Studio Option
Post Blast Lower Manhattan21st C. Civic Humanist InstitutionsTHE CITY AS A LITERARY TEXTTEXT INTERTEXT, CONTEXTPROVOCATION TO PROGRAMPOST BLAST LOWER MANHATTANA DEFINITIVE CITY ARCHITECTURE \”DAS UNBEHAGEN IN DER KULTUR\”\”Let us in a flight of imagination suppose that the city is not solely a human inhabitation but instead a psychic entity with a similarly long and copious past to that of an individual, in which nothing that has ever come to exist may perish. And that all of its incarnations are simultaneously present, from the most profoundly buried to the most contemporary \” Sigmund Freud The discomfort in the culture referred to in Freud\’s quote is the struggle of eros and thanatos, the creative and the destructive faces within the text of the city. The quote describes the Roman Forum, which is a theatre of the evolution of Civilization employed here, as a psychic model of the collective will.The provocation of the condition of lower Manhattan is to be read as a condition of conscious and unconscious fabric of the city. A fabric representative of events, individuals, material and technologic innovation, is a definitive site of this time.The project proposes a reading of the city as a literary text. The proposal must to innovate within a precise elaboration of an intertext of site to derive, position and structure a definitive program for the culture, the site, and the epoch.