Under the rug: Pleasure, violence, and other operations to de-sediment Central Park

Abstract

In The Manhattan Transcripts (1977–1981; Transcripts) Bernard Tschumi explores pleasure and violence as two driving forces in the creation of architecture space.

Tschumi’s experimental operations supported a design enquiry that probes across his proposed architecture of the event and recontextualises it from the contemporary perspectives offered by the Anthropocene theory. The operations were also calibrated to inform a design exploration that sought to de-sediment Manhattan’s ground conditions from within its geologic entanglements.

Under the Rug was the first of three instalments titled Insular Events, which were produced and curated as a virtual installation in 2021. Drawing more specifically from the Transcripts’ first episode—‘MT1—The Park’—the work critically reflects on how issues of representation may affect notions of ground as something that extrudes, fractures and de-sediments the city. It examines Central Park’s rigid boundaries within Manhattan’s urban grid, and it questions its political circumscription of land ownership and real estate development by following clues provided by the landscape’s topographical and hydrological conditions. These dissonant conditions of wetness and dryness activate lines of transgression with which to read Central Park less as a unified rug and more as a fractured archipelago, which breaks up its rectilinear limits and expands it into the city. 

Through a series of interrelated experiments using distinct representation techniques, Central Park’s thickness is explored in both plan and section to provoke the idea that the construction of the landscape might have erased and concealed many of this territory’s pre-park occupations.

Regarding Manhattan as a coalescence of dissonant spacetime conditions begins to suggest an architecture that offers a type of transgressive pleasure that comes from the violence of material movement through space. It is then suggested that an Anthoprocenic architecture of the event is a kind of seismic scoping that de-structures the city from within and that it may exist as a practice founded within an ethics of matter.