New York Geologics

Manhattan is commonly regarded as an iconic island-territory of the 20th century. Conventional representations reinforce its reading as an urban condition resulting from neoliberal capitalism. These forces have expanded the city grid and extruded its architectures as a laboratory of urban ideas. Yet, like many other coastal and insular conditions, 21st-century Manhattan faces adverse Anthropogenic climate change. Stronger storm surges and sea level rise now demand that the island re-calibrates its social and environmental positions. The city needs to consider once again its fluid archipelagic conditions inherited from glacial dynamics.

With a focus on iconic city representations, the book examines distinct logics that try to make capitalist progress compatible with its territorial conditions. Even though these logics of land, water and ground – here called geologics – are perhaps less dominant than the dense urban culture and, therefore, less predominant in the representation of the city, they are still important to explain why Manhattan evolved to its current condition. The book explores these geologics through relationships between three 19th-century plans of Manhattan and three late-20th-century architectural manifestos – Delirious New York (Rem Koolhaas), The Manhattan Transcripts (Bernard Tschumi), and Lower Manhattan (Lebbeus Woods).

Plans and manifestos are explored creatively through design experimentation that retrospectively re-positions these representations from the perspectives offered by the Anthropocene. With an intricate connection between image, text, and installation, the book is an open invitation to radically interconnected imagination. 

Tiago Torres-Campos is a Portuguese landscape architect and Associate Professor at Rhode Island School of Design. He co-edited Postcards from the Anthropocene (2022) and is currently writing a new book that offers alternative ways of thinking and visualising Manhattan geologically.