Who will harvest the opportunity?

"Manhattan is the richest, most professional, most congested and without a doubt most fascinating island in the world. To attempt to plant , sustain and harvest two acres of wheat here, wasting valuable real estate, obstructing the machinery by going against the system, was an affrontery that made it the powerful paradox I had sought" Agnes Denes, Wheatfield: A Confrontation 1982


via The City Project


Damon Rich, Cities Destroyed for Cash, 2009, 1431 plastic markers on a panorama of New York City, c.30 x 30m. Photograph: Damon Rich


Damon Rich, Red Lines Housing Crisis Learning Center, 2008. Installation views at MIT Museum, Cambridge, MA. (Photos: Judith M. Daniels)


Centre Point tower, London





I have no intention here, alas, solving the puzzle ever revolving around the question whether architecture is just the means and instrument, or the very source for changing the world. Yet, we know for sure that the real estate and the buildings themselves, at least in their very physical presence accelerated the last credit crunch. 'It's quite fascinating how this is possibly the first crisis of our times that has a distinctive architectural aesthetic - empty, detached suburban mansions connected by deserted streets, or slum-like frame houses in varying states of dilapidation,' says Joseph Grima, director of Storefront for Art and Architecture.

While the architecture of financial districts brings no hope of resolving the aforementioned puzzle, as it only makes them culturalized products, their today immense unrented, empty space offers maybe a crack into the heart of the problem. In Berlin, Potsdamer Platz, the facade became more valuable than the space itself. Look, also, at the enormous TINAG collection of London City office space waiting to be rented.

The housing schemes are unmistakeably connected to the corporations whether East or West. Maybe contemporary art has retained the means to confront the problem without falling into the culturalization trap. Damon Rich from Centre for Urban Pedagogy is in his project Red Lines Housing Crisis Learning Centre trying to unveil how does the notion of financial risk affect the built environment?

Office space is mirroring the capital, but sometimes, like in the example of Centre Point tower of London, built in the 1960s - floors waiting to be rented for years did not reflect the lack of the interest in this space - but the power and the monopoly of one man to raise the rent by such a gesture. There we are again at the same integral interdependent point of the state and its tax relief for the land developers. In Britain, it took a long time for broader public to accept the outlook of the tall buildings and the city smart facades, but in this country the traditionalists would probably embrace its first failure to use it for their understanding of some 'more human' form. If the dragons and lions did not help the City of London headway, can Feng Shui (in the year of Tiger) or at least, Maneki Neko?