Encounters with Manhattan's Geologic

In 1999, New York-based experimental architect, Lebbeus Woods, presented the island of Manhattan in an unusual form. Lower Manhattan—an aerial view of the island with the East and the Hudson rivers both dammed—was a revelation of what we all should already know but tend to forget: that its buildings, streets, parks and infrastructure sit on a huge metamorphic rock. As the architect once said, “Manhattan sits on the Earth”.
With its image of the reconciliation of New York’s most iconic symbol—the skyscraper—with its rocky foundation, Lower Manhattan resonates with James Hutton’s notion of deep time, an idea which gave new ways of reading and representing a planet that was much older than accepted by religious dogma.
While investigating the compositional layers of Manhattan’s geologic, Woods was interested in the scale—or the scales— of the city and its buildings, and how small they are when compared to the Earth itself. It is a question of spatial and temporal scales, which compress, distort and thicken the island in successional layers.
Over the last two hundred years, Manhattan has experienced a formidable urban expansion. The ambitious plan to overlay a rigid grid on the once forested, wet and hilly island went through many variations, most of which were ruthlessly determined to flatten hills, cut rocks, mow forests and fill ponds, wetlands and marshes, thus erasing the marks of an unregulated past.
Manhattan as we know today represents an extremely dense urban fabric where neo-liberalist capitalism was crystallised as tall, iconic skyscrapers, massive above and under-ground infrastructure and high-speculative real estate and retail markets. Prolific iconography about the city proves our fascination as well as ways through which the city constantly re-brands itself.
This exhibition focuses on the on-going research by design project developed for New York City within the scope of my PhD. It aims to reveal meaningful encounters with Manhattan’s geologic, a notion that no longer simply refers to geology but also emanates its own cultural and aesthetic meaning; it allows us to think experimentally about space, time and change.
This body of work here presented is divided in three parts: the first is an exercise of revealing Manhattan’s geologic delineations and of speculating on issues of representation when the island is positioned in a much wider space-time depth. The second aims to rethink architectural and engineering inventions in the city as devices for working with geological faults. And the third proposes the notion of park as a politically charged landscape veil of mediation.
This investigation started in the spring of 2014, when the Institute for Rational Urban Mobility, Inc (IRUM) together with the The Architect’s Newspaper launched an international design competition titled Vision 42 with the intention to rethink and redesign 42nd street in Manhattan. The brief encouraged participants to provide new visions of a new pedestrianized version of the street, with a light tram solution connecting both rivers.
The competition allowed for a personal reflection about two significant issues: first, on the importance of allowing the city to regain a relationship with its bedrock; second, on the significance of refuting the idea of street as road-channel, or even simply as a pedestrian channel with a light tram, in order to embrace a wider notion of street as a gathering place, an urban and cultural stage and an environmental facilitator.
This proposal entitled 42nd Street Reactive Ground was shortlisted in the first stage of the competition, and selected to be featured in an public exhibition in New York. In the second stage, it was selected as one of the four winning proposals.
The distinct ontologies of time examined and utilised in the experimental work—deep time, resilience, duration, or seasonality—have also emerged from the study of the Anthropocene, which informally refers to the contemporary geological epoch in which humans have perhaps become the greatest agents of change happening at an exponential rate across the globe. The Anthropocene is here explored less as a political idea to describe a new geological layer and more as a powerful and meaningful metaphor to contextualise how we live the present, whilst also opening up streams of investigation about what the future might look like.