Fireworks over Central Park
Pear - Orange - Ginger Charlotte, 2012 celebration cake
Highlights of 2011 - Rotterdam, May 2011
Best Wishes for 2012
Highlights of 2011 - Owls at Antwerp Zoo
Les Dîners de Gala by Dali
Editta Sherman - Christmas Lunch, Central Park South
Brief: The legacy of infrastructural utopias is realized in the northern tip of Manhattan where the George Washington Bridge enters Manhattan, forming an elevated highway that crosses the city and incorporates Nervi’s revolutionary bus station and a series of housing towers. This unfinished modernist project terminates abruptly at the eastern edge of Manhattan where the highway crosses the Harlem River and carves through the Bronx with a remnant wake of on and off ramps.
Completing this utopian project raises new questions: how can this dynamic but unfinished hybrid be reconsidered as a new mega form, where a new reciprocity between the precision of architectural expression and the systemic logics of ecology, landscape, and infrastructure can generate a contemporary paradigm?Statement: What is a utopia today? A dreamer lies on the city’s bedrock - giant spiders weave away his dreams - webs expanding out of sight. A tapestry spreads and fastens to the streets, projected as a three dimension matrix, a scaffolding of dreams. This sensitive membrane sifts through the currents of the city, catching in its web particles, fragments, seasons, nights and days, lifting them up in the winds like a fisherman hoists his net.
Up here in the stratosphere, the layers of the city peel away, elutriating as in geological formations. Looking down, we see the speeding cars, above us the moon, motionless stars - and planets. But from this incisive contemplation of the city comes a feeling of nostalgia, as if we had left the Earth and were but ghosts walking through the walls of the city’s towers. They no longer exist in physical form, all is abstraction.
A mermaid is caught. Her body is tangled in the ropes, but her spirit wanders and animates our structure - is it not in fact our desire that flutters in those cables?
An intangible manifestation of the city, framed within its air-rights, a space in constant expression allowing a better understanding of our environment, and also of ourselves. In a world whose complexity escapes us, confuses us, crushes us, but inspires us - this is today’s utopia.
Savinien Caracostea - a project for the Evolutionary Infrastructure studio, by
Weiss/Manfredi • Fall 2011 Harvard Graduate School of Design
Animation for Meshes of the Afternoon
a part of Evolutionary Infrastructures, a Weiss/Manfredi studio
Fall 2011, Harvard Graduate School of Design
Meshes of the Afternoon rendering, Between the Towers
