What’s
your recipe to change downtown? Lower Manhattan Cultural Council invited
the public to spice up the pot by suggesting their “recipe” for
the area south of 14th Street, be it anything from a design for a new
public piazza to the instructions for making a new kind of pizza.
What we'll produce is a recipe book for downtown to be published
using “just-in-time” printing
by Dexter Sinister.
The book will be released at the Cities,
Art and Recovery Book Launch. For more information including how to
get a copy of this book, stay tuned to this page.
South Bank Centre, London. Cedric Price, 1984.
A proposal for a raft of balloons forming a canopy,
whose height could vary in order to accommodate temporary exhibits underneath.
The site was described by Price as “London’s last lung”
on which permanent building should be avoided.
Lastly, please send your recipes by August
17th, 2006,
as we plan to publish by the 15th of September to ensure freshness.
The Charge In July 1978, Talking Heads released their second album, More
Songs About Buildings and Food. In the suggestion of “more”, the band was playing off the typical second album syndrome where hastily thought out rehashes get set to vinyl in hopes of cashing in on the band’s current hype. Yet “more” here meant not just “yet another” since
with this album came new co-producer Brian Eno, who enhanced the musical
flavor especially in terms of the rhythm section, the sequencing, the pacing,
and the mixing. Eno acted almost like a chef, taking what was available
in the kitchen, and combining it with imagination and flair. Possibly to
arouse the curiosity or hold the attention of perspective buyers, the tongue-in-cheek
ambiguity in the title, both superfluous and abundant, nevertheless ties
together the two pillars of civilization (and cities): architecture and
cuisine.
Traditionally, these disciplines evolved side-by-side out of local
environments and raw materials, and as a result, strongly demonstrated a sense of place. For the ancient Greeks, the olive tree stood at the center of their body politic as they built with its wood and ate and traded its fruit and oil. Likewise, Antonio Gaudí became a national symbol as his undulating scaled and barnacled roof surfaces, like the characteristic mixture of surf and turf known as
paella, perfectly blended Catalonia’s landscape of mountains and sea.
Are globalization and industrial mass-production sounding the death knell for the traditional relationship of location to buildings and food? With the general devaluation of both, the fast food industry does to the built environment what it has done to the American diet – that is, made it bland and uniform.
New York City is a special case in point.
Just as McDonalds has applied modern assembly line techniques to restaurants,
New York’s unique mixture of politics and construction methods have produced
streets of uniform glass box skyscrapers, and the now rapidly growlingly pre-fab
condominiums. Add to this mix the recent influx of the suburban big-box chains,
the highest density of fast food spaces in the country, and other standardized
white-cube storefronts.
Is New York becoming bland? What is missing in the plans for downtown?
How do we get something that’s not just more - more buildings and more food—additive,
superfluous and certainly not ingenious?
What’s
your recipe to change downtown? Lower Manhattan Cultural Council invited
the public to spice up the pot by suggesting their “recipe” for
the area south of 14th Street, be it anything from a design for a new
public piazza to the instructions for making a new kind of pizza. 
