The winners of the 2012 New York CityVision competition have been announced! The jury, composed of president Joshua Prince-Ramos of REX-NY, Eva Franch i Gilabert of the Storefront for Art and Architecture, Roland Snooks of Kokkugia, Shohei Shigematsu of OMA, Alessandro Orsini of Archi[TE]nsions, and Mitchell Joachim of Terreform One, reviewed and selected the best entries for the Rome-based competition, which posed the question, “If the future is gone, what past is expecting us?”

Entrants generally answered this question with wit, in some cases looking for the bright side of a forlorn pessimism. Many of the drawings showed a good deal of Archigram-like inventiveness, and also drew from that group’s graphic style.

First Prize: Eirini Giannakopoulou, Stefano Carera, Hilario Isola, and Matteo Norzi

The winning entry envisioned a scenario where Manhattan had become too overwhelming, leading its residents to move to New York’s other Burroughs. Manhattan is then turned into a gigantic trash dump, where only the tops of its iconic towers are left showing above the rolling landscape of landfill.

Click through for more of the top entries, plus honorable mentions.

Second Prize: E. Pieraccioli, C. Granato

The second prize entry saw New York as a gigantic archaeological site, protected from rising water levels by a gigantic concrete wall. The city becomes a museum to what we call the present as the rest of the world is covered by ocean.

Farm Prize: Miles Fujiki

This entry lays out plans for the Institute For Imagining New York, a last refuge for artists, dreamers, and other outcasts, from the advancing tide of ‘brute economics’ and corporate force. It acts as a seed for the reversal of privatization, since “it is not a reliquary but a reactor core,” and will bring about the resurrection of imagination as a purposeful and rewarding activity, rather than a childish one.

Honorable Mention: F. Furiassi

This project reacts against the dense development by private interests that was allowed to almost entirely subjugate nature on the island of Manhattan. It proposes a reversal: in areas now given over to nature, private development would be allowed, but everywhere else would be given back to nature. Therefore, what is now Central Park becomes an island of hyperdensity overlooking fields and forests.

Honorable Mention: A. Koetter, J. Rowen, E. Zeifman

This project treats the existing city as a dead layer of history, past its prime, and proposes a new city built above the existing streets. The new infrastructure would run into some buildings, and would reroute around others. Here, the existing city is left forever in the present as other presents build their own structures above.

Honorable Mention: J. Tigges, F. Segat, A. Menon, N. di Croce

Here, Manhattan’s iconic buildings become offended by the new World Trade Center tower and begin to evacuate the city, some flying to other planets, but most settling in other cities around the world–a traveling circus of surprisingly nimble skyscrapers roaming all over the globe seeking fresh, new contexts.

Images: Competition entrants via CityVision

by AJ Artemel

posted in Uncategorized

tagged archigram, cityvision, design competition, future, manhattan, manhattanism, new york, past

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