Yesterday was a beautiful day for wandering along Roosevelt Island’s waterfront. The Omnibus team and fifty of our friends spent the afternoon learning about the history of the masterplan, seeing one of the infamous pneumatic trash chutes in action, and getting a guided tour of the Fast Trash! exhibition (open for one more week!). Thanks are in order for Juliette Spertus, Judy Berdy, Jack McGrath, Adam Michaels, and Marianne Lau for taking us around.

Scheduled tour-guide Donald Richardson, one of the masterplanners of Roosevelt Island, was unable to join us at the last minute. Luckily, Judy Berdy of the Roosevelt Island Historical Society was part of the group and stepped in to fill his shoes. Berdy shared her extensive historical knowledge of the island, from its days as Blackwell’s Island, home to a penitentiary, smallpox hospital and asylum for the insane, to its transition to a hospital complex, renamed Welfare Island, and its subsequent redevelopment in the late 1960s/early ’70s into the Roosevelt Island we know today. The original three-phase masterplan, developed by architects Philip Johnson and John Burgee, anticipated housing and services for 20,000 residents and turned the island into a car-free zone, connected to Queens by the Roosevelt Island Lift Bridge and to Manhattan by tram and subway (though F train service did not come to the island until 1989). Ultimately only phase one was implemented, and car-free didn’t take hold (though the island is essentially a one-road town — Main Street, supplemented by a few service roads), but the island flourished and is now home to approximately 12,000 people. Development continues, with a newly modernized tramway opening later this year and construction underway for the FDR Four Freedoms Park at the island’s southern tip.

One element of the masterplan that did get implemented — and the topic that piqued the interest of many of our meet-up attendees — is the island’s pneumatic trash system.  Juliette Spertus, architect, curator of Fast Trash! and subject of last week’s Omnibus feature, explained more about the history and implementation of this unusual trash collection system. Together with Jack McGrath, the exhibition’s curatorial assistant, and Marianne Lau, an architect who lives on Roosevelt Island, Juliette walked us around the island, stopping to let us see the infrastructure in action. First stop: Riverwalk, courtesy of Charlie, a maintenance supervisor, who showed us one of the residential complex’s chutes. Next stop: the waste transfer station, where we saw the remarkably unassuming entry point where the island’s two central tubes converge to deposit the trash of thousands and peered in through windows at the facility.

While walking along the waterfront, we caught sight of another project of interest to Omnibus readers: the tidal hydropower turbine project implemented by Verdant Power and Keyspan to harness the energy of the tidal estuary that is the East River.

We wrapped up the afternoon at the exhibition space itself, watching a sample Lamson airtube shoot a capsule over our heads and across the room, looking at archival documentation of New York City’s now-defunct pneumatic mail delivery system, and learning about past experiments and current advances in pneumatic waste management in cities around the world. Juliette, Adam Michaels of Project Projects, who designed and co-organized the exhibition, and other members of the exhibition team discussed the research and inspiration for the show and pondered issues surrounding waste management and consumption on a broader scale. Our nation consumes at an excessive rate, producing a similarly excessive waste stream, one that is whisked away to far-off landfills, making it easy for us to ignore or deny the larger impact our habits create. The relative invisibility of our waste management system, it was argued yesterday, might detract from our perception of individual accountability. Would a centrally-located, highly-visible waste disposal system encourage better practices? How can we learn from the infrastructure investments being made in places like Stockholm, Barcelona or Macau? Both Juliette and Judy also rallied for individual and community involvement on a local level. The existing system is reaching its limits, and those who support its modernization, potential expansion to incorporate recycling, or even exploration of the technology’s plausibility beyond the island must make their voices heard. Sound advice from a Sunday afternoon walking tour.

As always, thanks to everyone who came out to join us. Don’t miss our next event. Sign up for our weekly email, become a fan of Urban Omnibus on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter to keep up with the latest.

Judy Berdy of the Roosevelt Island Historical Society

Charlie, maintenance supervisor, Riverwalk.

Architect and Roosevelt Island resident Marianne Lau.

Project Projects' Adam Michaels and Fast Trash! curator Juliette Spertus.

Photos by Varick Shute or Cassim Shepard.

The five commissioned projects include “intelligent” street furniture that behaves in unexpected ways by David Jimison and JooYoun Paek; a public interface to water quality and aquatic life of urban rivers by David Benjamin and Soo-in Yang in collaboration with Natalie Jeremijenko; a social network for collectively regulating energy consumption involving plant life as both carbon sink and circuit breaker by Haque Design + Research; smart tags for tracing the city’s digestive system and illuminating its removal chain by the SENSEable City Lab at MIT; and a festival of collaborative work sessions organized in urban public spaces by Anthony Townsend and the Breakout! team. Taken together, the projects in Toward the Sentient City aim to catalyze public discussion on the design and inhabitation of near-future urban environments.

According to the project’s director, Gregory Wessner (Exhibitions Director, the Architectural League of New York),

Over the past several years, as the Architectural League has become increasingly involved in exploring the proliferation of various types of ambient, mobile and ubiquitous computer technologies, we have often been asked, what does this have to do with architecture? … At a moment when new digital technologies seem to be dematerializing more and more of the world around us (think books, CDs, photographs), what impact can they possibly have on the insistent materiality of buildings and cities?

The exhibition offers a provocative series of answers to these questions. In advance of the opening next week, Urban Omnibus has invited the commissioned teams to answer, in their own words, what they think their project has to do with architecture and what it has to do with the future of the city.

Too Smart City

Three pieces of street furniture – a bench, a trash can, and a sign – offer a comedic challenge to the notion that increasingly “smarter” embedded intelligence and robotic systems are an aspirational goal in the design of objects, environments and services in public space.

Amphibious Architecture

Two networks of interactive, luminescent tubes floating in the East River and the Bronx River monitor and report water quality, presence of fish and human interest in the river. Through a simple text message interface, the project links the terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems of the city, urging citizens to look beneath the surface and suggesting a new mode of engagement with natural systems and public information.

Natural Fuse

A city-wide network of biotic devices act as both electricity outlets and as a shared resource that offsets C02. The exhibition space will act as a store where visitors trade in an economy of plants networked in their ability to produce electricity and to act as a carbon-sink. Cooperation among user produces more energy to share; inefficiencies or greed diminish the network’s capacity.

Trash Track

Hundreds of small, smart, location-aware tags – deployed in Seattle and New York – track different types of trash through the city’s waste management system, revealing the often surprising journeys of our everyday objects in a series of real time visualizations.

Breakout!

This festival liberates workers from the traditional offices spaces and invites them to relocate their work in urban public settings, relying on three sets of tools: lightweight infrastructure, social software and facilitators’ guides that will jumpstart collaborations to inspire creative workers, activate street-life and intensify the use of under-performing public spaces.

The Sentient City Hub Exhibition will be on view at The Urban Center
from September 18th to November 7th.
457 Madison Avenue
New York City

Gallery hours:
Monday – Saturday (closed Thursday)

11 a.m. – 5 p.m.

Free admission