A blog by Gabriella Morrone who is currently a thesis student at the Syracuse University School of Architecture and a member of the Crisis City thesis collaborative.



Contention:

“the idea that festival, like revolution, marks both a break in everyday life and a rehabilitation of the everyday…”

In the era of modernity, society changes so rapidly, yet the built environment is, by comparison, relatively static. New structures require massive investments of capital, and thus are expected to have a degree of permanence which will justify a high investment through a long life. However, temporary architectures (which may last an hour, a day, a week, or a year) provide a way for the built environment to change at a pace similar to the extreme speed of shifts in the consumer tastes, social trends, and flows of energy
and capital.

Thus, festivals, such as Burning Man or Mardi Gras, in their temporary and temporal nature, provide examples of spaces (designed by flexible and dynamic micro-societies or special interest niches) which are highly flexible and dynamic spaces, able to change and meet the needs of a rapidly changing society. Note, for instance, the rapid change of size exhibited by “Black Rock City” over a 3-year period in which the inclosed area increased from a perimeter of eight to nine miles, as projected attendance numbers increased (and following the constant increase in the site’s size). Yet the following year, the metropolis decreased again to an eight mile perimeter, resulting from complaints of the attendees and the removal away from the human scaled city, that the site was becoming. This is an example of a space becoming highly responsive and flexible to the needs of the “event” which creates the space.

Festivals are special celebratory instances, desirable and defined by their temporality. They provide counterpoints to and escapes from our routined lives. Our existing systems are designed to produce stability, yet we already introduce moments of ruptures (festivals) to counteract the constant routines and to provide relief from the existing state. The contention is to design an architecture through the medium of a festival which provides a critique on our current and primarily static architectural manifestations and their relationships to our rapidly changing social environments. The architectural artifact will reintroduce celebration, absurdity, inversions, and play by the temporary rupture of a festival into the existing urban routine.

Just as an architect can explore spatial issues through the medium of “a building,” an architect can likewise perform his/her art through the medium of a “festival.” This thesis is an exercise in absurd juxtaposition which will illuminate disparities in iconic American cultures. I have decided to transplant the infamous Burning Man festival in an unlikely and somewhat incompatible setting: the bustling streets of America’s capital center, Wall Street. In doing so I will call attention to the existing problem of the highly regularized conditions of the Wall Street worker of New York City by juxtaposing their circulation patterns and movements in the city with the spontaneous ludic conditions of festive activities achievable through the redesigning and transformation of the existing cityscape (streets, facades, sidewalks). By activating these differences, the festival will reconstruct our existing notions of the street as a connector, and redefine the street as a space of dynamic engagement.

1 Henri Lefebvre, Critique de la vie quotidienne [Critique of Everyday Life], 2nd ed., trans. John Moore vol. 1 (New York: Verso, 1991), pg. xxviii.