Zucotti park
I took a walk this Sunday around the financial district, from my office at 14 Wall Street to Fulton Street via my favorite route: through Naussau Street. I walked down Fulton Street towards the river, to enjoy the sunlight at the Seaport. Manhattan in my mind has always been skyscrapers, so it has in a lot of other people’s – it was in Manhattan that one of the bibles of 20th century architecture was born: Delirious New York by Rem Koolhaas.
The scenery that day stunned me; the sun was low and its light was caught by the facade of each of the old and new skyscrapers, highlighting in different intensity and giving each building a unique character. It was a complex and ambiguous play in which any character could be the protagonist, it could be the sun, the building, the people, or the grid. The last is a particularly important character in this play, it makes possible the different landscapes: some streets were immersed in the shade and you could feel the cold and the quietness and some, like Naussau Street, seem to be laid out so that it is aligned with the sunlight, making it warm and welcoming. People tend to walk towards where there is sunlight, where there are more people and shops. Naussau Street is modest in scale, which makes it the more friendly, and shop after shop – a Starbucks, a pizza shop, a Vietnamese sandwich shop, and other restaurants – line its pavement.
I arrived at the Seaport. Here the intensity of sunlight is increased, making a high contrast between surfaces of different angles. Because of that high contrast, the textures beneath the shading were revealed. Most of them were made of pieces of fabric, supported by light structure in metal. This reminded me of Dong Xuan Market in Hanoi, where temporary details were more dominant than permanent ones. The main difference was the orderliness of the structures, which fitted well with the old buildings; there should be a careful design of where to attach these structures on the buildings’ facades. In some cases, the facades were covered in metal sheets, providing a transition between old material – brick and concrete – to the new, lighter one – metal pot, handrail and fabric cover. It was, for me, unusual to see a part of Manhattan where the skyscraper moved behind the scene and became the background for the modest low-rise buildings and their attached “temporary” components to play as the main character.
Then I walked back, this time all the way up the end of Fulton Street. In the corner where Fulton Street crossed Nassau Street, a Starbucks Coffee building had a wonderful decorative pattern at the top, blending with the warm reflection from the opposite side, which brought me back to the beauty of permanent structures. As I moved along the street, I came from the temporary to the permanent, from the everyday life to the symbolic. Here, at the end of the street, stood the Ground Zero construction site, designed by Daniel Libeskind. The sun was higher now and made less contrast between dark and light, but instead filled the street with a more complex choreography of shadows and reflections.
However the goal of my journey was not to seek the permanent, brilliant contemporary piece of architecture in the end of the road, but to visit Zucotti Park, located 3 blocks away, where I could find the Millenium Hilton Hotel, the 21st century department store, and the Brooks Brothers building. As an architect, I enjoyed both “temporary” structures and the “permanent” ones, as they represented different visual enjoyment. The permanent structures, of course, were more complex and were the symbol of the high civilization, represented by high technology and expressive materials. However, that day, the temporary architecture had taken the voice.
The Zucotti park appeared, finally, before me, with crowds of people. Except the two big tents in beige, everything else was saturated in that crowd. Only as I moved closed I discovered clusters of tents scattered throughout the park. More surprisingly, I discovered the flags indicating the spatial functions such as Food, Comfort, Coaching and so on, humbly stood among the jungle of tents. Perhaps it was the most dense place in one floor one can imagine here in NYC, where the approximate density was about three person per square meter. And it all functioned perfectly, with control and a variety of space programs, including library, sanitation department, and even arts and sustainability section. And all was constructed by temporary structures. If architecture is for people enjoyment, then, so the Zucotti Park should be considered a case for architectural study where column grid, functional distribution or facade design would useless. Other scales were of more import: the study of the role of the table or the bookshelf or the scale of a piece of a tent component. There were also new factors of design such as the connection of the tent cord and a tree, or the free standing structure of these tents, which played a crucial role as they supposed to be self standing. The performance of parts was of high consideration: the lightness of the structure, the spatial combinations that the parts could make. The parts, as much as the people who used them, supposed to self-sustained.
I never expected to see such a thing, the temporary components and the vibrant ambiance of community, and in New York! While the components in Hanoi were of everyday use, and was actually permanent in the urban landscape, the component raised these days in Zucotti Park was of different meaning: a revolution to regain the democracy, or so they say. I wondered why it was always New York, to contemplate about architecture. For Rem Koolhaas, it was the culture of congestion, represented by skyscrapers. For me, it was the sense of community, the idea of living in the public instead of programmed boxes, which was represented by the permanently temporary.
– Tuan Manh Nguyen
(edited by Tue Ngoc Nguyen)