7 Days in NYC: Exploring Contemporary Landscapes
  • Intro
  • Schedule
  • Course Materials
  • Daily Blogs
    • Foreword
    • Day 1
    • Day 2
    • Day 3
    • Day 4
    • Day 5
    • Day 6
    • Day 7
    • Afterword
  • Blogging Tutorial
  • Image sharing
  • Archive
    • 2015 Edition
    • Foreword
    • Day 1
    • Day 2
    • Day 3
    • Day 4
    • Day 5
    • Day 6
    • Day 7
    • Afterword
    • 2014 Edition
    • Foreword
    • Day 1
    • Day 2
    • Day 3
    • Day 4
    • Day 5
    • Day 6
    • Day 7
    • Afterword

Shuai Yan & Yichao Kang

5/15/2014

3 Comments

 
Today our group decide to stay in Manhattan to explore more about the urban. The destinations in Manhattan include various parts of city, attracting us so much. Although it’s rainy this morning, the fresh air gives us a great passion to start today’s trip. The most impressive two of today’s trip are the Earth Room which is located at 141 Wooster Street and the exhibit on Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City project, located in MoMA’s architecture and design galleries.

         The New York earth room is an amazing design. The designer, Walter De Maria, which is a master in earth art. His famous project, lightning field, which I saw it many times in the book, influenced many artists and architects. The New York earth room is his another important project, created in 1977. When I just came into this room, I remember another design, 100 million porcelain sunflower seeds, designed by Ai Weiwei. The two differences are, the second project can be touched and doesn’t keep for a long time. The New York earth room is the memorial of earth art from 70s, as Walter said, the artists use the earth and the time to sculpt in the same time.

We have been MoMA several times before, but this time is pretty lucky. The exhibit on Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City project inspire us a lot. Frank Lloyd Wright may be the most influential America architect of the 20th century in my opinion. He has thought a lot of the development of the urban. The “Broadacre City” is one of the most urban project he has designed. How Wright thought about the growing America city from 1920 to the 1950s is exhibited, and Broadacre City is the project “when he worked simultaneously on radical new forms for the skyscraper and on a comprehensive plan for the urbanization of the American landscape”. This exhibition gives us some ideas for us as architect or landscape architect. We should not only consider one architecture or landscape to be a separated part. Thinking about the urban and making the project be one cell for the city is a super important idea we should hold.

The little “Pocket Park” is extra “gift” I must mention. Although I have been MoMA before, we have not examines the landscape before. It’s a park for sculpture, but not only for exhibition. People will be able to have a rest there, maybe a cup of tea, maybe chatting. It’s really good.

Before go to the “safari 7”, we download the audio. During the trip on the line 7, we listen information about the wildlife. Although we have not seen real animals at all, it’s really a good method which make us to consider the wildlife that is living with us in the same city. 

Picture
Picture
Picture
3 Comments
derek
5/15/2014 01:32:13 pm

looks like you guys had a great day, wish I could have been there!

Reply
mh
5/15/2014 09:13:14 pm

you are right that Weiwei's sunflower fields learns a lot from De Maria's Earth Room. I felt the same way about his work "Straight" that I saw today at the Brooklyn Museum. Glad you could visit MoMA, their sculpture garden is definitely worth seeing. I wanted to go up on the roof to see a garden by Ken Smith (the landscape architect we met on Monday morning along the East River esplanade), but we could not get permission. Sometimes it's hard to get access to outdoor spaces!

Reply
mh
5/15/2014 09:24:53 pm

...oh, and I'm so glad you could see the Earth Room- this is easily my favorite landscape in NYC, but it is only open from Wednesday-Sunday, so we could not see it when we were walking through Manhattan on Monday. Glad you liked it!

Reply



Leave a Reply.

    Thursday 5.15

    What I Did on my Free Day

    Participants

    All