Re: Fresh Kills -Reply

JY,  nice of you to ask.

Briefly, this is a third in a series of studios I have been running on the
issues of the "natural" and "technological"  (previous studios dealt w/ the
Mississippi River - see, I believe, J.Arch.Ed. later this year, and Spuyten
Duyvil in upper Manhattan).

        Although my pro-environmental politics usually surface, my real
goal is to elicit a broader understanding of the slippery relationship
between our artifacts and the "natural" world and move the
environment/architecture discussion beyond "solar panel" solutions - the
problem, as I see it, is side-stepped in much alternative energy or
sustainability pedagogy because of assumptions about what is natural
and unnatural.

        The socially-constructed aspect of Nature (as opposed to, let's
say, the geo-biological entity it represents) and its' curiously antagonistic
relationship to Technology (as something "unnatural" despite having been
spawned by biological entities, i.e., ourselves) is the ground on which
areas such as the Gowanus Canal are approached in the studio. When
viewed as systems rather than icons, nature and culture (the ultimate
example of technological homo faber) can be seen as sharing the same
history (what C. Merchant calls history "from the ground up"). It is this
ecology, if you will, that the students try to wrap their heads around.

        As JY notes, there are ideas at work proposing to turn the Canal
into a waterfront  Soho...need I say more. Alternatively, we are trying to
conceive solutions which do not efface the Canal's instructive history,
nor its' place in the cultural diagram, nor its ongoing role in a larger
bio-regional and urban system of effects. Although the "smoke-stack"
technologies screwed up the Canal, post-industrial technology is not far
away in the clean-up. Examples abound which are beginning to re-figure
the relationship between nature and technology - the USACOE proposal
to activate the Mississippi River locks and dams via atmosphere
measuring satellite-computer networks thereby producing the very
texture and flow of the river, or the recent Glen Canyon Dam
computerized flooding to "restore" the Grand Canyon's eco-system, or
the ongoing real-time Black Rock Forest eco-system web page here in
NY (thanks to my colleague Jean Gardner). This goes beyond even
techno-fix idealism to the very "nature" of nature.

In any event, as with all ambitious studio undertakings... we shall see.
BTW have called Peter Testa, somebody up at CU tell him to buzz me.

rma, thanks for the forward might have missed it otherwise. and dn
thanks again for coming to the review.

PW
New School for Social Research/Parsons School of Design
Dept. of Architecture & Environmental Design

>>> John Young <jya@xxxxxxxxxxxx> 03/28/96 04:04pm >>>

Maybe Peter Wheelwright, subscriber here, will tell a bit about his studio
at Parsons taking on the fetid Gowanus Canal in festering Brooklyn,
whose prelim designs Natsios glad-eyed recently.