Well, frankly, I have been exploring this new frontier, the city of New Amsterdam, attempting to discover as many things as I can before they handcuff me to my desk in studio. There have been trips to contemporary urban parks perched on old railroads:
This is The High Line. It used to be 1.45 miles of elevated freight rail servicing Bell Laboratories and Nabisco in the Meatpacking District. It had sat abandoned since 1980, and was in danger of being demolished to appease developers who wanted the valuable property it was occupying, when a group of urban activists and designers got the brilliant idea to turn it into a public greenway. The park opened this spring, receiving rave reviews, and has been teeming with crowds ever since. It also provoked the development of some impressive new buildings in the area designed by starchitects from around the globe. The park itself was designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro (with Field Operations), which just so happens to be the firm Tiffany is working for. Pretty cool, no?
There have been excessive and extravagant dinner parties:
And there have been expeditions to places like Trader Joe's, deep in the heart of Union Square, where the cash register line winds up and down all of the store's aisles.
It's fascinating how even the simplest of chores become adventures in the city. Each new objective brings unexpected results. For example, this morning Danny and I tried to rent him a road bike so he could discover what will surely become his new favorite activity. We walked the 4 blocks to the bike shop, only to find its gate lowered and nothing written next to "Wednesday" on the business hours. The shop's website said nothing about being closed on Wednesdays, and yet, there it was, just out of reach, just for today, with no justification. These kinds of follies and foibles in the city tend to make me feel like Henry Hudson himself, so determined to discover something new and extraordinary, only to find that in fact there is no direct passage to India through the North American continent, or that walking around the World Financial Center in a skin tight cycling outfit is quite embarrassing. But it's important to remind ourselves that these hiccups are not failures, they are successes in their own right. Hudson may not have discovered what he was looking for, but he paved the way for the colonization of New York. If it weren't for his valiant efforts, I would probably be going to school in some former Spanish colony instead of a former Dutch one.
In the same vain, perhaps I'm not exactly where I expected to be one year ago. But I embrace fortuity, and I welcome the unexpected twists and turns that lay ahead of me in my education and ensuing career. This is a city built on serendipitous interactions, a city essentially built on autopilot. New York City as it stands today isn't the result of a single vision, a comprehensive plan. It's a fantastic powder keg of activity, constantly creating the right environment for explosive and brilliant combinations of people, ideas, and even architecture. I want to contribute to this fabric of collaboration, someday I will build architecture that will forge these unexpected interactions. I don't yet know how, but I know if I focus on the quest, rather than the destination, the cues leading me to new and surprising discoveries will be much easier to find.
-Kyle
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