THE MANHATTAN HYPER-TEXT

Between order and dis-order, between omologation and difference, the City shows its contradictions. This complex reality, that marries the principle of the rapid and progressive change, can be compared to a text or, rather, to a multiplicity of texts, whose reading  can be easily misunderstood because the writing’s rules change in space and time and can’t be learnt once for all. A body-space structured like a palimpsest, on which the story disposes in layers that mingle and intersect each another, in a process of continuous changing: this is the City. To read the complexity of the urban text means understand a multiplicity of texts in a process of infinite becoming; if in the City this multiplicity seems to be confused and chaotic is only because we perceive its accumulation.

TEXT 1

Before the great grid of 1811, the land allotment into farms is the first real territorial structure that

covers wholly the peninsula of Manhattan. Together with Dutch Settlement and British colonization, the structure of farms constitutes the first tissue ofManhattanand defines the first organization of the viability. We can find today the marks of this structure in the orientation and edge of the grids in theLowerTownor in the direction of Broadway.

But what would be the CityVision today if this land subdivision constituted the main structure of the urban tissue?

TEXT 2

The great expansion of Manhattanconsists in the great (vertical) growth of its service buildings since the beginning of 1900 century until today. This continuous growth, that has always followed the rule of vertical development, defines the edge of the vertical city.

This development has deeply characterized theManhattan’s skyline, giving to the City an image strongly identitary.

But what would be the CityVision today if this urban growth followed different rules?

How and where could be the connections between the different urban texts?

HYPER-LINKS

Placed at the intersections of the great urban grid (1811), they are infrastructural exchangers of flows and attractors of urban functions.

The new urban multi-scale entities have the task to operate the join of the differents city’s structures preserving identity and difference as values of a new multi-identitary metropolitan context.

The hyperlinks define a strong structure of relations, changing the reading of the existing, multypling it and its connectivities. This system of connections provides new ways to see the city and to be seen from it, linking (vertically) the different urban texts in a new layered map.

Thenew cityform can be read as an overlap of the different urban structures.

Every structure constitutes an independent system, a text, that conserves the differences and refuses every process of physical integration with other systems. The new urban development modifies deeply the City’s balance, redistributing in vertical what before was in horizontal: the lower residential town, the public middle town and the new office/financial upper town.

The proposal offers a CityVision of a past never been and of a present non-exixtent.

What will be the City of tomorrow?