The last semester of Cornell’s Master of Architecture II program is underway in Manhattan. In addition to a studio led by Rob Rogers and Jonathan Marvel, we are taking a seminar reexamining Colin Rowe’s Collage City. Mark Morris leads the seminar with modules by guests Chris Otto, Lebbeus Woods and Christoph Kumpusch, Kathy Battista, Mary Woods, and Henry Richardson. The module by Woods and Kumpusch was titled Common Ground, a reference to the streets and walkways all New Yorkers share. After a lecture on drawing by Professor Woods, our group was tasked with individually documenting a piece of common ground, writing a commentary about our findings, and creating an analog or representation of the ideas discovered in the process. Based on my exploration of a piece of granite curb in Greenwich Village, I became interested in the function of thresholds in the city, which seem to create spatial boundaries that must be negotiated by pedestrians. Here is my piece of Common Ground:
The Site
Commentary
In Greenwich Village, a tired hunk of granite subtly marks the threshold between sidewalk and street. Its corners worn smooth from a century of utility, the stone takes on a more natural geometry than its original sharp lines and perfect bullnose. Long gone is the evidence of its excavation, fabrication, and installation. It appears to have always existed in this spot, maintaining a stoic order in a city of chaos. Even the yellow paint applied by a union roadway line painter has all but faded from the pocked surface of the curb. A small shift in elevation—maybe three inches—is complemented by a distinct change in pavement to denote the edge. The line of curb acts a seam, tenuously stitching together the fabric of equally old paving stones and a contemporary concrete walk. Compared the smoothness of the concrete, the street surface is a topography unto itself, a warped grid of canyons and gullies. As the stones slowly wear, the spaces in between them gradually collect the residue of the city. Yes, the street sweepers, both manual and mechanical, do their best to collect the refuse, but still, tiny pieces of urban life nestle themselves in the depressions between pavers. This microcosmic index reads like a guestbook of activity: a cigarette filter flicked into the street when no ashtray was readily encountered; a dead leaf, the victim of a late spring frost, the fragmented remains of an earlier concrete walk. The current walk, in its broom-brushed consistency, resists the collection of debris, save for the myriad of irregular, black splotches that dot its surface. One wonders if hundreds of individuals spat their gum onto the ground at this very point or if a local office manager, always eating too many onions with her lunch salad, habitually deposits her sticky breath freshener on the same patch of sidewalk on the route back to work. The gum spots hold fast to the sidewalk while the cigarettes all end up on the street, thus maintaining the separation of roadway and walkway, at least in terms of oral fixation products. A traffic sign rising above the pavement echoes the function of the granite curb with diagrammatic clarity. The pedestrian, forced off the stone edge by its thinness and irregularity, must chose a side, but presses on toward thousands of urban thresholds left to cross.
Threshold/Boundary Drawings
Exhibition
The culmination of the Common Ground module was an exhibition of our projects, held at Cornell’s 17th Street studio on June 24th, 2009. Guest discussants included Miodrag Mitrasinovic (Parsons), Shannon Mattern (The New School), Anthony Titus (Cooper Union), and Mark Morris (Cornell). The exhibition proved a very meaningful way to summarize and reflect upon the ideas and work produced in our nine day sprint. I was pleasantly surprised by the daring and depth found in many of my colleagues’ work. Despite the vast differences in approach, the common effort for the exhibition brought a tighter sense of studio community, which should help us finish our program with verve.
Discussion of Thresholds (photograph by Brook Moyse)
Viewing the Work
Group Discussion (photograph by Brook Moyse)
Installation View
Dowel Detail
