Speculative Project
Exhibition @ Pinkcomma Gallery. Boston, MA.
2018
w/ Mclain Clutter, Cyrus Peñarroyo and Michael Amidon. More @extents.us
Shaped Places of Carroll County, New Hampshire
US’s 2016 presidential election results.
This project speculates on the complex reciprocity between who we are and the shape of where we live; between identities and the built environments that support them. Culminating in the design of three linear cities, the project seeks to geometrically organize population at a geographic scale to carefully prescribed ends – drawing upon a set of protagonists and sources from Frank Stella to M.A. Ochitovic, and from American formalism to critical geography. Forced to co-exist, this melange informs strategies for co-existence; for patterns of urbanization that urbanize the rural while ruralizing the urban.
For those who follow US politics, New Hampshire remained purple on the US presidential election map until late on Nov 8, 2016. The political battleground between liberal urban and conservative rural population, makes New Hampshire a microcosm of the US as a whole.
Frank Stella
In his 1966 essay, “Shape as Form: Frank Stella’s Irregular Polygons,” Michael Fried applauded Stella for a very precise quality. Each painting in the Irregular Polygons featured a shaped canvas containing geometric bands of color within. Fried noted that it was impossible to determine whether the geometry of the stripes dictated the shape of the canvas or vise-versa. For Fried the mutual dependence between colored bands and canvas support prohibited all meaning external to the form, securing the status of high art. Shape and content forged a complex reciprocity. Each painting within Stella’s “Irregular Polygons” is named after a town in Carroll County, New Hampshire. Many of these towns are also Census Places. The shapes of Census Places are rarely defined by sensible markers or physical features. Rather, it is the instrumentalization of policy and control of population within the Census Place that makes its shape real. Shape and content forge a complex reciprocity.
Frank Stella inside his workshop. (source unknown)
( 1 ) Sanborville, ( 2 ) Union, ( 3 ) Conway.
Linear cities
Shaped Places recalls the visions of Russian Constructivism in which the linear city was a tool to unite urban and rural populations. These unbuilt examples deployed repeating planning units along infrastructural lines composing housing, production, institutions, nature, and collective space. Rural and urban populations were meant to merge as one public for the Revolutionary State.
Ivan Leonidov’s Competition Proposal for the Town of Magnitogorsk. Axiom view
Ivan Leonidov’s Competition Proposal for the Town of Magnitogorsk. Detail and perspective view.
The three sites
Shaped Places has three sites, each a Census Place – Sanbornville, Union, and Conway. In each site, the formal logic from a Stella canvas is applied to the shape and topography of the eponymous census place to yield zoning bands. Along these bands, linear city planning modules would be deployed, contorting to the shape of their geographic host to elide rural and urban populations. Within, each inhabitant would find herself perpetually confronted with the other, perpetually usurped within the body politic, by design. Shape and content forge a complex reciprocity.
Sanborville ( 1 )
Union ( 2 )
Conway ( 3 )
