REVIEWS

Untitled No. 22— Florence Twu

Lessons from a pandemic in shaping social connection to place

LOSS

The New York City of my memory is gone. As its public life is driven into myriad interiors by COVID-19, I recall a trip in 2010 that included artist Julie Mehretu’s Guggenheim exhibit, Grey Area. Over meticulously drawn scenes of urban imagery, the sumi ink marks that Mehretu refers to as “characters” gathered and intensified over the surface of six monumental paintings. On the one hand, they suggest the movement and energy now sorely missing from the city’s streets. On the other, they can be read as an urban community’s cruel unravelling. I’m not a New Yorker, but I’ve developed my own affinity to the city through its once-vibrant cultural life.

SLOWNESS

Memorial Day weekend, 2020. Start of the virus’ first summer season. Foregoing typical haunts in the city, I found myself at Coney Island. Two months past its annual opening date, the rides of Luna Park stood quiet. Still. As if time has stopped, and we are stumbling through its sticky, viscous matrix.     

Swimming, and swimming slowly. New York’s relationship with the ocean is captured for me in architects’ Diller Scofidio’s Slow House (1989). Like Coney Island, it too was designed as an escape from the fast pace of city life: a solitary vacation home on the Atlantic coast with coveted waterfront view. Its form is pure trajectory, "conceived as a passage, a door that leads to a window… a physical entry to an optical departure."[1] The progression terminates at a TV monitor providing a mediated view of the same scene as the window. Slow… as the exterior curvature of the house obscures the ocean from view when approached from the west, thwarting the curious guest’s “desiring eye.”[2] Slow… for only revealing its picture-window view for those who follow the curving space inside without knowing where it leads. Originally operating as conceptual artists, Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio take every opportunity to fold their artistic backgrounds into their architectural practice. Critic Anya Ventura writes: “visual perception is not always immediate and artworks at times demand the space to unravel slowly…”[3] Too often we forget that, at its core, “Art wants to be slow.”[4]

Under the regime of COVID-19, the Slow House’s mediated view takes on new significance. Image and reality are allowed to diverge: the screen can display winter scenes in fall or a sunny day during a storm. The eye accustomed to synchronicity is also slowed. Asynchronous play, more mundanely applied in situations such as coordinating between time zones poles apart, betrays time’s thick existence, calling attention to its idiosyncrasies. Regardless of the explosion in the use of digital technologies, their temporal repercussions remind us of how firmly we are bound to place, not just by emergency curfews and shelter-in-place orders. And to be in place invites us to put down roots.

MUTATIONS

The history of Coney Island has been anything but slow. Unlike Central Park, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux to mitigate cholera outbreaks in 1858, its growth was propelled forward by the speeds of entrepreneurism, spectacle, and pleasure. In Delirious New York (1978), architect Rem Koolhaas traces the island’s developmental trajectory. Its initial manifestation in 1895 was as a resort, providing urban-weary Manhattanites a natural retreat from their increasingly artificial surroundings. Once the completion of the Brooklyn Bridge improved access, it quickly became the most densely occupied place on earth during the summer months. As Manhattan’s urbanity continued to intensify, Coney Island evolved again, this time into a “Super Natural”[5] locale, an intensified urban pleasure-scape where one could swim under a night-become-day (via strong electric lights) and even take a “trip to the “moon.” The power of technology to experientially transport is readily evident, from bridge engineering to amusement park novelties. 

A spin in the Barrels of Love, a precursor to the contemporary dating app, further addresses the loneliness and alienation attributed to metropolitan life. Men and women would walk separately in lines feeding into a giant rotating cylinder. Inside, no one could remain on their feet and strangers tumbled into each other’s arms. The innocent machine fabricated a mediated, “synthetic intimacy,”[6] an anti-alienation technology that eventually sent its newly formed couples onto the small boats and dark spaces of the Tunnels of Love. Today, as it was a hundred years ago, monumental challenges faced the kindling of romance, fostering of intimacy, and facilitation of spontaneous encounters. Are these the same problems of togetherness we’re faced with under pandemic conditions?

Countering the notion that alienation and loneliness are necessary consequences of urban life, author Rebecca Traister considers the city as a comforting presence, for single women in particular: “cities offer domestic infrastructure… The city itself becomes a kind of [spousal] partner, providing for single women the kind of services that women have, for generations, provided men.”[7] The city itself is not the alienating factor. Taking Traister’s position to the extreme, it instead provides mute companionship, necessary diversion, and, in the best of cases, smoldering chemistry. When denied our urban amenities of museums, coffee shops, and corner grocery stores, however, it is the isolation and zoom fatigue of interior, virtual life that unfortunately remains. 

Today, Coney Island functions again as an escape, but this time for the sweeping views, fresh air, and physical activity sorely missing from life under lockdown. As beachfront, the island’s connection to nature is largely mineral: sand (i.e. silica) and salt, with the additional natural resources of water and open air. Its trend towards the artificial was reversed when NYC Parks was awarded jurisdiction of beach and boardwalk in 1938. In yet another mutation, Parks Commissioner Robert Moses reimagined the island as a destination for “exercise and healthy outdoor recreation.”[8] Claiming fewer and fewer visitors were coming because they preferred more natural experiences near water, Moses expanded the beach by moving the boardwalk inland several yards and adding a two-foot layer of fine white sand to the beachfront. [9]

Under the regime of social distancing, Moses’ naturalized vision prevails over what Koolhaas termed island’s prior “urbanism of Fantastic Technology.”[10] Without the screams of roller coaster riders and cries from vendors hawking their wares, the air is filled with the sounds of reunited friends and crashing waves. To the east, the sheer expanse of the Atlantic is a relief after weeks of video calls in tight spaces. More importantly, abandonment is not the spatial reality of the pandemic here: the public realm of the boardwalk teems with life, albeit prudently distributed. Visitors politely disperse on the beach--a dappled surface of bodies and towels. Patches of activity along Riegelmann Boardwalk are both invigorating and comforting. The scene feels strangely normal. Here, the touch of a stranger in an anti-alienation thrill ride is not needed. Instead, a togetherness based on measured proximity has been established through a collective realization, a sigh of relief. We are here. Here are others. And that is enough. 

A post-COVID urbanity is easier to imagine walking along the 80-foot wide boardwalk, attuning us to evermore overscaled, grandiose, and potentially excessive outdoor spaces. While instilling a greater appreciation for natural sublimity, the virus has driven us both inwards towards virtual worlds and outwards into boundless spaces. 

The fanciful and hypercommercial Coney Island of yore persists in digital space. YouTube viewers can virtually experience Luna Park’s thrill rides through pre-pandemic footage, while pandemic buying has not only sustained but completely revitalized boardwalk hotdog companies Nathan’s and Feltman’s.[11] Throughout March and April, both experienced unanticipated Fourth of July-level sales. A simulated coaster ride and dislocated hotdog are markedly different, but recent technologies and infrastructures underpin them both. 

As quarantine has demonstrated, a life lived through screen time and interior space is patently unfulfilling if not outright unviable. Nature both enacts its revenge and justifies its indispensability, as public spaces are highly sought after. We are given the opportunity to regain our ties to the landscape and sea. Coney Island’s mutations under quarantine flicker between the digital and ecological poles that bookend today’s lived reality. One wonders what it would be like if its next iteration leaned towards the colorful installations of artist Pipilotti Rist’s 2016 New Museum exhibit Pixel Forest and its synthetic vision. With its history of amorous engineering, the island could also take up this type of approach in lieu of the more reactionary shifts of prior iterations. 

Returning to Mehretu’s Grey Area after a romp through art, architecture, nature, and technology, her swarming marks may now hint not only at destruction but also rebirth, suggesting an open-ended dream for the city’s ability to revitalize. New York may not be my city, but it’s a bit of every city today. 

References

[1]  The Museum of Modern Art. “Diller + Scofidio, Elizabeth Diller, Ricardo Scofidio. Slow House Project, North Haven, New York, Plan of Lower-Level and Sections. 1989 | MoMA.” Accessed September 23, 2020. https://www.moma.org/collection/works/201.

[2]  DS+R. “Desiring Eye.” Accessed September 23, 2020. https://dsrny.com/project/desiring-eye.

[3]  Ventura, Anya, “Slow Criticism: Art in the Age of Post-Judgement”, Temporary Art Review, February 15, 2016. http://temporaryartreview.com/slow-criticism-art-in-the-age-of-post-judgement/.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Koolhaas, Rem, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for New York, Oxford University Press, 1978. p 33. 

[6]  Ibid, 35.

[7] Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation (2016). 

[8] “Coney Island Beach & Boardwalk Highlights - Coney Island : NYC Parks.” Accessed September 23, 2020. https://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/coney-island-beach-and-boardwalk/highlights/204.

[9] “NYC Parks: Coney Island Beach & Boardwalk Highlights.” Accessed January 10, 2021. https://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/coney-island-beach-and-boardwalk/highlights/204

[10] Koolhaas, 62. 

[11] Krueger, Alyson, “How Quarantine Saved the Hot Dog.” The New York Times, May 22, 2020, sec. New York. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/22/nyregion/coronavirus-hot-dogs-feltmans.html.

Florence Twu is an educator in the fields of architecture and landscape architecture and participated in the WriteON 2020 workshop session.  

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