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

For all the griping about tourist crowds, corporate control or inauthentic sanitization, no one can doubt Times Square’s status as iconic, legendary and spectacular. In an excerpt from his 2006 book On the Town: One Hundred Years of Spectacle in Times Square, Marshall Berman, a scholar whose Marxist readings of urban history might lead one to expect a dismissal of the area’s redevelopment in the 1990s, writes, “it isn’t as bad, as antiseptic, as suburban, as many of us feared. It’s nice to see that Rudolph Giuliani’s project of turning the keys to the city over to Disney hasn’t turned the city into Disneyland. The thrill’s not gone.”

Of course, much of that thrill comes from the dazzling electric signs, the teeming crowds, the overwhelming sensory experience of the place. But the group responsible for its upkeep, the Times Square Alliance – which was originally formed as a Business Improvement District in 1992 to provide additional security and to clean the streets, and subsequently grew to produce New Year’s Eve, Broadway on Broadway and other large events – also sees Times Square as a fertile canvas for contemporary artists, a unique opportunity to bring individual, creative visions to bear on a popular landscape that we think we know. So Times Square Alliance president Tim Tompkins hired Glenn Weiss, a veteran arts administrator and curator with a diverse body of work that has ranged from putting on shows at Storefront for Art and Architecture and PS1 in the 1980s to implementing local government public art programs in Seattle and south Florida, to bring public art to Times Square.

Business Improvement Districts are more commonly known for putting on events (alongside traditional maintenance activities) than they are for robust public art programs. Weiss cites other examples, like the Downtown Alliance, the Madison Park Conservancy or the Chicago Loop, as examples of local or community-based groups committed to public art. But few places can claim the sheer number of visitors or the indescribable energy of Times Square. With those unique characteristics in mind, we took Weiss on a walk through Times Square to talk about the place, the role of public art in civic life and some of the art works he has facilitated over the past three and a half years. It was one of his last days on the job, as he prepares to move to Houston to take on yet another exciting challenge at the intersection of community engagement, urban placemaking and contemporary art practice.

– C.S.

What do you do?
For the past three and a half years, I’ve been the manager of public art and design for Times Square. We look for the very best in contemporary arts in all mediums and all forms, and we invite artists to come in and diversify the activities and reputation of Times Square as it is today. We want Times Square to be seen as part of New York as a whole. And since the best in contemporary art and design is part of that whole, we want that to be in Times Square.

I see myself primarily as an arts administrator who also does curatorial work rather than the other way around. The difference is that my goal is to facilitate creative people to do their best work. I’m less concerned with evaluating whether the work is excellent to present or whether it advances the field, I’m evaluating whether or not I can help an artist do something special in a particular place with a particular community. And in Times Square, that community is the 300,000 people who pass through here every day.

Times Square is the most amazing document of the kind of interfaces we create between ourselves and what we broadcast to ourselves.

How did this job come about for you?
When I first heard about this opportunity in Times Square, I was living in Florida, where I managed a public art program and worked in urban design and planning for a suburban, planned community called Coral Springs. I think part of what qualified me for this position – in addition to my experience as a curator in alternative art spaces and as an arts administrator in local government – was a blog about public art I’d been writing for the previous two years or so for ArtsJournal. There were not many people writing consistently on public art at that time.

So you’ve worked with public art in a wide variety of contexts.
When I moved here for this job in 2008, it wasn’t my first time in New York. In the ‘80s, I studied architecture at Columbia, and during that time I became friends with a lot of great artists in the East Village, one of whom is Kyong Park, who founded Storefront for Art and Architecture in 1982. We worked together for two years running Storefront, and we became very engaged in how artists and architects are able to make an impact with their work. We did several major public projects: one dealt with homelessness and how to build shelters, another was our attempt to save Adam Purple’s Garden in the Lower East Side. We didn’t think to label these projects as “public art,” we just thought of ourselves as doing stuff out in the world. To be here, doing that, during those early years was an exceptional experience in my life.

After that, I moved to Seattle, but I simultaneously became the architecture curator at PS1, so I would return to New York to manage the exhibitions I organized up until 1990. When I first moved to Seattle, I curated a series of outdoor exhibitions on people’s front yards. Then I was hired to be the manager of the public art program for King County, which surrounds and includes Seattle. So that’s where I “learned” public art in an official sense.

I’ve heard your early work described as political in nature. Do you think about your work in public art as political?
I don’t. In the ‘80s, in Seattle as well as at PS1 or at Storefront, my work was very clearly political: I wanted to change the world, I wanted to find artists and architects that were interested in changing the world and I wanted to work with them.

In Seattle, after running the public art program for King County, I decided I wanted to be a community activist in my neighborhood, which was a very low income and very diverse community. And what happens when you dedicate yourself to the community is that all those abstract ideas about who is to blame for various kinds of social injustice suddenly seem not to function very well. Not only do you have to work with real people who have wonderfully different ways of doing things, but you also have to start making compromises in order to effect change within your community. When you start to do that, the strategy of being aggressive toward the powerful doesn’t function as well any more.

Given the trajectory of your career — moving from being a curator in the vanguard of art and culture to a role in municipal government instituting public art policy — what does “public art” mean to you? How would you define it?
Public art, as I see it, began as an idea that architecture had failed to humanize its environment, that the bad modernism and strip-down economics of government buildings had left public architecture bereft of any human intimacy. Public art as we think of it today emerged from a passionate urge to bring back that sense of human intimacy.

But these days, architects are finding ways to bring that intimacy into our built environment. So public art, when it works well, becomes about finding ways for artists, administrators and curators to work together – in  collaboration with communities of people who use or visit a particular place – to create the conditions for some new thing to be born.

What does Times Square mean to you?
From 1990 until I moved back here in 2008, I hardly ever visited New York. And in 1990, Times Square was a very different place than it is today! Even when I did live in New York in the ‘80s, I would rarely ever come to Times Square. 42nd Street was very active, whether it was with movies or porn or drugs, but Times Square itself was very quiet. There weren’t even very many electric signs at that time. Other than when people came to see Broadway shows, there was a sense of emptiness.

When I came back for the first time in 2008, it was completely surprising to see the number of people, the number of stores, the kind of transformation to a place that seemed more normal in a way but also not normal at all. Times Square is the most amazing document of 21st century entertainment, of the kind of interfaces we create between ourselves and what we broadcast to ourselves.

There is no other place like it, maybe in the world. Times Square is a place of visceral experience; it is not a place of thought. And making that connection in an artwork – to experience, rather than to thought – can be extremely difficult.

So what was the process for presenting public art in that context?
We started by identifying the public space throughout Times Square, both the plazas and the privately-owned public spaces. We did two open calls for ideas, one in 2009 and one in 2010. Basically we just said “give us your ideas about what you would like to do and we will evaluate the quality of the proposal and the feasibility of actually making it happen within that space.” Our criteria for selection, beyond making sure every proposal considered was functional and safe, prioritized projects that somehow spoke to Times Square and the people who would be here.

When I first came, we started out at the Port Authority Bus Terminal with Tattfoo Tan’s giant mural on the front of the bus terminal and then a smaller mural on a fence on 8th Avenue by Kai McBride. Our idea was to go from all these corners because, here in Times Square itself, there is very little space. When the Mayor closed Broadway to traffic, then everything changed.

"Nature Matching System" mural at the Port Authority Bus Terminal | Photo courtesy of the Times Square Alliance

How has the public art program interfaced with the urban design changes that happened over the past few years, if at all?
Tim Tompkins is very concerned, and rightly so, that Times Square be a great public space with valuable civic events and people on the ground. The Times Square Alliance did not want Times Square to be just left as an empty plaza or open only to corporate events. The public art program became a kind of demonstration project to show how these plazas could be a benefit to the general public. Remember: on an average day, 300,000 people pass through Times Square.

One thing about Times Square is that an audience is always here, in a way that does not exist when you are in, say, Madison Square Park or in front of the County Court House. So one of the main objectives for artists or designers is to figure out what to do with that audience. How do you engage them, where do they physically place themselves? How do they as a group go in and out?

One of the great projects from Performa in 2009 was Arto Lindsay’s dance performance where a line of fifty dancers slowly made their way through Times Square. I loved the way the crowd dealt with how to keep up with the performance. They had to keep running around ahead of the dancers. So you have the dancers in a line, but the people move in blobs and waves as they try to keep up with the the dancers — and the strange phenomenon is that the crowd didn’t give the dancers any space. They would keep crowding around them again and again, so the crowds become part of the interactive potential for the artist.

Here is another type of interactive project, a piece called Performer by Adam Frank, installed in Anita’s Way, which is the name for the pedestrian passageway of the Bank of America Tower. Adam calls this a “self-affirmation piece.” If you stand in this spotlight on the ground, your presence triggers the sound of beautiful applause for you and only you.

Passersby triggering applause at "Performer" by Adam Frank

Tell me about some other artists and artworks that you brought to Times Square, and how they responded the context they found here.
One of the major ways that visitors to Times Square engage with the place comes from photography and the public’s desire to make a visual record of themselves experiencing something new. As an artist, how do you take advantage of that?

"Valentine Heart" by Gage / Clemenceau | Photos courtesy of the Times Square Alliance

In 2009, Gage / Clemenceau Architects attempted to do just that with Valentine Heart. They made a sculpture of a heart and also designed a little stage in front of the sculpture with up-lights. People waited in line to have their picture taken on the stage with the heart. Gage / Clemenceau understood what people wanted to do and how to create a setting for it in Times Square.

The first and only time we tried using the three billboards at the southern end of Times Square — the NASDAQ, the Reuters, and what was then Panasonic News, which is now the Sony News — was two years ago during Performa ’09. For a piece called Snorks, the artist Loris Greaud had all three screens playing images of fireworks for 20 minutes that relate to a complicated project of underwater animals and fireworks in Abu Dhabi.

We did a piece with the Cuban artist Alexander Arrechea on the NASDAQ Board right after the economic crisis, which was a giant animation of a wrecking ball smashing against the NASDAQ sign. Not only did the public not really recognize what was happening, but even NASDAQ did not necessarily recognize the relationship between the piece and what was going on in the world.

What we found is that for the artists as well as the people who come to Times Square on a daily basis, the memory of being in Times Square and the projection of being in Times Square is almost as important as actually doing the work in Times Square.

"Black Sun" by Alexander Arrechea | Photo courtesy of the Times Square Alliance

That seems to reflect what you were saying about people’s primary point of engagement being photos of themselves in this place, the desire to create a memory of having been in a place seems a primary reason that a lot of people come.
People come here to experience the center of New York. For example, my wife’s relatives are from Argentina. When they come to New York, they don’t think about whether or not they might come to Times Square. They have to come to Times Square on a visit to New York.

Another thing that interests me about Times Square is that a lot of the social services remain. Right in front of us is the Woodstock Hotel, which provides services for very low-income seniors, and there are facilities for the homeless nearby. These types of uses may no longer be considered to be part of the character of the place in the way they might have been in the ‘80s or early ‘90s, but the living legacy of the senior center in the Woodstock Hotel is just as much a part of Times Square as the history of the Paramount Theatre, the site of the first youth fan craze for a musician, for Benny Goodman in the ’30s. Years later there was an actual riot for Frank Sinatra, with teen girls fainting as he arrived to perform. These historical moments become part of the density of the experience.

Do you consider the billboards and signs themselves to be a form of public art?
No, I don’t. They are very infrequently used to engage or empower an individual community or to bring the artist and the community together. But I do think what makes Times Square unique is the way that it fills up your whole cone of vision and your peripheral vision: everywhere you look, there’s this lighting and this crazy energy that you don’t experience in physical space anywhere else in the world. When you’re here, you feel the space of it as opposed to a combination of the particular buildings or other individual components.

But, speaking of billboards, a little known fact is that 1 Times Square on the southern end has no occupants, aside from a Walgreens on the ground floor. It is completely economically supported by the advertising from the billboards.

Public art by the Red Stairs | Photo courtesy of the Times Square Alliance

You’ve worked at the county level in Seattle, at the town level in south Florida, and in Times Square you are working at the relatively small scale of a district, albeit one of the most iconic districts in the world. In terms of having a coherent, influential or successful public art program, do you like working at the district level?
I think the great public art administrators and curators in the country are those that have a single place of operation where they continue to work over and over again. Of course there are groups like Creative Time that do great work pretty much everywhere. But, for me, a sustained effort will produce better results than what’s possible in a county or a large city or a state, where you would have to come into a community one time, learn once, listen once, and then leave. I think it’s far more difficult at larger scales to do work that’s the same level of quality, unless you are very lucky or have the benefit of an artist’s sheer determination to do a great job.

What’s next for you?
I’m going to run the Art League Houston, which is an art center near downtown Houston. My goal is to expand its capabilities in serving the artist community and those people who want to make art – fusing adult education with community engagement. I have this idea in my head, after being here in the land of the virtual, to get back to something my parents dreamed of in the ’50′s and ’60s, which was for people to make art together. In their generation they called it a hobby; in ours we call it Do-It-Yourself; but whatever we call it, there’s a desire for physical and collaborative activities, for people to come together and make art together. I’d like to try to help create space for that in Houston.

…

Glenn Weiss has maintained a diverse professional practice assisting governments and civic organizations with physical transformations of cities and neighborhoods through urban planning, architecture, landscape and public art. Since May 2008, Glenn Weiss has developed and managed the new public art program for the NYC Business Improvement District responsible for Times Square and the Broadway Theater District. He is currently the executive director the Art League Houston. 

On August 6th, a small group gathered around artist Mary Mattingly to listen to “The Story of Flock House,” a history of her current work-in-progress and its corresponding exhibit, The Investigation, Constitution and Formation of Flock House, currently on view at the LMCC’s Art Center on Governors Island. Flock House is a prototype nomadic living system made of recycled materials that is designed to latch onto urban buildings and structures to establish symbiotic relationships with them and those who will reside in it.

Mattingly presented her talk in the LMCC gallery, an intimate setting that allowed the event to progress as a conversation rather than a lecture. The gallery space holds a compilation of bits and pieces of the elements that have both generated and been generated by the Flock House project – from diagrams and sketches to sculptures and photographs. Born in 2010, the House is the sequel to Mattingly’s Waterpod project, a floating mobile dwelling, also made of recycled materials, that aims to push the boundaries of the ever-densifying city into New York’s waterways. Flock House, much like the Waterpod, offers a malleable and fluctuating space that migrates around New York City, this time pushing the city into the limitless sky.

Flock House Installation at 33 Flatbush Avenue | via marymattingly.com

The first photograph of Mattingly’s presentation, a black and white print of a wooden house on wheels in Northern Connecticut in which she was raised, made clear the early origins of her fascination with nomadic living systems. But the concept of a perched, autonomous living system did not occur to Mattingly until she was navigating around the five boroughs during her Waterpod journey. Throughout these travels, she encountered a new fascination: industrial waterfront cranes and the operators’ cabs affixed to them. She began to imagine migratory houses with hanging gardens tethered to old structures, wondering “Is this the future of New York?” Mattingly and a few of her friends moved into one of these perched crane-top cabins and lived there until they were kicked out for legal reasons. Unimpeded, Mattingly established a relationship with Al Attara, a Brooklyn landlord with community-driven, eco-friendly visions, who gave her permission to use the rooftop of 33 Flatbush Avenue – a sanctuary of communal spaces for artists and entrepreneurs — as the birthplace for the House.

Flock House began to materialize. Mattingly and her collaborators gradually collected recycled materials (mostly abandoned vehicle parts and construction materials), planted vegetation and, with the help of architecture students, constructed a pathway of wooden planks. In summer 2010, a prototype of the House was installed at Smack Mellon Gallery to allow for greater public access to the work-in-progress.

Flock House Installation at Smack Mellon | via marymattingly.com

Though Flock House is constantly undergoing changes as a basic principle, certain components are set in stone. The fiberglass exterior shell is made of recycled industrial materials that have been crushed and re-casted into an organic sphere with open patches intended to mimic human migratory patterns around the globe. Its size is fixed to match the width of a highway lane for travelling purposes. This shell, however, wraps around a modular skeleton comprised of steel bars that can be hinged and unhinged into any desired shape. Eventually, the House will be able to latch onto other structures. Inhabitants will use collected rainwater to shower, drink and grow vegetation, and solar and human power to generate energy. (The team of architecture students collaborating with Mattingly is currently studying human power systems.)

The Governors Island exhibit presents a myriad of fantastical, non-functional, self-sufficient systems constituted of recycled materials: a vibration-powered light system; an air-purifier that sucks smog in and releases clean air, potable water, and fertilizer; a build-your-own-island system; a wearable home; and a bike-powered water purification system. Mattingly intentionally staged a conceptual show, presenting her interest in the fantastic and the plausible existence of such systems in the future, rather than their engineered actualization. But she also used charming subtleties, such as a rock under one of the wheels of bicycle system that would hypothetically hinder it from moving forward, to draw the viewer back to the real-world relevance of the systems she imagines. Infused throughout the installation is Mattingly’s criticism of the hasty pace of our times: “The more we speed up, the more we need to slow down.”

Air Ship Arecibo City | via robertmann.com

Perfection is by no means Mattingly’s ambition. She is not on a mission to reinvent living systems as perfectly autonomous utopic habitats. In fact, she was pleasantly surprised to encounter new obstacles from destination point to destination point during her travels in the Waterpod. Likewise, Flock House is meant to rely upon the symbiotic relationships that will emerge in each of its new environments. She references Archigram’s Plug-in City ­– a framework for an imaginary city with components that are plugged in and consistently reorganized – as inspiration. Through interdependent relationships, the project will encourage human collaboration and teamwork, a crucial element for the future of our cities.

Though Flock House’s journey has not yet been fully choreographed, a few of its destination points are nearly definite, including Times Square, Brooklyn Bridge Park and Snug Harbor, and it is scheduled to commence its travels with invited guests in May 2012. And though the House is a tangible project with a concrete plan of action, The Investigation, Constitution, and Formation of Flock House bears the form of a conceptual alternative to urban development. Flock House itself is simply a more elaborate manifestation of Mattingly’s dreamlike collages and of her endearingly clumsy “system” sculptures; a baby-step towards awareness.

The Investigation, Constitution and Formation of Flock House is on view through August 14.

Claire Ross is currently a project assistant at Urban Omnibus and will soon be obtaining her M.Arch at the City College of New York. She grew up in New York, Philadelphia and France’s Cote d’Azur and now lives in Manhattan.

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.

Feasibility study for new ferry service | image via NYCEDC

A FERRY FEASIBLE PROPOSAL?
The Bloomberg Administration continues to make WAVES (Waterfront Vision and Enhancement Strategy) along the city’s waterfront with a ferry service to open later this year. Boats will stop in Greenpoint, Dumbo, Downtown Brooklyn and East 34th Street with the potential to expand and connect more remote sites around the city like JFK, LaGuardia, Bay Ridge, Coney Island, Hunts Point, Soundview and City Island. In hope that the ferry service will succeed where past attempts (like 2008′s $1.5 million water taxi experiment) have failed, the city’s Economic Development Corporation promises a “robust, regular service [that] will be well-integrated with existing transportation options, providing a new sustainable and enjoyable way for commuters and tourists alike to get around the city.”

CALATRAVA’S TRANSIT HUB IS EXPENSIVE
Lest the “wings” of Santiago Calatrava’s World Trade Center PATH station be compromised, Port Authority approved a $180 million budget increase for the project this week. The soaring price prompted Matt Chaban of the Observer to question the ease with which the government has freed up funds for the transit station while reneging on reconstruction of the nearby St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church, destroyed on 9/11. Chaban’s piece underscores what the choice implies about how we prioritize public projects.

TRASH TRACKED
The National Science Foundation recently announced the winners for its 2010 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge, awarding first place in non-interactive media to the urban researchers at MIT’s SENSEable City Lab who created TRASH|TRACK, one of the five projects commissioned for the League’s fall 2009 exhibition Toward the Sentient City. The project maps the route of discrete pieces of garbage as they travel through the waste management system over two months. Not only is their concept a clever investigation into the life of our forgotten waste, the resulting maps and video visualizations reveal the surprising journeys of items like a banana peel or empty ink cartridge as they traverse the country, displaying the patterns of our wastefulness and illustrating that garbage doesn’t exclusively end up in the local landfill. TRASH|TRACK also demonstrates the potential of ubiquitous computing to help us understand urban space. For more information from Science Magazine, click here. For information about Toward the Sentient City, click here. And to buy a copy of Sentient City, the new book documenting the exhibition, click here.

THIS JUST IN: PEOPLE ARE MOVING TO DOWNTOWN BROOKLYN
Downtown Brooklyn, that collection of new condos and skyscrapers hailed to shepherd the “Manhattanization of Brooklyn,” according to Councilwoman Letitia James, is apparently booming. According to the New York Post, the neighborhood’s population has doubled over the past year to 12,000 residents — thirty times what it was in 2000.

Greene Street, 1768 | image via aidwatchers.com

THE HISTORY OF A CITY BLOCK
Did you know that the Apple Store on Prince Street used to house a brothel? William Easterly of NYU’s Development Research Institute breaks the history of development down to the city block in a blog post that looks at Soho through the ages, beginning with much less dense days of light habitation by the Delaware ethnic group and continuing through epidemics, prostitution booms and art movements to its upscale present day. As fascinating as this snapshot of history is, even more interesting are the possible untold stories in every city block. Easterly asks, “we usually analyze Development at the national level. Why not other levels?” A question that in the very least should inspire some internet research projects.

SUSTAINABLE TAXIS FACE ROADBLOCK
Mayor Bloomberg’s quest for more sustainable transport options in New York City has fallen afoul of the feds. Because only federal agencies are allowed to regulate fuel economy and emission standards, the Supreme Court refused to consider the City’s appeal. This latest blow to the City’s attempts to green its cabs follows two other proposals rejected by lower courts: the first, in 2007, would have mandated all taxis get at least 30 miles to the gallon by 2009 (most of our 13,000 cabs get about 16 miles per gallon); the second, in 2009, would have replaced the entire fleet with hybrids by 2012. According to Inhabitat, the Metropolitan Taxicab Board of Trade, which brought the original suit, maintains that “the mandate was impossible for taxi owners since most currently available hybrids wouldn’t have been able to go through the beating most cabs get on a daily basis.”

THINGS TO DO THIS WEEKEND
The arts community has converged on New York this weekend for the major international art fairs held throughout the city. While only the most ambitious art enthusiast would think of bustling between the Armory at Pier 94, Scope at Pier 40, Pulse on W. 18th St., and Verge in Brooklyn, we are eager to see any if any new visions for the urban environment emerge from all this contemporary art.

.
The Roundup keeps you up to date with topics we’ve featured and other things we think are worth knowing about.

Many New Yorkers know about Chashama, the arts organization Anita Durst founded in 1995 to help artists and curators find underused spaces to house temporary exhibitions, performance spaces and studios. The organization relies heavily on the Durst family’s history in New York City real estate, and acts as a diplomatic Robin Hood of real estate. Based on the idea that empty property does not always serve the interests of landlords and developers, some have been willing to donate their spaces on a short-term basis. And through these direct space donations and many public and private grants, Chashama is able to offer spaces to artists at subsidized rent rates or for free.

This socialism of the arts – from each according to his ability and to each according to his need — helps sustain a diverse, dynamic and provocative cultural environment in New York, in the face of a disappointing lack of affordable space for creative production and dissemination in the city. Chashama currently has three galleries and two window spaces in Manhattan, and two studios spaces in the outer boroughs. Because of the lowered barriers to entry into these spaces, exhibitions run the gamut from independent video game arcade curators to nomadic fine artists to all-ages DIY concert mavens, all within a few months. Likewise, the diversity of audiences that are linked through this one organization is astonishing.

Blithedale Romance, installation view | Photo: Suko Presseau

The Blithedale Romance, currently on view at the Chashama gallery at 217 East 42nd Street, is a retrospective exhibition of monthly groups of artists from last summer’s chaNorth residency in Pine Plains, New York, curated by the 2010 chaNorth residency manager, Veronica Kavass. chaNorth is the pastoral corollary to the Chashama project in New York City, giving artists space and time to which they might not otherwise have access. While in New York City, Chashama offers artists and curators the scarce resource of real estate, in Pine Plains they are given the rare opportunity to live the country life: white farmhouse, meadow, fireflies, hammock, weather-worn barn shed, just the right-sized pond, and a bikeable backroad to town. This idyllic setting is complemented by the hard work inherent to agricultural life. Residents are expected to contribute to the productivity of McEnroe Organic Farm — also a Durst property — by planting, hoeing, picking, and generally getting their hands dirty. In return, the farm is the primary source of food for the house, and residents cook and eat their locally sourced meals together daily. It’s a bit “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner…” so to speak.

“Power Lines” by Brandon Neubauer

Both the excitement of displacement and the physical routine of chaNorth foster an intense communalism and interdependency. The residency aspires to the tradition of rural utopian experiments; the title The Blithedale Romance comes from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s fictionalized account of his time at the Brook Farm experiment. Transcendentalists, shakers, and hippies have all sought to build communities outside of society as both protest and inspiration, be their motives religious, creative, or political. The geographic removal from cities and towns symbolizes a distance in ideas and ways of living and relating to one another. The rural setting explores alternate venues for inspiration, productivity, health, community, and sustainability.

The new twist with chaNorth (and its newer neighbor, The Wassaic Project), is that it is essentially framed by an urban art world that supplies artists, funders, administrators and visitors to the project. The day-to-day of chaNorth may be a model of pastoral living, but it would not exist without the city a train ride away. That’s not to say that it wouldn’t be possible. But this relationship between ChaNorth and the city generates questions regarding how the residency functions as an outlet and support for individual artists and for existing creative networks in the city itself. Many of the artists return home to their respective cities feeling refreshed, with finished work, a new local network of creative professionals, some recipes, a book deal maybe, and firsthand knowledge of where garlic scapes come from.

Left to right: “Harvest, Skin, Cayote” by Suko Presseau, “Pioneers (Assembly)” by  Cosme Herrera, “Departure” by Yuko Oda

The Blithedale Romance is on view at the Chashama gallery at 217 East 42nd Street through February 28, 2011. You may have missed Sara Bouchard’s performance of her new song cycle and Brook Stephenson’s group reading of his intense coming-of-age-as-a-person-of-color novella, but you can still catch that summer feeling in four fantastic films, a letter of intrigue and mystery, bright and colorful multimedia pieces, bold paintings and bucolic photographs, and woodcarvings-cum-mapping projects. Artists on view are Emily Bolevice, Aneikit Bonnel, Murray Dwertmann, Yuko Oda, Cosme Herrera, Stephen Holding, Elias Melad, Brandon Neubauer, Suko Presseau, Ryan Schneider, Eliza Stamps, Linsey Wallace, Christine Wang, Seldon Yuan.

Human Dam” (video still)  by Murray Dwertman

Sarah Snider is the Executive Assistant at the Architectural League of New York. She has lived in London, Paris, and the Bay Area, and she works with Co-op NYC, a network for NYC based housing cooperatives.

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.

Read on for a preview of the items you’ll see on Tuesday night. Click on any of the images to enlarge. The Omnibus team wholeheartedly thanks everyone who has donated their work to this event. See you there!

Neil Freeman (The Brooklyn Typology Project, Elastic City)
Identically Named Places Connected (USA), AP 5/5, 2008
All identically named places in the United States connected by a line. Part of a series originally commissioned by Next American City magazine.
inkjet print
13″×19″
For more information about Neil Freeman, visit fakeisthenewreal.org
Updated: Minimum bid: $100
.

Stanley Greenberg (City as Organism, Only Some of it Visible)
Valve Chamber, Shaft 2B, City Tunnel No. 3, Bronx, 1992
gelatin silver print with archival mat
8″×10″ (sheet); 13″×15″ (with mat)
For more information about Stanley Greenberg, visit stanleygreenberg.net
Minimum bid: $750

.

Heather L. Johnson (Ever-circulating Fluids and Continuously Moving Parts)
29.53’46″ N 95.42’15″ W [Cypress Home Construction], 2008
graphite on vellum and paper
6 ¼”×7 ½” (sheet); 10 15/16“×9 ¾” (framed)
Courtesy of Christina Ray
For more information about Heather L. Johnson, visit christinaray.com
Minimum bid: $450
.

Douglas Ljungkvist (Portfolio: The Quiet City)
Untitled, 2010
digital photograph print
13″×19″ (sheet); 18″×24″ (with mat)
For more information about Douglas Ljungkvist, visit douglasljungkvist.com
Minimum bid: $300
.

Jeff Goldberg (photographer); Yumiko Matsui (sculptor) (Miniature Worlds: Coney Island)
Coney Island, 2009, paper and mixed media sculpture
inkjet print
18 ½”×13″
Donated by Erica Stoller/Esto
For more information about Yumiko Matsui, visit her website
For more information about Esto, visit esto.com
Minimum bid: $75
.

Michael Neff (Portfolio: The Night Shadow)
16th Street between 7th and 8th, New York, NY, 2009
archival inkjet print
12″×18″ (image); 13″×19″ (sheet)
For more information about Michael Neff, visit michaelneff.com
Minimum bid: $125
.

Linda Pollak (Urban Topographies: Cuts & Patches, Queens Plaza: Infrastructure Reframed)
Cuts + Patches, 2008-2010
archival digital print
8.65″×36″
Minimum bid: $250

.

James A. Reeves (My Living Room, Vinegar Hill to the Pencil Factory, Sprawling Urban Definitions)
My Living Room, 2009
Houston St., NYC
digital photograph print
13″×19″
For more information about James A. Reeves, visit bigamericannight.com
Minimum bid: $50

.

George Trakas (George Trakas at the Water’s Edge: Newtown Creek)
NC 32, 2011
pencil and watercolor on paper
11″×14″
Updated: Minimum bid: $75
.

Urban Omnibus Party + Auction
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
7:00-9:00 p.m.
Trespa Design Centre
62 Greene Street
New York City
Click here to purchase tickets
Advance tickets start at $25 ($30 at the door)

Click the image above to launch a slideshow of selections from The Night Shadow by Michael Neff.

I am interested in looking more closely at the spaces and objects that surround us in our daily lives. It is easy not to be present, especially in New York, and I try to keep myself open to the out of place, surprising juxtaposition, or formal beauty that can be found by walking out the door. This point of view has led to projects ranging from investigations of grocery store price stickers to photographs of the spaces around big box stores. Ultimately, my work stems from an instinct to point at something and say, “Look!”

The Night Shadow project began in March of 2006. I was living and working in the West Village. I often worked late and on my walks home I began to take notice of the shadows along my route — primarily ones cast by exterior lights on buildings and street lights, but sometimes by interior light shining through a window. I did some drawing experiments in 2002 where I sat in a café and repeatedly traced sun-cast shadows of window lettering on my table. The sun moves quickly in relation to something so small so I would start at one end of the type and work my way to the other. By the time I was done the whole shadow had moved and I would start again. The end result was very much like Heidi Neilson’s Long Island City Sundial project; it almost felt like animation.

I chose chalk for this project because it seemed right. Much like shadows, chalk is impermanent. I also recognized that many shadows fall on buildings and my intention was to share something beautiful and surprising, not anger home or business owners. By choosing chalk over paint or ink, I left the outcome up to those who chose to engage. If someone didn’t like the work, they could wash it away or wait for it to rain.

I draw and photograph all of these works at night. Night in New York City is surprisingly bright. During the day, shadows change quickly, which inevitably results in distorted tracings. Shadows cast by electric lights gave me the opportunity to spend time on each piece and make very intricate drawings. I once spent 3 1/2 hours making a drawing on Hudson Street that was probably 150 feet long and 8 or 10 feet wide.

The photograph is an important part of the process, acting as documentation and a vehicle to share the work, so the fact that the drawing is fugitive doesn’t bother me. But I enjoy hearing that people have run across the drawings in person. There haven’t been that many and they don’t last very long, so there’s something special about encountering the work out in the city itself.

For more information about Neff’s work, check out his website and his Flickr page. All photographs copyright Michael Neff, all rights reserved.

.

Michael Neff was born in Seattle, Washington. He earned a BFA in photography wih a minor in printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design. He lives in Brooklyn and dreams of driving on the West Coast.

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.

FATBERGS
“A nice working environment” is not how most would describe a city sewer system, but to Rob Smith, “head flusher” at Thames Water, traversing the bowels of London has its upsides. Smith and his team of 39 flushers are responsible for unclogging sewer tunnels of “fatbergs”– congealed deposits of cooking oil and flushed waste that look as disgusting as they sound. Fatbergs are typically formed of restaurant grease, used condoms, baby wipes and after a bad rain, dead rats. They collect in floating masses to stop up sewer waterways, leading to water pollution. As “Below the Waste Line,” a video by the Guardian, and a post on Edible Geography reveal, an intimate look at subterranean infrastructure reveals a waste-based map of our unsavory disposal practices (Leicester Square for example is a trouble zone for dumped oil from fast food restaurants) and the daily olfactory patterns of the urban population (morning showers are a particularly pungent time).
.

Canal Street | Photo by Flickr user YoHandy

CANAL STREET MAKEOVER
To say Canal street is hectic is an understatement, and fortunately the New York Metropolitan Transportation Committee has taken note. In a report released last Thursday the NYMTC recommends widening sidewalks to make the famously bustling street more pedestrian friendly. The report also calls for curb extensions, a redesigned intersection at Canal and Bowery, and crackdown on parking placards to reduce car congestion. The DOT says they will use recommendations from the study in their own plans for the street, funded with World Trade Center relief aid dollars. For more analysis on the report check out Streetsblog’s take.
.

ASTOR PLACE MAKEOVER
East Village hubs Astor Place and Cooper Square are also slated for a makeover, as plans for a pedestrian plaza project that were previously sidelined by the economic downturn are now underway. WXY Architecture and landscape architects Quennell Rothschild and Partners, along with the Department of Design and Construction, envision reconfigured streets that make room for new parks, benches, trees and plantings, and added traffic islands, bringing more greenery and usable public space to the highly trafficked triangle.
.

Chuck Close taxi top | via ShowMedia

ART CAB
Happy Holidays from John Amato. The president of Show Media, a company that sells ads on NYC taxis, is devoting 500 ad spots to feature art by Chuck Close and Kehinde Wiley. This is the second year self-proclaimed art lover Amato has done this. Last year, work by Yoko Ono and Alex Katz traveled the city streets. Now if only someone would donate video installations to replace TaxiTV inside the cabs…
.

OBAMA’S URBAN POLICY
Jarett Murphy at City Limits checks in on the progress of the Obama administration’s urban policies, hoping that the White House Office of Urban Affairs will pick up the pace on policy implementation as the President enters the second half of his term. Murphy cites the collaboration between federal agencies, like the Sustainable Cities Initiative led by HUD, the DOT and the EPA, as evidence that urban policy is slowly aligning with the demands of today’s metro growth and getting out of bureaucratic mire, but says the administration needs to follow up on planning with tangible projects to win favor and funding.
.

NEW YEAR, NEW TRANSIT
The TransportPolitic reports on widespread commitment to public transportation in US and Canadian cities for 2011, saying that five new light rail lines slated to open over the next year, along with over a dozen other transportation projects that will break ground, “represent a continent-wide public sector commitment to the extension of transit offerings.” In New York, construction will continue on both commuter and metro rails, with LIRR access at Grand Central planned for 2016 and the much discussed 2nd Ave subway line to open in 2017.
.

.
The Roundup keeps you up to date with topics we’ve featured and other things we think are worth knowing about.