The Future Imperfect of Cities,Landscapes and Dreams

An installation by Leslie Ryan, PhilippBosshart, Deborah Forster & their students from NewSchool of Architecture.

January 30 - March 7

Jan. 30, 10am-2pm-  Utopian North Park, model-making workshop.

February 20, 7-9pm - Panel Discussion- A conversation, " Community Development in the Context of Art"  with Gail Goldman, Public Art Planning and Policy Consultant, Leslie Ryan, Landscape Architect and Planner, and Lynn Susholtz, Artist. Rather than ask how art is part of a community plan, we ask- what is community development in the context of art?  What is the city that you would invent?

Urban landscapes are more than scenery – the appearance or view of a place – they are scenario as well: emergent narratives and organized ways of dreaming about both near and distant futures. The current conversation about the future of North Park urges us to look at what continues and what changes over and through time and space. What is already written in this place and what will the future erase? What will be invented and how will we inhabit it? In this urban workshop, we ask about the future imperfect of cities, landscapes and dreams.

With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.
- Italo Calvino Invisible Cities

It seemed to me then – as it still does now – that other notions, feelings, and desires governed the makers and builders of towns, that the city did not grow, as the economists taught, by quasi-natural laws, but was a willed artifact, a human construct in which many conscious and unconscious factors played their part. It appeared to have some of the interplay of the conscious and unconscious that we find in dreams.
                        - Joseph Rykwert The Seduction of Place: The History and Future of the City

top of page