0. ZAPP 29 RIGHT SIZE 10.25.16 SPREADS 2.12.17

ZAPP URBANISM
REVIEW 29
View from New York Wiindow, Johanna Post, 2016

ZAPP : Zoology, Architecture, Planting, Painting
ZAPP URBANISM REVIEW
Issue 29
Zapp Urbanism - Since 2001
Andrew MacNair, Publisher/Editor
Johanna Post, Managing Editor
Noemi Biel, Distribution
Zapp Urbanism Review is a publication of the
Manhattan Studio in collaboration with the
Elvis Zapp Urban Film Festival Projection Project
The opinions and views expressed by the authors
do not necessarily represent the views of
the publisher nor the collaborating groups.
Table of Contents
Johanna Post - Cover: New York Collage
Don Byrd - Bioscleave House Forward
Linda Hogan - Standing Rock Protest
Cyril Christo - Save the Elephants
Richard Sheryll - Deep Ocean Sampler
Henry Rueda - Rodolfo Agrella Planes
Phillip Baldwin - Sousveillant Selfies
Thom Puckey - Cruel Light and Slow Becoming
Eran Chen - Manhattan Grows
Mitch Joachim /New Lab - 3D City Map
Andrew MacNair - Pollock’s Threshing Floor
Adrian Nivola - Flying Machines
Fred Licht - Goya’s Way of Flying
Thomas Wensing - Governors Island Park
Steven Holl - Iowa Visual Arts Center Opens
The Manhattan Studio
251 West 92 Street - #2A3
New York, NY 10025
Email: zappurbanism@gmail.com
www.zappurbanism.com
www.zappurbanism.wordpress.com
ZAPP GENEOLOGICAL TREE
Skyline, IAUS 1976
Oculus, NYAIA 1980
Metropolis 1980
Express 1981
Architectures 1984
Zapp Urbanism News 2001
Not Not Mooks 2001
Zapp Review 2015
Body Tatoo 2 by Peter Donders, Belgium.
Bioscleave House Goes Forward
Don Byrd
The Bioscleave House in Easthampton, Long Island, New intent of exploring all possible procedures toward living
York, is a home for another kind of living. A place at once with the greatest intensity.
of play and profound meditation, it is a philosophical
house that disrupts the ordinary comforts of ordinary
The Bioscleave House opens the space of well being
living and poses questions of how to live. Ordinary daily
that is beyond comfort. There is no good place to put a
questions — of, say, how to get from the bedroom to the
television or any of the machines that are made to live in
bathroom — become both philosophic questions and
the place of the living. The architectural work to which
plans of physical and meditative practices. Every step is
Arakawa and Gins devoted themselves for the last twenty
a question not only because the footing is uncertain but
years of their lives is the continuation and completion
also because the spaces into which one steps are always
of the conceptual painting, videography, sculpture, and
in some measure illusory.
writing that they had done from the beginning. Biocleave
House is one of the concluding monuments of perhaps
The visionary artists Arakawa and Madeline Gins, who the most profound artistic collaborations of the Twentieth
designed the house, with the office of the Architectural Century. This unique house—a rare example of an art
Body Research Foundation, for friend and client Angela that allows all of the arts to incohere together as dynamic
Gallman, created a living laboratory in which high theory and participatory monument—must be rescued, rebuilt,
and the daily business of preparing breakfast or taking and opened as a living laboratory that poses the deepest
questions about life as a procedure that unfolds as
a bath join. The house is the result of intensive artistic
research into not giving in. Life in the Bioscleave House is

Singing for Water, Standing Rock Protest
Linda Hogan, Water Protector, Chicksaw Nation
We are singing for water and for the protectors of Earth’s waters. We sing for water. Long-legged birds stand
at the edges of lakes and rivers to watch for fish, their nests hidden in the rushes. A doe crosses land and
stands guard as her little one drinks. All our brother and sister animals follow their worn paths to needed
waters. Trees and plants subsist with the rain, snow, and groundwater in a place where living Earth supported
large herds of bison for thousands of years.
As for us, we were water beings from the beginning. We rained from the broken waters of our mothers to
enter this world. We drank from our mothers to thrive. Water is our life-blood, and like all our creations
on this blue planet, we were born to its currents and passages. So we sing for those who pray to protect the
wide, long Missouri River on its elemental journey.
Standing Rock, this part of the Plains, is the world of well-known leader and Holy Man Sitting Bull. It is the
land crossed during the time of the Fort Laramie Treaty, signed in what is now Wyoming. In my mind’s eye
as I’ve studied history, I see the many leaders of nations crossing this land to participate in negotiations with
the American Government. Wearing beautifully made regalia, most traveled on horseback or with wagons,
the chiefs and the women ambassadors of nations who thought the Fort Laramie Treaty would be a resolution
to their problems. Even those who had earlier disputes came together with one another in kinship,
camping together, sharing meals and creating new relationships.
Now the chiefs of many tribal nations and other representatives have arrived again, this time to join in common
protection for the water of this Earth and in solidarity with the Standing Rock and Lakota. This is still
the land of Standing Rock and other Lakota Nations, still held together by the words and memory of Sitting
Bull, who loved and protected his people. No company or state has the right to take a thin, dirty business
through it, an oil pipeline certain to break, destroying the water and contaminating the future.
But the Dakota Access Corporation sent its private aggressive militia to declare its own War on the People.
With that amount of harassment, the water protectors could certainly be in danger. We already saw on the
news that, after being told where the burial sites and sacred lands were, the bulldozers went to those areas
and tore through the Earth, the opposite of what was expected. What drives such hostility is hard to imagine.
Photographs from space reveal that Earth is a water planet. No living thrives without water. It is for that
reason space explorers search for planets that may contain this element: it a sign of life.
Most First People have chants or songs about the sacred nature of water. Water is even used for baptism in
Christian religions. I hear that even the waters have their distinct songs as they journey toward the oceans.
We live on a single globe of water, all of it one entity. It is alive, this elemental force, this yearning sacred creation,
longing to reach an ocean. It is always moving away, traveling and then returning, in its glorious circle.
And we know that when we sing for water, we sing for ourselves.

Photograph by Cyril Christo and Marie Wilkinson.
Only the Elements Matter
Cyril Christo
To us on the raft the great problems of civilized man appeared
false and illusory-like perverted problems of the
human mind. Only the elements mattered. Thor Heyerdahl
Our 11 year old son Lysander would agree. Several years
ago during a supermoon he said, “We have landed on the
moon, but we haven’t landed on earth yet!” We have
spent the past decade showing him the deities of existence,
the lions and tigers and polar bears to understand
the marvels of their respective eco systems, the ice, the
forests, and the savannah from which we emerged. Today
species are struggling to survive under the perfidy of our
kind. Elephants are still being massacred in the thousands,
an issue we helped bring to the world’s attention
in 2011 in the tremendous article in Vanity Fair Agony
and Ivory (written by Alex Shoumatoff) when no-one in
the media was listening. Last September's CITES meeting
in South Africa must finally give maximum, Appendix 1
status to one of the pillars of existence, the elephants. Fail
them and civilization will falter. As one Samburu elder one
told me, if we should lose the elephants, we will lose our
minds. The only thing left will be to kill ourselves!!
Whales, the purest expression of the collective unconscious,
are swallowing the plastic refuse of an overwrought,
unconscious species. The Great Barrier Reef has
suffered immeasurable damage due to climate change
and forest fires burn the lungs of the earth. Will sea shells
still spiral their grand architecture of time in 2050? Will
childhood survive the onslaught of what adults deem
progress, education and civilization? When D.H. Lawrence
wrote “The elements! The elements! You can’t win
against the elements!”, he underscored that the salvation
of the earth and the life force is the mandate of our time.
With less atom smashing and bomb building we could
turn the Titanic of our civilization around. But do we
want to? Native Elders have said for decades, that
we must turn our planetary behavior by 2020. That
is the point of no return! With the abysmal heat approaching
irreversibility we can no longer dig into
the hell realm which oil and coal has unleashed.
I have seen a Navajo and Tibetan elder bring rain from a
clear blue when Santa Fe was in extreme drought for 6
months straight in 2000. “Our metaphysics are wearing
woefully thin,” cried Lawrence. Technology alone will not
save us. We need a cellular, karmic, emotional recalibration
of our connection to each butterfly we encounter.
An elephant researcher in South Africa said “Science is
not the answer, poetry is.” By poetry she did not mean
simply quoting TS Eliot about The Wasteland. She meant
the ability to respect and honor life. The elephant
decimation of late, a being that forged our relationship
to earth and who migrated alongside us for millennia is
being rendered into chopsticks. In Hebrew the word for
elephant “pil” is the root of the verb to “wonder” - our
highest faculty. But children will not be able to wonder if
they become the only free moving mammals on earth in
20 years time. In fact they will no longer be free.
We impose exams, and tests and homework assignments
on the young not telling them that we adults are failing
them and existence almost beyond repair. Darwin,
Cousteau, Paul Watson, Jane Goodall will not forgive this
civilization for what we have wrought. Some answers
have come from the simplest acts like the planting of 100
million trees in central India, an act of grace involving
no computers! We have given in to our “gadget gods” as
W.H. Auden declared. Now it is time to give to the god of
grace and altruism.
For those who do not believe in climate change go see
the Greenland ice sheet melting and witness its planetary
lamentation. Lysander saw it as an entire ship sang Happy
Birthday to a three year old taking in the hyperborean
fantasia of snow. Now with an 11 year old on the horizon
I wonder if school can foster the salvaging angel of his
curiosity and will and responsibility to indeed save what is
left of this planet. I have told Lysander the greatest things
you will learn, you will learn outside of school, from the
school of the earth, before time became a regimented
and fragmented time sheet to fuel the apoplectic and
autistic industrial landscapes where “the few remaining
spaces have been infiltrated, divided up, domesticated,
deprived of natural systems, denuded of natural processes,
systematized, artificialized, sterilized, commercialized.”
(Isak Dinesen)
What are we creating but a technological slum feeding
its populace meaningless art and TV shenanigans? Then
what do the children inherit? What will they experience
except a longing for an earlier time when other creatures
besides humans walked the earth? Will they indeed be
able to experience anything at all? Or are we human
dinosaurs in the making? If we love this planet as Helen
Caldicott, the nuclear activist asked, this is the year when
everything must change. It is not too late to reverse
course. A lot has been lost, but we must fight for what
is left as if our souls, our children’s lives depended on
it. $6 billion is not too much a price tag for cleaning the
eco system around the Barrier Reef, reversing nitrogen
runoff and other water pollutants. The rainforests can
no longer be felled. Life on earth will not forgive us. Life
(Light Imbuing the Firmament of the Earth) exists as it
does with the photosynthetic process as nowhere else in
the universe. Will we find the courage to save the priceless
species of earth and the elements, the species that
fostered our very minds?
The Maasai have no word for nature, it is simply enkope
Ngai, the beauty of the Creator. Only the West, only the
European mind, the so called mind of the Enlightment,
created a gulf between the humanity and nature. We
need to create a new bridge between ourselves and the
rest of creation, not divides. We are a novel, upstart species
in the adolescent stage of evolution. Half of the life
force of earth has been lost in the last 50 years. We must
hold on to what we have left. Biodiversity is as crucial as
the effects of climate change. We are but one species
among millions. It is time we learned that lesson while

Deep Ocean Benthic Sampler
Richard Sheryll
Deep Ocean Benthic Sampler (DOBS) possesses a unique capability to the fields of deep sea microbial
ecology, biogeochemistry and natural products discovery, the ability to obtain an uncontaminated
sediment core samples and preserve in situ conditions of pressure and temperature upon retrieval to a
surface ship.
Biological diversity of marine organisms, especially of microbes found in the deep-sea, hydrothermal
vents, cold water seeps, but also the understudied abyssal plains holds great potential for natural products
discovery and applied biotechnology. General cultivation independent diversity assessments based
on the universal taxonomic marker molecule 16S rRNA have revealed a vast diversity of microorganisms.
However, for the most part the physiology and metabolic abilities of these organisms remain
unknown. This is mainly due to the fact that only a small fraction (

Plan and Plane
Collecting Knowledge
N o m a d i c S t u d i o
Maria Elvira Dieppa
From an architectural point of view, spaces
are determined by the perimeter - even if
that frontier is not a physical one - a basic
configuration of a container and content.
How do we approach to that perimeter, the
relation between that border, the context,
and other containers; the interaction of the
border itself and the content, not from a
physical experience but from mindful and
sensory experience, is the starting point
for Memory Loop - a series of silkscreen
prints that recreates overlapped spaces
of Caracas architecture, landscaping and
public art.
The synthesis of multiple perimeters
juxtaposed, blended through the use of
solid pure black opens up a new gate to
remember the architectural and sensory
space in a different way. The use of yellow
paint, that folds through the architectural
space and invades the pieces, the expansion
of the border is achieved. This is not
art, it is a document that communicates a
live organic space, a place in memory.
Rodolfo Agrella
Review - Henry Rueda
“To make a collection is to find, acquire, organize and store items,
whether in a room, a house, a library, a museum or a warehouse. It is
also, inevitably, a way of thinking about the world - the connections and
principles that produce a collection contain assumptions, juxtapositions,
findings, experimental possibilities and associations. Collection-making,
you could say, is a method of producing knowledge.” *
When you navigate through the archives of Rodolfo Agrella’s work, you
find yourself in a very ambiguous and unfamiliar territory. The diversity
of media, scales and approaches creates a vast repertoire of images and
messages, not only a joy to the critical eye - but also a work in constant
progress.
Is this Art? Is this Design? From the days of the “Yellow Laboratory,”
Agrella’s early studio in Caracas, we recognize an obsession for the Plan
and the Plane, that comes to the surface in unrecognizable mutations.
Lines, patterns and repetitions are part of a methodology used to create
abstract compositions based in a familiar vocubulary. You know you are
looking at something you may have seen before. Is it and indigenuous
pattern? Is it an architectural plan? Is it a graphic design? Is it a painting?
Is it visual poetry?
This collection was created as an exploration of forms, a notation, a text.
Almost like a botanist, the work is presented as a sequence of variations
of what seems to be, a basic module. The white surface contains a black
form that is almost identical in volumen, but absolutely different in size
and shape. The black forms seem enigmatic at first glance, although they
come from the families of Arp, Calder, or more directly from the Nenias
of Gerd Leufert.
Black on white, visual communication, form and space as fundamental
concepts. The form has arms, legs, edges, cut outs, smoothness, movement,
feels like an architectural drawing sometimes, organic and structured
in moments, free and open. An interplay between positive and
negative, a sequence, a story. In an earlier collection, “Crudo,” Rodolfo’s
work was about an intervention of black geometric forms on top of natural
wood utensils. At that time the black form created a disruption on the
passive support. The forms were simple, the support more complex.
The work becomes almost scientific the moment you read a structure
behind it, but then, inmediately, the artist betrays the support and covers
the space with color. Color that grows as a cloak on top of the pieces, respecting
no limits or frames, then the exhibition becomes a performance
and the result is an installation, is it really?
Where is this color coming from? Tropicality has become a constant motivation
on his practice. Monochrome interventions in spaces, something
he tested in previous projects, becomes a very subtle veil that covers the
“in-between” spaces. The work, is it a series of pieces? Or is it one single
piece under the colored veil? This constant ambiguity and complexity
makes Rodolfo Agrella’s work an exercise in curiosity.
I decided to work as a nomadic studio in August 2014. To stay put in New York seemed expensive and constraining. I
had just become an American Citizen and suddenly I fell into the option of full rights to travel the world. London
seemed the first option. The work comes from an architectural thinking process and it manifests itself as a history of
the geography possibilities. I do not plan this nomad mobility, I am interested in how it appears in my path. My Colombian
studio is the point of connection to the earth, it sits on top of an actual mountain made of sand in front of the
Caribbean Sea. The idea that I can have a house on an actually piece of land is exciting. After recently visiting the local
Khogi Indians, I could clearly experience that comfort and security are more real when you live in a territory rather than
in a house. I can always return to this precipice working next to the wall of the house with a Pegasus painted by the artist
Alejandro Obregon. He built the house for his young family at the end of the 1950’s. One day, watching the Pegasus
painted on the wall, I realized how my future was linked to him as is my past but that is another story. The house sits on
a piece of land that has the form of the bow of a boat and I realized that the Pegasus was pulling my boat that was going
to take me to see the world. The world seems large - but my interests are to experience and discover how my own personal
history connects with it. I suppose this link comes from my pirate ancestry. I have been to London, Mexico City,
Brooklyn, New York City, Pradomar, Miami, and Boston with this nomad-painting studio. Two months time seems good
to feel out the place, but sometimes it is less. I plan to continue painting abstract stories as the plan unfolds to go to
Berlin and Rome very soon. To learn how each city thinks and feels and moves gives me really a profound understand-
*“Ways of Curating”by Hans Ulrich Obrist

“Cruel Light and Slow Becoming” by Thomas Puckey, Amsterdam, 2016
Death by Selfie
Sousveillance in Danger
The Danger of Sousveillance
Phillip Baldwin
What would these two things have to do with each
other? Sousveillance, or the selfie, is benign, naïve,
and almost certainly pathetic as one wishes to record
the self present in life. Sousveillance puts the subject
in front of a meal or an attractive partner. At random
moments of joy there is good meal, good lover, or amateur
porn which makes an aggrandizement out of the
section of the vain endeavor knowing that all of this
will be missed soon. In the 'danger selfies' - they are
dangling from skyscrapers and power lines. They
are traveling at high speeds in the car that is soon to
crash. The impulse or the hairline difference between
the status of recording one's beautiful life, and the disaster
is interchangeable. Perhaps they have enough
find a toast to push it over the edge. Perhaps they
have no idea. Yet the selfie taken at the moment of a
car crash, the tight rope walking across the skyscraper
tower, the flirtation with the wild animals, all of this
has to do with a sense of completion. Thanatos rears
its beautiful head and reaps the crop of stupid voyeurs.
But what has to be completed? The sousveillance life is
the current life. They told me that I would have to put a
sign in the room saying that people in this room would
be photographed by each other at some point. fuck this.
this was obvious in terms of a media class. You would
have to live under a rock not to know that 'information
wants to be free' - no, it wants to be reflected on. Nobody,
especially now, is making any money at it. I thought this
was obvious in terms of the applicants social media,
mixed with the mobile smartphone, and the prevalence
of the photograph. More photographs were taken in two
hours on Facebook than they were in in the whole century
before. Why not up the stakes? I got a reprimand
for photographing their work to complement these narratives.
I couldn't give a shit. The spear bearers and the
understudies to the real life conducted will disintegrate
into time or over exposure by their own means. Yes, why
not put the body at risk? Why put the mentor at risk who
was only trying to aid your ability to get your image out
there? Crawl up the food chain with little self promotion
with greater exposure that leads to greater job security?
These are mundane markings of photography:
birth, children in the coffin, people in their portraiture
with the deceased, the wedding, the formal portraits of
a life - adorned with the constipated image of the other.
These were familiar faces in the past. It took expensive
silver prints to make each. I remember the fantastic
sums of money completing a six-month stay
in Rome, or in Tokyo, and measured every shot. They
would cost a lot. Perhaps it should return to this
again. For what security do we have with our digital
zones and clouds? Aren't these as insecure as the
precipice? The void now entered is that of abundance.
Except for the abundance of attention. Reflection.
I am in danger of aiding, through the use of digital media,
the ability for them to get their image out there. Refine
it. Class it up. To say they are plebeian is a compliment.
A lot of them are mediocre, little technocrats, mall rats,
self-aggrandizing poets of their craft at 20, and some
other absurdities that reduce them into children again.
Helicopter kids who will then have the real education
when they have to pay rent. if. Every active exposure is
some Titanic feat and worthy of some Academy award.
Every act of recording is tantamount to a grenade pulled:
in this overexposed world they do not wish to be overexposed
by 'the other.’ They are not culpable when they
get off the bench. Hence the selfies. Hence surveillance.
Hence sousveillance. Hence the dangerous context.
The feeling is that we are here, we have been here. In all of
our bratty Thanatos pushing. Debt and divorce are slow
kisses of Thanatos. The feeling is this vain preparation
for living is here and will not amount to the hype leading
up to it. We live in the hype of preparation. Endless
departure. Of course the selfie is brilliant and one of the
most useful things we own. Own? This is violent world
and it is one of the plateau. The selfie is the 'rest.’ It is
recorded in the moment and broadcast to ourselves, and
hopefully a thread to others...a thread back to ourselves.
When it is not, it is a mistake. It is an accidental exposure.
It is incomplete. Fall off the ledge to that of abundance.
But why the danger? Why the speed? Why the witnessing
of the digital camera at the very heights of the skyscraper
and in a pursuit of that? What? Completion?
The incidence of these are more profound than thought:
they speak to dissatisfaction with a recorded life only.
In the new world where we are going nowhere special
at all, the diffusion of values in the rigidity are held to
be too steadfast, we look for the background of danger.
We forecast a background of danger with more than 8,
9,10 billion people. The small Thanatic kisses of the
completion of the species attends everyone in debt. We
sell youth, why not give it away? Potlach. Burn it. We
look to human life put in sharp relief, much like the drug
induced paintings of animals on the inside of the deep
and difficult caves of the Neolithic France and Spain. We
are attaching singular threads with 15 minutes of fame.
Dangerous threads, otherwise there are no eyeballs.
Then the helicopter kids return to their basement apartments
where they are charged no rent by their parents.
Ennui. We are also showing how banal fame might be.

Manhattan Growing
Eran Chen
Manhattan growth over the last decade, like many other major cities around the world, can be characterized by reflexive
adaptation to the ever-growing demand for housing and office space, expressing corporate power and resulting
in the biggest man made sculpture ever created. The qualities that existed on a tree lined street with townhouses
were slowly diminished with midrise and high-rise towers on the same streets. The balance of private and public
spaces was radically distorted and with it, we lost the very rudimentary elements we need as humans. We have been
brainwashed to believe in dogmas sold to us by developers and city planners that higher is always better and that
human interactions and connectivity can be replaced with a gym or lounge or a kid’s playground in some basement
floor. We have to restore all that we lost and do it in a new way, one that accommodate density and vertical living
with fragmentation and porosity, individualism with community, man-made with nature. Now that mankind has
taken full control of our universe, we need to design new types of environments, make buildings that are not deadended
- but rather ongoing ever-changing networks. We need not only to imitate nature to inspire design but also use
design to inspire nature.
Urban Tangle = Messy Urbanism
Public Project via Mitch Joachim with NYU Students and New Lab
Notes on Messy Urbanism by Andrew MacNair
Urban Tangle is an example of Messy Urbanism. Messy Urbanism comes out of the city itself. The city is a messy place. No
matter how hard we try to clean it up it remains messy. The mess is always there. It always comes back. No matter how hard
we try to organize it, sweep it, push it away or inside, messiness is perpetual – and natural. We are messy. Life is messy. The
world is messy. The universe takes the cake for messiness. We are messy inside, messy outside. We are messy on land, in the
ocean, in the air. Math is messy. Science is really messy. Music is messy. Dance - even messier. Basketball is a scramble. And
Football – is the messiest mess.
Architects try so hard to make the world neat. People don’t live like that. Only magazines live like that. And only TV makes
lives – and houses and cities - look neat. No matter how hard we try to clean things up, randomness, disorder, chaos, cacophony,
disjunction, non-sense, un-logic, irrationality always reigns supreme – unless we build a bridge or a skyscraper or
perform brain surgery or go to Mars, then we try very hard to be clear, neat, exact, precise – but all effort for neatness is
constantly being reversed by the ebb-and- flow of accident, happenstance, wear-and-tear, decay, rupture and fracture.
We don’t like to think about messiness. We certainly are conditioned to not like nor want it. To see other people’s dirt, trash
and chaos is disturbing and troublesome. To see a dirty car bothers and irks most of us. To breath dirty and toxic air is horrid.
To live with banging, sirens and honking is seen as Hell. Barking dogs bug us. Crying babies are hushed. Screeching buses,
screaming subways are just bad, bad, bad.
No matter how much we clean, dirt and dust keep coming back. No matter how hard we plan and design neat neighborhoods,
well order new towns, spiffy new cities, we always have to beat back the mess of poverty, , crime, and disease. We
try and try to solve the so-called problems of the poor -- there will always be people who are poor. We try and try to solve
the problems of the slums and so-called slum dwellers, but there will always be slums. We try to clean-up the air and water
here, but they mess it up over there.
There is an end to life. There is an end to earth. There is an end to the sun. There probably is an end to time. There may no
infinity. There may be no answer – and/but only temporary solutions.

Threshing Floor
A threshing floor is a smooth, flat surface that was used in the process of harvesting grain. Before there was machinery
farmers used a threshing floor to separate the grain from the chaff. The harvested produce would be spread
over the threshing floor and then cattle or oxen would be led over it, to crush and break the sheaves apart with
their hooves. At times, people used sticks to beat the sheaves apart. The grain would be separated from the husks,
or chaff and then tossed into the air so that the wind could blow the chaff away, leaving only the good, edible grain.
This was called winnowing.
The threshing floor has spiritual significance as the place where good and evil are separated. The difference between
the grain and the chaff, between good and evil people, is not their good or evil works. The grain is gathered
into the barn by faith - providing spiritual safety.
JACKSON pollock's STUDIO Floor
The floor of the Jackson Pollock studio in Springs, East Hampton, NY both lies and stands there in a small, weathered,
wooden barn out back behind the house where he and Lee Krasner lived. There is nothing grand about it.
By today’s standards and inflated views, it is surprisingly tiny. A tiny space. A minimal hut. One room in a two room
barn. The other, front, first room is flat on the ground and was both entry and tractor space. The studio room is to
the left up a few creaky wooden stairs so that the floor is lifted off the ground a few feet. The first floor is grounded
on the ground, the second floor is lifted, lifting off the ground – slightly.
This floor on which and where Pollock painted his exploding paintings is now part of a museum run by Stony Brook
University as the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center. There is the house and there is the barn, his studio, with
that floor. So the studio floor is part of a bigger, overall picture of where and a little bit of how they lived but in a
renovated frame.
The studio and the studio floor being just a part of the larger story are reduced to a disappointing and even pathetic
museum stereotype: the studio and floor are now an open gallery and no longer much evidence of Pollock’s workspace.
One has to take off shoes and put on cheap fuzzy colored sock slippers. Then we can go in, walk around. The
studio has a series of black and white framed under glass documental photographs hanging along the outside walls.
Visitors enter, and seem to naturally walk around the room mostly looking at the hanging photographs with an occasional
look at and/or a walkover on the central paint splattered floor where Pollock back bent over painted up, or
down a storm. The main space of the work floor, his fallen easel, is subsumed by people not paying much attention, at
least not for very long.
Folks mulling around the outer space with a few wandering folks literally shuffling in clumsy muffin slippers in awful,
cheap pastel colors render the central workspace into a secondary area, just an old floor with some spilled paint on
it. The studio converted into a traditional archival gallery with pictures around the outside walls, it’s center reduced,
back to its original pedestrian platform storing tools, corn and hay – the entire point of the Pollock studio and this
floor is lost, even destroyed. The workspace, that flat, wooden barn floor, was, and still is, the sacred center. A workspace
is sacred. It has a special place for an artist. It is the center. The middle of the middle, maybe the psychic world,
the heart and soul.

Flying Machines and Musical Instruments by Adrian Nivola were shown in August at the Drawing Room in East Hampton, NY.
Homage to Sumter Battey, 2014, Adrian Nivola.
Flyer for a Retired Samurai, 2014, Adrian Nivola.
Two Flying Machines, Adrian Nivola.
From “Disparates: A Way of Flying” (Modo de volar) by Franciso Goya after 1812.
Goya is the first to illustrate in his paintings the dubious nature of action when action is no longer determined by a fixed,
transcendental moral code. In a world that had lost its former stability based on revealed religion, he and his contemporaries
had only reason and instinct left. Both proved to be unreliable instruments for navigation in a new era bedeviled by
enigmas, vague menaces, and the very concrete horrors of the Napoleonic Wars.
In a “Way of Flying” (Modo de Volar) men wearing birdlike headdresses and sporting hugh wings are seen in flight. There
is no horizon line, no way of telling up from down, and most important of all, there is no indication of Goya’s (and by implication,
our own) point of vantage. This divorce from any kind of ground is a constant in the “Disparates,” for even those
plates that do not levitate in pure air are devoid of any indication of locale or ground plane.
Yet for all their distortion of normal experience, there is nothing artificial about these visions. To call them dream images
short-circuits the issue. For even in dreams we experience gravity and register sensory experience. Some part of our being
resonates to the menace and the loneliness of the “Disparates.” Clinical psychology might at some future date help in the
interpretation of this haunting series of pictures. But their real meaning, one is willing to believe, will forever lie beyond
the grasp of even the most refined scientific examination. Psychiatry, after all, tries to resolve distraught and incongruous
situations. The “Disparates,” however, are the quintessence of that part of our life that forever defies understanding.
Fred Licht – “Goya, the Origins of the Modern Temper in Art”
Volare in Cielo o Paradiso
Flying Machines by Adrian Nivola
Adrian Nivola's sculptures express an aspiration for flight stripped of scientific understanding
and practical considerations. Each is therefore emphatically absurd from a functional standpoint
and incapable of fulfilling its promise to leave the earth. Yet as sculptures, their unlikely
ambition is essential to their character and aesthetic value. Each represents an exuberant
if ill-informed shot at a romp in the sky. And like many human characters, who go through
elaborate pains to fulfill a purpose only to veer severely off course, they are no less lacking for
lyrical grace in the process.

The Park at the
Center of the
World
Thomas Wensing
Recently the Dutch landscape architecture firm of Adriaan
Geuze, West 8, realized the second phase of their design
for Governors Island, an island just a stone's throw from
downtown New York. I embarked the ferry from Pier 6 in
Brooklyn to investigate.
Governors Island is located 800 yards south of the southern
tip of Manhattan at the point where the Upper New
York Bay splits into the Hudson River and the East River. It
is 172 acres large and has been inaccessible to the public
for over two centuries. Between 1783 to 1966 Governors
Island was a military base of the US Army and until 1996
it served as a port station of the US Coast Guard. In 2003
the island was officially, in exchange of the symbolic sum
of one dollar, transferred back to New York City and New
York State.
The northern and historically most significant part, with
its leafy lanes, fortresses, exercise sites, historic officers'
houses and barracks was declared a National Park. In
2007, the Governors Island Preservation and Education
Corporation called a competition to determine the vision
and design for the redevelopment of the whole area. The
southern tip was destined to become a park and recreation
area with cultural and commercial development
sites to the east and west. The competition was won by
the team of West 8, Rogers Marvel Architects and Diller,
Scofidio + Renfro, which was later complemented by
Mathews Nielsen Landscape Architects and Urban Design
+.
the history of the island. The involvement of the Dutch
landscape design firm West 8 is a funny co-incidence
since Governors Island has a historical relationship to the
Netherlands. Dutch colonization began in 1624, when
Cornelis Jacobsz Meij arrived with the vessel Nieu Nederlandt
and left 8 men to trade furs with the locals. At the
time the island was densely covered with oaks, chestnut
and hickory. In reference to the nuts covering the ground,
the Lenape tribe called the island Pagganuck, which in
Dutch translated as Noten Eylant, and was later bastardized
by the British into Nutten Island. Staten Island to the
south, much larger of course, was named after the Dutch
States-General, the main governing body of the Netherlands
at the time. In 1633 landed a regiment of 104 men
and this marks the first use of the island as a military post.
In 1664 the British captured Manhattan from the Dutch,
and in 1699 Nutten Island was rechristened Governors
Island and the use of the island was made exclusive to the
Governors of the King.
In 1783, after the final British withdrawal from Governors
Island, the Island became part of a system of coastal defenses
of the young republic. It is this contiguous military
use that has ensured that Governors Island has been able
to resist, in spite of its close proximity to New York, the
pressures of development, and has retained much of its
historic character. For example, two well-preserved North
American coastal batteries can be found on the northern
tip of the island, Fort Jay (1794) and Castle Williams
(1807-1811). Together with the South Battery, these
three fortresses managed to deter the British in the War
of 1812 to attack New York.
Especially the star-shaped Fort Jay feels like a time capsule;
when I was there in early August a group of volunteers
in full civil war era battle dress were firing a cannon
at the fortress walls from across the moat. These civil war
enactments are some of the summer activities planned
by the previously mentioned Leslie Koch. Although the
island is steeped in military history the choice of this particular
war theater is a bit perplexing; the island served
as a camp for some 1,000 Confederate prisoners of war
and saw no real action. Not that any of the spectators
seemed to mind this artful falsification; most Americans
lap up this kind of patriotic display without a second
thought.
build shops, housing and barracks after the Second World
War, but most of these have now been demolished and
those that remain lie empty, forlorn and burnt out. These
acts of vandalism were committed by the New York Fire
Department (FDNY), as part of their training program, and
are located in what has been earmarked as one of the
development zones.
The idea for the development zones is, just as happened
with the New York campus of Cornell University is to
found a "Governors Island Innovation Cluster" where
research and educational institutions come together. It
is obvious that the vacant historic buildings need tenants
(and with it maintenance) - but it is not clear what the
public-private partnership entails and how it will look.
The ambitions of Leslie Koch appear to venture into a
more commercial direction:
pristine state offered by the decay of the old buildings and
the new plantings. It was a stated aim of the competition
to unify the northern and southern part of the island.
The moment one strolls through the archway of Liggett
Hall and leave the historic military buildings behind, you
find yourself at Liggett Terrace, and the park stretches
out in front of you. When the development zones on the
edges are complete, phase I of the park, the playground,
hammock grove and the play lawns will together form the
open heart of the island. I don’t know if the intention is
to make reference to the parade ground of the Mc Kim
Mead and White scheme, but it does seem an analogous
solution. The Hills and picnic grounds are further south,
nestled against the promenade. Of the hills Grassy Hill,
with its 25 feet, is the lowest hill and it overlooks the park
with Liggett Hall, the historic buildings of Governors Island
and the skyline of Manhattan in the distance.
According to Leslie Koch, the outgoing CEO of the Governors
Island Trust, and driving force behind the development
of Governors Island, West 8’s idea to make artificial
hills on the island was eventually the deciding factor
which tilted the decision in favor of their proposal. The
client was expressly looking for a design that would be
stimulating and provide a sensory experience. West 8
team translated this prosaic message best, not only by
way of its proposed program but through the vistas which
were opened up through the risings in altitude. The master
plan will be realized in phases and last July, the second
phase of the park, ‘The Hills’ was inaugurated by Mayor
Bill de Blasio.
Before appraising the design I want to go deeper into
At the beginning of the twentieth century Governors
Island was just 70 acres large, but between 1901 and
1912 some 3.7 million cubic meters of rubble, excavated
from the Lexington Avenue subway line, was deposited
at the southern end of the island. The shape of the
island now resembles the shape of an ice cream cone.
Mc Kim, Mead & White designed a symmetrical campus
for the barracks around a rectangular parade ground.
The scheme was never fully executed; only Liggett Hall,
a large neo-classical barracks building of 1929 by these
architects, was finished. It roughly marks the spot where
the island’s original coastline used to be and its archway,
once intended to provide a grand entrance to the grounds
now serves as an appropriate entrance to the park and a
backdrop for Liggett Terrace. The military did eventually
"I'm always very careful to call this an island, not a park,
because it's not - it's an economic development project.
There's nothing worse for a building than to sit vacant.
You need these kinds of active uses to both pay for and
justify more frequent ferry service. Every hour is just a
little too unpredictable, but if you knew there was a ferry
every 20 minutes until 10 o'clock, you might stick around
for another drink. "
The city is now engaged in a public bidding process for
architects and engineers to attract interested parties and
proposals for the campus design. But let’s return to the
design of West 8, while we can still enjoy the relatively
The inspiration for the design is based on Frederick Law
Olmsted’s Central Park, which of course is an interpretation
of the English landscape tradition combined with
the functional and recreational elements of the German
Volkspark. The informal, and often lenticular landscape
design elements provide a meandering route along vistas,
intimate spaces and so-called moments of ‘discovery.’
These paths and spaces are off-set by the large open spaces,
such as the ‘Picnic Point’ and the Play Lawn. Discovery
Hill is 40 feet high, and has – to extend the comparison
with the English landscape tradition – a veritable folly by
way of a solid concrete cabin of the English artist Rachel
Whiteread. ‘Cabin’ is surrounded by waste and detritus
found on the island cast in bronze. The occupiable space

A House That Catches No Shadows
Project by Diemut Strebe
In “A House That Catches No Shadows” we build a 3D architectural
(with a scale of 1:100 / 16x16x12cm) model of
the famous building designed by the Austrian philosopher
Ludwig Wittgenstein who constructed the villa together
with the Austrian architect Paul Engelmann for his sister
Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein in Vienna.
The model is entirely covered with grown carbon nanotubes,
tiny cylinders which are made entirely out of carbon
atoms that will grow on a catalyst that is attached to
a carrier material. The tubes absorb 99.965% of the light.
Almost no photon can escape from the grown forest grid
of the 1mm high grown tubes, 50 to 200 nanometers in
diameter, each tube is 10,000 times thinner than a strand
of human hair.
Crucially, this material is of very low-density: it’s 99 %
empty space. That way, when light hits the material,
there’s almost nothing to reflect off of. The photons, particles
of light enter and become trapped in the nanotube
forest, bouncing around until they dissipate as heat.
This way the coverage removes all shapes, perspectives
and traceable surface features of plasticity by erasing any
shadows. In his notorious “Tractatus” - Wittgenstein tried
“to draw a limit to thought” - limitations about what we
are able to speak in a meaningful way. He phrased it, “in
order to draw a limit to thinking we should have to be
able to think both sides of this limit (i.e. we should have
to be able to think what cannot be thought).”
In this early work Wittgenstein did not deny the importance
of aesthetics or aesthetical problems, he places it
beyond the border where we can speak meaningfully. In
simple words: We can obviously hear and perfectly distinguish
the sound of a clarinet, but we have great problems,
to actually say this very sound.
We feel that even when all possible scientific questions
have been answered, the problems of life remain completely
untouched. Of course there are then no questions
left, and this itself is the answer. “Tractatus” 6.52 . An
architectural model usually is built to give full overview
about a building’s structure, to manifest all sculptural
qualities up to exact details at a smaller scale.
An architectural model that is actually hiding its plasticity
and three-dimensionality can be seen as a quite adequate
analog on ideas about limitations of thought. A sculpture
that undermines or erodes its own visibility can represent
the ambivalence, the conflicting nature of these thoughts.
We are curious, how it will look like, as well: a house that
casts and catches no shadows.
In November, 1925, Mrs. Stonborough-Wittgenstein commissioned
Engelmann and her brother to design and build
a large townhouse. The Wittgenstein House was built in
what was then Kundmanngasse 19, now Parkgasse 18,
Vienna. It consists essentially of three rectangular blocks.
Wittgenstein spent obsessive effort on details and
mathematical ratios to solve symmetrical problems and
problems of proportion which stretched the collaboration
in all respects to its ultimate philosophical and formal limits.
The house was finished by December 1928. This new
project-in-progress acts as a statement against the claim
of a British artist Anish Kapoor to try to monopolize this
material of carbon nanotubes for his own use.
It is unacceptable that any artist tries to achieve exclusive
availability for a material in artworks, by simply buying
the rights for it. We use a slightly different percentage of
carbon nanotubes, not traceable to the human eye - that
can be used by any artist on any work.
of the cabin and the waste of consumerism have become
solid and permanent - An ironic comment perhaps on the
values which built the skyline of Manhattan across the
water? Who knows?
Then there is the fun part, Slide Hill for the kids, again
some 40 feet high, with four fantastic slides and, finally
Outlook Hill, the tallest hill of 70 feet. You can reach the
top of the hill in two ways, through the 'safe' and long asphalt
path, or with the more adventurous, irregular steps
from recycled granite blocks. These blocks were part of
the seawall around the island which had to be replaced
as it did not meet current requirements of anticipated sea
level rise caused by climate change. In the code compliant
and litigious environment of the USA it came as a bit
of a surprise to me that these wonderful granite stairs
were even executed. The casual nature and the quality
of the infrastructure of the park were a breath of fresh
air in comparison to most parks in the city. Reaching the
top of the hill, one is rewarded by a magnificent view of
the Statue of Liberty, New Jersey, New York, Brooklyn and
Staten Island; the ideal visual spectacle for the tourist
snapshot.
The Hills seamlessly connect with the first phase of Governors
Island Park, which apart from the aforementioned
lawns and facilities consists of breathtaking planted fields
of color, it reminded me of the Dutch garden designer Piet
Oudolf, who has planted Battery Sea Park and the High
Line of course. Having grown up in the Netherlands on
the coast, in a town called Den Helder, the Hills gave me
a real Proustian moment. The seawall in my region consisted
of dikes but also of sandy dunes, planted with helm
grass, clusters of pine trees and rosa canina or dog-rose
bushes. Although the Hills are not intended as dunes, the
park and hills have been specifically designed to withstand
the changes brought about by climate change. The
Hills, like Dutch dikes, consist of several layers for structural
integrity and erosion prevention. They are made
up of debris from the demolition of the structures on the
island, pumice to keep them light, and finally layers of
sand, compost and topsoil. Geotextile is used to prevent
subsidence and soil run off. Furthermore, the whole quay
of the island and rip rap retaining wall was renovated and
made more robust.
Wittgenstein House, Vienna, by Paul Englemann and Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1928.

Photographs by Steven Holl.
The opening of the Iowa Visual
Arts Building, University of
Iowa, Iowa City. The design is
based on the notion of laminar
shift and seven vertical cuts of
light cutting through the 280
foot wide expanse of the arts
facility bringing natural light
every studio.
Steven Holl
Forthcoming ZAPP URBANISM REVIEW 30