MODERN TIMES
DAMNHATTAN! The aim of the project is a contextualization of New York city’s evolution based on a relation between ideological coordinates and the actual social-political dynamics, starting points of any future vision. The graphic propose as a newspaper article presume a certain historical date as a free hypotesis by the reader. Dates are free omitted by the author in order to present an extreme prototype of one of the countless possibly evolutions of the city, free from realistic dates or effectively realization assumptions. By using a literary character as the journalistic storyteller any references are denied to an effective future (no matter how possible it might be or not) in order to present the project as a simple idea.
Pushing to the limits the actual opposite social strengths a contrast-based society came out, where all lives someway in the alchemy of this possible social experiment. The absence of any certain references and the extreme social evolution push the society to maybe provocative solutions, reflecting the total absence of any orientation by leaders and organizational structures of the occidental societies. In this future of missing prospective and for his historical driving-force position, New York became the most extreme experiment, trying to set up a possibly global development. From this uncertainness rise this society where the excessive urbanization and immigration brought the city to a social collapse.
In the hypotetical future projected the ecologist social components has taken the power and organized an army occupation of Manhattan island in order to realize their ideal society. The development of this project divide the city in 3 macro functional areas: UP – OLD – DOWN HATTAN by the realization of an organizational-functional-social structure. UPHATTAN reproduce the main formal architectural icons of the island (the avenues-streets grid and the skyline) in order to create a representatively future element of the city (the skynet). OLDHATTAN is the city previously known as Manhattan, collapsed down a no-stop flow of tourists and immigrants, where the huge old architectures are just decadent ruins to observe, empty of any functions except the residential one. An object to preserve and observe like a time capsule of an old civilization reduced to be just the icon of itself, whit the only functions of agricultural production, naturalistic development and lifestyle expression of the citizens. DOWNHATTAN is the exactly upside down skynet, used for energetic production, gather and distribution.
The final result is an organized chaos, main feature of anytime Manhattan, pushing the social development to his extremely highs, giving us an hypothesis of a possible future where the presented solutions (how good or bad they could appear) are just represented as the simple result of this human mix that New York has always been. If something went wrong, someone should noticed times before. Now the only thing that is possible to do is to close eyes, take a deep breath and live.
