LOWER MANHATTAN Revisited | LEBBEUS WOODS
I find myself revisiting a concept called revealing verticality in which spaces existing in the Z direction alters perceptions of scale and volume.
So I was speculating on the future of the city and I said, well, obviously, compared to present and future cities, New York is not going to be able to compete in terms of size anymore. It used to be a large city, but now it’s a small city compared with São Paulo, Mexico City, Kuala Lumpur, or almost any Asian city of any size. So I said maybe New York can establish a new kind of scale – and the scale I was interested in was the scale of the city to the Earth, to the planet. I made the drawing as a demonstration of the fact that Manhattan exists, with its towers and skyscrapers, because it sits on a rock – on a granite base. You can put all this weight in a very small area because Manhattan sits on the Earth. Let’s not forget that buildings sit on the Earth.
I wanted to suggest that maybe lower Manhattan – not lower downtown, but lower in the sense of below the city– could form a new relationship with the planet. So, in the drawing, you see that the East River and the Hudson are both dammed. They’re purposefully drained, as it were. The underground – or lower Manhattan – is revealed, and, in the drawing, there are suggestions of inhabitation in that lower region.
So it was a romantic idea – and the drawing is very conceptual in that sense.
Professional couch potato and magnitude participant in the vast science of thinking in nothingness. An architecture trained creative constantly questioning our everyday designed life. Currently a long time contributor to the future world in architecture.