Spatial Addiction.

I have an addiction to 125th Street. Kind of sad, you might say. At least an addiction could be, at the very least, decadent and debaucherous. I can't fully explain, but here I am 2-months outside of the job that brought the troubled project to my life and I still spend about 4 hours a day with the place. Not only am I teaching a studio at Columbia using the site but am also developing both a national competition entry and some public programming involving it. Oy vey, I say. But sometimes, along with addiction comes deeper discovery. And when you're fully invested in an addiction, such discovery is like finding an entirely new drug you're quite sure isn't on the market yet. That is momentarily exhilarating.

A students discovery of the image below is enough to make a spatial addict's heart race. This is 125th Street in 1609, according to the brilliant Mannahatta Project showing the site as a 378m. tidal creek:















Here is the site now:





















At a studio critique this past week, two outside critics Molly and Runit discussed how no time has been as exciting as now for landscape architecture in the city. We are seeing the ecology of the water edges seep into the city through various movements of design and policy. As well, we are being exposed to tools like Mannahatta and the first built project in NYC born out of the theory of landscape urbanism: The High Line. This is the first contemporary theory our profession has seen since the Picturesque, and is proving to be materially (as well as intellectually) successful. As a profession, we are becoming empowered, not without the help of the recession which has disabled architecture. But even more empowering is when these new tools, times, and economies allow us to see and understand the sites we work with in new holistic, systematic, and informed ways. When the 1609 condition of 125th Street is overlaid on the current site, we can clearly see how the site's natural history has been inherited in it's current form, as the creeks and the streets reflect the same course. But now our responsibility is to take this information a step further as we work tirelessly to form a more thoughtful future city.