Destruction and Deconstruction: New York City (1981-1988). From science fiction to architectural culture

Abstract

Throughout the eighties, New York City experienced specific cultural architectural activity and production, based upon urban concerns. With significant resonances between science fiction and real-life, Manhattan would be depicted as an open canvas for similar visual and formal interpretations. Theory and practice approaches to understand that grid island turned out extremely alike. From 1981 to 1988 literature, cinema and architecture had to represent the city as a place of alienation and accident, of concentration and fragment of plans and sections, superimposed all at once. Both in fiction and architecture, a cinematic ruin representation was searched for. In fiction there was destruction and in architecture there was deconstruction. The place would be a permanent motif for the representation of the aftermath. From John Carpenter’s film Escape from New York (1981) to Paul Auster’s novel In the Country of Last Things (1987), the city image would change from a violent and prison-like territory to a decadent and ruined walking map. During those years, throughout different media and genres, human and urban conditions reflected the real politics, economics and cultural demands. Figures like vagabonds, resilient individuals and military agents turned out to be main characters living in those Cartesian streets. Simultaneously, this very same place would be the object of several studies on the urban and architectural uncanny feeling of the cityscape. From Bernard Tschumi’s graphic manifesto The Manhattan Transcripts (1981) to Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley’s exhibition Deconstructivist Architecture (1988), New York City was acknowledged as a palimpsest and a place subject to fracture. The paper aims to define the echoes and proximities between science fiction and architectural culture as an attempt to characterize and symbolise this contemporary and postmodern great western city.