The Downtown Business Club - Slides

PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, 2015

Maybe you were high or drunk last night. You still have more than eighty dollars to make it till the rent is due in three weeks. Your body aches. You spent one of your dollars for mushroom barley soup and buttered challah bread at Kiev for your 6:00 a.m. lunch. You worked on your band/comic book/monologue/design/play/ film/painting/poems/graffiti/flyer all afternoon. Your boy/girlfriend is somewhere else. Night has come and your senses are sharp. You know what's out there. Soon you're dressed, out and heading east. Straighter friends said you were crazy to live east of Second Avenue: "Do you want to get shot?" CBGB's is over and you're not that comfortable at Club 57. You don't wear all black anymore. You can wear what's fun: something masculine/feminine.

Bryant Park is New York City's only 100% privately funded and managed 'public' park, making it an oft looked-to model of public-private partnerships. This paper examines the everyday workings of the park using ethnographic and archival data, and criminological and urban theory. These details help us understand how Bryant produces a theme-park-like social order in its built environment, landscaping, management, and programming of the park. I suggest that social control functions through five governing principles: visibility, classification, predictability, vulnerability, and empowerment. Everything is neatly classified, from people to activities to trash. Vulnerable design elements like flowers are chosen to suggest the park is cared for. Park-goers are meant to feel not controlled, but in-control; safe, comfortable, and empowered. This elaborate manipulation of semiotics and space serves to produce surplus value for multiple corporate interests involved in and around the park. I argue that the park operates as a site of production of revenue for these corporate interests. I explain how the park is created and marketed as a product itself, which park-goers have an unwitting share in producing. Thus New York’s elite-business community benefits from this nominally public park. Bryant Park es el único parque “público” de la ciudad de Nueva York de financiación y gestión 100% privada, lo que lo convierte a menudo en un ejemplo de partenariados público-privados. Este artículo analiza el funcionamiento cotidiano del parque, utilizando datos etnográficos y de archivo, así como teoría criminológica y urbana. Estos detalles nos ayudan a comprender cómo Bryant produce un orden social dentro del parque en el entorno creado, paisajismo, gestión y programación del parque. Se sugiere que el control social funciona a través de cinco principios de gobierno: visibilidad, clasificación, predicción, vulnerabilidad y empoderamiento. Todo está cuidadosamente clasificado, tanto las personas como las actividades o los cubos de basura. Se eligen elementos de diseño vulnerables, como flores, para sugerir que se cuida el parque. Se pretende que los visitantes del parque no se sientan controlados, pero bajo control; seguros, cómodos y con poder. Esta elaborada manipulación de semiótica y espacio sirve para producir un valor añadido para numerosos intereses corporativos que están involucrados en el parque. Se defiende que el parque funciona como un lugar de producción de ingresos para esos intereses empresariales. Se explica de qué forma se crea y comercializa el parque como un producto en sí mismo, en el que los visitantes del parque participan de forma involuntaria. De esta forma, la comunidad de negocios de élite de Nueva York se beneficia de este parque “público”, únicamente en su nombre.

Sin ser una heterotopía, pues no recluye la 'otredad' sino que reune a quienes se alejan de ella, el club es tal vez la manifestación urbana más conocida de un espacio de excepción. Explicando su surgimiento en la Inglaterra victoriana, y analizando uno de sus casos emblemáticos en Londres, este texto nos permite entender no sólo el espacio del club sino también sus políticas arquitectónicas de exclusión. Palabras clave · tipología, exclusión, caballeros, Club de la Reforma, Londres La vida del club es un gran misterio, y sus adeptos deben ser cautos para explicar el tabú del club a los bárbaros externos. (Sala, 1862:207)

The game in its broadest sense is an amusing way to spend time in every field. But the thing that breaks the amusement is the certain, general rules of the game against rapidly changing world in the scale of urban. That is why the pressure on the individuals can be felt. They are independent from each others in a metropolis, due to reach the minimum values of life to meet their basic needs from the time that they prefer to live in fixed rules of ordinary games which are vicious.

2001

My article studies a critical era in the history of the Uniform Commercial Code: the era in which the proposed Code of 1949, a product of the academic drafters, entered into the political world and changed to meet political realities.' Marking the end of this era was the start of the New York State Law Revision Commission's (NYLRC) study of the U.C.C. in 1954. In these few years, the drafters of the U.C.C. made several fundamental decisions about its nature which today form the basis of the nation's and the world's commercial jurisprudence

International Journal of Architectural Computing, 2007

This research includes a new teaching proposal for architecture and geography, based on Systems Theory and Dynamics Systems, aimed at improving the understanding of the complex structure and dynamics of the city. SimCity, a game of strategy that allows us to design and to plan the city, is used as the software, with the aim of conducting didactic experiments, and integrating the complex relations that configure the city. The methodology incorporated theoretical and experimental stages, and concluded with a simulation exercise. The exercise had a very good reception, as a method for learning and research, creating a great aptitude for generating good research questions, by making many variables visible simultaneously. The research has developed, and participants have, subsequently, been exposed to the second version of the course, where new concepts are being integrated (emergence and cellular automata) to deepen the theoretical base, and to allow further analysis and experimentation...

City, Territory and Architecture, 2022

Starting from Comprehensive or Interpretive Sociology and the Sociology of skyscrapers, this article proposes as basic objectives to verify how the North American economic culture is showed in the symbolism of the skyscrapers of Chicago and New York and to verify the parallelism between the formal evolution of these buildings and the main economic transformations that have occurred in North American society in recent decades. In short, we will try to highlight the following symbolic questions: if the skyscrapers of Chicago and New York represent the defense of an American business culture marked by strong competitiveness and individualism; if they express the aesthetic transition from a capitalist rationalist architecture to another aesthetic where fiction, fantasy and spectacularity prevail; if this process is in tune with the transformation from an industrial capitalism to another of consumption and if it manifests itself through the decline of rationalist structural architectural elements towards others marked by glass, lightness, fluidity, liquidity and commodification; if the individualism that characterizes North American capitalism has also mutated in recent decades, that is, if from a primitive exaltation of autonomy as a core value of society, it drifts towards the cult of an individualized, privatized self disconnected from public space. Ultimately, it is about confirming the sociological utility of skyscrapers, understood as symbolic, economic, social and cultural objects.

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