New York City’s Soundscape

Robert W. Park — Sat, 08 Jun 2013 09:21:31 +0000

My first visit to New York provided an initial insight. We arrived in the afternoon on a very hot day. The taxi that took us from JFK to the Upper Westside was air-conditioned in the old fashioned way. Blasts of warm air flooded through its open windows as we swung around intersections. The worn sound of the engine was the driving force, but the pressure of the horn was our lance and we jousted through the city in a bout of noise, heat and motion. Our drop-off point was a simple fifteen storey 1930s brick apartment block on West End Avenue. A Manhattan block has its own particular sound in the summer. The dry heat has a dampening effect on the constant dirge of traffic. An insect-like hum emits from hundreds of exterior air-conditioning units and drips of condensation from their underbellies pepper the sidewalk. Sirens in the distance, maybe half a mile away, provide a feint harmony to those screaming past. Rushes of amplified music wax and wane as doors open and close. But above all of these sounds is the sound of the human voice. New Yorkers seem to have developed a tonal intonation that can cut through the bass sound of the city. Their voices can always be heard, and they are often exercised. It is a city of confident communication – much more so than any other I have been to.

I found it hard to settle on that first night. Not because the noise was preventing me from sleeping. I didn’t need sleep. Fuelled by the sounds emitting from the street, my adrenalin levels were high, and I wanted to stay connected to the source. I spent most of the night by the tenth storey window listening to the city continue to emanate. Just as I finally began to doze off, a hallucinatory vision appeared outside the glass – a personification of everything I had experienced that day – welcoming me, but warning me to sleep, to get some rest. The city is not going anywhere. There will be more of the same tomorrow.

The above extract is the introduction to a longer essay, “Noise:Silence – The Battle for New York City’s Soundscape”.

Midtown Sleeps

Robert W. Park — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 12:01:40 +0000

Manhattanism is the architectural doctrine of density, height and a Coney Island sense of commercial invention. It has been New York’s major contribution to world culture. For years, New York designers and theorists have struggled with Manhattan. The Commissioner’s grid has been its formal master and the Manhattan block has acquired mythical status. There have been attempts to break the grid – Robert Moses, Le Corbusier, Clarence Stein and others with superhighways, superblocks and garden cities – but it now has too many champions, and its heritage is too ingrained in America’s collective psyche. Through the grid, the city ebbs and flows – but gets denser all the time. So if attempts to pacify or restrain Manhattan are destined to fail, then why try? The city will change, but it cannot be cajoled. Designing Manhattan is anti-Manhattan. Instead, our approach to this project has been to present a fairy-tale. We have hypothesised a future scenario that has downgraded the urban value of Midtown Manhattan. The city has changed through economic necessity and social upheaval – not through design. The Financial District has broken free, an independent city state, and Harlem has risen to become a major economic centre. Meanwhile Midtown has developed a crisis of congestion, becoming a dense urban slum, a walled city.

We see the cultural value of Midtown Manhattan as a city artefact. It is a unique assemblage of architectural bravado, a defining urban moment. But Midtown is at the whim of powers beyond its control, the same powers that created it. It is, perhaps, destined to be destroyed by Manhattanism. To highlight this irony, we have proposed an intervention.

We have acted as curators. We have cleared Midtown, and assembled other related urban artefacts that are under similar economic pressures – The Empire State Building, McGraw-Hill Building, Flatiron, UN Secretariat. When the collection is complete, we have encased the entire Midtown area in a block of solid glass. Petrified.

Midtown is now a singular urban object, preserved, and immune from outside pressures. It is not dead, but is sleeping. Awaiting a time when it might be rediscovered again.

New York City Vision – Competition

Intrivia » New York

New York City’s Soundscape

Midtown Sleeps