THEORY

How to formulate a theory of perception--on a metropolis defined by a malleability of time, space, and phenomena--in an age inundated by sensory media? Situating New York City within the contemporary discourses surrounding design, its renowned status as the global capital of commerce, intelligence, and wealth settles into history, providing space at center-stage for the emerging urbanisms of the 21st century’s developing nations. Formerly defined by its rude, adolescent health and explosive sense of spectacle, New York now reaches a point of maturation--an archaeological potential--allowing for forensic investigation into the rapid processes that defined its growth. The moment is appropriate to interrogate the city’s architectural and infrastructural components as the sophisticated material substrates of 20th century urbanism par excellence. Critical to the success of this evaluation is the way that is chosen to look at the city--the device used to frame and engage the city’s content. Looking into 20th century visual-aural culture, cinema and locomotion are identified as tools used to construct and idea about landscape--instruments of the mechanical age responsible for restructuring the way we see space.

This essay and its accompanying film exist at the intersection of cinema and locomotion. Situated in the present and looking to the past, both the text and the film are positioned along the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (BQE) as the line of inquiry from which the city, and history of seeing the city, is understood. By historicizing the BQE within the sociopolitical context of its conception and construction, and contrasting the cinematic space that it generates with canonical modes of landscape representation, the expressway becomes a heuristic device for building a larger, more expansive theory about the role of urban infrastructure in landscape as moving image.  

GENESIS

Conceived as a resolution to the congestion of Old Brooklyn, the BQE’s genesis is traced back to 1937 as part of a larger regeneration plan that seeks to improve the conditions of the borough, particularly the neighborhoods directly adjacent to the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridge.  As the automobile gains traction as the dominant medium of transport in the city, the elevated railways extending from the bridges and deep into Brooklyn become insufficient and increasingly irrelevant as a way to distribute metropolitan density. The once affluent suburban neighborhoods of Brooklyn begin to erode under the loads of the urban masses, and a decongestive measure became necessary. Spearheading the realization of this new infrastructure is Robert Moses, a notoriously prodigal figure distinguished by his insensitivity to neighborhood sentiments:

For Robert Moses city life was  the daily grind, a fundamental fact of modern existence but basically unsympathetic to the good life. City life meant sacrifice, with the individual bending his will to the collective, exemplified by Moses’s oft-repeated phrase about large-scale projects: “you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” (“New York 1960” 37)

This attitude occupies the extreme end of a spectrum that describes mid-century perspectives about urban development, characterizing the trends of Modernist planning that maintain the militant ethos of the movement’s avant-garde roots. Occupying the other end, as the voice of what Moses refers to as “the little people,” is American-Canadian writer and activist Jane Jacobs:

For Jane Jacobs the city was a great liberation, the ultimate freedom, an intricate web of individuals, buildings and streets, a mosaic or tapestry that somehow amounted to more than any singular vision and was absolute anathema to the idea of a grand plan. In Jacob’s view, New York, or at least the parts of it that she admired, had the ingredients of a post-industrial age utopia; it was definitely not  an ideal to be endured.” (“New York 1960” 37)

Standing in direct opposition to Moses on a number of planning episodes—including the Lower-Manhattan Expressway and the Cross-Bronx Expressway—Jacob’s criticisms position her among the most vocal opponents of Moses’ urban renewal policies. But what is most critical about these two contradictory figures is not the specifics of their positions within New York’s planning history, nor the logistics of their achievements, but rather their potential towards signifying two divergent ways of seeing the city that can be traced back to the origins of landscape as a constructed idea. Simultaneously maintaining relevance to the BQE as a theoretical context, Moses’ and Jacob’s perspectives are reverse engineered into performative and narrative modes of landscape representation that can in turn be instrumentalized into filmic techniques for figuring forth a cinematic space about the BQE.

PERFORMATIVE

Rather than being expressive of inner feelings—affetti, as the Italians called them—many northern figures tend to be what I would call performative. By this I mean that a figure is described in terms of an action performed, be it speaking, dancing, playing, or whatever. This ease with described figures, with what indeed is a particular view of human nature, is basic to the fascination with depicted proverbs. By their nature proverbs define people in performative terms—he who hits his head against the wall, he who wears a blue cloak, and so forth.

(Alpers 218) Fig. 2

Robert Moses operates within the performative landscape. Any sense of affeti within the city is eradicated, reduced as noise within the productive paradigm of his empire. The BQE is conceived as an instrument for the decongestion of the metropolis. The frame of his perspective, delineated only by the scope of the project and its associated demographic figures, contains within it a composition of neatly arranged elements--a building here, a road there… a park here, a bridge there. Within the foreground, middleground, and background of his picture, the BQE is superimposed upon an urban substrate, excavating existing neighborhood building stock to clear grade for new arterial geometries:

During the construction of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, Moses rented the penthouse floor of the Marguerite Hotel--an old, sedate establishment right next to the expressway’s route--and used it as an office. It had two advantages: only a very few people knew of its existence, so he was interrupted by few telephone calls, and he could look down on the construction as he worked. And he spent a lot of time looking down at it, watching the cranes and derricks and earth-moving machines that looked like toys far below him moving about in the giant trench being cut through mile after mile of densely packed houses, a big black figure against the sunset in the late afternoon, like a giant gazing down on the giant road he was molding. (Caro 846)

In the same way that Bruegel positions himself with omnipotence above the Dutch landscape, describing proverbially actions performed upon it, Moses too assumes to role of God, arranging architecture and infrastructure as miniature objects composing in their aggregation the totality of his urban vision.

NARRATIVE

In referring to the notion of art in the Italian Renaissance, I have in mind the Albertian definition of the picture: a framed surface or pane situated at a certain distance from a viewer who looks through it at a second or substitute world. In the Renaissance this world was a stage on which human figures performed significant actions based on the texts of the poets. It is a narrative art.

(Alpers xix) Fig. 4

Jane Jacobs operates in opposition to Moses and the narrative mode, placing the individual at the center of her urban values. The action of the city occurs in one-point perspective, a 20th century form of Renaissance humanism celebrating the multiplicity and complexity of the built environment as a layered triumph of man’s collective performed actions. Lewis Mumford, an avid supporter of Jacobs values and himself an opponent to Moses agenda for urban renewal, describes this alternate perspective of the BQE at its cantilevered promenade:

Mumford regarded the triple-decker highway at the edge of Columbia Heights as “among the most satisfactory accomplishments in contemporary urban design,” both for drivers and urban promenaders. The promenade, Mumford said, reached a “breathless architectural climax” at its northern end, where it “terminates in a small circle surrounded by a stone wall… Within the circle, there are benches and trees, all arranged in the same circular pattern, while the stone paving consists of circular bands of texture—broken stone, hexagonal blocks, cobblestones—forming a complicated pattern with which the eye could play for hours at a time if it were tired of looking across the Bay.” The embankment leading from the circle to the ramp was planted with rhododendrons. Mumford raved about the overall impression created by this end of the promenade: “The concentrated effect of the complex forms and textures, the dynamic rhythm of the space itself, are almost too good to be true. Here, abstract geometry, landscape gardening, and architecture, along with the tactile value of sculpture and painting, unite in a deeply satisfying composition. (“New York 1960” 898)

A victory of the Brooklyn Heights Neighborhood Association, the promenade surmounts Moses six-lane expressway, forcing it to split in two and obediently stack itself underneath the Promenade’s sublime communal pathos. A testament to the tenacity of the voice of “the little people,” the Promenade exists triumphantly in Renaissance perspective, allowing for the narrative action of community to be staged.

COMPLEXIFYING THE BINARY

Having looked at two opposing modes of conceptualizing  the composition of the BQE within the landscape of New York City—performative and narrative--it is necessary to recognize that both perspectives have so far been defined by static frames and still image composition. When the structure of performative representation (foreground-middleground-background) and the perspectives structure of narrative representation are animated not as a single image but as a sequence of images, the neat binary illustrated by Bruegel’s Dutch Renaissance painting and Raphael’s Italian Renaissance painting begins to break down and complexify. That is, when the still image becomes the moving image by virtue of locomotion and film, a cinematic space emerges whose nature and theoretical implications can’t be entirely accounted for when polarizing visual-aural constructs as either performative or narrative. Rather, the moving image produces a more ambiguous realm, where a visual experience of the BQE can be said to oscillate between the performative and narrative, providing new and unexpected cinematic results that shift as the velocity of the vehicle (degree of locomotion) and the orientation of the camera are adjusted.

ANXIETY, VOYEURISM, AND MONTAGE

Whereas previous efforts had concentrated on radial roads, Moses focused on what he called “loops” or “belt” roads, urging a public plagued with war jitters in the early 1940’s to build highways as an important part of the city’s efforts to protect itself in case of war. In 1941 he proposed the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and the Harlem River Driveway as “defense highways,” alleging that while German and Italian delegations had already traveled to the United States to study both proposed and realized roadways before building their own extensive artificial highway system, New Yorkers had yet to complete their own. (“New York 1960” 898)

The state of anxiety in which the BQE was conceived and constructed transfers directly to the optical drama and variegated visual feed experienced when traveling its length. Moses leveraged fear of immobility as a tactic for intervening, quickly and effectively, upon the existing fabric of the city.

You can draw any kind of picture you like on a clean slate and indulge your every whim in the wilderness in laying out a New Delhi, Canberra or Brasilia, but when you operate in an overbuilt metropolis, you have to hack your way with a meat ax. (Caro 183)

-Robert Moses

Hacking his way through the neighborhoods of Brooklyn in the name of national security, Moses built an expressway with unprecedented adjacencies. During periods of low velocity locomotion (i.e traffic jams) the gaze of the driver is allowed the freedom to temporarily abandon the one-point perspective required by high-velocity travel (Fig. 6) and observe performatively--as foreground, middleground, and background--the optical perversity of the BQE. By simply rotating ninety degrees, the camera attached to the vehicle becomes a scanning device, registering orthographically the facades of the city (Fig. 7).  At a complete stop, the scan becomes voyeurism. The camera penetrates the surface condition of the building’s mass and discovers the depth of an interior space, peering through the windows. Occupying the entirety of the frame, the architectural facades and the ruptures in its continuity become pure foreground. As velocity increases, the detail is again lost, with now more dramatic moments of deep space swinging into and out of the frame as the brief distances between building stock reveals the horizon. In the flash of a single frame, the performative orthographic reading of the facades collapses into deep narrative perspectives, delivering views down boulevards and sight of the urban action occurring along lengths of store front (Fig. 8). As the city densifies and the horizon becomes increasingly rare, the cinematic space shallows. Levels of detail are rendered in direct proportion to the distance between camera lens and architectural surface, until finally a combination of high velocity locomotion and high density building stock results in pure montage. Progressions of light, sound, texture, and movement concatenate into a continuous visual feed punctuated by samples of darkness at underpasses (Fig. 9).  As underpasses become overpasses and the expressway elevates itself across South Brooklyn, the sky and horizon reclaim the image. Frames circulate before the lens, registering only the rhythms of post-spectacle road side paraphernalia.

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