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write-up/kultureflash_17.09.2007
Landmarks of New York
The Chrysler Building. The Brooklyn Bridge. The Guggenheim Museum. Arguably the most famous metropolitan area in the world, New York City is an intricately woven urban gesamtkunstwerk whose iconic buildings and streets have provided the background for uncountable films, works of art, and record sleeves. Once the epitome of High Modernism, the urban fabric of the city that never sleeps was a frantically stitched-together quilt of modernist skyscrapers and brownstones until 1963, when the destruction of Penn Station to make way for Madison Square Garden spurred the creation of the Historic Landmarks Preservation Centre – a body with powers to ‘designate,’ or list, important structures to save them from demolition. Some argue that the Centre’s work has made New York the mythical Gotham that it is today, while others hold its conservative attitude responsible for killing the architectural energy and organic growth of the metropolis. Either way, this exhibition about the heritage of what Rem Koolhaas (in Delirious New York, his ‘retroactive manifesto for Manhattan) has called an “addictive machine from which there is no escape” is a reminder of the need for planning debates in a post-9/11-year when NYC is simultaneously rebuilding its wounded core and designating more buildings than in the past 20 years.