ARCHITECTURE

to tangible evidence drawn from readily available documents.
Rather than speaking with the authoritative voice
of expertise or recommending future action prematurely,
we have sought only to put these facts and this evidence—
numerical, textual, and visual—on the table, to demonstrate
that nothing is self-evident as it may appear. Implicitly, this
report asks a simple question: How might anyone with a
vested interest in architectural design and a commitment
to addressing our time’s most pressing social concerns reconcile
the two, if at all?
— Reinhold Martin, Jacob Moore, and Susanne Schindler
Notes on Photography
From East 125th Street to West 125th Street, New York, June, 2015
Emily Kloppenburg, Ilaria Ortensi, photographers
Thomas Roma, editor
For the commissioned photographs included in Part 1 of this report, the
goal was not to illustrate projects mentioned in the text, but to convey
the ever present, often banal, and seemingly self-evident faces of inequality,
which can be found anywhere, anytime. Together with their
advisor Thomas Roma, Emily Kloppenburg and Ilaria Ortensi—current
and former Master of Fine Arts candidates at Columbia University,
respectively—proposed Manhattan’s 125th Street as a site of investigation.
One of Harlem’s commercial and cultural arteries in an area long
characterized by disinvestment, this important east-west corridor has,
in recent years, been the site of charged debates prompted by the rapid
demographic and physical changes. If the art of inequality is visible
anywhere, it is most certainly here, at our doorstep.
In my work, I use photography as means of visually mapping subliminal
states of various “architectures” within their environs. For The Art
of Inequality, I traversed the horizontal axis of 125th Street in New York
City. Systematically moving from west to east, I sought to locate abstruse
instances of our current urbanity that surpass the known and the preconceived.
My pictures reveal the “concealed” as pertinent examples of the
delicate, complex realities that surround our contemporary structures as
well as the visual and social landscapes that they inform.
— Emily Kloppenburg
(pages 26, 27, 38, 39, 50 bottom, 52, 64, 65, 74, 75, 77, 89)
I’m interested in the possibility of exploring architecture as a product of
political, social, and aesthetic conditions. Through my work I want to
communicate the conflicting ideas and feelings that emanate from contemporary
space. I believe that the way we construct and perceive ourselves
has a strong affinity with the way we construct space. Growing up
in Rome I developed a sensitivity toward space that is strictly connected to
time. Photography is, for me, the ideal medium through which to describe
the rapidity that characterizes urbanism today.
— Ilaria Ortensi
(pages 28, 40, 41, 50 top, 51, 53, 62, 63, 86, 87)
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