New York, Grand Canyon, 2013
“When he arrived in Manhattan for the first time, in 1935, he held a press conference at which he described even the Empire State Building as too small and claimed the city’s leaders were too timid to hire him. He later described the height of Manhattan’s towers as “nothing more than the manifestation of an inferiority complex.” He also wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times in which he claimed that “American skyscrapers have not attained the rank of architecture; rather, they are merely small objects such as statuettes or knick-knacks, magnified to titanic proportions.” In their stead, he proposed a city of buildings that “don’t try to outdo each other but are all identical,” with highways running right to their front doors—he believed the city’s grid system was obsolete in the automobile age. Le Corbusier met with many of the city’s power brokers, including Nelson Rockefeller, who was then running his family’s real estate business. Le Corbusier pitched an early version of his Unite d’Habitation, but after two months with no commissions, he returned to France, dazzled and disappointed.”
-----Le Corbusier and New York City: A Love-Hate Relationship/Fred A. Bernstein
As one of the world’s great global cities, New York City must continue to cultivate opportunity and nurture innovation in every field. The Grand Central Canyon will give the city a new vision for future generations. It is better to have a building which is powerful enough to give people a new space, a new skyline, and new urban sublime and stuplime.
Sublime adjective \sə-ˈblīm\
An object which mixes the elements of large scale, high contrast, dynamic, infinity, and dark that display an extremely powerful tension that generates a reaction of astonishment to subjects.
Stuplime adjective \stü-'plIm\
From Ugly Feelings, Sianne Ngai, Stuplime be defined as “the aesthetic experience in which astonishment is paradoxically united with boredom” (P271)
I am interested in the tension between sublime and stuplime which create a new living environment of vertical urban circulation and change the Manhattan grid from horizontal aspect. There are two ways to approach the design of Grand Central Canyon. First, the large scale massing will be generated from a series section and plan studies of canyon by considering at the contrast and proportion with site in order to generate a sublime exterior of canyon. Second, a surface condition will be use as a way to provide the feeling of stuplime. The surface condition will be numerous repeating blocks which be attached on the interior of canyon in order to have low contrast texture scale with highly detail quantity.
