NYCV SECOND PRIZE /// Human Heritage Site

Every form of progress, every technological invention, linked to the development society, brings with it a double image: Into success is also included anxiety and danger of his possible and probable failure. Study and design the means to avoid such a disaster becomes almost important as the study progress. If it’s true that the destructive effects never cease to act, and that they are repeated in the history of every cycle, it is true that what is civilization at a given time, will be the primitive state in the next moment. Creation and Destruction, the scene endlessly. The feverish speculative activity in human years, within the “grid”, has led to a heaviness of the Earth. The temperature increases slowly. Regardless of the most mortifying surprises, the earth continues its transformation toward equilibrium.

Although it was built without a concrete manifest, New York is the same manifest of the cosmopolitan city of the twentieth century, of the development and progress mentioned above, and of standards of living and relating.

Following this, New York is an open monument, global urbanism paradigm of the twentieth century, urban assemblage of events and phenomena, so it must be preserved. Crib of the whims of man, of consumerism and entertainment, it cannot be erased and forgotten, but is stored as a chip in our DNA. A document on how we were. Atlas of civilization and of archaeological as Pompeii and Herculaneum were examples of civilization of a people

But progress and development have also changed the state of society, the system of relationships and systems reorganization. Facing the great phenomena that follow the digital revolution, the architecture runs into the problem of contemporary space (the Future) and it creates new districts, new towns, new settlements systems, corresponding to their time and not moved by stimuli of megalomania and speculation, but moved by an organization of systematic type towards the development of an organic structure

The various mechanisms underlying the development of information and its dissemination between real space and virtual space have created structures that allow extending the spatial condition of a city. Internet, video conferencing, mobile communication and virtual communities are increasingly present, seem to inhabit these spaces. The search for an urban architecture that takes into account the displacement of these blurred boundaries that put a strain on traditional definitions of megacities and bring media attention to a civilization yet to be designed.

“The nature is no longer the natural environment. Instead, are the centers of our abandoned and decaying urban fabric.” – Prototype of a Post-Industrial Resource, Newburgh, NY, Advanced Studio VI, spring 1996 – Leslie Gill.