More Yale Visions of Red Hook
Gowanus Lounge checked out the entire Red Hook exhibition mounted by those Yale Architecture School grad students that created the unpleasant visions of Red Hook's future. They are on display through August 20 as the BWAC Summer Art Show at the Beard Street Peir at 499 Van Brunt Street.
Meanwhile, Steve McFarland the Red Hook resident who brings us the always superb and engaging B61 Productions, and who was quoted in the New York Times story on the Yale plans, notes that the creations were not entirely positively greeted by some community members at a forum on Saturday. Steve will have a report up soon.
We've already offered our opinion about their esoteric and unhelpful nature, even though a lot of work clearly went into them. In any case, we photographed some of the drawings and present a handful here.
posted by rsguskind at 11:10 AM
3 Comments:
It seems to me that these projects should be interepreted merely for what they are - visions - and not as egotistical fights of fancy or esoteric avant-gardism. The work is about exploring the possibilities of a site like Red Hook in order to open people's eyes its great potential (beyond the more "artificial" economic and legal constraints that typically define convenctional urban devlopment). Current development trends in Red Hook have failed to explored this potential at all. Sure, these student proplosals don't stand much chance of being realized, but I have to wonder if they're much worse than what Red Hook has planned for it anwyay...
What's the potential of your property? Has anyone proposed restoring it to its natural state as a flood plain? How about building a 31,000-car parking lot on it (in a neighborhood of 13,000 residents)? Or leveling your home and all surrounding industry so that Manhattan residents don't have to go all the way out to Fire Island?
If you took offense to such proposals, surely it would be due to a failure to open your eyes to the great potential of your own back yard.
Its called imagination. Did you even bloody LOOK at the explanations of the work, or did you just look at the pretty models?
The works are there not as plans for how to destroy Red Hook, but as exercises in thought for how to recognize the total needs of the community, the total needs of the environment, and the total needs of the city at large.
You try it.
If your response is "Leave Red Hook As Is" then you fail. Go back to your closed box thinking. BWAC is about open thinking. That's what artists DO.
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