Updated Abstract 10/8

Cities hold great promise for new modes of living and personal expression by the dynamics of exchange and closeness their inhabitants experience each day. Shared contentiousness within cities can generate a creative and just use of urban resources whether they be physical or cultural systems.  However, the 21st century city in North America (specifically New York City)  has sold its potential out from under the feet of its inhabitants, opting for repressive structures that spatially control and exclude many from the critical discourse necessary to build an equitable city. The corporatization of public space is strategically fashioned to serve only the dominant power base, its whims, and those who tangentially hang on. Landscape Architecture must leverage its own marginal status to re-imagine public spaces that are curious and unexpected, and reflect the idiosyncratic accretion of urban life;  both socially and physically. What if the rebuilding of crumbling urban infrastructures became a means/site(s) to reinvent social relationships through revealing a collective need for resilience, empathy, and knowledge ?

Precedent 1: Schouwburgplein (in progress)

Social Space Precedent 1:  Schouwburgplein, Rotterdam, Netherlands
                                            West 8 Urban Design & Landscape Architecture BV
                                            Completed 1996


Schouwburgplein (Theater Square) in Rotterdam binds the urban space around it through its own void.  What appears to be empty is full of activity and the energy of change. The materiality of the square is deployed as an organizational feature as much as an aesthetic expression.  The ground plane is elevated 14 inches above a car park, creating a broad stage that echoes the main buildings of the square; a concert hall, city theater and multiplex cinema.  Taking a clue from the function of the area, the square itself calls the public to perform in innumerable ways, through day and night and across seasons. The flat plane allows the surface materials to be magnified in their careful juxtaposition as they define specific zones that heighten physical awareness of people as they inhabit the square. The flatness recalls agricultural patterning of the Dutch countryside while its emptiness releases an urban experience of spontaneous interaction, distinct, sudden and fleeting.

The design of Schouwburgplein uses light, both natural and artificial as a material source of meaning.  The considered placement of materials is associated with fugitive daylight while at night the light is layered and embedded in the activity of the square. Green illumination from under the pavement amplifies the floating quality of the square while fragments of these same lights turn white and brighten into a picture of the milky way.  The ventilation towers and the theaters themselves cast different characters of light. The most dramatic element of the square are the four hydraulic lighting masts.  By day their sculptural presence recalls to the cranes of the Rotterdam shipyards in their mechanic animal bodies.  As the sun goes down they can be adjusted by users to illuminate any activity below, sweeping wide or narrowly focused. Like the  surface materials, light performs as both object and subject in the generation of meaning.  These physical and transient elements are situated to activate civic discourse through gesture, invitation, and opportunity.

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Critique

Reaction to  essays:  What is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue, Judith Butler
                                  Being Critical, Marc Treib


The two essays describe the function, task, and meaning of critique at two very different registers of intensity. The Treib essay comes from a pedagogical perspective as he focuses on the development of  critical thinking as a foundational premise of teaching and learning. Through the student’s exposure to teachers and invited critics at design reviews, the process of critique leads to the student’s absorption of critical questions that she/he will later bring to their work as the make it, developing the skills of evaluation on their specific projects. Later this ability is transferred into constant critical thinking as they approach their own work and the work of others.  Treib’s hope is that critical thinking will inspire perpetual assessment of ones values while shaping those values at the same time.

The Butler essay pulls out from Foucault’s idea of virtue a deeply carved significance of critique as a means of self generation.  There is reciprocal action here also in the assertion that critique’s function is always seen in relationship to another thing or set of conditions.  Unlike in the Treib essay, critique does not express a process of evaluation, but rather it provokes a stance and a view that interrogates the structures that influence our perceptions, internally as well as externally.  Through the practice of critique our interactions in the world (with the world) can both illuminate the framework from which we see, question, and judge and open the opportunity to develop an ethical perspective that is individual because it is central to the formation of the self.  In opposing dominant power structures, virtue is inherently revealed by the act of resistance for Foucault.  Butler asserts the practice of critique is a state of poiesis, a critical moment when one thing is transformed into another, when the act generates a more virtuous and free self.