Movement and architecture : design entry for the 1998 Van Alen Prize in Public Architecture : design ideas for New York's other river, the east river

Abstract

Think of a neighborhood. It knows the Johnsons next door. It knows the ice cream parlor down the street. It knows stories of grandeur and depression. It has coherence. But technology changes. Location or peculiarities of the region that might have brought early success may later bring destruction. Grandma’s stone cottage makes way for a parking lot for the new high-rise office complex across the way, and a cobble-stone street gets bisected by a superhighway over here. What happens in the fragments where community becomes divided? Does it mutate into something new after losing a limb? Or will it decay and die? Will the same technology that changed the community once change it again? And how can any sense of resistance to this change bring about a self destruction?