In 1969,
Ian McHarg published Design With Nature and crystallized the idea that
land should be “suitable” for particular uses. McHarg’s detailed mapping
processes integrated ecology, geology, and demographic data to identify areas
where specific program could be, and was deeply influential to heavy-handed mid-century
city planning projects. Yet, as much as McHarg attempted to read and understand
land, his deeply analytical approach was guided by subjectivity about what is
valuable - and what is not.
At the
heart of Staten Island lies the New York Farm Colony, a welfare institution
established in the 19th century – which is now a derelict, 45-acre
site that has become a beacon for Instagram-savvy urban explorers, graffiti
artists, paintballers, and adventive plants. It is a staging ground for
counter-cultural activity, as Joanne Hudson writes: “through occupation [ruins]
become spaces of use, performance, and attachment.” Its existence questions the
car-based suburban monotony of Staten Island as a whole, offering an
alternative narrative of what place could be.
Gridded
surveys of random points across Staten Island and the Farm Colony shaped a
personal conception that the vernacular of the borough is meaningfully “ugly
and banal,” a landscape of often decontextualized parts. The grid is not only
observational but interventional. Each survey point is a source point for
landscape-making media involving flora and materials and a place for
deployment, according to a recontextualized, ‘refracted’ land use map, that is
designated based on the following:
1.
Where SUITABLE and RANDOM land use align, replace with CURRENT land use.
2.
Where RANDOM and CURRENT land use align, replace with SUITABLE land use.
3.
Where CURRENT and SUITABLE land use align, replace with RANDOM land use.
Resultantly,
the project attempts to structure a landscape urbanist approach that values
chaos as much as logic. Drawing from post-modern thinkers such as Bernard
Tschumi, John Cage, and Robert Smithson, Refracted Ruins seeks to
understand and contradict gridded, process-based approaches to design and
artwork, but also stretch conceptions of place beyond site. Moreover, it
critiques the dependability of the Suitability Analysis model through valuing moments
across Staten Island that contradict the logic of what is or what should be.
Most of
the project is “means” but the “ends” are best captured by the 65 collages,
which are made with site photos and crayon overlays. Speculating on what a
Staten Island that values unpredictability, counterculture, and the “ugly and banal,”
the project celebrates the many things land can be, and questions if it should
ever be just one.
Staten Island, New York City, NY
Collaged maps with object labels.Banal Gallery Model: baltic birch plywood,
acrylic dowels, 3D-printed site objectsA very McHarg-esque suitability analysis of my site and Staten Island as a whole.
Process axon.Survey model: MDF, Pushpins, T-pins, laser-cut
cardboard tags.Observed objects + materials.Observed flora.“Flowcharting” design choices.Collaged postcards featuring excerpts from the 25-page written project component.Individual site collages created with site photos, crayon, and highlighters.