Grand Central Terminal, 1927; the Whitney Museum of American Art, 1966 | Photo: Corbis; Ezra Stoller/Esto via nymag.com

GREATEST BUILDING EVER
What is the greatest building in New York? New York Magazine asked that question to a panel of noted architectural thinkers, including the League’s very own executive director Rosalie Genevro and board members Robert A.M. Stern and Gregg Pasquarelli, for its recent feature The Greatest New York Ever. The “arguers” weigh in on what makes a good New York building and debate their picks for the city’s best. Grand Central Terminal won points for its accessibility, legibility and beauty, and Breuer’s brutalist Whitney, with two votes, is runner up. Their debate generates insight into the past ten years of development and design in New York, which Mark Lamster talks more about in this Design Observer post.
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Trailer – The Pruitt-Igoe Myth: an Urban History from the Pruitt-Igoe Myth on Vimeo.

THE PRUITT-IGOE MYTH
A new documentary turns fresh eyes to the notorious demolition of Minoru Yamasaki’s Pruitt-Igoe housing project. The Pruitt-Igoe Myth examines the stories excluded when the housing project became a symbol for the death of modernism – namely those of its tenants – and looks to the urban context of 1960s St. Louis to provide a more complex understanding of the building’s ultimate demise. Through interviews and research the documentarians analyze the influence of urban renewal and suburbanization in the development of America’s post war urban landscape, in a film that, given the recent burst of the housing bubble, seems particularly timely. The Pruitt-Igoe Myth premieres at the Oxford Film Festival in Mississippi on February 11-13.
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NEW PARK DESIGN GUIDELINES
Streetsblog reports on the new High Performance Landscape Guidelines just released by the NYC Department of Parks and Recreation and the Design Trust for Public Space. “A comprehensive manual for the design and construction of sustainable parks and open space,” the guidelines offer best practices for stormwater management, reducing the urban heat island effect, encouraging physical activity and increasing bike and pedestrian accessibility. You can download a PDF of the complete manual on the Parks Department’s website.
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TOMORROW: ROBERT MOSES IN SONG
Who knew urban planning could elicit so much musical inspiration? Last month, we published a review of In the Footprint, a theatrical production about Atlantic Yards. Tomorrow night, the story of polemical planner Robert Moses will have the stage. Robert Moses Astride New York is a musical-in-progress chronicling the master builder’s career as he transformed New York and battled New Yorkers. Composer Gary Fagin scores the protests of mothers vying to save a Central Park playground and draws dialogue from Robert Caro’s definitive Moses tome, The Power Broker, (Caro himself got a sneak peek at the production for this New York Times piece). Starring Rinde Eckert and accompanied by the Knickerbocker Chamber Orchestra, Robert Moses Astride New York premieres tomorrow, January 15th, in a free, one night only performance at the World Financial Center Winter Garden.
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Scott Jordan uncovers historic refuse. Photo via Pardon Me For Asking

DIGGING UP BROOKLYN
Last week, we delved into the underworld of London’s sewers to show you fatbergs. This week’s excavated find is a little lighter on the ick-factor. Check out Pardon Me For Asking for a look at an excavated outhouse pit in the backyard of a Brooklyn Heights home built in 1845. Urban archeologists Scott Jordan and Jack Fortmeyer have unearthed discarded household objects from the 19th century in what is just the latest in their 35-year history of urban archaeological digs.
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REMINDER
If you haven’t done so already, please take a few minutes to fill out the Omnibus reader survey! Remember, one lucky survey respondent will win a $50 gift certificate to McNally Jackson Books.

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

If all public meetings convened by acronymed local agencies benefited from the voice of talented thespians, local politics might be more transparent, and definitely more entertaining.

The Civilians, an investigative theater troupe, takes social debate to the stage through research and interviews that form the content of their scripts. Last year, Urban Omnibus featured a video segment on The Civilian’s performance Brooklyn at Eye Level, which was an early iteration of its current production In the Footprint: The Battle Over Atlantic Yards. In the Footprint dissects the issues surrounding the contentious Atlantic Yards development, drawing on testimony from local business owners, outspoken residents and community organizers. The play presents diverse points of view in the words of people involved in or affected by this controversial project, from the owner of a neighborhood bagel shop to celebrated Atlantic Yards proponent Jay-Z. It succeeds not only in representing the range of interested parties, but also in providing space for each voice. Given the pathos of the last line in the closing song, “you have the right to your own space but not the space that’s all around you,” the collection of voices resounding through one theater is a unique achievement.

In the Footprint catalyzes dialogue among audience members because it creates a conversation that animosity between opposing camps prevented from actually happening in real life. For example, onstage the zealous ACORN director Bertha Lewis can spar with the equally passionate Patti Hagan, founder of Prospect Heights Action Coalition. Both women care deeply about the implications of the project and acknowledge its complexity (Lewis lauds the potential for jobs, low income housing and community improvement while Hagan decries the corruption of officials and destruction of the neighborhood), something that may have been lost sight of over years of argument and protest. Audience members are able to see a microcosm of what was at stake in the project, and because the production uses the actual words of the real-life stakeholders it portrays, this microcosm is not so much simplified as distilled.

Of course, a point of view is present; the selection of interviewees and the way in which their testimony is condensed and arranged grants sympathy to a certain side of the AY debate. Opponents of the project are given more stage time and seem more quirky than grandstanding supporters. Developers Forest City Ratner and Mayor Bloomberg declined to be interviewed for the project and thus their only lines are drawn from press releases and public statements — but considering they have been the dominant force in the Atlantic Yards saga, it’s hard to bemoan their lack of representation in In the Footprint. After all, it is a production by The Civilians about civilians. The stage gives a platform for many voices who didn’t have the microphone during the process, like the owner of a nearby beauty shop and a security guard, along with those who did. And given its themes of urban character and neighborhood, the play achieves just what a good neighborhood ought to: interaction and discussion.

The Civilians say they use a journalistic approach to examine the layers of complexity around a certain issue. In the case of Atlantic Yards, drama and complexity abound. In the Footprint becomes a lens to scrutinize the deeper socioeconomic and racial conflicts entangled in the new Nets arena. Often, the debate over the development was a vehicle to air grievances about the gentrification of Prospect Heights and express tension between black and white residents – a reality that, at the time, escaped many onlookers who were not directly ensnared in the issue. Through the dialogue, the audience can piece together a history of Prospect Heights and Fort Greene from redlining to gentrification. Ultimately, very little is said about basketball, but much is revealed about Brooklyn and Brooklyn identity. Sports, as is often the case, became a metaphor for hometown pride – the Dodgers are invoked a number of times, usually by Borough President Marty Markowitz – and everyone seems to weigh in on what it means to be a Brooklynite. As the Hagan character point out, Brooklyn, despite the fact that it could easily exist as its own city, has no local newspaper. It does, though, have a lot of bloggers.

Bloggers, vocal citizens and actors too, it turns out. Steve Cosson directs a performance that recalls the historic role of theater as a platform for social commentary: at one point the aforementioned bloggers even join in a bathrobed Greek chorus and remind the audience of the potential for dialogue and education that comes at the intersection of art and community activism.

In the Footprint runs through Saturday night at the Irondale center in Fort Greene.

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Caitlin Blanchfield is a freelance writer and Urban Omnibus project associate residing in New York City.

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.

Ilana Halperin, Boiling Milk (Solfataras), 2000.

After several years obsessively following a cluster of artists, investigators, cartographers and academics interested in varied approaches to human interactions with the land, I was excited to learn that the Experimental Geography exhibition, which showcases many of these projects and highlights the evocative associations that bind them together as a group, would be on view where I could see it, in the James Gallery at the CUNY Graduate Center.  The exhibition, on tour since September of 2008 with a corresponding book published by Melville House in early 2009, is here in New York City until the end of August.  On July 20th, I attended a panel discussion at CUNY featuring the curator, several contributing artists, and social theorist David Harvey, which drew out some of the themes of the exhibition in an attempt to define the ‘emerging’ practice of experimental geography.

Connecting a “growing body of culturally inspired work,” as curator Nato Thompson describes it, Experimental Geography asks many questions about the interaction between the aesthetic and the geographic, between urban and geological scales, between the poetic and didactic.  As he clarified in the panel discussion on July 20th, these questions are largely about the “aesthetic approach to the interpretation of space as a social phenomenon,” inspiring the discussion’s frequent name-dropping (and some works’ implicit referencing) of Karl Marx, the Situationists and Henri Lefebvre.   The exhibition ranges from an archive of 23 maps that include world governments and U.S. camp sites (the We Are Here Map Archive) to a listening booth of GPS-guided audio bus tours (e-Xplo) to a photograph of milk boiling in a tin from the heat of a live volcano’s sulfur spring (Ilana Halperin, above).

Looking toward a ‘politics of spatialization’ rather than one of representation, this is no traditional landscape photography fare.  How might we think about contemporary security culture in the city of Boston? Listen to kanarinka’s psychogeographic It Takes 154,000 Breaths to Evacuate Boston, a table of glass jars containing speakers, each of which plays the recorded sounds of her fearful breath as she ran out of the city on its different evacuation routes.  What subtle spatial elements structure our everyday urban experience, and how do they play upon our movement and subjectivity?  View Alex Villar’s Upward Mobility, a filmed performance of the artist subverting the conventions of city planning, absurdly/tragically attempting to navigate a horizontal city through vertical climbs.

None of the eighteen pieces fall strictly into “geography” or “art” camps, though the degree and direction of the interaction between the two disciplines varies.  Experimental Geography’s strength lies here, plainly enough, in the conjunction of the two elements in its title.  True to the meaning of experimental, none of the pieces offer conclusive answers, leaving room for an immense amount of interpretation and speculation.  This kind of artistic practice, taking place within a geographic sphere that encompasses all human activity, allows relations otherwise unrevealed in either field alone to emerge, connecting research, mapping, material production, and human subjectivity.

Images from Multiplicity's The Road Map, 2003.

Take, for example, Multiplicity’s The Road Map (above),  a two-channel video projection of drives through the West Bank zone surrounding Jerusalem.  The two journeys, one with an EU passport containing Israeli permissions and one Palestinian, measure the density of border controls in this area as experienced by two different possible travelers.  The results – 01:05 vs. 05:20 hours, respectively – convey an immersive sense of frustration, documented as well on smaller television screens displaying slowly scrolling maps of the two different drives along the same latitude.  Blending non-traditional academic measurement with a fresh, tangible experience of political space as constituted by highways, checkpoints, taxis and dirt roads, geography here acts as both an influence on and subject of visual research.

spurse, Micromobilia, 2008.

Some works are less successful in the context of the exhibition. Spurse’s Micromobilia (pictured above), a research station-cum-archive-cum-pseudo-classroom-space unfolded out of three crates, consists of a heady mix of dense chalkboard charts, books on systems theory/biology/geology/microbiology and beyond, catalogued specimens at numerous scales, and standard scientific equipment encased in Styrofoam (as if specimens of a different order).  Spurse’s intent here is to create a “geography of participation” in which the borders of disciplinary research collapse, allowing for a new site of engagement and co-production.  Yet when I tried to remove a folder from its encasement in an attempt to participate in this sort-of-laboratory, I was told by a gallery attendant not to touch it.  Seeing the work as an aesthetically-minded academic archive of possible engagements instead of an active space to use, I could now only imagine spurse’s process of crafting and assembling Micromobilia with a sense of envy for those who put it together with full access to its materials.

In some instances, Thompson’s curatorial intention to define experimental geography as a broad and inclusive practice did a disservice to some of the works on view. For example, a set of one dozen exhibition posters from the Center for Land Use Interpretation – an organization I share Thompson’s opinion about as an example par excellence of this sort of thing – did not convey a sense of CLUI’s hundreds of hours of meticulous research, documentation, and unique presentational formats.  Trevor Paglen’s contributions were a limited sampling of images from an otherwise very impressive and singular body of previous work.  The We Are Here Map Archive, gathered by Daniel Tucker, was on the other hand a sizeable collection of recent cartographical forms and tools, able to be taken out of a folio and examined up-close on a table. The prevalence of notebooks and pens among my fellow visitors suggested that the fragmentary nature of the exhibition materials left viewers hungry for more: I got the sense that many people looking around the James Gallery were going to go home and look up the vast tomes of research and information merely hinted at by the works displayed.

David Harvey speaks at the July 20th panel discussion. Photo: Independent Curators International

If participation and experimentation emerged as crucial aspects of my experience with Experimental Geography, July’s panel discussion missed the mark.  You may not have known from this review of theorist David Harvey’s contribution to the discussion, but a full panel was present, including Nato Thompson and three artists in the exhibition: radical cartographer Lize Mogel, military geographer/photographer Trevor Paglen, and spurse collaborator Iain Kerr.  Very interesting presentations by all present gave way to a familiar sense of academic stagnation as the Q&A concentrated almost entirely upon Harvey’s derision of the ‘suburbanization’ of New York City, a discussion which Mr. Kerr (and I, internally) severely questioned in relation to the more fundamental aims of the exhibition.  A Marxist analysis of the emancipatory potential of either an anti- or post-capitalist mode of spatial production is not what is most interesting, vital (or new) about the pairing of geography and art.

Signaling Experimental Geography as a practice is certainly valuable as a “platform for interpreting the world that makes us who we are,” as the exhibition brief states, but it is an expressly visual, often tactile platform.  Harvey’s work, in the tradition of Kropotkin, Reclus, and Lefebvre, does group together many of the relevant forces at work in contemporary spaces, but his position on the relationship between capitalism and urban experience did not inform a second viewing of the exhibition, nor reveal a sensitivity to the visual, tactile or experiential elements in the work displayed, nor provide many original avenues for a spatialization of politics.  (The ironically conspicuous presence of plastic Poland Spring water bottles on stage was also pointed out by an audience member in the beginning of the Q&A, but was generally ignored.)

Despite any qualms over ‘presentation vs. spatialization’, or the commentary at the panel discussion, the exhibition is something to be experienced and engaged by everyone.  There is plenty of work to see that I haven’t mentioned, including the ever-expanding gallery of visitor-created maps of New York City.  As Trevor Paglen notes in his essay on the exhibition, geography is not just about space, but entails its own space of inquiry.  And Experimental Geography (in both exhibition and book form) does just that.

Experimental Geography is on view June 24th-August 27^th at the James Gallery, CUNY Graduate Center

365 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10016

Hours: 12 Noon–6:00PM, Tuesday–Saturday

Free Admission

Sam Silver is a project associate at Urban Omnibus. He is a student at Wesleyan University where he majors in environmental studies and philosophy.

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.

“Centroids and Asphalt” deals with the materials and rules from which cities are made: from asphalt and brick to trees and shadows, from property and telecommunication lines to pigeons and cockroaches. Freeman talked a bit, engaged the group in conversation, and got us all making lists of what we could and couldn’t see around us with chalk on the sidewalk. Like Freeman’s previous work, it infuses the dry language of urban planning with a lyrical quality. That’s why it makes for a great day out for the urban enthusiast. But in the context of Elastic City, this walk also functions as part of a larger collection of bespoke and interactive experiences, all of which, through the frame provided by each individual artist, make the familiar landscape of the city unfamiliar, fascinating and profound. Therefore, both this particular walk and the idea of walks in general as a form of artistic practice merit a closer look. So we posed a few questions to Freeman and Shalom. Read what they have to say below, but first check out a glimpse of Centroids and Asphalt in the following brief video. -C.S.

Urban Omnibus: What is Elastic City and how did it come about?

Todd Shalom: Elastic City commissions artists to create walks in an effort to promote new dialogue between participants and the city. I’ve been giving soundwalks since 2004, both around the United States and in other places where I lived (particularly Israel and Argentina). Toward the end of my time in South America, while traveling in Cusco, Peru, tired and short of breath from altitude sickness, I thought about my pending return to New York with these questions: how can I hold onto the heightened awareness I feel while traveling? How can I further my explorations of poetry in different genres and create a fluid place for artists to expand upon their interests? I figured I should stick with a form I know well, that’s accessible, and has very few pre-requisites for the participant… walks!

I’m used to working between genres, so I look for artists who can adapt their talent into walks. I’m interested in encouraging artists to expand upon their own personal poetics and bring it outside. For instance, in Neil Freeman’s work, the challenge was how can we take his incredible knowledge and vocabulary of city systems and mapping and bring it to participants in a way that is interactive, that expresses what he needs to say and that forms a trusting, however temporary, community. Generally, the artists have an idea of what they want to explore, what’s meaningful or urgent to them, and then I chat with them, playing a role similar to that of a curator, about how to best develop this through group participation.

Urban Omnibus: Neil, what appealed to you about the idea?

Neil Freeman: How we move through space plays a huge and under-appreciated role in shaping how we process, perceive and value different spaces and places. I’ve always been a little disappointed that work I’ve done requires the viewer to sit in front of a computer or stand in front of a print. I was excited to work on something where participants go out and experience something new in a new space.

Urban Omnibus: How are Elastic City walks distinct from the tradition of walking tours as an instrument of communicating historical information, organizing around historic preservation, or activating specific forms of civic pride?

Neil Freeman: Todd was emphatic that Elastic City walks would be non-didactic. The emphasis isn’t on absorbing information, it’s on the experience. Although my walk is about cities in general, and the fabric of the neighborhood, there’s little about it that’s specific to Bushwick. That’s purposeful.

Todd Shalom: Walking tours bore me– that’s what podcasts are for. In contrast to traditional walking tours, which seem to re-tell somebody’s or some group’s past experience through data and facts, Elastic City walks strive for a more embodied experience in the present moment. These walks offer to widen the perspectives for participants. For instance, on Niegel Smith’s “Monumental Walk,” we walk through downtown New York and make monuments with our bodies (both individually and in groups) in response to the existing outdoor monuments and sculptures that do not reflect our own personal histories.

Niegel Smith's "Monumental Walk." Photo: Kate Glicksberg. All rights reserved.

Urban Omnibus: Do you see the walk as a specific artistic genre? A sub-genre of performance? A format? A medium?

Todd Shalom: The walks are performative, and I often refer to them as performances when trying to explain them to someone unfamiliar with the concept. But I think they exist both within and outside of that genre. A walk can include making visual poetry with found objects or intentionally following a stranger. In most walks, there are exercises, techniques and processes that are proposed to the group: it can be workshop-y. Simply, the walk is a pliable canvas — I’m still feeling it out. Right now, I’m not so concerned with how to categorize the walks, rather I’m more interested in how walks can open myself and others up to new ways of experiencing each other and the city together.

Neil Freeman: I’d say that walks are a format flexible enough to incorporate many media and genres. The world of art that involves social interactions is big and woolly, and I don’t understand how it all fits together.

Urban Omnibus: Tell us about “Centroids and Asphalt” and how you came up with the concept.

Neil Freeman: We walk around a typical neighborhood and look at it. We try to figure out just what we’re walking around in. Our hands get a little dusty. Spatial distributions and cockroaches are inevitably discussed.

A few days before I first met with Todd to talk about Elastic City, I ran across a few conflicting accounts of where the center of population of New York City is. I calculated it myself, and it happened to be nearby to where I live. So I visited, and really enjoyed the place. That provided the hook for building a walk around arbitrary points and a close-up look at the materials and infrastructure of the neighborhood.

Urban Omnibus: Since Urban Omnibus first came upon the Brooklyn Typology Project, we’ve been very interested in the ways your artistic practice and urban planning practice inform each other. Here’s a quote from an essay you wrote about that project for Urban Omnibus:

“Planning has a great deal to learn from artistic understanding and reinterpretations of daily life. Both art and planning are (or should be) flexible and adaptable to a variety of temporal and physical scales. The only constant in cities is change, both in planning and art. Seeing both art and planning as processes of rule-setting and adaptation, Brooklyn Typology means to sit between the two worlds, presenting concrete information, while also fostering a nuanced and layered understanding of the city.”

Do you see “Centroids and Asphalt” as part of the same tradition of making art? Analyzing lists, rules, statistics and standards and the ways cities and neighborhoods adapt them over time?

Neil Freeman: Yes. I think of “Centroids and Asphalt” as an art project. Perhaps it ends up being a bit of a primer on the urban landscape — but it’s just as much an education for me as anyone else. I end up learning something new each time. It’s really about creating a conversation around the urban landscape. The specific kinds of analyses that the walk presents are less important than the conversation, but it’s clear that it’s in the same vein as the Brooklyn Typology Project. Both are about the patterns of everyday buildings, materials, and ho-hum details, and how little details interact with big picture systems.

Todd Shalom's "Dirty Gay Soundwalk." Photo: Algirdas Sabaliauskas. All rights reserved.

Urban Omnibus: What inspires you two about New York? What would you say is unique about its social or sensory experience?

Todd Shalom: I was raised in the New York suburbs, so the city has always been an outlet, a place where I feel free. Returning to New York after living in other places is like seeing an ex-boyfriend, it’s tangled in memories, trauma and inspiration. Through these walks, I’m able to re-engage with the place that I love, make new memories, and create work that’s (ideally) in harmony with where I live. As for its sensory offerings, since I grew up near here, New York doesn’t seem particularly unique to me. I’m more intrigued by the hissing of the buses in Buenos Aires (the busses whisper to passers-by) or how the shadows on the Western Wall in Jerusalem create metaphorical narratives for those at its base. That said, it’s a challenge for me — how to continue to create a new experience in a place I know well.

Neil Freeman: I love New York, but I don’t think it’s all that unique. It has certain qualities in excess that others lack. What I like about New York is that it’s big enough and diverse enough to do many things well. It almost doesn’t matter what those things are – I love that it’s messy and doesn’t make a ton of sense much of the time.

Urban Omnibus: Duchamp once said, “the artist of the future will simply point his finger.” Do you agree with that prediction?

Neil Freeman: He was right, wasn’t he? Plenty of artists over the last couple decades have been doing just that. The trick is knowing where and when to point.

Todd Shalom: Yes, hats off to Duchamp for a self-pat on the back. It’s now lazy to point, though in his time it was revolutionary. On the walks, there’s an element of “hey, take a closer look at what you haven’t paid attention to,” but the walks aren’t one-trick ponies — they’re presented with the intention that a participant will bring his or her own experience and contribute to the work.

Daniel Neumann's "De-masking the Bridges." Photo: Algirdas Sabaliauskas. All rights reserved.

Urban Omnibus: Sticking with the art historical for a moment, to what extent is your interest in walks influenced by precedents such as the writings of De Certeau, Debord’s dérive, Baudelaire’s flâneur? These tropes have become clichés in urbanism. How do you think they are considered by artists who do not necessarily identify as urbanists?

Todd Shalom: I can’t speak for other artists– we each have our own influences that we find at different times for different reasons and seem to judge them unfairly once we’ve absorbed them. Kill your idols. The writings you mention above are influential but not defining. Lots of people like to point to psychogeography when talking about Elastic City, and well, Guy Debord is inspiring, but I’ve been more influenced by artwork in other genres that I can bring to the walks. I’d rather not laundry list but, as inspiration: look to the light in the films of Stan Brakhage; the generosity in the work of artist Harrell Fletcher; the dream states of Eva Jordan; the listening exercises from the Acoustic Ecology movement; the liberating writings of John Cage; the self-self-consciousness of poet Kate Colby; the interactivity in the work of Golan Levin; the honesty of director Niegel Smith; the fantasy world of James Bidgood; the vibrant and subversive domesticity in the sculptural work of Vadis Turner; the playful and empowering fashion of Martín Churba, the personal rituals of Juan Betancurth; the compassionate framework of Einat Manoff; the post-clever design of Lucha (Russell Austin, Luis Bravo & Agi Morawska); and 60s/70s performance art (Fluxus, Vito Acconci, Carolee Schneeman).

Urban Omnibus: Does it matter to you whether people consider the walks as art or not?

Todd Shalom: I believe that all people are artists, as they create their own experiences. Whether or not the art is interesting/compelling to someone else is another question.

Urban Omnibus: Indeed. So, what’s next for Elastic City?

Todd Shalom: Upcoming walks include one investigating urban signage with font designer Ksenya Samarskaya, a walk on homesickness by urban designer Einat Manoff, and a walk that I’m creating in collaboration with Juan Betancurth where we go to lucky spaces and also make spaces lucky. Next season, we might be ready to use technology, but first things first.

Todd Shalom's "Brighton Zaum." Photo: Algirdas Sabaliauskas. All rights reserved.

Neil Freeman is an urban planner and artist whose work focuses on cities, lists and maps. His work has appeared in the Believer, Black Book and the Next American City, and in exhibitions in Chicago, London, New York and Cambridge. He studied art and math at Oberlin College, and planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He lives in Brooklyn.

Todd Shalom is the founder of Elastic City. He works with text, sound and image. He performs and makes installations to re-contextualize the body in space using vocabulary of the everyday. In this pursuit, Shalom often collaborates with performance artist/director Niegel Smith. Together, as Permiso, they conceive and stage interactive rituals in public and private environments. Todd’s solo work includes improvisational music performances, soundwalks, poetry readings, installations, photography and sleepovers. He is an active member of the New York Society for Acoustic Ecology.

The subway grate Conrad and Walshe performed on top of is a permanent public sound installation, entitled Times Square, created by Max Neuhaus in 1977. The sound work continues to be heard 24 hours a day, seven days a week thanks to the support of the DIA Arts Foundation, the MTA’s Arts for Transit, and the Times Square Alliance. The Neuhaus work underscored the performance. And while it is hard to compete with a naked cowboy, a bald eagle, and a famous actress (all of which were present during the performance), most of the people passing through Times Square were drawn to the harmony that Conrad and Walshe created between the howling and chirping of the intonarumori and the Neuhaus installation. While we normally think of musical performances around subway stations as busking rather than an intentional intervention in public space, perhaps this performance, and the crowd assembled to hear it, supports Neuhaus’ theory that, “Our perception of space depends as much on what we hear as what we see.” Perhaps it might provoke us to rethink our relationship to the urban environment, and the senses that define that relationship.

Besides, it is still impressive that the futurist sound – developed a century ago – can still emerge above the rest in one of the most raucous intersections in the world. The contemporary wooden sound machines that Conrad and Walshe played are based on the original intonarumori, invented in 1913 by the Italian futurist and sound artist Luigi Russolo, and arguably the first analog synthesizer. Russolo’s intent was to produce beautiful industrial noise (try to imagine the sound of a skyscraper being dragged across Manhattan—that is its desired effect). These instruments were destroyed during WWII, but as Conrad stated in a conversation after the performance, “They were found in Italian graves…still bearing the stains of the vegetables thrown at them during the first Futurist performances.”  Replicas were designed under the specialized supervision of Luciano Chessa.

The Futurist Manifesto celebrates its hundredth anniversary this year. Making sense of it today feels a bit backwards but we do it, among other reasons, because it informs our current culture of noise music, performance, and public art intervention. This brief high-profile buskers’ performance/birthday party was planned in conjunction with the Performa 09 Biennial “to sing of the great crowds agitated by work, pleasure and revolt.”  What better way to do it than with noise music, a form that helps people make sense out of the chaos around them?

After the show, Conrad offered an affectation of the manifesto.  “We dont like WAR,” he roared and turned to refer to the absent military recruitment station.  “It used to be there…” he trailed as though he didn’t know what to make of the disappeared prop. Naturally he lost his momentum: “Are you my organizers?” he asked us in a playful, defeated tone. “No, we are your spectators!”  we responded for fear he’d start ordering us around. Then he turned his personal video camera away from himself and angled it on us, announcing, “You are the organizers of the future! Tell everyone!”

Photos and video excerpt by Veronica Kavass.

Veronica Kavass is a curator based in New York.

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.

Choreography by Larry Keigwin for Breaking Ground – A Dance Charrette. Photo © Julie Lemberger

DANCING IN THE STREETS invites Architects, Choreographers, and Dancers to take part in Breaking Ground – A Public Charrette

Led by
Joanna Haigood
Federal Hall National Memorial
Thursday, November 12, 10 am – 2 pm or Friday, November 13, 10 am – 2 pm

Breaking Ground – A Public Charrette is a site-specific choreography workshop that will be held in one of New York City’s most intriguing sites. Led by nationally acclaimed choreographer Joanna Haigood, the workshop offers participants a unique opportunity to work across disciplines to explore movement composition within the context of architecture, history, and public spaces. Haigood offers tools to interact with this historic landmark and guides participants to create short studies in response to Federal Hall’s history and architecture. Participants will discuss architecture as object, its function and design, and its role as metaphor, as a stage, and as container of history. The 4-hour workshop is modeled after the 5-day dance charrette process, which Joanna Haigood developed for Breaking Ground – A Dance Charrette, Dancing in the Streets’ critically acclaimed series that “raised the bar for site-specific dance in this city” (Gay City News).

THE WORKSHOP

• A guided tour of Federal Hall with focus on its history and architecture
• An overview of site-specific work
• Choreographers, dancers, and architects work together in small teams to create short movement studies in response to the site

TO REGISTER:

The workshop is free, but advance registration is required.

• Each workshop is limited to 25 participants
• Slots will be filled on a first-come, first-served basis
• The Friday, 11/13 workshop is SOLD OUT.
• Register here for the Thursday, 11/12 workshop (deadline has been extended)
• There are 5 spots open for Thursday’s workshop. Upon registration, you will receive an automatic confirmation email from the registration service provider, NYCharites.org. Shortly after this confirmation, you will receive detailed information from Dancing in the Streets, including travel directions.

If registration for your preferred day is sold out, you can join the waiting list by emailing: events@dancinginthestreets.org

Please include the following information with your email

• First & Last Name
•  Email Address
•  Home/Cell phone
•  Which workshop you would like to attend—Thursday, Nov. 12 or Friday, Nov. 13.

Dancing in the Streets will notify you if and when a slot becomes available.

Registration begins October 15^th and ends November 5^th November 12th. Upon registration, you will receive an automatic confirmation email from the registration service provider, NYCharites.org. Shortly after this confirmation, you will receive detailed information from Dancing in the Streets, including travel directions.

Joanna Haigood is widely recognized for her site-specific and aerial choreography that uses natural, architectural and cultural environments as points of departure for movement exploration and narrative.  She is the Founding Artistic Director of Zaccho Dance Theatre.  Her work has been commissioned by the Joffrey Ballet, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Festival d’Avignon, and Dancing in the Streets, among others.

Federal Hall National Memorial: the Greek Revival building, designed by Ithiel Town and Alexander Jackson Davis, was erected in 1842 on the site where George Washington took the oath of office as the first President of the USA.

Dancing in the Streets has a 25-year legacy as a premiere producer of site-specific work.  It has commissioned, produced and presented more than 500 performances and installations by over 300 contemporary artists. Breaking Ground is one of the organization’s two signature series.  The other is Hip Hop Generation Next, a series of performances, films, and panel discussions that explore the local, national and international evolution of hip hop dance.

Presented in partnership with openhousenewyork

Choreography by Ann Carlson for Breaking Ground – A Dance Charrette. Photo © Julie Lemberger

THE PROVENANCE OF BEAUTY. from Sunder Ganglani on Vimeo.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more reviews of this performance:

+ The Village Voice

+ The Daily News

+ WNYC


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

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

These days the newsfeed about Atlantic Yards is a little bit quieter than it has been. But, in certain parts of New York City, mere mention of the project still amounts to fightin’ words. For the past six years, it seemed every hot-button urban issue – density, scale, historic preservation, community benefits agreements, eminent domain, the MTA, Olympic aspirations, job creation, gentrification, racism – was somehow implicated in this controversial project. The groups supporting or protesting the project seemed incapable of speaking the same language, much less seeing eye to eye.

Talking to New Yorkers is easy. New Yorkers have opinions. And often, they’re ready to share. When the topic is neighborhoods – those places where buildings, family, identity, money and politics intersect – people have, well, a lot to say. Why, then, is community engagement so tricky? Many attempts to formalize a process of soliciting the advice and identifying the priorities of residents result in frustration and misinterpretation if not outright mutual incomprehensibility and protest. Sometimes it takes artists – unaffiliated with the institutional agendas that drive development projects and often cleave communities into warring factions of stakeholders – to rise above the fray and invite disputing voices into dialogue.

The Civilians is a theater company whose creative process begins with broad-based, face-to-face investigation into real life. They pound the pavement, interview experts and passersby on the topic at hand – current and past Civilians’ productions range from a play about the Evangelical Christian community of Colorado Springs to one about climate change – then they perform monologues culled and collated from interview tapes, and mash the material up with music and dance. For the past year, the Civilians have been looking at all aspects and viewpoints on the Atlantic Yards development proposal as an inroad to broader urban issues of home and neighborhood change in New York City. In December, they transformed their research and interpretations into the multi-disciplinary performance project, Brooklyn at Eye Level. In this piece, two members of the Civilians’ creative team share with us their singular process and offer us a quick peek at the performance. This just might contain lessons for a new paradigm of how to engage and really hear each other.

–Cassim Shepard
Project Director,
Urban Omnibus

For watchdog blogging on Atlantic Yards, going back four years, check out Atlantic Yards Report.

To stay up to date on the Civilians’ process and productions, check out their site.