 and 2009, the New York Photo Festival 2009 and the Lucie Awards 2009. Since 2002, he has been a board member of the New York chapter of the American Society of Media Photographers and served as president from 2006 to 2009. He lives in New York with his wife and their young daughter.