Recently arrived in New York City and perusing its newest architecture exhibition, a visitor to the Museum of Modern Art might think—contrary to what they would have witnessed on the way to the museum—that the city has been irreparably decimated by the Covid-19 pandemic and the slower-moving ecological and social disasters of our contemporary “polycrisis.” The twelve projects on display in the exhibition New York, New Publics present the city as a post-apocalyptic landscape where architects build upon the rubble and ruins of a bygone civilization. Dodging storm surges, New Yorkers seek refuge under discarded building fragments and in concrete bunkers, as they recall episodes from a more heroic past with an assist from augmented reality technologies—or so the curatorial story suggests.
There is Freshkills Park, Field Operations’ two-decades-and-counting endeavor to build a 2,200-acre park where visitors will one day hike and birds will nest atop the monumental landforms of a half-century of the city’s discards. Meanwhile, at a diminutive community garden in Queens, contemporary architectural detritus—a concrete facade mockup from a luxury condominium in downtown Manhattan—is turned on its side and into a potting shed. This is proof of concept for New Affiliates in its effort to match expensive and materially intensive construction waste with scrappy garden plots across New York City in a bizarre salvage operation. In interviews, the architects have expressed an interest in the relationship between architecture and anthropology; and in the show there is a whiff of a “salvage paradigm”—a 20th-century ethnographic attachment and missionary zeal for the preservation and documentation of cultures on the brink of extinction. But now the endangered are us, and the designs on display provide fodder for contemporary anthropologists studying the art of living among capitalist ruins.
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